danbruno.net/blog

eBay auction: Every NES game ever made, plus assorted accessories.

PC vs PC: Bill Gates and John Hodgman, together on the Daily Show. This can only end in tears.

I’ve written before about Castle of the Winds, one of my all-time favorite PC games. (It’s freely available now — try it out!) On Thursday Gamasutra published an interview with Rick Saada, the game’s author, about his history in the industry. Apparently he’s now working on a new project:

The idea would eventually develop into Pirates of the Burning Sea, an MMO set in the Caribbean in 1720 that combines ship combat with the ability for players to explore sea and land areas. “It’s been several years of steady work and growth,” says Saada, “and at this point we’ve got over 50 people pushing towards a June release.”

The Daily Mail has a compelling story about British Airways Flight 9, also known as the Jakarta incident.

• Went outside when the wind chill brought the temperature down to negative double digits.
• Read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in one five-hour sitting.
• Continued to consume the instant ramen water even after finishing all the noodles.
• Consumed instant ramen.

Today Larry Bacow emailed this message to the Tufts community:

Dear Friends,

The search for Harvard’s next president continues to receive a lot of media attention, and my name seems to keep appearing as one of the individuals possibly under consideration. Understandably, I’ve received a number of questions from members of the Tufts community on the subject. Some of you may still be wondering if I am a candidate. Let me say definitively: I am not.

Very early in the process, I declined a request to be interviewed by the Harvard search committee. I declined for the simple reason that I am happy at Tufts and proud to be its president.

I look forward to continuing to work with all of you to make this great institution even better. Tufts has a very bright future, and I am delighted to be part of it.

Best regards,
Larry

I don’t have much of an opinion on Bacow, since I don’t know what he’s accomplished. However, I do respect him turning down a job at Harvard to stay and improve Tufts. Thanks, Larry!

Suggestions for a Proposed National Code of Health Emoticons and Abbreviations for Instant Messenger.

Things My Boyfriend Says is a collection of quotes from some girl’s boyfriend. “‘Who loves you?’ ‘Megatron.’”

I was browsing through my Applications folder yesterday and discovered that my new laptop came preinstalled with Comic Life, a program to create comic strips. By default it looks for pictures in your iPhoto library, and since I tend to move stuff to Flickr and then erase it from my hard disk, all I had were a few stray photos from around the Tufts campus.

So, uh, here’s what I came up with (click for slightly enlarged version):

I think this should be a series. Although it would have limited appeal, I guess.

I found this amazing map on Metafilter, where it was variously described as the “big flashing map of shit going down” and the “Flaming Hungarian Map of Utter Terror.” Basically it shows you all the bad things happening in the world at any given time, from car accidents to hurricanes to outbreaks of avian flu. I bet they have one of these at CTU.

Young adult novelist John Green lives across the country from his younger brother Hank. This year they’re going to try an experiment: in lieu of their usual written correspondence — text messages, emails, instant messages — they’re going to communicate through daily video blog posts (and occasional phone calls, but we aren’t privy to those). So far it’s hilarious — they’ve been coming up with challenges for each other, punishments for missing an update, and “projects” to do together, sometimes conflating the three.

The videos are uploaded to YouTube and embedded in blog posts on John’s site. Here are the rules and the posts so far: Jan 1, Jan 2, Jan 3, Jan 4, Jan 5, Jan 8, Jan 9, Jan 10, Jan 11, Jan 12.

Even if you’re against file sharing, it’s hard not to like The Pirate Bay. An unapologetic host for a ton of copyrighted material, they keep their servers in Sweden, which has no laws prohibiting BitTorrent trackers. They publish any legal threats they get from protesting corporations and publicly ridicule them. They’ve even started a political party — the Pirate Party, naturally — to reform intellectual property law.

Now, they want to buy their own country. (Well, of course they do. It’s the logical next step, isn’t it?) Their target is Sealand, which, to all appearances, is an abandoned oil rig off the coast of England that pretends to be a sovereign nation for its own amusement. Anyone who donates will be made an honorary citizen. No word yet on whether they plan to have free wifi.

Will the Pirates be able to raise enough money to buy an island nation? Can they convince anyone to recognize Sealand’s claim to legitimacy? Will the MPAA just buy an F-16 and nip all this in the bud? Only time will tell.

A letter from Jumah al-Dossari, a Bahrainian being held captive at Guantanamo Bay.

Hey, it’s a new year! Time to start things up again here at danbruno.net.

• As usual, there’s a new theme. It’s become a tradition here that I ignore the website for a few weeks and then change the look of the site, as if that could fool anyone into thinking I’d been updating it. This theme is the lovely Mandigo, by Tom at onehertz. Not bad, eh?
• The Cool Mac stuff page was long overdue for an update. Since the last update in *cough* 2005, I’ve found a bunch of great new applications. I also found that some apps seemed cool when I first downloaded them, but didn’t stand the test of time. The new list has all of the good stuff without the cruft.
• I got rid of the tags. It was too time-consuming to get the tag database to any useful level of completion, and they weren’t particularly useful anyway. If you want to find something, you will find the search box perfectly servicable.
• I updated the About page. The attentive reader will notice that a) I’m now on a MacBook Pro instead of a PowerBook, and b) I’m “creating a portable recording studio of sorts.” By “creating a portable studio,” of course, I mean “learning how to use Logic Express.” So in the coming months, look for a new section of the site where I dump all of my homemade amateur demos on you!
• I’m selling ads (I know, I’m laughing too) in the sidebar through Project Wonderful, a new auction-based ad service from Ryan North. (Yes, that Ryan North.) Until the boxes fill up, you can actually “buy” an ad for free; actually, I fully expect the price to hover right around free for quite a while. So, you know, act now, or not!
• I have some guitar tabs I’ve been working on scattered throughout my hard drive, so hopefully I’ll start to fill out that anemic Tablature page soon as well.