archived stuff

Older links and things are collected here.

nanowrimo 2006

powers of 10

Lovely little 9-minute educational film about... the universe, basically.

I think I'd seen this before somewhere. It's been copied and parodied all over the place, though, so I might have caught some derivative version. (I think there might be a CFB animated version...).

In particular, there was an illustrated version of this in my astronomy book by Terrance Dickinson. I loved that book, and that was my favourite part.

wind farms off the county

Treehugger on a Lake Ontario wind farm project, off of Prince Edward County.

I dunno... As my mom points out, rich people are always buying up property in the County, thinking it'll make a great retirement place. They last until the first winter. Getting snowed in for weeks doesn't make for a fun retirement. I love it, but it's no Cape Cod. Some areas of the County are still pretty depressed.

I've heard about another wind project in the County, and they did have NIMBY issues. I remeber Tanya Huff being interviewed in the Intel as being in favour of it. Personally, I think more wind farms in the County would be fantastic.

on behalf of canada, please make more

:D The CBC interviews Shinichiro Watanabe about Samurai Champloo

keeping focused

I'm gonna have to try this. Have you ever typed along in an IM message and, when you were typing, a new person chimes in and you hit Send and half your message goes to the new person and not the person you meant it for? Yeah. Me too. This may or may not help for that.

making a game of it

I'm listening to the latest Distributing the Future podcast (which is occasionally interesting, if somewhat wide-eyed and breathless about all the wonderful things that are happening in Web 2.0 land). This one is about games. Kind of. The first part, at least, is about engaging users in game-like activities when they're using otherwise boring, non-game applications. Like eBay. Or Google Maps.

It just got me thinking about how it applies to work stuff. It can't be that hard to turn defect tracking into a game...

The trouble I'm running into here is... Accumulating points and levels is great for something like Amazon or eBay, it sounds a lot like performance metrics when you're talking about software development. There's no consequence to having a bad score on eBay. At worst, you can just create a new account. Here, in a shitty enough environment, a bad score can get you fired. And suddenly, your fun game mechanic becomes a lot less fun.

Also, you don't want to have people fiddling around with their work item tracking tool all day. You want them to deal with them and move on.

Interesting idea, though.

shark boy and lava girl

Not the crappy kids' movie.

I like this.

procrastination

Understanding procrasination in order to overcome it.

Need to close a few tabs...

This actually looks interesting and insightful, which is surprising considering it comes from a university couselling services office.

nekokoneko!

uw minix talk

Andrew Tanenbaum (the guy who wrote the CS textbooks for operating systems and networks) is going to be giving a talk on the new version of MINIX, his teaching OS. As noted previously, Prof Tanenbaum is my hero.