Normally, I listen to music while working, but lately, I’ve been listening to podcasts, namely You Look Nice Today, a “journal of emotional hygiene” featuring Merlin Mann and company talking about everything under the sun, and Stackoverflow.com with Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky talking about software development and other geek obsessions.
Last week, I finished Grand Theft Auto IV. All in all, I’d have to say that it wasn’t as difficult — and definitely nowhere near as out-and-out throw-your-console-out-the-window frustrating as its predecessor Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This is fine by a casual player like me, who got in a few hours’ playing every week, with one marathon Sunday afternoon. Now it’s time to take the online multiplayer part of the game for a spin.
Game Design Essentials: 20 Atari Games is a long (23 pages!), thorough but incredibly fascinating look at games from the time when Atari mattered as a videogame company. Back when they were something, they weren’t afraid to bust out of the genres of the time, take chances and come up with some innovative, experimental and sometimes mind-bending games with unique touches, right down to that unmistakable bell sound whenever you inserted a coin into the machine.
On the off chance you hadn’t heard, Steve Job’s WWDC Keynote address takes place this afternoon at 1 p.m. Eastern. Silicon Alley Insider will be liveblogging it as will MacRumors. You might also do well to check Summize, who will be working with Twitter to help it through the expected WWDC chatter-fest.
Chad Myers has put together a list of general consulting wisdom. My favourite rules: “Always Be Solving (problems). It’s better to solve a problem 80% correct and revise the 20% than wait for a 100% plan,” “You can’t win ’em all. Solve what you can in your time and leave things better than how you found them. That’s really all any of us can do,” and “There’s no crying in consulting!“
Registration for RubyFringe closes in two days or when the 150 attendance slots sell out. There’s a lot about this conference that makes it different from many others, from its single track to the offbeat presentations to the after-hours events to “companion care” — that’s right, they’ve even got things for your non-techie significant other to do!
I’ll write more about RubyFringe in the days leading up to the event, but for now, I recommend checking out InfoQ’s article.
b5media, the company for whom I am Nerd Wrangler, is one of the finalists for the Canadian New Media Awards’ “Most Promising Company of the Year”. The announcement was made at the nextMEDIA conference, which took place this weekend in Banff.
We’re up against the esteemed competition, FileMobile and Viigo. According to the Canadian New Media Awards site, the winners will be announced at their gala in October.
My congratulations to my coworkers! I knew that working at b5 was going to be special.