or maybe something uplifting…

I have to say that Winer’s really hit on something with this one (10/27/2005). He did his Morning Coffee Notes podcast from a breakfast get-together last Thursday . The tone is very casual and we get to hear all the regular diner sounds. I don’t know if it’s all that great foley or the wide variety of voices, but something really strikes me about the whole production.

Maybe it’s more personal for me since it’s kind of like evesdropping in a bay area diner.

Topics wander from gender in tech to cohousing, have a listen - it’s long but it’s interesting.

I’m listening to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code from Monday right now. When I heard the first few minutes I had to say “What the hell is this and why do I want to hear it?”
Read the rest of “The Daily Source Code really just isn’t”…

I played We ♥ Katamari last night with a friend. The game is really smooth. It’s nice that the maps are pretty open-ended and that helps gameplay feel smooth. The co-operative play is great, too. Both players work together to build the same Katamari, so the game doesn’t need a split screen. On the competitive level we tried the game was fun but you’re each building a Katamari of your own, so the screen is split down the middle. Split screens always feel constrained in my experience. So it encourages playing the co-operative levels and that’s great.

I honestly do love it when games come out with an E rating that are fun and not just the usual pablum too often passed off as a kid’s game.

Of course, sometimes I have twisted ideas… Read the rest of “I ♥ Katamari Too”…

That took way too long to figure out. Sometimes the information you need is right in front of you but you can’t recognize it. I just figured out that the TableModel and the TableColumnModel are next to each other in the Swing heirarchy. The way I was looking at it I thought they should overlap somehow.
Read the rest of “Fooling with a JTable”…

Panera Bread’s great. Some fresh food, some vegetarion choices and free WiFi. At least a couple of Starbucks in Windsor just got free WiFi this week, but I haven’t tried them out yet. It’s great when something starts taking hold like this. Maybe I don’t need that T-Mobile account anymore. Pardon me, but my soup’s getting cold.

Correcton: the wi-fi at the Starbucks in Windsor is not free. It’s just as pricey as it is in the Starbucks in the US, but provided through Bell so I apparently can’t use my US T-Mobile account there (as far as I can tell).

Stick with Flying Monkey or The Coffee Exchange for free WiFi in Windsor. I always like the Latté at TCX better anyhow.

Cool, cool and cool.

I’m suddenly excited but I’ll try to break this down as it happened (and no, you probably won’t be nearly as excited).

I just saw that Joel Spolsky’s going to be in Santa Clara in March 2006 for EclipseCon. So of course I have to check when the GDC will be next year. I know it’s going back to San Jose next year and I’ve been looking forward to that. Now I see they’ve just updated the GDC web site with the promise of more info coming soon. To top it off, the EclipseCon runs March 20-23 at the Santa Clara Convention Center and the Game Developers Conference will run March 20-24 in San Jose - I’m guessing it’s on Almaden again. So they’re about eight miles apart.

I got to meet Joel for lunch with a crowd of other devotes in Toronto early this year. That was a great experience. I didn’t have much to say, but I’ve been following Joel’s commentary for a few years now and it’s good to get a little face time. Meeting someone who has been successful in my field and has well-founded opinions that he can clearly express is a valuable experience and was well-worth the trip to Toronto. I got to take a break the rest of the weekend and visit with friends and family too. Joel is a prime example of the celebrity of the geek crowd and he’s earned his status. I enjoy that he shares his experiences in a way that’s very accessible to his readers. I also saw it as a chance to get my feet wet networking with other entrepreneurial-minded developers. It’s great to spend some time with people who think like you, and that made for a great time. With any luck, maybe he’ll arrange the same kind of get-together in Santa Clara.

Then there’s the news happening with GDC. Read the rest of “Details Coming up for GDC 2006″…