I am the Burgerfan!

Presenting some materials at work this week, I realized I wanted to mark up the screen at select times while I was talking. While a laser pointer would have been sufficient to get people to look at an item of interest at a given time, it would not allow me to further illustrate any points.

Enter the tiny software program called ZoomIt. At your whim, you can freeze a screen, and proceed to draw, type, and otherwise mark it up as if it were a whiteboard. When you are done, it all erases and you are back to your original screen/presentation.

The amusing thing is that this small feature was almost as impressive as the stuff I was talking about. Almost ;)

ZoomIt is available alongside other useful utilities in the Sysinternals collection.

There are legal issues surrounding the imitation Scrabble game known as Scrabulous. The fact that this is making news headlines around the world is very intriguing. I’m guessing that before the game was available via facebook, it did not have anywhere near the popularity and user base. So here we have this facebook entity shaping our lives in such ways as to determine what constitutes ‘major news’ in our society.

People are sad that they can no longer play Scrabulous on facebook (in Canada and the US). The reality is, these people are lazy. It appears that the same game is served up for play through their regular homepage, which I think was available well before facebook went mainstream. So what people are really sad about, is the fact that they lost their convenient way to play it — from within facebook.

Will I miss Scrabulous? No. To me, turn based games follow a sort of bell curve pattern. To start, its kind of fun, you see how things work out. Then, something catchy about the game, plus additional people available to play against causes urge to play more. Then, you are checking it every couple of minutes. And then, slowly and without reason, the interest wanes. The game is played less, and then almost never. In the case of Scrabulous, I couldn’t be bothered to check if it was my turn anymore, nor did I particularly care. In the case of netrisk, after a few games, I think I got my fix, and didn’t feel the need to either find people to start another game, or wait for everyone to actually finish their turns. And in the case of Scrabble (the real board game), Tiffany and I go through cycles where we play it a lot for about three weeks. And then it goes onto the shelf for another two to six months. Just a natural flow.

The reality is: if I want to play Scrabulous or a Scrabble type variation, I can sign up at the Scrabulous site, or try out the official Scrabble facebook game. Or pour some juice and set up the board game at the kitchen table. Or play one of the other millions of anagram-based web games widely available on the internet. That’s enough options for me.

Do I think the imitation game should have been taken down? Sort of. While I don’t think that legal action was necessary, and admittedly would like to see Scrabulous live a long internet life, I think that it was the right thing to have happen in the end.

Am I biased? No.

When Coca Cola was getting started, lots of imitation beverages jumped onto the scene, trying to cash in on Coke’s new found success and popularity by offering similar product with intentionally confusing similar names. I’m not saying that Scrabulous is trying to be deceptive here, but Coke had the right to protect its product, and Hasbro/Mattel do too. And at the end of the day, I’m glad that I can enjoy the refreshing taste of the one and only Coca Cola.

[A response to Brad's Post]

If you hear for the first time that Steven Spielberg made a video game, you’d think it was going to be an Epic Story told with Rich HD Graphics. Instead, he simply wanted to make something fun and simple for his kids.

How many times have you taken a collection of small rectangular items and stacked them up? And then how many times have you knocked your tower over (or someone else’s)? Boom Blox takes these primal urges just a little further, and then gives it to you in hand-wavy simplicity on the Wii.

While there are other things available in this game, I have mostly played modes involving throwing baseballs or bowling balls at various towering structures composed of blocks. I can’t stop knocking stuff over! As soon as one mission is complete, the craving to knock over another tower quickly sets in. Its a good thing I am mostly unpacked now, or the piled up moving boxes would have become some tempting targets…

I can’t help but wonder if Boom Blox and Jenga are some sort of Grade 1 “virtual sandbox” course for terrorist children.

After being away from work for a week plus a long weekend to get settled into the new home, I forgot my work password!

Someone in Europe (Belgium I believe) either a) incorrectly thinks that my email address is theirs, or b) is incapable of giving people their correct email address. The result has been that I am occasionally the recipient of personal emails (not spam), in French. Having tried emailing one of these people without a response, I am led to believe that the particular email sender does not understand English.

A couple of weeks ago this guy decides to create a Skype account with his my email address. As a result, I start getting Skype account emails, in French. After a couple of these, I try to contact this guy through the Skype service. Having failed this attempt at reaching the mystery person, I reset the password to the Skype account, effectively locking him out with no way to log back in. I then assigned the account to a different random email address. As far as the Skype account goes, its someone else’s problem now. I hope this person has at least discovered their real email address.

Its my email address. You can’t use it. (But you can send me an email!)

Lola cannot resist the allure of the keyboard. Having said that, here is her first post to the internet:

I forgot how to log into my own blog. How embarrassing.

Now the internet is subject to my ugly mug.
Take that!

The late 90’s was the start of the road tripping era for me. Whether it was to Red Deer or to Regina, music was key in keeping the mood up and in some cases, remembering the journey. At the time, mix tapes were on the way out, giving way to discmans and in-car cd players. On one of my longer trips predating the in-car player, I was using a casette adaptor, and actually had to place my discman on a pillow on the other seat to keep it from skipping due to the car motion. The 48 CD booklet was a must to ensure all your favourite CDs were on hand, as well as some other stuff in case you felt like it.

At about the same time, I recall making an mp3 from a song off one of my CDs. It took an hour to make the one song, and I lost interest in trying to copy the rest of the CD. However it was amazing that I did not have to hunt for the CD any more when I wanted to hear that song.

Thanks to technology advancement over the last decade, it is only a matter of seconds to copy a given song from a CD, ready and waiting for my listening pleasure. Road trips have evolved to airplane trips, and the discman has given way to the iPod (with FM transmitter for those ‘vintage’ car rides). Less clutter. Smaller devices. ALL my music. Wherever/whenever I want to listen to it. I realize that I have not touched my 48 CD book in about three years! Most of the CDs that are in it right now have been in there for even longer.

What is interesting is that more often than not, the CDs that I buy now will only ever get used once or twice. They become part of a collection, and must not fall victim to scratches from CD Drives or getting eaten by my car player. They almost always go directly into iTunes, copy, back to the CD Case, and are placed on the shelf until the end of time. The mp3 becomes the well travelled audio companion.

And if I don’t feel like listening to it, random has a new song ready and waiting, from another CD that is probably hasn’t been touched since it was copied to the computer.