mindspill

Check out this now ... and I'll see you tomorrow

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:31:50 GMT

Some more flash goodies, this time with the flash game Line Rider but beware this is ADDICTIVE. What you've got to do is to create a race track to guide the tobaggonist down a path. There's no hope I can explain how funny it can get. Just to give you a clue there are currently over 11,000 videos on google of Line Rider tracks.

Via The ten most addictive online flash games ever made

Rugby world cup fever

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 21:46:31 GMT

I'm under rugby world cup fever. While I'm waiting for my new laptop to arrive (had a wait time of 4-6 weeks), I found a BBC online rugby game. Considering it's just a flash game it's quite sophisticated. You get to pass, kick and win scrums and there's even a tutorial which at was way more difficult than beating Italy. The game was designed for the 6 nations rather than the world cup, but it's good fun anyways.

I'm not a rugby guru but I still can say that Ireland were a total disaster last Sunday. They played Namibia, a bunch of white African farmers, and even risked losing the match. They’re reminding me of when Italy failed to qualify in the European cup. I'm seriously considering forsaking the green team for the black team. After all I identify more with black than with green.

10 questions for a profession

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 23:30:30 GMT

I'm starting a new game. This may be a bit more intellectually demanding than the boyfriend or the 'where I'm from' games, but hopefully more rewarding. Actually I might start a new section in the blog called silly games.

The game is this: Ask 10 questions regarding any profession. The questions must be directly related to the profession not generic questions.

My first set of questions is for an unconventional job in the software industry. The documentation writer.

What type of documentation do you usually write (user manuals, API documentation, or other documentation)?
With the event of the web many programs are publishing their documentation on the web. What medium do you prefer for publishing documentation, web or HTML, PDF files or printed documentation?
With whom do you interact most in the development team to write the documentation?
What part of the documentation do you prefer writing?
Have you got any tricks of the trade of making your documentation more accessible to be understood by the non-technical person?
What do you think about the quality software documentation in general?
Do you feel that your role in the production of software is appreciated enough?
Would you write documentation for an open source project?
Did you ever contribute to improve the usability of a product while you were documenting it?
What do you think is the major shortcoming software developers have when they write the documentation themselves?

If you're a documentation writer and would like to reply, please feel free to comment.

You're also free to play along and write your own 10 questions to a profession of your choice. What I might try to do is find some people with blogs in the mentioned profession and ask them to answer the questions.

Experiment Result

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 07:12:36 GMT

Remember that experiment with the colour, animal, body of water, and room? Well here's the reason for it. In Diary, Chuck Palahniuk says that Carl Jung used these questions to represent these things :-

The Colour and description of the colour you gave are representative of how you think about yourself.
The Animal is other people.
The body of water is your sex life.
And, the all white room is your thoughts on death.

Tip 10: Time wasting

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 20:50:38 GMT

This tip isn't to save your time but to waste it. These are some flash games/animations I found on the web through Stumbleupon!

Tilt - Balance a stand on your finger. Simple and addictive

Icon war - Icons fighting each other

Interactive art - Get immersed in the picture

The Angry nintendo nerd (youtube) - Finds fault with crappy games and rants about them. hilarious. Parental Advisory.

Experiment

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 20:26:20 GMT

Come on I need some replies on this. I'll tell you why later.

Name your favourite color and 3 words to describe why?
Name your favourite animal and 3 words to describe why?
Name a body of water and 3 words to describe why?
Describe how you would feel if you were locked in a white room with nothing in it but a simple wooden bench on which you were sitting naked, waiting?

You know when you're addicted to blogshares when

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 02:48:44 GMT

Your internal clock triggers every 15 minutes in time for the next idea drop.

Billions of dollars are still not enough.

You set your start page to the ideas market.

You cannot work with a calculator without comma separating the thousands.

Neglect your blog in favour of blogshares.

Start paying attention to the number of outgoing links you add to your blog.

How are you addicted to Blogshares?

Sick leave has finished

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 05:30:19 GMT

Tomorrow I'm back to work since last Tuesday, even though I'm still not in tip top condition after this tedious flu. At least I've managed to work on the holiday video editing in the morning which is much easier after 11pm. When working on larger sequences of video at the once give the end result a much better flow and identity. Additionally this left my nights free to get gobbled up by blogshares maniawhich has replaced the very brief chess phase I've been through in the last weeks.

Blogshares is getting me paranoid to the extent that I decided to buy a premium membership. After hesitating for about a week I was completely determined to buy the membership until I saw the damn paypal graphic. Our country is still not supported so all my plans burnt up in flames leaving a very nasty e-mail residue to paypal.

The best thing about blogshares is that apart from being a bomb to play making millions of virtual blog cash, it is a huge manual blog directory with more than 2200 categories. You get to categorize any blog in the system to earn chips depending on the detail and accuracy of your categorisation. In fact something rather funny happened when Kitty from Traces of time categorized mindspill in the love life category which I found rather amusing and quite strange. It turned out that my references to my girlfriend led to this intuition.

As expected a number of blogs are featuring posts about our new pope, Benedict XVI. As I'm not one to formulate predictions based on total ignorance I thought it would be more worthwhile to point to a couple of articles that seem to be more familiar with the new boss.

Learning Mahjong

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 04:42:42 GMT

My New Year retreat at our mate's farmhouse was a great way to start the New Year. The best part of it was that I managed to teach Mahjong to my village pals. I've been meaning to learn and teach the game from when we arrived from Malaysia but it's only till now that I've sorted out the rules and learned it well enough to be able to teach it.

At first I tried to learn Mahjong through the internet and although there are several resources it seems that each document is different from the rest. The reason for this is that the game has got a lot of variants which can sometimes lead to completely different games. Working on the premise that the best way to learn a game is to play it I searched for a game to play.

My first attempt was to play Yahoo's version but the documentation of the game was akin to Jboss's documentation i.e. close to zero. The next software I found though provided the solution to all my problems. The software is Four Winds Mahjong and apart from being a great game it goes out of its way to explain the game. The game comes with a flash tutorial that introduces you to the basics of the game and the extensive documentation lists and describes most of the known variants of the game. What's more the site keeps a knowledge base with all the versions known which is much more than anyone interested in the game can desire.

If you're interested in learning and playing Mahjong my advice is to go and download an evaluation version of Four Seasons and learn the European Version which is the best versions for familiarising oneself with the game. I've create a brief summarised cheat sheet that I used to teach the game with that might turn hand especially in the beginning to provide easy reference for keeping points.

'Tis the season of code

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 05:51:45 GMT

I'm at the office on this Saturday afternoon dead tired after a morning of intense Christmas shopping. I'm writing this post in IntelliJ just in case our manager passes around and stares at the monitor as usual. This post will look like one big large comment. I even included it in comment tags for the atmosphere.

This week we started seriously coding the leave application system and considering that my mate hasn't programmed for the last two years we're on a good pace. This program has become like the end of the world because everybody is pestering and asking about it, with our manager almost forcing us to work overtime in order to finish it. I really don't believe this is the real reason but anyway we're doing our best.

Anyway, enough of coding blabber and on with the events of the week. Last Thursday I managed to find the board game Taboo at a very expensive price of almost $60. The game is played by trying to explain a word to your team without using related words. For example you must describe the word "OPEN" without using the words "DOOR", "CLOSE", "DRAWER", "ENDED". It's a good way to keep juggling your mind after a day's work.

With all this Christmas wrapping paper I started doing some origami again with my current favourite model being the classic Japanese crane. The initial origami rekindled interest started by trying to make some models to tag Christmas presents, but the more I think about it the more futile the idea seems.

Since I was pretty busy this week I didn't have much time to read but the few columns I selected were very interesting:-
Improving Usability
Rands in Repose - How to lose a job Part 1
Red Herring - The business of technology

I'm currently experimenting with Desktop Search software. Apparently these are programs developed by the major search engines that work like complex windows find files. They index all documents like word, excel, web pages etc. on your PC and allow you to search for them though a web interface. I downloaded google's desktop search hoping that it's better than the competion from MSN's desktop search and the newly released Ask Jeeves Desktop Search

Yesterday the Champions League fixtures were drawn. We're spoilt for choice on which game to watch with particularly hot matches like Milan to Manchester, Real Madrid to Juventus and Barcelona to Chelsea.