Local tech evangelist David Crow points to The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need. Unlike What Color is Your Parachute? or Who Moved My Cheese?, Johnny Bunko is in manga form -- that's right, it's a Japanese-style comic book.
An unusual book needs an unusual promo, and Johnny Bunko is no exception -- it's got a trailer!
What if Grand Theft Auto IV had come out in 1990, for the NES? The ad would probably look like this:
"In the past, Grand Theft Auto has been severely criticized for being too violent," says Conan O'Brien. "Well, the new version -- I got it yesterday and was playing with it -- it's been toned down a lot. I'm not sure it's better..."
This ad for Lenovo's ultra-portable ThinkPad X300 is a pretty good counter to the ad for the MacBook Air...
...but I think I'll wait for the Mac version. The ThinkPad may boast that it's the "no-compromise" machine, but the lack of Mac OS X is a big-ass compromise in my books. Especially when the OS likely to be bundled with this machine is:
I got a number of books for free this past week:
And four books from Apress, courtesy of Julie Miller:
I'll be reading them this month and posting my reviews here in Global Nerdy. Watch this space!
I had trouble getting Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon to work on my Toshiba laptop, but heard that Hardy Heron was a significantly more compatible distro and had a little Windows installer called Wubi that would simply things greatly.
Click the picture to see a larger version.
As both a dog person and an aficionado of science fiction action flicks, this photo amuses me to no end:
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
Here's a first in a series of regular updates on the just-released and much-awaited Grand Theft Auto IV. In this installment, there's a hint about how to get all that Serbian translated into English, a video featuring ten more minutes of gameplay, and some thought on "sandbox" games done right.
Read on for more about the line, my initial impressions and a video featuring the first ten minutes of the game.
Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood will tell you that there's nothing like a computer you build yourself, and as the Star Wars comic below shows, it applies to droids you built yourself too:
Click the comic to see it at full size.
Comic courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
Click here to see the comic at full size.
There will be more substantive tech articles soon, I promise. But I can't resist posting a photo titled Slave Leia Pillow Fight...
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
The video New Media Douchebags in Plain English was posted back in October, but it's new to me and might be new to you:
I've played Assassin's Creed only on XBox 360 and I don't recall the procedure to quit the game being as byzantine as it is on the PC version, shown below:
Click the comic to see it at full size.
All tech articles and no play makes Jack a dull nerd. Here's a fun little exercise -- can you identify the cartoon characters by their silhouettes in the illustration below?
Click the image to see it at full size.
Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
Here's a little story about customer service: while staying at a hotel villa in Disney World, Paul Campanale tossed away a cardboard container, not realizing that it contained his wife Karen's engagement, wedding and five-year-anniversary rings. Employees at the hotel told Campanale that recovering the jewelry would be impossible, but executive housekeeper Drew Weaver realized that the trash from the Campanales' villa wouldn't have reached the compactor yet. Weaver and seven volunteers from staff put on protective clothing and went dumpster-diving -- and found the rings.
I'm telling this story here, in a blog primarily aimed at techies in startups and small- to medium-sized companies, because it's an excellent object lesson...
Over at Signal vs. Noise, 37signals' blog, David Heinemeier Hansson asks Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco?
Grand Theft Childhood is a new book written by Dr. Lawrence Kutner and Dr. Cheryl Olson, a husband-and-wife team who co-founded the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media. In the video above, Drs. Kutner and Olson talk with X-Play's Adam Sessler about some of the findings from the study documented in their book.
If you're a reader of Coding Horror -- and if you're a programmer or aspire to become one, you should be -- you're probably aware that its author Jeff Atwood recently left his job to work on his own projects. Today he announced what one of those projects is: StackOverflow.com, a joint effort with Joel "Joel on Software" Spolsky.
The folks at Flickr have announced the opening of code.flickr.com, which bills itself as "Your one-stop shop for information, gossip and discussion with the Flickr developer community". Among other things, you'll find the Flickr DevBlog, browse their open source code either via the ticket tracker or their public SVN repository, hack the Uploadr, and discuss the Flickr API in the forums.
And to think that it's Apple that gets associated with the term "Reality Distortion Field": here's an internal Microsoft video featuring a faux Bruce Springsteen band singing about how the Vista sales team "saw lots of sales" can expect to see even more now that SP1 is out. I also show some other equally painful Microsoft Windows-related videos.
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
When I moved to my current position as Nerd Wrangler at b5media, I arrived to discover that the computer waiting for me was a Toshiba P200, a 17" beast of a laptop that I've named "The Coffee Table". This is the first time in about 5 years that I've worked with Windows as my primary operating system, and after a month in Vista, my feelings about operating systems are pretty much summarized by the picture below:
More on my experiences in a later post.
[Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.]
Even more on Creative Labs' recent mistake. Read on for details...
When driver incompatibilities with Windows Vista caused Creative Labs' Audigy series of sound cards to lose some of their functionality, one "Daniel_K" stepped up and wrote some workaround software that restored those missing features. You'd think that this act -- essentially crowdsourcing at its best -- would be applauded by the fine folks at Creative. You be wrong.
Read on for more about how Creative did not let a good deed go unpunished.
Global Nerdy is Joey deVilla's technical blog. It covers all sorts of nerdy things, whether they have to do with life, work or play -- from a short blurb on the latest tech news to a book or game review to full-length articles on some aspect of programming that he finds interesting.
Joey is the Nerd Wrangler at b5media, a Toronto-based startup behind a global media network of 320 blogs which get a total of 10 million pageviews a month. He brings a combination of software development skills, blogging experience and rock and roll accordion to b5.
(The standard disclaimer applies: the opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of Joey deVilla and do not necessarily reflect those of b5media.)
He's an active participant in TorCamp, a community of people interested in building up Toronto as a creative high-tech city.
Joey's best-known extracurricular activities are playing rock and roll accordion and blogging at his personal weblog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
