At Christmas Kelly forced me to buy a Nintendo DS and then brainwashed me into getting a game called Feel the Magic™: XY/XX by making me play a little of it. Despite the title and the “Teen” rating, it’s actually a pretty tame (but still cool) game about a boy trying to impress a girl. The gameplay showcases the advances of the DS making use of the on-board microphone and the touchscreen — which is seperate from the normal gameplay screen.
As you complete portions of the game and the dificulty increases you are rewarded with outfits, shoes and hairstyles for your virtual girlfriend. When I was given the outfit below I initially thought the game needed a higher rating than “Teen”. I know that Japanese Cosplay is fairly kinky but this seems awfully forward.
Off-hour parking lot density is a leading indicator of stock performance. Post pictures of parking lots of publicly traded companies anytime except 9to5 M-F. Bonus points for including the day, time, stock symbol and last close in the description of the photo. Private companies and VC firms are also prey for discovery. Here’s a little story on how this got started.
There are so many half-baked components to this, including low participation, but I like the idea.
I’m playing around with the offerings from our new host (instead of concentrating on finishing the small details of the move like the rest of Rollerfeet.com or everyone’s email) and came across a chat tool. See if it works (literally and figuratively) for you.
Found this on the Cult of Mac blog, and couldn’t help but think of me and K. Chad Hauser.
Darn, that looks good
I can’t say much about the USS San Francisco running aground. Obviously, all our thoughts are with the family of the sailor killed. I will make the following observations:
- As long as men have been going to sea in ships, the sea has been doing her best to kill them.
- The Pacific is a really, really big place. Information density in places is scarce, and there are, no lie, still areas where charts rely on, say Cook’s expedition in the 18th century.
- There is a good reason why the pilot keeps saying “Keep your seatbelt securely fastened until the plane has come to a full and complete stop at the gate” – even really big objects can come to a sudden stop when they hit something. Inertia says that anything not fastened down will continue moving until it comes into contact with something that is fastened down.
- This is why you wear your seatbelt in your car.
Item 1 For the past few months, I’ve been pretty good about rating songs as they play on “Party Shuffle” (most useful for providing background music at the office) or in “Shuffle” on the iPod, and I’m noticing that most of my ratings end up being either 3, 4, or 5 stars, most likely because I’m not likely to buy/download music that I don’t like, nor keep it in my library. But at the same time, I’m wondering if I couldn’t get finer granularity if I used 1 star as a “Like it OK” rating instead of a “As appealing as an intimate video of a threesome featuring Al Franken, Mike Moore, and Rush Limbaugh” when I rank a song with only one star. I’m not likely to change, since I’m all about keeping albums intact, and there are some albums with crappy songs.
Item 2 Y’know what I’d dig? A service that aggregated user’s iTunes song ratings automatically. Kind of like Amazon’s ratings, except one level further down. Complete with the ability for user comments to be added. Here’s what I see as hurdles:
1. At least an order of magnitude more entries (assuming 10 songs/album), and probably even more, since Amazon misses a lot of indy labels and out of issue stuff.
2. The kicker is the privacy issues: I’m sure that there are a lot of folks out there who still have songs from Napster (back when it was cool) in their libraries for which they haven’t actually bought a license. (Not that anyone reading this page would condone such a thing). Who wants to share that kind of stuff?