mattguest.com

Alan keeping warm

Our heater was out all day today and while we waited for the repair guy we had to keep our little guy warm.

posted from iPhoneSlide.com

iPhones are neat.

I’m posting this from my brand new iPhone.. Very cool.

This thing really knocked my socks off, they managed to pack a lot of power into a very solidly built little package.

Also, the edge connection is not as bad as people on the Internet make it sound.. bunch of whiners if you ask me. Its not blazingly fast, but it’s still better than dialup. The fact that i can use the internet at all on a device this small with full javascript and Ajax support is just amazing to me.

It’s almost enough to make me not feel guilty about paying into AT&T’s mass surveillance research. Oh well, as soon as the sdk comes out in February I’ll get over it, I’m sure.

Mealy apples suck

There is little else in this world worse than biting into what you think is a crisp, delicious, juicy apple only to encounter a mouth full of dry, tasteless sand.

Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way

I was at Barnes and Noble the other day picking up a computer book and as usual I took some time to rummage through the bargain bin, looking to rescue a forgotten gem from wherever big book stores eventually send their unwanted goods. As I passed over numerous uninteresting titles on cooking, yoga, and astrology (three topics guaranteed to reserve you a spot on the ‘last chance’ rack) a name popped out at me from several titles down.. Bruce Campbell. Well, I’m a huge Bruce Campbell fan so I immediately grabbed it up to see what I had found. Turns out he wrote a novel, and it was discounted to $4.95!

“Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way” was a fun read. It’s a fictional story written in the first person involving real people like Bruce, Richard Gere, and Renee Zellweger. In it Bruce gets a shot at an A-List Mike Nichols film, after which craziness ensues as things go down hill for both him and the film. His research into his new role as a doorman involve plenty of interesting characters, over-the-top circumstances, and the campy humor we expect from the B-movie king. He has a way of writing that makes it feel like he’s talking directly to you, like you’re sitting together having a drink as he regales you with the time he almost co-starred in a big Hollywood film.

The large type and one and a half line spacing made me a little wary as first, but in the end it was a fun story that held my interest tightly enough that I got through it in three sittings and felt the need to report on it here. Oh, and it’s got lots of fun graphics to help you visualize bits of the story.

If you’re a Bruce Campbell fan that appreciates his self-deprecating sense of humor then I highly recommend it.

Welcome Alan!

Cathedral

My wife and I have really been enjoying the game Cathedral lately. I picked up the travel edition a while ago and it is excellent. It’s the exact same game as the larger version, except with magnet pieces and a much easier to handle box. I’m really impressed with the quality, with beautiful hardwood pieces and a really nice wooden storage case with a metal clasp and handle. The game of Cathedral itself is a pretty easy abstract strategy game where each player places down differently shaped pieces on a grid to try and wall off portions of the board. The person who ends up putting down the most pieces wins.

The game is akin to checkers or chess in the sense that it’s really easy to learn but can be as easy or hard as your opponent makes it.

But with all this praise there must be a dark cloud, and it’s a biggie. I haven’t seen how the pieces are stored in the full version, but in the travel edition the pieces need to be placed in perfectly, like in the picture up there, to get the plastic cover on that holds them in place. Unfortunately the only guide you have to putting them in is this plastic cover that only helps by either fitting on top or not - very little help in putting the bits back in the box. The first time we played it took me an entire half hour to get them back in. This oversight is surprising given the overall quality of the game and is the kind of thing that could bring me to banish it to the back closet, along with our spanish language Monopoly, never to be seen again. My wife and I really enjoyed playing though, so I decided to take all the pieces out again and create a guide of where the tiles go. I sized the image so that it can be trimmed and laid directly into the bottom of the box, allowing me to put the pieces right on top when we’re through.

So, for anyone else that decides to purchase the game, or has shelved it in frustration, I have provided a copy of the map here for your downloading pleasure.

By the way, if you’re interested in checking out Cathedral then you can find it at a lot of places. But, if you are local to the Berlin, NJ area then you should pick up your copy at All Things Fun! - my (and your’s too if you’ve ever been) favorite gaming store.

Oblivion Rocks

Wow. After almost 300 (Three Hundred!) hours of dungeon crawling, guild climbing, and delving into the fiery underworld itself, I have completed the main quest in Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion. I’ve never played a game so engrossing. From the beautiful rolling landscapes that invoked more than a couple ‘Holy crap, that is awesome’ moments to the eerie caverns and elven ruins (which I’m not ashamed to say creep me out on occasion when I’m playing in the dark), Oblivion has justified my purchase of the XBox 360.

So what now? Well, I’m going to purchase the Shivering Isles addition which adds an another 40 hours of gameplay, and after that I’ll probably start over with a magic focused character and see what the game is like from that perspective.

If you have an XBox 360, or an overpowered gaming pc, and you haven’t played Oblivion then you need to get cracking. And when you do check out this site: The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, the only Oblivion reference you’ll need.

Cellular Automation and Flex

With AJAX, Flex, and now Silverlight, the whole RIA thing is really starting to heat up, so I decided I should start getting up to speed.

So, here is my first real AS3/Flex project.. a version of Conway’s Game of Life written in AS3, wrapped in a Flex front end. It’s really cool because I attempted to write a version of this in Flash MX a while ago and the player couldn’t handle it. The Flash 9 player is a big step up in terms of speed.

I am really pleased with Flex Builder. Including things like a debugger with breakpoints and real error messages really takes Actionscript coding to a respectable level. Actionscript 3 itself helps a lot as well, supporting full oop including inheritance, interfaces, and get/set methods for variables.

Another nice feature of Flex Buider is the “Publish Application Source” feature, allowing you to easily share the source code of an application. If you right click on the movie above and choose view source it’ll open a window where you can browse the code and download a zip of the whole project.

Conway’s Game of Life

The Game of Life was invented by John Conway in 1970 and is a popular example of cellular Automation. I like it because it’s simple to program but can produce some very interesting results. The rules are simple:

Lay out a grid with some of the cells blocked in. These are considered live cells. The game then goes through iterations, creating and destroying cells based on the number of neighbors they share.

• If a cell is empty and has exactly three neighbors it is brought to life.
• If a live cell has four or more neighbors then it dies of over crowding.
• If a live cell has less than two neighbors id dies of loneliness.

Pretty simple, but a lot of fun to play with. Check out the Wikipedia entry for more information.

Those Crazy Brothers Grimm

There are plenty of lessons out there that attempt to teach your children respect for their elders, but this has got to be the strangest I’ve come across -

“A man and his wife were once sitting by the door of their house, and they had a roasted chicken set before them, and were about to eat it together. Then the man saw that his aged father was coming, and hastily took the chicken and hid it, for he would not permit him to have any of it. The old man came, took a drink, and went away. Now the son wanted to put the roasted chicken on the table again, but when he took it up, it had become a great toad, which jumped into his face and sat there and never went away again, and if any one wanted to take it off, it looked venomously at him as if it would jump in his face, so that no one would venture to touch it. And the ungrateful son was forced to feed the toad every day, or else it fed itself on his face, and thus he went about the world knowing no rest.”

The Great and Powerful Book

There is no denying it, I am a technology buff. I get my news, weather, music and the greater portion of my entertainment online. I have digital cable, a DVR, surround sound and a laptop that is attached to me about 75% of the time. But even with all this just a mouse or remote control click away there is still something incredibly comforting to me about cracking open a real-life paper and ink book.

I have quite a few of them.. enough that they warrant their own room in my house, my own private mini-library. The majority of my books are computer or art related, though I do have a lot of very old books that I inherited from my father’s side of the family - some dating back to the 1800’s. I’m always amazed at how well they’ve held up over the years and for this reason when I go out to buy a book I always try and get the highest quality hardback version if available in the hopes that one day some future member of the Guest family line can explore my collection and enjoy it as i have my forebears’.

But I digress.

It is undeniable how easy and helpful it can be to purchase books online. If I am looking to purchase a computer or technical book it’s the first place I go. I browse the reviews, find exactly what I’m looking for and a few days later it arrives. But I started writing this post with the intention of expressing my great pleasure over the gems that can be found offline, in a brick and mortar book store. Lots of book stores have bargain areas offering greatly discounted books, often hardcovers that more thrifty buyers had passed up in lieu of the (usually substantially) cheaper paperback versions. I try and make my way to the local Borders or Barnes and Noble’s at least once a month or so to scour the bargain bins for anything that looks remotely intriguing. I’ve obtained most of my more interesting non-computer related books in this manner.

Over the holidays I received a Borders gift card from my sister, always one of my favorite gifts, and tonight I decided to stop by after work to see what struck me. For a less than $40 I was able to get all of the following:

“The Wind in the Willows and Other Writings” by Kenneth Grahame.
I look forward to reading this one with my child one day.

“Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe.

“Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad.
I really get into stories of the Victorian exploration (and terrible exploitation) of pre-1900’s Africa. To this tune I also highly recommend “To the Heart of the Nile” by Pat Shipman.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Tales” by Washington Irving.
A fine collection of short stories.. classic fairy tales and fables being among my favorite reading.

“Origins” by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith.
Self described as “An illuminating excursion into the beginnings of the Universe - from the big bang to the birth of life itself.”

“Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared Diamond.
I saw a review about this one on another blog some time ago and put it on my mental list of books to get.

The first four books are all published by Borders Classics and are of extremely high quality. Thick pages, perfect type and strong binding all for a measly $10 cover price, of which I paid half. The other two are also fairly high quality and were marked down substantially, over 90% in the case of “Origins“. I like to think that these books will last for years to come bringing my family entertainment, knowledge, and culture that a DVD, podcast, or video game just cannot match.