Wow. When did the demoscene go cross-platform? Ante Dominum has been ported to Windows, Linux, and OSX.
It’s probably the greatest 64k demo I’ve ever seen ever. Ever! It’s got a catchy little soundtrack and the particle effects are some of the best I’ve seen. It’ll download in half a second and it takes less than five minutes to run, so quit being a stick in the mud and start watching!
We’ve all seen ‘secret’ safes that look like common household objects. A shaving cream can that unscrews to reveal a storage space inside, for example, or the ol’ hollowed-out book trick.
How about some fake skid-marked underpants? I wish I had thought of this first.
The “customer review” for this five foot speaker cable from Monster Cable makes me wonder.
Whs the reviewer crying because the sound was SO AWESOME or because he just realized that he spent $1250 on five feet of goddamn speaker cable?
The first few HD-DVD releases are coming out soon, and their packaging indicates that they do indeed support 1080p.
The first HD-DVD players will only output at 1080i though, so Blu-Ray is still more attractive for early adopters.
Last night on Southpark Comedy Central caved to terrorists by refusing to allow Mohammed to appear on the show. Of course he was already on it five years ago, but that was before there were international riots.
It made me irritated enough to waste time writing a letter to spineless Comedy Central! And I never write letters! Next thing you know I’ll be protesting economic summits and listening to Phish. Oh Christ.
Rube Goldberg has been beaten at his own game by Japanese nerds!
I wish I was a Japanese nerd. 
This is a good story.
Last night we were all excited to play old-school Gauntlet over Xbox Live with our friends Stacy and Steve. They had just gotten their 360 up and running and we were ready to go.
So Tammy puts on the Xbox headset and it’s not working. Turns out one of our goddamn cats (the smart money’s on Conan) chewed through the cord. So I did what any responsible pet owner would do. I picked him up and yelled at him in the face, squeezed him until his eyeballs popped out, and threw him across the room.
I was afraid that wouldn’t be enough to teach him a lesson though, so I hatched a little scheme.
Observe the cat trap:
I took what was left of the headset and completely coated the wires with Tabasco sauce and left it on the floor of the kitchen overnight. Wires don’t taste good, and people need to know that. Especially when those people are cats.
So I’m feeling pretty smart and smug and stuff and I’m laying in bed half asleep, laughing to myself, trying to imagine what Conan’s reaction will be when he discovers his new toy in the middle of the night. Ha-ha! “He’s gonna shit himself when he tastes that Tabasco and he’ll never chew through wires again. Brett you’re a friggin genius when it comes to pets.”
I chuckle a little and rub my eyes, roll over in bed and then it hits me – My eyes are on fire. I sit up straight in bed and yell “EYES ON FIRE!”
I run screaming over to the bathroom sink and shove my face under the faucet and start rubbing my eyes, trying to wash them out. This does a great job at getting the remaining Tabasco on my fingertips evenly distributed across my eyeballs. By this point I can barely open my eyes and things are only getting worse! I start to think that hey, even though Tammy’s on the toilet maybe I should break down the door so that she’s the last thing I ever see. In a crisis situation you don’t really have time to stop and think.
But then I remember that I have eye drops, so I open up the cupboard under my sink and start knocking things over until I find the little plastic bottle of soothing, cooling relief. I squirt half the bottle into my eyes and it works, mostly. After about 10 minutes I’m good. And actually my eyes feel really good when all is said and done.
Now I’m not a moron. I washed my hands after I set the trap. With soap. And yet somehow I still managed to pepper-spray myself.
It was an eye-opening experience!
Also, the cat-trap appeared to be untouched this morning.
Up until now I was pretty indifferent on the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD battle.
Today I’m joining the Blu-Ray fans. The HD-DVD format tops out at 1080i, while Blu-Ray has native support for 1080p/60!
I had no idea! And I’m pretty amazed that nobody’s made a bigger deal about this. With a much higher resolution than HD-DVD and a larger storage capacity…what’s not to like about Blu-Ray?
Bejeweled 2 is a simple game, but it’s a hard game to be really good at. There are times when I think I like it even more than Tetris, and that’s saying a lot.
Last night I started experimenting with a new strategy. Instead of using a hypercube as soon as I get it for mega points, I save it until there’s absolutely no other moves left. Last night this strategy took me from 11,000th place on the Xbox Live leaderboards all the way up to somewhere in the 6,000s!
Two things to keep in mind if you use this strategy!
1- If hypercubes aren’t used, they DO transfer over to the next level. Gem distribution remains the same from level to level, but their placement is jumbled.
2- If you take too long to make a move and you have a hypercube on the field, the game will usually suggest that you use it. Ignore this suggestion! There often ARE other moves available, but the game is trying to trick you into giving up your magic bullet!
If you don’t have a 360, fear not! You can play a free demo of Bejeweled 2 in your browser.
Why dual-boot when you can virtualize? Hot on the heels of Boot Camp comes Parallels, a Windows emulator for Intel Macs. It claims to offer “near-native performance” of emulated OSs, of which Windows is merely one of many!
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