The Boston Diaries

Of the two banks I have (neither one by choice really, but that's a story for another time), one didn't register a transfer of funds to my account, and the other one is holding onto my cash until the last possible moment (“available on January 7^th my XXX—I don't consider 11:59:59 pm January 7^th to be January 7^th, but alas it's expected; if only I could subject the banks to the whimsy they subject unto me).

XXXXXXX!

A pox on both their houses!

Cursor * 10, an amusing fourth dimensional game

Cursor * 10 (link via reddit) at first seems a simple game—just click on the stairs to move up, with the goal being the 16^th floor. It's pretty trivial until the 8^th floor where you have to press a square to get the stairs leading up. But once you leave that square, the stairs disappear.

Quite the little puzzle until you realize what the rather cryptic message, “cooperate by oneself?!” (seen at the begining of the game) actually means—your past lives can help!

Each time you run out of time, you start over on the first floor, but so do all your previous lives. So the trick there is to get to the 8^th floor, and hit that square until you run out of time. Then using your second life, get to the 8^th floor, and wait until your “first” life shows up and hits the square, then proceed onward.

There are a few other places where you need past help as well.

It's not everyday you come across a multidimensional time-based game, although this game is a bit too frantic for my tastes.

I think this horse is beyond glue now …

I no longer find Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer Tool list inspiring. Instead, it's fatiguing. The pace of change in the world of software is relentless. We're so inundated with the Shiny and the New that the very concepts themselves start to disintegrate, the words repeated over and over and over until they devolve into a meaningless stream of vowels and consonants. “Shiny” and “new” become mundane, even commonplace. It's no longer unique for something to be new, no longer interesting when something is shiny. Eventually, you grow weary of the endless procession of shiny new things.

The Magpie Developer

Jeff Atwood's rant on the everchanging landscape of the Computer Industry (read the whole thing— it's worth it) expands upon my continuing rant against control panels.

But this, perhaps, is my argument in a nutshell: