You've got the goldeneye kid...

Back when the Nintendo64 was still putting up a fight against the original Sony PlayStation, me and all my nerdy friends used to play a game based on the James Bond movie GoldenEye. It came out right as I was going away to art school, and we spent many late nights playing the first real 4 player shoot'em up. Seriously...we were obsessed.

The game was so good, and so popular that we played it well after the Nintendo64 had pretty much ran it's course. Even when all the best games where being made on "Compact Discs" we still plugged in that clunky cartridge and had the times of our dorky lives shooting each other. The game is considered by most gamers to be a classic.

With The Nintendo Wii's super successful "virtual console" (a part of the Wii that allows you to buy and download classic games from years gone by... Like The Original Zelda!) everybody's been asking when GoldenEye will make it's triumphant return to the Nintendo. Well it's complicated.

The company that made GoldenEye, Rare, was bought by Microsoft. They're dealing with their own next-gen console the Xbox360. So the possibility of them being really, really nice and letting Nintendo have the rights to GoldenEye looked pretty slim. Honestly, could anyone blame them for not helping the competition?

However, recently the President of Nintendo America went on the record as saying:

"Suffice it to say we would love to see [GoldenEye on Virtual Console], so we're exploring all the rights issues."

as well as:

"the pain is worth the gain"

wow... Game Companies are actually listening to their customers and are trying to give us what we want? To their credit, Microsoft has fully supported Nintendo's handheld system the DS. And with Sony being such jerk faces, Microsoft has actually been looking like the good guys lately. So maybe this'll actually happen!

of computers and puppets

We hope everybody had a happy Turkey Day. We spent our long holiday weekend working and playing Nintendo :)

We've been hard at work getting our science fiction puppet show ready. It's called station.signals, and it's going to premiere on Turner's Broadband Internet Comedy Channel called "Super Deluxe." The website should launch sometime in January. We'll keep you posted.

The theatre I used to work at, Dad's Garage puts up an improvised soap opera every year. Each year a new location or genre is picked as a backdrop for the soap characters. My favorite year was when we took on the Science Fiction genre. I, of course, played a robot named The Altair 9000.

The name was a play on two pop-culture references. The first was the Computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The beloved Hal 9000. The second was more obscure. Probably only notable to computer nerds. The name Altair came from the first ever computer with a microprocessor.

The Altair 8800. This was before anybody even knew that computers could be personal. (PC) This was back when computers usually took up a whole room. The Altair was a breakthrough, if just for it's size. Sadly, there wasn't much you could actually do with it. You programmed the computer by flicking a bunch of toggle switches, this in turn fed binary data into the minimal memory of the machine. This was reflected by LED lights on the face plate. That's it! What kind of program could you possibly write with that? You can now buy an Altair 8800 kit that you build yourself, just like the original. (via boingboing)

Later, the Altair designer would bring accessories to market, one of note being the tape reader. This is important because a young Bill Gates wrote one of the first actual programming languages for the Altair, a from of BASIC written on paper tape with holes punched in it. In a nod to future copyright concerns, Bill Gates waged a huge campaign against "pirates" who would "rip off" his programs by placing his original paper tape over blank paper tapes and punching the holes with a pencil!

Wii're excited

The Wii in Review:

We waited in line for much of saturday to make sure we could get our hands on a shiny new Nintendo Wii the second they were released. We realized that we could have probably gotten in line a couple hours later than we did. But we ended up being fourth in line, so we were happy to stay put.

And so it went... at about 12:05am on sunday morning my Special Lady-Friend (she waited with me, what a lady!) and I walked out of the store, our hands heavy with a newly purchased Wii.

Clearly Nintendo has ripped off Apple's style... Shiny, white, and candy-coated. While I am usually the first to balk at design mimicry... If you're going to do it, at least rip off the best. What this translates to is a very clean set-up and unpacking experience with the Wii. Opening the package and taking out the two individually numbered boxes was a thrill. Each sub-box is labeled with a smartly designed icon of all the Wii parts that box contains.

If you are not familiar with the new system, it uses an innovative "Wiimote" instead-of / in-place-of a controller. You point the Wiimote at the television like a laser pointer. A small hand on screen tells you where you're pointing. Within seconds we were making stuff happen. A few moments after that, we were swinging our virtual tennis rackets in WiiSports, the collection of 5 games that came included with the system.

Sunday Evening we were able to accumulate enough Wiimotes so that we could play 2 on 2 tennis! Four people standing in the space station living room swinging little shiny white remotes at the television was pretty hilarious, not to mention ultra-fun. To our utter joy most of the WiiSports games seemed to match our movements perfectly. However, I've found that you need to find each game's "sweet spot." Meaning that you need to play the game the way the game wants you to play it. Trying to get WiiGolf to recognize your spastic excuse for a golf swing won't get you very far. (Havens... I'm looking at you, and laughing. Have another drink why don't you)

Honestly I could go on and on about playing the Wii, but I'll spare you. The system is tight, the games are great... (I've been playing the new Legend of Zelda and it's just awesome, and I've only just gotten to the first dungeon!) If you are unsure about the system, I say go play it somewhere. I have a feeling that after you try tennis you'll be sold. Being the cheapest next-gen game system out right now doesn't hurt the Wii's greatness either.

It's a big Week!

Firstly,
Wednesday night @ 10:00pm
Matt Chapman (of homestarrunner.com) will be the guest monologist for The Doug Dank Project @ PushPush Theater. Matt will bravely deliver monologues that will then be used to create complicated tightly-woven* improvised scenes performed by highly trained improvisational professionals. (*guaranteed)
Get directions and/or tickets from PushPush Theater.

Nextly,
Thursday night @ 9:00pm
Pleaseeasaur performs at the Drunken Unicorn! Scheduled to open for P-saur is none other than The Attractive Eighties Women. This is a show that will surely go down in history as having actually happened! P-saur and AEW go together like guns and bullets, or rats and vampires.

If you missed P-saur the last time they came through town then you've probably not been warned about how Totally Cool Cobras can be despite the fact that it takes them several days to die sometimes!

Lastly,
The New Nintendo Wii comes out Sunday!
My birthday was at the beginning of this month. I have forsaken all gifts in order to roll-over my birthday into the purchase of a new Nintendo Wii. Here's hoping I can grab one on sunday! Nintendo has been reporting that they've exceeded their expectations in the number of Wii units they've manufactured, this means that hopefully I won't have to step on your face come sunday morning to get one. But be warned, I will step on your face if I need to, and I love you guys! THAT'S how important the Wii is!

Just imagine, by this time next week we could all be playing Nintendo together.
I'll be all like, "Would you like to take a turn with the Nintendo Wiimote? Also, how is your face healing? Sorry about that."

Currently on book-tour

Deranged Millionaire, Crazed Know-it-all, rival only to Ben Franklin in the area of Almanac authoring...

We can't get enough of John Hodgman, this week he is interviewed on the latest edition of BoingBoing.net's podcast. He's promoting the Paperback Edition of his awesome fake Almanac The Areas of My Expertise. If you haven't had a chance to read it... Do.

mp3 link | itunes subscription

I love it when a plan comes together.

Apple has reportedly dropped Justin "The Mac Guy" Long from their Mac vs. PC ads, while keeping the PC Guy!

We've been saying all along that John Hodgman, the actor who plays the PC, was worth at least 2 Justin Longs.

Physics for Future Presidents

Richard Muller is a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. He teaches a physics class designed specifically for non-physics majors called Physics for Future Presidents. In the style of Carl Sagan his goal for the lectures is "for everyone to come away with the feeling that what was just covered is important for every world leader to know." (via metafilter)

Now you can take his entire class online... for free-ninty-nine! (that means free) Complete with quizzes, exams, and google video of his actual lectures. You can even email Muller himself if you're having problems!

I have always kicked myself for not taking my math classes more seriously in school. Although I did take a shine to Catholic High School level Biology, but I believe this to be the result of having to hand draw hundreds of models of single celled, and micro organisms. Once I've drawn something I can pretty much remember it forever. I even tried to teach myself calculus with available online text books, however, I've found that without a good lecturer, it's difficult to self-teach.

Now that Muller's lectures are all available online, that's not such a problem anymore. Well, Berkeley has taken this even further. You can now view courses and lectures from UC Berkeley directly through iTunes! Also for free! It's really a refreshing thing to see knowledge being given away freely like this. Sadly, it's also very rare.

Why does it have to be so rare? Why shouldn't everyone have access to this knowledge? OK, the people who attend Berkeley have worked very hard to do so, and are paying a lot of money. I totally respect that, their reward for this is a Berkeley diploma. The knowledge itself, the actual teachings, should be free to everyone. But if you want to say you've gone to Berkeley, well that's a different story, you need to get the grades to be accepted, you must pay the University to sit in their classes. This is essentially what Steve Jobs did. He dropped out, and started attending the classes that interested him. Learning what he wanted to learn. Look where that got him.

It's the legend of Zelda and it's really rad.

those creatures from Ganon are pretty bad...

only 2.5 more weeks until the new Nintendo Wii launches!
also, happy birthday to me today.

I got a crotch full of quarters

This is one of the coolest costumes I saw floating around the internet this morning. This guy's costume was a PLAYABLE Pac-Man Arcade Cabinet. (via metafilter)

You've got the goldeneye kid...

Back when the Nintendo64 was still putting up a fight against the original Sony PlayStation, me and all my nerdy friends used to play a game based on the James Bond movie GoldenEye. It came out right as I was going away to art school, and we spent many late nights playing the first real 4 player shoot'em up. Seriously...we were obsessed.

The game was so good, and so popular that we played it well after the Nintendo64 had pretty much ran it's course. Even when all the best games where being made on "Compact Discs" we still plugged in that clunky cartridge and had the times of our dorky lives shooting each other. The game is considered by most gamers to be a classic.

With The Nintendo Wii's super successful "virtual console" (a part of the Wii that allows you to buy and download classic games from years gone by... Like The Original Zelda!) everybody's been asking when GoldenEye will make it's triumphant return to the Nintendo. Well it's complicated.

The company that made GoldenEye, Rare, was bought by Microsoft. They're dealing with their own next-gen console the Xbox360. So the possibility of them being really, really nice and letting Nintendo have the rights to GoldenEye looked pretty slim. Honestly, could anyone blame them for not helping the competition?

However, recently the President of Nintendo America went on the record as saying:

"Suffice it to say we would love to see [GoldenEye on Virtual Console], so we're exploring all the rights issues."

as well as:

"the pain is worth the gain"

wow... Game Companies are actually listening to their customers and are trying to give us what we want? To their credit, Microsoft has fully supported Nintendo's handheld system the DS. And with Sony being such jerk faces, Microsoft has actually been looking like the good guys lately. So maybe this'll actually happen!

of computers and puppets

We hope everybody had a happy Turkey Day. We spent our long holiday weekend working and playing Nintendo :)

We've been hard at work getting our science fiction puppet show ready. It's called station.signals, and it's going to premiere on Turner's Broadband Internet Comedy Channel called "Super Deluxe." The website should launch sometime in January. We'll keep you posted.

The theatre I used to work at, Dad's Garage puts up an improvised soap opera every year. Each year a new location or genre is picked as a backdrop for the soap characters. My favorite year was when we took on the Science Fiction genre. I, of course, played a robot named The Altair 9000.

The name was a play on two pop-culture references. The first was the Computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The beloved Hal 9000. The second was more obscure. Probably only notable to computer nerds. The name Altair came from the first ever computer with a microprocessor.

The Altair 8800. This was before anybody even knew that computers could be personal. (PC) This was back when computers usually took up a whole room. The Altair was a breakthrough, if just for it's size. Sadly, there wasn't much you could actually do with it. You programmed the computer by flicking a bunch of toggle switches, this in turn fed binary data into the minimal memory of the machine. This was reflected by LED lights on the face plate. That's it! What kind of program could you possibly write with that? You can now buy an Altair 8800 kit that you build yourself, just like the original. (via boingboing)

Later, the Altair designer would bring accessories to market, one of note being the tape reader. This is important because a young Bill Gates wrote one of the first actual programming languages for the Altair, a from of BASIC written on paper tape with holes punched in it. In a nod to future copyright concerns, Bill Gates waged a huge campaign against "pirates" who would "rip off" his programs by placing his original paper tape over blank paper tapes and punching the holes with a pencil!

Wii're excited

The Wii in Review:

We waited in line for much of saturday to make sure we could get our hands on a shiny new Nintendo Wii the second they were released. We realized that we could have probably gotten in line a couple hours later than we did. But we ended up being fourth in line, so we were happy to stay put.

And so it went... at about 12:05am on sunday morning my Special Lady-Friend (she waited with me, what a lady!) and I walked out of the store, our hands heavy with a newly purchased Wii.

Clearly Nintendo has ripped off Apple's style... Shiny, white, and candy-coated. While I am usually the first to balk at design mimicry... If you're going to do it, at least rip off the best. What this translates to is a very clean set-up and unpacking experience with the Wii. Opening the package and taking out the two individually numbered boxes was a thrill. Each sub-box is labeled with a smartly designed icon of all the Wii parts that box contains.

If you are not familiar with the new system, it uses an innovative "Wiimote" instead-of / in-place-of a controller. You point the Wiimote at the television like a laser pointer. A small hand on screen tells you where you're pointing. Within seconds we were making stuff happen. A few moments after that, we were swinging our virtual tennis rackets in WiiSports, the collection of 5 games that came included with the system.

Sunday Evening we were able to accumulate enough Wiimotes so that we could play 2 on 2 tennis! Four people standing in the space station living room swinging little shiny white remotes at the television was pretty hilarious, not to mention ultra-fun. To our utter joy most of the WiiSports games seemed to match our movements perfectly. However, I've found that you need to find each game's "sweet spot." Meaning that you need to play the game the way the game wants you to play it. Trying to get WiiGolf to recognize your spastic excuse for a golf swing won't get you very far. (Havens... I'm looking at you, and laughing. Have another drink why don't you)

Honestly I could go on and on about playing the Wii, but I'll spare you. The system is tight, the games are great... (I've been playing the new Legend of Zelda and it's just awesome, and I've only just gotten to the first dungeon!) If you are unsure about the system, I say go play it somewhere. I have a feeling that after you try tennis you'll be sold. Being the cheapest next-gen game system out right now doesn't hurt the Wii's greatness either.

It's a big Week!

Firstly,
Wednesday night @ 10:00pm
Matt Chapman (of homestarrunner.com) will be the guest monologist for The Doug Dank Project @ PushPush Theater. Matt will bravely deliver monologues that will then be used to create complicated tightly-woven* improvised scenes performed by highly trained improvisational professionals. (*guaranteed)
Get directions and/or tickets from PushPush Theater.

Nextly,
Thursday night @ 9:00pm
Pleaseeasaur performs at the Drunken Unicorn! Scheduled to open for P-saur is none other than The Attractive Eighties Women. This is a show that will surely go down in history as having actually happened! P-saur and AEW go together like guns and bullets, or rats and vampires.

If you missed P-saur the last time they came through town then you've probably not been warned about how Totally Cool Cobras can be despite the fact that it takes them several days to die sometimes!

Lastly,
The New Nintendo Wii comes out Sunday!
My birthday was at the beginning of this month. I have forsaken all gifts in order to roll-over my birthday into the purchase of a new Nintendo Wii. Here's hoping I can grab one on sunday! Nintendo has been reporting that they've exceeded their expectations in the number of Wii units they've manufactured, this means that hopefully I won't have to step on your face come sunday morning to get one. But be warned, I will step on your face if I need to, and I love you guys! THAT'S how important the Wii is!

Just imagine, by this time next week we could all be playing Nintendo together.
I'll be all like, "Would you like to take a turn with the Nintendo Wiimote? Also, how is your face healing? Sorry about that."

Currently on book-tour

Deranged Millionaire, Crazed Know-it-all, rival only to Ben Franklin in the area of Almanac authoring...

We can't get enough of John Hodgman, this week he is interviewed on the latest edition of BoingBoing.net's podcast. He's promoting the Paperback Edition of his awesome fake Almanac The Areas of My Expertise. If you haven't had a chance to read it... Do.

mp3 link | itunes subscription

I love it when a plan comes together.

Apple has reportedly dropped Justin "The Mac Guy" Long from their Mac vs. PC ads, while keeping the PC Guy!

We've been saying all along that John Hodgman, the actor who plays the PC, was worth at least 2 Justin Longs.

Physics for Future Presidents

Richard Muller is a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. He teaches a physics class designed specifically for non-physics majors called Physics for Future Presidents. In the style of Carl Sagan his goal for the lectures is "for everyone to come away with the feeling that what was just covered is important for every world leader to know." (via metafilter)

Now you can take his entire class online... for free-ninty-nine! (that means free) Complete with quizzes, exams, and google video of his actual lectures. You can even email Muller himself if you're having problems!

I have always kicked myself for not taking my math classes more seriously in school. Although I did take a shine to Catholic High School level Biology, but I believe this to be the result of having to hand draw hundreds of models of single celled, and micro organisms. Once I've drawn something I can pretty much remember it forever. I even tried to teach myself calculus with available online text books, however, I've found that without a good lecturer, it's difficult to self-teach.

Now that Muller's lectures are all available online, that's not such a problem anymore. Well, Berkeley has taken this even further. You can now view courses and lectures from UC Berkeley directly through iTunes! Also for free! It's really a refreshing thing to see knowledge being given away freely like this. Sadly, it's also very rare.

Why does it have to be so rare? Why shouldn't everyone have access to this knowledge? OK, the people who attend Berkeley have worked very hard to do so, and are paying a lot of money. I totally respect that, their reward for this is a Berkeley diploma. The knowledge itself, the actual teachings, should be free to everyone. But if you want to say you've gone to Berkeley, well that's a different story, you need to get the grades to be accepted, you must pay the University to sit in their classes. This is essentially what Steve Jobs did. He dropped out, and started attending the classes that interested him. Learning what he wanted to learn. Look where that got him.

It's the legend of Zelda and it's really rad.

those creatures from Ganon are pretty bad...

only 2.5 more weeks until the new Nintendo Wii launches!
also, happy birthday to me today.

I got a crotch full of quarters

This is one of the coolest costumes I saw floating around the internet this morning. This guy's costume was a PLAYABLE Pac-Man Arcade Cabinet. (via metafilter)

You've got the goldeneye kid...

Back when the Nintendo64 was still putting up a fight against the original Sony PlayStation, me and all my nerdy friends used to play a game based on the James Bond movie GoldenEye. It came out right as I was going away to art school, and we spent many late nights playing the first real 4 player shoot'em up. Seriously...we were obsessed.

The game was so good, and so popular that we played it well after the Nintendo64 had pretty much ran it's course. Even when all the best games where being made on "Compact Discs" we still plugged in that clunky cartridge and had the times of our dorky lives shooting each other. The game is considered by most gamers to be a classic.

With The Nintendo Wii's super successful "virtual console" (a part of the Wii that allows you to buy and download classic games from years gone by... Like The Original Zelda!) everybody's been asking when GoldenEye will make it's triumphant return to the Nintendo. Well it's complicated.

The company that made GoldenEye, Rare, was bought by Microsoft. They're dealing with their own next-gen console the Xbox360. So the possibility of them being really, really nice and letting Nintendo have the rights to GoldenEye looked pretty slim. Honestly, could anyone blame them for not helping the competition?

However, recently the President of Nintendo America went on the record as saying:

"Suffice it to say we would love to see [GoldenEye on Virtual Console], so we're exploring all the rights issues."

as well as:

"the pain is worth the gain"

wow... Game Companies are actually listening to their customers and are trying to give us what we want? To their credit, Microsoft has fully supported Nintendo's handheld system the DS. And with Sony being such jerk faces, Microsoft has actually been looking like the good guys lately. So maybe this'll actually happen!

of computers and puppets

We hope everybody had a happy Turkey Day. We spent our long holiday weekend working and playing Nintendo :)

We've been hard at work getting our science fiction puppet show ready. It's called station.signals, and it's going to premiere on Turner's Broadband Internet Comedy Channel called "Super Deluxe." The website should launch sometime in January. We'll keep you posted.

The theatre I used to work at, Dad's Garage puts up an improvised soap opera every year. Each year a new location or genre is picked as a backdrop for the soap characters. My favorite year was when we took on the Science Fiction genre. I, of course, played a robot named The Altair 9000.

The name was a play on two pop-culture references. The first was the Computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The beloved Hal 9000. The second was more obscure. Probably only notable to computer nerds. The name Altair came from the first ever computer with a microprocessor.

The Altair 8800. This was before anybody even knew that computers could be personal. (PC) This was back when computers usually took up a whole room. The Altair was a breakthrough, if just for it's size. Sadly, there wasn't much you could actually do with it. You programmed the computer by flicking a bunch of toggle switches, this in turn fed binary data into the minimal memory of the machine. This was reflected by LED lights on the face plate. That's it! What kind of program could you possibly write with that? You can now buy an Altair 8800 kit that you build yourself, just like the original. (via boingboing)

Later, the Altair designer would bring accessories to market, one of note being the tape reader. This is important because a young Bill Gates wrote one of the first actual programming languages for the Altair, a from of BASIC written on paper tape with holes punched in it. In a nod to future copyright concerns, Bill Gates waged a huge campaign against "pirates" who would "rip off" his programs by placing his original paper tape over blank paper tapes and punching the holes with a pencil!

Wii're excited

The Wii in Review:

We waited in line for much of saturday to make sure we could get our hands on a shiny new Nintendo Wii the second they were released. We realized that we could have probably gotten in line a couple hours later than we did. But we ended up being fourth in line, so we were happy to stay put.

And so it went... at about 12:05am on sunday morning my Special Lady-Friend (she waited with me, what a lady!) and I walked out of the store, our hands heavy with a newly purchased Wii.

Clearly Nintendo has ripped off Apple's style... Shiny, white, and candy-coated. While I am usually the first to balk at design mimicry... If you're going to do it, at least rip off the best. What this translates to is a very clean set-up and unpacking experience with the Wii. Opening the package and taking out the two individually numbered boxes was a thrill. Each sub-box is labeled with a smartly designed icon of all the Wii parts that box contains.

If you are not familiar with the new system, it uses an innovative "Wiimote" instead-of / in-place-of a controller. You point the Wiimote at the television like a laser pointer. A small hand on screen tells you where you're pointing. Within seconds we were making stuff happen. A few moments after that, we were swinging our virtual tennis rackets in WiiSports, the collection of 5 games that came included with the system.

Sunday Evening we were able to accumulate enough Wiimotes so that we could play 2 on 2 tennis! Four people standing in the space station living room swinging little shiny white remotes at the television was pretty hilarious, not to mention ultra-fun. To our utter joy most of the WiiSports games seemed to match our movements perfectly. However, I've found that you need to find each game's "sweet spot." Meaning that you need to play the game the way the game wants you to play it. Trying to get WiiGolf to recognize your spastic excuse for a golf swing won't get you very far. (Havens... I'm looking at you, and laughing. Have another drink why don't you)

Honestly I could go on and on about playing the Wii, but I'll spare you. The system is tight, the games are great... (I've been playing the new Legend of Zelda and it's just awesome, and I've only just gotten to the first dungeon!) If you are unsure about the system, I say go play it somewhere. I have a feeling that after you try tennis you'll be sold. Being the cheapest next-gen game system out right now doesn't hurt the Wii's greatness either.

It's a big Week!

Firstly,
Wednesday night @ 10:00pm
Matt Chapman (of homestarrunner.com) will be the guest monologist for The Doug Dank Project @ PushPush Theater. Matt will bravely deliver monologues that will then be used to create complicated tightly-woven* improvised scenes performed by highly trained improvisational professionals. (*guaranteed)
Get directions and/or tickets from PushPush Theater.

Nextly,
Thursday night @ 9:00pm
Pleaseeasaur performs at the Drunken Unicorn! Scheduled to open for P-saur is none other than The Attractive Eighties Women. This is a show that will surely go down in history as having actually happened! P-saur and AEW go together like guns and bullets, or rats and vampires.

If you missed P-saur the last time they came through town then you've probably not been warned about how Totally Cool Cobras can be despite the fact that it takes them several days to die sometimes!

Lastly,
The New Nintendo Wii comes out Sunday!
My birthday was at the beginning of this month. I have forsaken all gifts in order to roll-over my birthday into the purchase of a new Nintendo Wii. Here's hoping I can grab one on sunday! Nintendo has been reporting that they've exceeded their expectations in the number of Wii units they've manufactured, this means that hopefully I won't have to step on your face come sunday morning to get one. But be warned, I will step on your face if I need to, and I love you guys! THAT'S how important the Wii is!

Just imagine, by this time next week we could all be playing Nintendo together.
I'll be all like, "Would you like to take a turn with the Nintendo Wiimote? Also, how is your face healing? Sorry about that."

Currently on book-tour

Deranged Millionaire, Crazed Know-it-all, rival only to Ben Franklin in the area of Almanac authoring...

We can't get enough of John Hodgman, this week he is interviewed on the latest edition of BoingBoing.net's podcast. He's promoting the Paperback Edition of his awesome fake Almanac The Areas of My Expertise. If you haven't had a chance to read it... Do.

mp3 link | itunes subscription

I love it when a plan comes together.

Apple has reportedly dropped Justin "The Mac Guy" Long from their Mac vs. PC ads, while keeping the PC Guy!

We've been saying all along that John Hodgman, the actor who plays the PC, was worth at least 2 Justin Longs.

Physics for Future Presidents

Richard Muller is a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. He teaches a physics class designed specifically for non-physics majors called Physics for Future Presidents. In the style of Carl Sagan his goal for the lectures is "for everyone to come away with the feeling that what was just covered is important for every world leader to know." (via metafilter)

Now you can take his entire class online... for free-ninty-nine! (that means free) Complete with quizzes, exams, and google video of his actual lectures. You can even email Muller himself if you're having problems!

I have always kicked myself for not taking my math classes more seriously in school. Although I did take a shine to Catholic High School level Biology, but I believe this to be the result of having to hand draw hundreds of models of single celled, and micro organisms. Once I've drawn something I can pretty much remember it forever. I even tried to teach myself calculus with available online text books, however, I've found that without a good lecturer, it's difficult to self-teach.

Now that Muller's lectures are all available online, that's not such a problem anymore. Well, Berkeley has taken this even further. You can now view courses and lectures from UC Berkeley directly through iTunes! Also for free! It's really a refreshing thing to see knowledge being given away freely like this. Sadly, it's also very rare.

Why does it have to be so rare? Why shouldn't everyone have access to this knowledge? OK, the people who attend Berkeley have worked very hard to do so, and are paying a lot of money. I totally respect that, their reward for this is a Berkeley diploma. The knowledge itself, the actual teachings, should be free to everyone. But if you want to say you've gone to Berkeley, well that's a different story, you need to get the grades to be accepted, you must pay the University to sit in their classes. This is essentially what Steve Jobs did. He dropped out, and started attending the classes that interested him. Learning what he wanted to learn. Look where that got him.

It's the legend of Zelda and it's really rad.

those creatures from Ganon are pretty bad...

only 2.5 more weeks until the new Nintendo Wii launches!
also, happy birthday to me today.

I got a crotch full of quarters

This is one of the coolest costumes I saw floating around the internet this morning. This guy's costume was a PLAYABLE Pac-Man Arcade Cabinet. (via metafilter)

You've got the goldeneye kid...

Back when the Nintendo64 was still putting up a fight against the original Sony PlayStation, me and all my nerdy friends used to play a game based on the James Bond movie GoldenEye. It came out right as I was going away to art school, and we spent many late nights playing the first real 4 player shoot'em up. Seriously...we were obsessed.

The game was so good, and so popular that we played it well after the Nintendo64 had pretty much ran it's course. Even when all the best games where being made on "Compact Discs" we still plugged in that clunky cartridge and had the times of our dorky lives shooting each other. The game is considered by most gamers to be a classic.

With The Nintendo Wii's super successful "virtual console" (a part of the Wii that allows you to buy and download classic games from years gone by... Like The Original Zelda!) everybody's been asking when GoldenEye will make it's triumphant return to the Nintendo. Well it's complicated.

The company that made GoldenEye, Rare, was bought by Microsoft. They're dealing with their own next-gen console the Xbox360. So the possibility of them being really, really nice and letting Nintendo have the rights to GoldenEye looked pretty slim. Honestly, could anyone blame them for not helping the competition?

However, recently the President of Nintendo America went on the record as saying:

"Suffice it to say we would love to see [GoldenEye on Virtual Console], so we're exploring all the rights issues."

as well as:

"the pain is worth the gain"

wow... Game Companies are actually listening to their customers and are trying to give us what we want? To their credit, Microsoft has fully supported Nintendo's handheld system the DS. And with Sony being such jerk faces, Microsoft has actually been looking like the good guys lately. So maybe this'll actually happen!

of computers and puppets

We hope everybody had a happy Turkey Day. We spent our long holiday weekend working and playing Nintendo :)

We've been hard at work getting our science fiction puppet show ready. It's called station.signals, and it's going to premiere on Turner's Broadband Internet Comedy Channel called "Super Deluxe." The website should launch sometime in January. We'll keep you posted.

The theatre I used to work at, Dad's Garage puts up an improvised soap opera every year. Each year a new location or genre is picked as a backdrop for the soap characters. My favorite year was when we took on the Science Fiction genre. I, of course, played a robot named The Altair 9000.

The name was a play on two pop-culture references. The first was the Computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The beloved Hal 9000. The second was more obscure. Probably only notable to computer nerds. The name Altair came from the first ever computer with a microprocessor.

The Altair 8800. This was before anybody even knew that computers could be personal. (PC) This was back when computers usually took up a whole room. The Altair was a breakthrough, if just for it's size. Sadly, there wasn't much you could actually do with it. You programmed the computer by flicking a bunch of toggle switches, this in turn fed binary data into the minimal memory of the machine. This was reflected by LED lights on the face plate. That's it! What kind of program could you possibly write with that? You can now buy an Altair 8800 kit that you build yourself, just like the original. (via boingboing)

Later, the Altair designer would bring accessories to market, one of note being the tape reader. This is important because a young Bill Gates wrote one of the first actual programming languages for the Altair, a from of BASIC written on paper tape with holes punched in it. In a nod to future copyright concerns, Bill Gates waged a huge campaign against "pirates" who would "rip off" his programs by placing his original paper tape over blank paper tapes and punching the holes with a pencil!

Wii're excited

The Wii in Review:

We waited in line for much of saturday to make sure we could get our hands on a shiny new Nintendo Wii the second they were released. We realized that we could have probably gotten in line a couple hours later than we did. But we ended up being fourth in line, so we were happy to stay put.

And so it went... at about 12:05am on sunday morning my Special Lady-Friend (she waited with me, what a lady!) and I walked out of the store, our hands heavy with a newly purchased Wii.

Clearly Nintendo has ripped off Apple's style... Shiny, white, and candy-coated. While I am usually the first to balk at design mimicry... If you're going to do it, at least rip off the best. What this translates to is a very clean set-up and unpacking experience with the Wii. Opening the package and taking out the two individually numbered boxes was a thrill. Each sub-box is labeled with a smartly designed icon of all the Wii parts that box contains.

If you are not familiar with the new system, it uses an innovative "Wiimote" instead-of / in-place-of a controller. You point the Wiimote at the television like a laser pointer. A small hand on screen tells you where you're pointing. Within seconds we were making stuff happen. A few moments after that, we were swinging our virtual tennis rackets in WiiSports, the collection of 5 games that came included with the system.

Sunday Evening we were able to accumulate enough Wiimotes so that we could play 2 on 2 tennis! Four people standing in the space station living room swinging little shiny white remotes at the television was pretty hilarious, not to mention ultra-fun. To our utter joy most of the WiiSports games seemed to match our movements perfectly. However, I've found that you need to find each game's "sweet spot." Meaning that you need to play the game the way the game wants you to play it. Trying to get WiiGolf to recognize your spastic excuse for a golf swing won't get you very far. (Havens... I'm looking at you, and laughing. Have another drink why don't you)

Honestly I could go on and on about playing the Wii, but I'll spare you. The system is tight, the games are great... (I've been playing the new Legend of Zelda and it's just awesome, and I've only just gotten to the first dungeon!) If you are unsure about the system, I say go play it somewhere. I have a feeling that after you try tennis you'll be sold. Being the cheapest next-gen game system out right now doesn't hurt the Wii's greatness either.

It's a big Week!

Firstly,
Wednesday night @ 10:00pm
Matt Chapman (of homestarrunner.com) will be the guest monologist for The Doug Dank Project @ PushPush Theater. Matt will bravely deliver monologues that will then be used to create complicated tightly-woven* improvised scenes performed by highly trained improvisational professionals. (*guaranteed)
Get directions and/or tickets from PushPush Theater.

Nextly,
Thursday night @ 9:00pm
Pleaseeasaur performs at the Drunken Unicorn! Scheduled to open for P-saur is none other than The Attractive Eighties Women. This is a show that will surely go down in history as having actually happened! P-saur and AEW go together like guns and bullets, or rats and vampires.

If you missed P-saur the last time they came through town then you've probably not been warned about how Totally Cool Cobras can be despite the fact that it takes them several days to die sometimes!

Lastly,
The New Nintendo Wii comes out Sunday!
My birthday was at the beginning of this month. I have forsaken all gifts in order to roll-over my birthday into the purchase of a new Nintendo Wii. Here's hoping I can grab one on sunday! Nintendo has been reporting that they've exceeded their expectations in the number of Wii units they've manufactured, this means that hopefully I won't have to step on your face come sunday morning to get one. But be warned, I will step on your face if I need to, and I love you guys! THAT'S how important the Wii is!

Just imagine, by this time next week we could all be playing Nintendo together.
I'll be all like, "Would you like to take a turn with the Nintendo Wiimote? Also, how is your face healing? Sorry about that."

Currently on book-tour

Deranged Millionaire, Crazed Know-it-all, rival only to Ben Franklin in the area of Almanac authoring...

We can't get enough of John Hodgman, this week he is interviewed on the latest edition of BoingBoing.net's podcast. He's promoting the Paperback Edition of his awesome fake Almanac The Areas of My Expertise. If you haven't had a chance to read it... Do.

mp3 link | itunes subscription

I love it when a plan comes together.

Apple has reportedly dropped Justin "The Mac Guy" Long from their Mac vs. PC ads, while keeping the PC Guy!

We've been saying all along that John Hodgman, the actor who plays the PC, was worth at least 2 Justin Longs.

Physics for Future Presidents

Richard Muller is a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. He teaches a physics class designed specifically for non-physics majors called Physics for Future Presidents. In the style of Carl Sagan his goal for the lectures is "for everyone to come away with the feeling that what was just covered is important for every world leader to know." (via metafilter)

Now you can take his entire class online... for free-ninty-nine! (that means free) Complete with quizzes, exams, and google video of his actual lectures. You can even email Muller himself if you're having problems!

I have always kicked myself for not taking my math classes more seriously in school. Although I did take a shine to Catholic High School level Biology, but I believe this to be the result of having to hand draw hundreds of models of single celled, and micro organisms. Once I've drawn something I can pretty much remember it forever. I even tried to teach myself calculus with available online text books, however, I've found that without a good lecturer, it's difficult to self-teach.

Now that Muller's lectures are all available online, that's not such a problem anymore. Well, Berkeley has taken this even further. You can now view courses and lectures from UC Berkeley directly through iTunes! Also for free! It's really a refreshing thing to see knowledge being given away freely like this. Sadly, it's also very rare.

Why does it have to be so rare? Why shouldn't everyone have access to this knowledge? OK, the people who attend Berkeley have worked very hard to do so, and are paying a lot of money. I totally respect that, their reward for this is a Berkeley diploma. The knowledge itself, the actual teachings, should be free to everyone. But if you want to say you've gone to Berkeley, well that's a different story, you need to get the grades to be accepted, you must pay the University to sit in their classes. This is essentially what Steve Jobs did. He dropped out, and started attending the classes that interested him. Learning what he wanted to learn. Look where that got him.

It's the legend of Zelda and it's really rad.

those creatures from Ganon are pretty bad...

only 2.5 more weeks until the new Nintendo Wii launches!
also, happy birthday to me today.

I got a crotch full of quarters

This is one of the coolest costumes I saw floating around the internet this morning. This guy's costume was a PLAYABLE Pac-Man Arcade Cabinet. (via metafilter)

You've got the goldeneye kid...

Back when the Nintendo64 was still putting up a fight against the original Sony PlayStation, me and all my nerdy friends used to play a game based on the James Bond movie GoldenEye. It came out right as I was going away to art school, and we spent many late nights playing the first real 4 player shoot'em up. Seriously...we were obsessed.

The game was so good, and so popular that we played it well after the Nintendo64 had pretty much ran it's course. Even when all the best games where being made on "Compact Discs" we still plugged in that clunky cartridge and had the times of our dorky lives shooting each other. The game is considered by most gamers to be a classic.

With The Nintendo Wii's super successful "virtual console" (a part of the Wii that allows you to buy and download classic games from years gone by... Like The Original Zelda!) everybody's been asking when GoldenEye will make it's triumphant return to the Nintendo. Well it's complicated.

The company that made GoldenEye, Rare, was bought by Microsoft. They're dealing with their own next-gen console the Xbox360. So the possibility of them being really, really nice and letting Nintendo have the rights to GoldenEye looked pretty slim. Honestly, could anyone blame them for not helping the competition?

However, recently the President of Nintendo America went on the record as saying:

"Suffice it to say we would love to see [GoldenEye on Virtual Console], so we're exploring all the rights issues."

as well as:

"the pain is worth the gain"

wow... Game Companies are actually listening to their customers and are trying to give us what we want? To their credit, Microsoft has fully supported Nintendo's handheld system the DS. And with Sony being such jerk faces, Microsoft has actually been looking like the good guys lately. So maybe this'll actually happen!

of computers and puppets

We hope everybody had a happy Turkey Day. We spent our long holiday weekend working and playing Nintendo :)

We've been hard at work getting our science fiction puppet show ready. It's called station.signals, and it's going to premiere on Turner's Broadband Internet Comedy Channel called "Super Deluxe." The website should launch sometime in January. We'll keep you posted.

The theatre I used to work at, Dad's Garage puts up an improvised soap opera every year. Each year a new location or genre is picked as a backdrop for the soap characters. My favorite year was when we took on the Science Fiction genre. I, of course, played a robot named The Altair 9000.

The name was a play on two pop-culture references. The first was the Computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The beloved Hal 9000. The second was more obscure. Probably only notable to computer nerds. The name Altair came from the first ever computer with a microprocessor.

The Altair 8800. This was before anybody even knew that computers could be personal. (PC) This was back when computers usually took up a whole room. The Altair was a breakthrough, if just for it's size. Sadly, there wasn't much you could actually do with it. You programmed the computer by flicking a bunch of toggle switches, this in turn fed binary data into the minimal memory of the machine. This was reflected by LED lights on the face plate. That's it! What kind of program could you possibly write with that? You can now buy an Altair 8800 kit that you build yourself, just like the original. (via boingboing)

Later, the Altair designer would bring accessories to market, one of note being the tape reader. This is important because a young Bill Gates wrote one of the first actual programming languages for the Altair, a from of BASIC written on paper tape with holes punched in it. In a nod to future copyright concerns, Bill Gates waged a huge campaign against "pirates" who would "rip off" his programs by placing his original paper tape over blank paper tapes and punching the holes with a pencil!

Wii're excited

The Wii in Review:

We waited in line for much of saturday to make sure we could get our hands on a shiny new Nintendo Wii the second they were released. We realized that we could have probably gotten in line a couple hours later than we did. But we ended up being fourth in line, so we were happy to stay put.

And so it went... at about 12:05am on sunday morning my Special Lady-Friend (she waited with me, what a lady!) and I walked out of the store, our hands heavy with a newly purchased Wii.

Clearly Nintendo has ripped off Apple's style... Shiny, white, and candy-coated. While I am usually the first to balk at design mimicry... If you're going to do it, at least rip off the best. What this translates to is a very clean set-up and unpacking experience with the Wii. Opening the package and taking out the two individually numbered boxes was a thrill. Each sub-box is labeled with a smartly designed icon of all the Wii parts that box contains.

If you are not familiar with the new system, it uses an innovative "Wiimote" instead-of / in-place-of a controller. You point the Wiimote at the television like a laser pointer. A small hand on screen tells you where you're pointing. Within seconds we were making stuff happen. A few moments after that, we were swinging our virtual tennis rackets in WiiSports, the collection of 5 games that came included with the system.

Sunday Evening we were able to accumulate enough Wiimotes so that we could play 2 on 2 tennis! Four people standing in the space station living room swinging little shiny white remotes at the television was pretty hilarious, not to mention ultra-fun. To our utter joy most of the WiiSports games seemed to match our movements perfectly. However, I've found that you need to find each game's "sweet spot." Meaning that you need to play the game the way the game wants you to play it. Trying to get WiiGolf to recognize your spastic excuse for a golf swing won't get you very far. (Havens... I'm looking at you, and laughing. Have another drink why don't you)

Honestly I could go on and on about playing the Wii, but I'll spare you. The system is tight, the games are great... (I've been playing the new Legend of Zelda and it's just awesome, and I've only just gotten to the first dungeon!) If you are unsure about the system, I say go play it somewhere. I have a feeling that after you try tennis you'll be sold. Being the cheapest next-gen game system out right now doesn't hurt the Wii's greatness either.

It's a big Week!

Firstly,
Wednesday night @ 10:00pm
Matt Chapman (of homestarrunner.com) will be the guest monologist for The Doug Dank Project @ PushPush Theater. Matt will bravely deliver monologues that will then be used to create complicated tightly-woven* improvised scenes performed by highly trained improvisational professionals. (*guaranteed)
Get directions and/or tickets from PushPush Theater.

Nextly,
Thursday night @ 9:00pm
Pleaseeasaur performs at the Drunken Unicorn! Scheduled to open for P-saur is none other than The Attractive Eighties Women. This is a show that will surely go down in history as having actually happened! P-saur and AEW go together like guns and bullets, or rats and vampires.

If you missed P-saur the last time they came through town then you've probably not been warned about how Totally Cool Cobras can be despite the fact that it takes them several days to die sometimes!

Lastly,
The New Nintendo Wii comes out Sunday!
My birthday was at the beginning of this month. I have forsaken all gifts in order to roll-over my birthday into the purchase of a new Nintendo Wii. Here's hoping I can grab one on sunday! Nintendo has been reporting that they've exceeded their expectations in the number of Wii units they've manufactured, this means that hopefully I won't have to step on your face come sunday morning to get one. But be warned, I will step on your face if I need to, and I love you guys! THAT'S how important the Wii is!

Just imagine, by this time next week we could all be playing Nintendo together.
I'll be all like, "Would you like to take a turn with the Nintendo Wiimote? Also, how is your face healing? Sorry about that."

Currently on book-tour

Deranged Millionaire, Crazed Know-it-all, rival only to Ben Franklin in the area of Almanac authoring...

We can't get enough of John Hodgman, this week he is interviewed on the latest edition of BoingBoing.net's podcast. He's promoting the Paperback Edition of his awesome fake Almanac The Areas of My Expertise. If you haven't had a chance to read it... Do.

mp3 link | itunes subscription

I love it when a plan comes together.

Apple has reportedly dropped Justin "The Mac Guy" Long from their Mac vs. PC ads, while keeping the PC Guy!

We've been saying all along that John Hodgman, the actor who plays the PC, was worth at least 2 Justin Longs.

Physics for Future Presidents

Richard Muller is a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. He teaches a physics class designed specifically for non-physics majors called Physics for Future Presidents. In the style of Carl Sagan his goal for the lectures is "for everyone to come away with the feeling that what was just covered is important for every world leader to know." (via metafilter)

Now you can take his entire class online... for free-ninty-nine! (that means free) Complete with quizzes, exams, and google video of his actual lectures. You can even email Muller himself if you're having problems!

I have always kicked myself for not taking my math classes more seriously in school. Although I did take a shine to Catholic High School level Biology, but I believe this to be the result of having to hand draw hundreds of models of single celled, and micro organisms. Once I've drawn something I can pretty much remember it forever. I even tried to teach myself calculus with available online text books, however, I've found that without a good lecturer, it's difficult to self-teach.

Now that Muller's lectures are all available online, that's not such a problem anymore. Well, Berkeley has taken this even further. You can now view courses and lectures from UC Berkeley directly through iTunes! Also for free! It's really a refreshing thing to see knowledge being given away freely like this. Sadly, it's also very rare.

Why does it have to be so rare? Why shouldn't everyone have access to this knowledge? OK, the people who attend Berkeley have worked very hard to do so, and are paying a lot of money. I totally respect that, their reward for this is a Berkeley diploma. The knowledge itself, the actual teachings, should be free to everyone. But if you want to say you've gone to Berkeley, well that's a different story, you need to get the grades to be accepted, you must pay the University to sit in their classes. This is essentially what Steve Jobs did. He dropped out, and started attending the classes that interested him. Learning what he wanted to learn. Look where that got him.

It's the legend of Zelda and it's really rad.

those creatures from Ganon are pretty bad...

only 2.5 more weeks until the new Nintendo Wii launches!
also, happy birthday to me today.

I got a crotch full of quarters

This is one of the coolest costumes I saw floating around the internet this morning. This guy's costume was a PLAYABLE Pac-Man Arcade Cabinet. (via metafilter)

You've got the goldeneye kid...

Back when the Nintendo64 was still putting up a fight against the original Sony PlayStation, me and all my nerdy friends used to play a game based on the James Bond movie GoldenEye. It came out right as I was going away to art school, and we spent many late nights playing the first real 4 player shoot'em up. Seriously...we were obsessed.

The game was so good, and so popular that we played it well after the Nintendo64 had pretty much ran it's course. Even when all the best games where being made on "Compact Discs" we still plugged in that clunky cartridge and had the times of our dorky lives shooting each other. The game is considered by most gamers to be a classic.

With The Nintendo Wii's super successful "virtual console" (a part of the Wii that allows you to buy and download classic games from years gone by... Like The Original Zelda!) everybody's been asking when GoldenEye will make it's triumphant return to the Nintendo. Well it's complicated.

The company that made GoldenEye, Rare, was bought by Microsoft. They're dealing with their own next-gen console the Xbox360. So the possibility of them being really, really nice and letting Nintendo have the rights to GoldenEye looked pretty slim. Honestly, could anyone blame them for not helping the competition?

However, recently the President of Nintendo America went on the record as saying:

"Suffice it to say we would love to see [GoldenEye on Virtual Console], so we're exploring all the rights issues."

as well as:

"the pain is worth the gain"

wow... Game Companies are actually listening to their customers and are trying to give us what we want? To their credit, Microsoft has fully supported Nintendo's handheld system the DS. And with Sony being such jerk faces, Microsoft has actually been looking like the good guys lately. So maybe this'll actually happen!

of computers and puppets

We hope everybody had a happy Turkey Day. We spent our long holiday weekend working and playing Nintendo :)

We've been hard at work getting our science fiction puppet show ready. It's called station.signals, and it's going to premiere on Turner's Broadband Internet Comedy Channel called "Super Deluxe." The website should launch sometime in January. We'll keep you posted.

The theatre I used to work at, Dad's Garage puts up an improvised soap opera every year. Each year a new location or genre is picked as a backdrop for the soap characters. My favorite year was when we took on the Science Fiction genre. I, of course, played a robot named The Altair 9000.

The name was a play on two pop-culture references. The first was the Computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The beloved Hal 9000. The second was more obscure. Probably only notable to computer nerds. The name Altair came from the first ever computer with a microprocessor.

The Altair 8800. This was before anybody even knew that computers could be personal. (PC) This was back when computers usually took up a whole room. The Altair was a breakthrough, if just for it's size. Sadly, there wasn't much you could actually do with it. You programmed the computer by flicking a bunch of toggle switches, this in turn fed binary data into the minimal memory of the machine. This was reflected by LED lights on the face plate. That's it! What kind of program could you possibly write with that? You can now buy an Altair 8800 kit that you build yourself, just like the original. (via boingboing)

Later, the Altair designer would bring accessories to market, one of note being the tape reader. This is important because a young Bill Gates wrote one of the first actual programming languages for the Altair, a from of BASIC written on paper tape with holes punched in it. In a nod to future copyright concerns, Bill Gates waged a huge campaign against "pirates" who would "rip off" his programs by placing his original paper tape over blank paper tapes and punching the holes with a pencil!

Wii're excited

The Wii in Review:

We waited in line for much of saturday to make sure we could get our hands on a shiny new Nintendo Wii the second they were released. We realized that we could have probably gotten in line a couple hours later than we did. But we ended up being fourth in line, so we were happy to stay put.

And so it went... at about 12:05am on sunday morning my Special Lady-Friend (she waited with me, what a lady!) and I walked out of the store, our hands heavy with a newly purchased Wii.

Clearly Nintendo has ripped off Apple's style... Shiny, white, and candy-coated. While I am usually the first to balk at design mimicry... If you're going to do it, at least rip off the best. What this translates to is a very clean set-up and unpacking experience with the Wii. Opening the package and taking out the two individually numbered boxes was a thrill. Each sub-box is labeled with a smartly designed icon of all the Wii parts that box contains.

If you are not familiar with the new system, it uses an innovative "Wiimote" instead-of / in-place-of a controller. You point the Wiimote at the television like a laser pointer. A small hand on screen tells you where you're pointing. Within seconds we were making stuff happen. A few moments after that, we were swinging our virtual tennis rackets in WiiSports, the collection of 5 games that came included with the system.

Sunday Evening we were able to accumulate enough Wiimotes so that we could play 2 on 2 tennis! Four people standing in the space station living room swinging little shiny white remotes at the television was pretty hilarious, not to mention ultra-fun. To our utter joy most of the WiiSports games seemed to match our movements perfectly. However, I've found that you need to find each game's "sweet spot." Meaning that you need to play the game the way the game wants you to play it. Trying to get WiiGolf to recognize your spastic excuse for a golf swing won't get you very far. (Havens... I'm looking at you, and laughing. Have another drink why don't you)

Honestly I could go on and on about playing the Wii, but I'll spare you. The system is tight, the games are great... (I've been playing the new Legend of Zelda and it's just awesome, and I've only just gotten to the first dungeon!) If you are unsure about the system, I say go play it somewhere. I have a feeling that after you try tennis you'll be sold. Being the cheapest next-gen game system out right now doesn't hurt the Wii's greatness either.

It's a big Week!

Firstly,
Wednesday night @ 10:00pm
Matt Chapman (of homestarrunner.com) will be the guest monologist for The Doug Dank Project @ PushPush Theater. Matt will bravely deliver monologues that will then be used to create complicated tightly-woven* improvised scenes performed by highly trained improvisational professionals. (*guaranteed)
Get directions and/or tickets from PushPush Theater.

Nextly,
Thursday night @ 9:00pm
Pleaseeasaur performs at the Drunken Unicorn! Scheduled to open for P-saur is none other than The Attractive Eighties Women. This is a show that will surely go down in history as having actually happened! P-saur and AEW go together like guns and bullets, or rats and vampires.

If you missed P-saur the last time they came through town then you've probably not been warned about how Totally Cool Cobras can be despite the fact that it takes them several days to die sometimes!

Lastly,
The New Nintendo Wii comes out Sunday!
My birthday was at the beginning of this month. I have forsaken all gifts in order to roll-over my birthday into the purchase of a new Nintendo Wii. Here's hoping I can grab one on sunday! Nintendo has been reporting that they've exceeded their expectations in the number of Wii units they've manufactured, this means that hopefully I won't have to step on your face come sunday morning to get one. But be warned, I will step on your face if I need to, and I love you guys! THAT'S how important the Wii is!

Just imagine, by this time next week we could all be playing Nintendo together.
I'll be all like, "Would you like to take a turn with the Nintendo Wiimote? Also, how is your face healing? Sorry about that."

Currently on book-tour

Deranged Millionaire, Crazed Know-it-all, rival only to Ben Franklin in the area of Almanac authoring...

We can't get enough of John Hodgman, this week he is interviewed on the latest edition of BoingBoing.net's podcast. He's promoting the Paperback Edition of his awesome fake Almanac The Areas of My Expertise. If you haven't had a chance to read it... Do.

mp3 link | itunes subscription

I love it when a plan comes together.

Apple has reportedly dropped Justin "The Mac Guy" Long from their Mac vs. PC ads, while keeping the PC Guy!

We've been saying all along that John Hodgman, the actor who plays the PC, was worth at least 2 Justin Longs.

Physics for Future Presidents

Richard Muller is a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. He teaches a physics class designed specifically for non-physics majors called Physics for Future Presidents. In the style of Carl Sagan his goal for the lectures is "for everyone to come away with the feeling that what was just covered is important for every world leader to know." (via metafilter)

Now you can take his entire class online... for free-ninty-nine! (that means free) Complete with quizzes, exams, and google video of his actual lectures. You can even email Muller himself if you're having problems!

I have always kicked myself for not taking my math classes more seriously in school. Although I did take a shine to Catholic High School level Biology, but I believe this to be the result of having to hand draw hundreds of models of single celled, and micro organisms. Once I've drawn something I can pretty much remember it forever. I even tried to teach myself calculus with available online text books, however, I've found that without a good lecturer, it's difficult to self-teach.

Now that Muller's lectures are all available online, that's not such a problem anymore. Well, Berkeley has taken this even further. You can now view courses and lectures from UC Berkeley directly through iTunes! Also for free! It's really a refreshing thing to see knowledge being given away freely like this. Sadly, it's also very rare.

Why does it have to be so rare? Why shouldn't everyone have access to this knowledge? OK, the people who attend Berkeley have worked very hard to do so, and are paying a lot of money. I totally respect that, their reward for this is a Berkeley diploma. The knowledge itself, the actual teachings, should be free to everyone. But if you want to say you've gone to Berkeley, well that's a different story, you need to get the grades to be accepted, you must pay the University to sit in their classes. This is essentially what Steve Jobs did. He dropped out, and started attending the classes that interested him. Learning what he wanted to learn. Look where that got him.

It's the legend of Zelda and it's really rad.

those creatures from Ganon are pretty bad...

only 2.5 more weeks until the new Nintendo Wii launches!
also, happy birthday to me today.

I got a crotch full of quarters

This is one of the coolest costumes I saw floating around the internet this morning. This guy's costume was a PLAYABLE Pac-Man Arcade Cabinet. (via metafilter)

You've got the goldeneye kid...

Back when the Nintendo64 was still putting up a fight against the original Sony PlayStation, me and all my nerdy friends used to play a game based on the James Bond movie GoldenEye. It came out right as I was going away to art school, and we spent many late nights playing the first real 4 player shoot'em up. Seriously...we were obsessed.

The game was so good, and so popular that we played it well after the Nintendo64 had pretty much ran it's course. Even when all the best games where being made on "Compact Discs" we still plugged in that clunky cartridge and had the times of our dorky lives shooting each other. The game is considered by most gamers to be a classic.

With The Nintendo Wii's super successful "virtual console" (a part of the Wii that allows you to buy and download classic games from years gone by... Like The Original Zelda!) everybody's been asking when GoldenEye will make it's triumphant return to the Nintendo. Well it's complicated.

The company that made GoldenEye, Rare, was bought by Microsoft. They're dealing with their own next-gen console the Xbox360. So the possibility of them being really, really nice and letting Nintendo have the rights to GoldenEye looked pretty slim. Honestly, could anyone blame them for not helping the competition?

However, recently the President of Nintendo America went on the record as saying:

"Suffice it to say we would love to see [GoldenEye on Virtual Console], so we're exploring all the rights issues."

as well as:

"the pain is worth the gain"

wow... Game Companies are actually listening to their customers and are trying to give us what we want? To their credit, Microsoft has fully supported Nintendo's handheld system the DS. And with Sony being such jerk faces, Microsoft has actually been looking like the good guys lately. So maybe this'll actually happen!

of computers and puppets

We hope everybody had a happy Turkey Day. We spent our long holiday weekend working and playing Nintendo :)

We've been hard at work getting our science fiction puppet show ready. It's called station.signals, and it's going to premiere on Turner's Broadband Internet Comedy Channel called "Super Deluxe." The website should launch sometime in January. We'll keep you posted.

The theatre I used to work at, Dad's Garage puts up an improvised soap opera every year. Each year a new location or genre is picked as a backdrop for the soap characters. My favorite year was when we took on the Science Fiction genre. I, of course, played a robot named The Altair 9000.

The name was a play on two pop-culture references. The first was the Computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The beloved Hal 9000. The second was more obscure. Probably only notable to computer nerds. The name Altair came from the first ever computer with a microprocessor.

The Altair 8800. This was before anybody even knew that computers could be personal. (PC) This was back when computers usually took up a whole room. The Altair was a breakthrough, if just for it's size. Sadly, there wasn't much you could actually do with it. You programmed the computer by flicking a bunch of toggle switches, this in turn fed binary data into the minimal memory of the machine. This was reflected by LED lights on the face plate. That's it! What kind of program could you possibly write with that? You can now buy an Altair 8800 kit that you build yourself, just like the original. (via boingboing)

Later, the Altair designer would bring accessories to market, one of note being the tape reader. This is important because a young Bill Gates wrote one of the first actual programming languages for the Altair, a from of BASIC written on paper tape with holes punched in it. In a nod to future copyright concerns, Bill Gates waged a huge campaign against "pirates" who would "rip off" his programs by placing his original paper tape over blank paper tapes and punching the holes with a pencil!

Wii're excited

The Wii in Review:

We waited in line for much of saturday to make sure we could get our hands on a shiny new Nintendo Wii the second they were released. We realized that we could have probably gotten in line a couple hours later than we did. But we ended up being fourth in line, so we were happy to stay put.

And so it went... at about 12:05am on sunday morning my Special Lady-Friend (she waited with me, what a lady!) and I walked out of the store, our hands heavy with a newly purchased Wii.

Clearly Nintendo has ripped off Apple's style... Shiny, white, and candy-coated. While I am usually the first to balk at design mimicry... If you're going to do it, at least rip off the best. What this translates to is a very clean set-up and unpacking experience with the Wii. Opening the package and taking out the two individually numbered boxes was a thrill. Each sub-box is labeled with a smartly designed icon of all the Wii parts that box contains.

If you are not familiar with the new system, it uses an innovative "Wiimote" instead-of / in-place-of a controller. You point the Wiimote at the television like a laser pointer. A small hand on screen tells you where you're pointing. Within seconds we were making stuff happen. A few moments after that, we were swinging our virtual tennis rackets in WiiSports, the collection of 5 games that came included with the system.

Sunday Evening we were able to accumulate enough Wiimotes so that we could play 2 on 2 tennis! Four people standing in the space station living room swinging little shiny white remotes at the television was pretty hilarious, not to mention ultra-fun. To our utter joy most of the WiiSports games seemed to match our movements perfectly. However, I've found that you need to find each game's "sweet spot." Meaning that you need to play the game the way the game wants you to play it. Trying to get WiiGolf to recognize your spastic excuse for a golf swing won't get you very far. (Havens... I'm looking at you, and laughing. Have another drink why don't you)

Honestly I could go on and on about playing the Wii, but I'll spare you. The system is tight, the games are great... (I've been playing the new Legend of Zelda and it's just awesome, and I've only just gotten to the first dungeon!) If you are unsure about the system, I say go play it somewhere. I have a feeling that after you try tennis you'll be sold. Being the cheapest next-gen game system out right now doesn't hurt the Wii's greatness either.

It's a big Week!

Firstly,
Wednesday night @ 10:00pm
Matt Chapman (of homestarrunner.com) will be the guest monologist for The Doug Dank Project @ PushPush Theater. Matt will bravely deliver monologues that will then be used to create complicated tightly-woven* improvised scenes performed by highly trained improvisational professionals. (*guaranteed)
Get directions and/or tickets from PushPush Theater.

Nextly,
Thursday night @ 9:00pm
Pleaseeasaur performs at the Drunken Unicorn! Scheduled to open for P-saur is none other than The Attractive Eighties Women. This is a show that will surely go down in history as having actually happened! P-saur and AEW go together like guns and bullets, or rats and vampires.

If you missed P-saur the last time they came through town then you've probably not been warned about how Totally Cool Cobras can be despite the fact that it takes them several days to die sometimes!

Lastly,
The New Nintendo Wii comes out Sunday!
My birthday was at the beginning of this month. I have forsaken all gifts in order to roll-over my birthday into the purchase of a new Nintendo Wii. Here's hoping I can grab one on sunday! Nintendo has been reporting that they've exceeded their expectations in the number of Wii units they've manufactured, this means that hopefully I won't have to step on your face come sunday morning to get one. But be warned, I will step on your face if I need to, and I love you guys! THAT'S how important the Wii is!

Just imagine, by this time next week we could all be playing Nintendo together.
I'll be all like, "Would you like to take a turn with the Nintendo Wiimote? Also, how is your face healing? Sorry about that."

Currently on book-tour

Deranged Millionaire, Crazed Know-it-all, rival only to Ben Franklin in the area of Almanac authoring...

We can't get enough of John Hodgman, this week he is interviewed on the latest edition of BoingBoing.net's podcast. He's promoting the Paperback Edition of his awesome fake Almanac The Areas of My Expertise. If you haven't had a chance to read it... Do.

mp3 link | itunes subscription

I love it when a plan comes together.

Apple has reportedly dropped Justin "The Mac Guy" Long from their Mac vs. PC ads, while keeping the PC Guy!

We've been saying all along that John Hodgman, the actor who plays the PC, was worth at least 2 Justin Longs.

Physics for Future Presidents

Richard Muller is a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. He teaches a physics class designed specifically for non-physics majors called Physics for Future Presidents. In the style of Carl Sagan his goal for the lectures is "for everyone to come away with the feeling that what was just covered is important for every world leader to know." (via metafilter)

Now you can take his entire class online... for free-ninty-nine! (that means free) Complete with quizzes, exams, and google video of his actual lectures. You can even email Muller himself if you're having problems!

I have always kicked myself for not taking my math classes more seriously in school. Although I did take a shine to Catholic High School level Biology, but I believe this to be the result of having to hand draw hundreds of models of single celled, and micro organisms. Once I've drawn something I can pretty much remember it forever. I even tried to teach myself calculus with available online text books, however, I've found that without a good lecturer, it's difficult to self-teach.

Now that Muller's lectures are all available online, that's not such a problem anymore. Well, Berkeley has taken this even further. You can now view courses and lectures from UC Berkeley directly through iTunes! Also for free! It's really a refreshing thing to see knowledge being given away freely like this. Sadly, it's also very rare.

Why does it have to be so rare? Why shouldn't everyone have access to this knowledge? OK, the people who attend Berkeley have worked very hard to do so, and are paying a lot of money. I totally respect that, their reward for this is a Berkeley diploma. The knowledge itself, the actual teachings, should be free to everyone. But if you want to say you've gone to Berkeley, well that's a different story, you need to get the grades to be accepted, you must pay the University to sit in their classes. This is essentially what Steve Jobs did. He dropped out, and started attending the classes that interested him. Learning what he wanted to learn. Look where that got him.

It's the legend of Zelda and it's really rad.

those creatures from Ganon are pretty bad...

only 2.5 more weeks until the new Nintendo Wii launches!
also, happy birthday to me today.

I got a crotch full of quarters

This is one of the coolest costumes I saw floating around the internet this morning. This guy's costume was a PLAYABLE Pac-Man Arcade Cabinet. (via metafilter)

You've got the goldeneye kid...

Back when the Nintendo64 was still putting up a fight against the original Sony PlayStation, me and all