Archive for August, 2002

I just discovered ScummVM. This is an emulator that lets you play Lucasarts adventure games that used the SCUMM engine (such as Sam & Max) on a modern machine. Yay!

I’ve got Sam & Max and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis installed again, and I can play them again!

For those of you who don’t understand why this is a good thing, here’s some dialogue from the start of Sam & Max (Oh, and Sam is a walking talking dog in a suit, and Max is a homicidal rabbit):

Sam: Where should I dispose of this bomb where it won’t hurt anyone we know or care about, Max?

Max: Out the window, Sam.

Ahhh, revisiting the classics.

Great story from MetaFilter. (Hosted on Salon.com)

Nothing like seeing a story about technical stuff that’s obviously been written by someone who understands the terms intimately.

You know what’s funny? My creative impulse has been much less than it used to be for some time. I’ve sit down at Photoshop a number of times to have a shot at making a new wallpaper for one thing or another, and I just haven’t been able to do anything good. Waller’s block, I guess.

I’ve got a list of resolutions for while Trang’s away:

  • Keep self busy
  • Do more exercise, especially Wu Shu
  • Start work on proposal for PhD
  • Try to get a wallpaper or two out
  • Try to finish some of the games I have installed
  • And finally, reduce my expenditure across the board

Speaking of Trang, I had a great weekend spending lots of time with her. Oh man, I’m going to miss her.

Shay’s added a comments feature: I’m going to go over later and test it out.

Anyway, gotta dash – people don’t have their internet and they’re getting antsy.

I’ve been quite busy lately, with working a second job doing consulting, working at LE, and spending as much time with Trang as I can, before she goes away. Thus the lack of blogging. Apologies.

Gack. Silence is bad, for a blog.

Things are going well – I had a really nice weekend, with Trang and I managing to get some nice time together, and also managing to get out and do the being sociable thing.

I can’t believe it’s less than two weeks until Trang goes. I know, it’s only five weeks that she’ll be gone, but that will be the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other since we started going out.

I’m going to miss her a lot.

As Dan says: Your computer is not alive. Although it may seem that way when it stops working just when you really need it to.

The manifest pages are up! Just go to either to the link on the sidebar, or here.

Yes, I’m back from Manifest. I had an awesome time, and there’s a whole bunch of photos I’ll put up today, hopefully.

Well, I’m just packing up my stuff, and then I’m off to the airport to go to Manifest! yay!

It’s sort of funny, after having posted the previous item this morning, to come across some analysis of the ‘National IQ test’ last night. If you have a look through there you can see some good examples of using graphs to exaggerate differences, by simply changing the y axis scale.

And that’s aside from the debates about the futility of assigning a single number to ‘intelligence’. The psychometric literature has a lot to say about this. And that’s aside from all of the issues about socioeconmic effects biasing the outcomes.

I guess what really pisses me off is the general trend to give people a quick summary of information, without indicating to them that it is a summary. So people get these sound bites of, for example, ‘HRT increases the risk of breast cancer’, without an explanation of how much, for whom, who these numbers were obtained by, how they were obtained, or even that there may be more to the story than that.

It’s this sort of crap that led to the Asteroid Flap of a week or so ago. If you looked at the actual findings, it was pretty clear that there was a pretty wide area the asteroid was going to pass through, and because of the limited accuracy of observations, the earth happened to intersect that area, creating the possibility of an impact in 2019. Of course, it was reported as ‘End of the world to come via asteroid in 2019′. And that’s it. No wonder people panicked.

Again, it would be nice for people to simply ask ‘Where is this information from? How reliable is it?’ before getting too excited about stuff they see in the news.

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