tl;dr: I found my dad’s grave online today. I talk about that, tell a bit of story, and then repost the obituary that my mother wrote him in 1995. So, a funny thing happened to me today. I found my father’s grave online. Yeah, that’s a thing that can happen, I guess. I was googling […]
<tl;dr>: In February of 2017 I started a training program for software development and planning, financed by the German government and administrated through the Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK). I turned in my project thesis on April 14th and took four hours of exams on April 25th. Today I received the results […]
Douglas Adams once famously observed: “I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five […]
Sunday, February 22, 2015
New Employer: “How much do you know about PHP? We’re going to need you to work with PHP and Symfony.” Me: “Give me the weekend and I’ll get back to you on Monday.” Sometimes you need to learn things quickly and that involves setting up a lab to read documentation, execute tutorials, and experiment with […]
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Bruce Sterling wrote, “The Hacker Crackdown”, in 1992 and published it as an ebook; let’s remember that this was before there were browsers and the Internet was mostly an academic domain. In order to read this ebook, you would have to find it available on a Bulletin Board System (BBS) and downloaded it as a […]
Friday, September 12, 2014
“Digital: a love story” is one of those pieces of media that was a long time in coming; it now has a whole personal story wrapped up in its discovery, initial experience, dormant phase, and subsequent completion. If you’ll indulge me, let me tell you a tale that spans 4 years. I’ll try to keep […]
I’ve already written a few posts about Inform 7: it’s a powerful tool for creating interactive fiction that has a very low cost to entry. But, it’s also very complex and DOES have a learning curve. Yes, you can make a playable game by compiling the single line of source text: “The Kitchen is a […]
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
I initially found out about Jason Scott from Jimmy Maher’s blog The Digital Antiquarian–another guy who will get his own post shortly. Maher mentioned Scott’s text adventure documentary, “Get Lamp.” I found it on Youtube, and was immediately hooked. When you have 2 hours to invest in something cool, you can find it here. Jason […]
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
I was watching the Philosophy Tube’s channel on youtube the other day, and saw his episode on “Rick and Morty” as an argument against Scientism: Link The media landscape that I live in is a little constrained: I don’t have a TV or access to cable, and tend to avoid mainstream programming. This is not […]
Once a month three guys throw the Mini Game Jam; it’s basically an 8 hour workshop with the purpose of creating a game from scratch. It starts with a get-to-know-you exercise: every participant is given five pieces of paper with the same number printed on each; the goal is to talk to five different people […]