LEGO Video Games

Post ImageMy brother bought me LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy for my birthday (which was Dec. 28) and we spent quite a bit of time playing it over the last couple days before he went back to Red Deer. I think I am hooked! I never played the original LEGO Star Wars game, but I almost want to go and buy it now. The concept always sounded kinda funny to me, but now that I’ve played the game, my laughter has been replaced with awe. The game is simple yet incredibly fun to play!

I was browsing around Wikipedia today, looking for information on the LEGO games, and I found this:

LEGO Batman is an adventure video game developed by Traveller’s Tales. It will be similar to the LEGO Star Wars series, in that it will both be a game based on a licensed property and have environments, objects and creatures made out of LEGO.

Awesome! That was the first thing I thought of while playing LEGO Star Wars – I thought, “they should make lots of LEGO games!” It’s such a wonderful environment for fun, light gaming.

Seems they are way ahead of me:

Upon being contacted, developer Jonathan Smith (games programmer) stated that they will definitely be developing more LEGO games in the future.

I don’t know what they have in mind, but I can think of some LEGO games I’d like to see! Here’s the movies/franchises I’d like to see turned into LEGO video games:

  • The Matrix
  • Lord of the Rings
  • Harry Potter (LEGO already has the rights to this one…)
  • Spider-Man

One of my favorite toys as a kid was LEGO. My brother, sister and I played with it all the time! It’s almost too perfect that LEGO is now playable on my new favorite toy, my Xbox 360.

Read: LEGO

Wishes for 2007

Post ImageInstead of predictions for the coming year, I’ve decided I’d rather just post some wishes. Lots of my predictions from last year were wishes anyway! So here they are, in no particular order.

I wish…

  • …the Edmonton Oilers could once again go all the way to the Stanley Cup Final after some truly impressive trade-deadline maneuvering by Kevin Lowe. And I hope they win this time!
  • …the Xbox Live Video Marketplace would come to Canada.
  • …that I could graduate and not have to go to school anymore!
  • …my parents would come to Edmonton for a bit in the summer!
  • …Spider-Man 3 could become the top box office movie of all time, eclipsing Titanic. Seriously, it’s gonna be a kick ass movie!
  • …that Podcast Spot could become the number one podcast site on the net.
  • …that I could get a MacBook. And a new desktop with Vista.
  • …Microsoft would release Halo 3.
  • …that Microsoft would fix Outlook 2007!
  • …that by the time August rolls around I’ve found a good apartment downtown.

This will be a “living” list, which means I intend to come back and add to it later.

Review: Predictions for 2006

Post ImageLike a lot of people, I had some fun a year ago and made some predictions for 2006. Now that the year is pretty much over, I guess I should see how I did:

  1. SORTA RIGHT: Canada did indeed win the World Juniors, but we didn’t win the Olympic gold medal.
  2. SORTA RIGHT: In March, RIM settled its lawsuit with NTP, but it was later sued by Visto. I don’t think that has been solved yet. On the consumer front, the BlackBerry Pearl is off to a great start!
  3. WRONG: Ah not even close. The Steelers won the Superbowl.
  4. WRONG: Well we did get the Zune which has wi-fi, but I guess I was a little early on this one.
  5. MOSTLY WRONG: Apparently Toyota is still #2 in the world, but GM continues to have financial troubles.
  6. MOSTLY RIGHT: The PS3 did in fact launch, and it was in fact really expensive. Too early to tell what level of success it will have.
  7. WRONG: Man, who would have thought the Oilers would get so close! I don’t know why I picked Ottawa, they always choke.
  8. WRONG: Vista RTM’d in November, not September. I am sure the usual suspects made their usual claims.
  9. WRONG: Wishful thinking I’m afraid, but we did see Gears of War!
  10. WRONG: I think the iTunes/iPod combo still has a firm grip on the market, despite a (disputed) report that iTunes sales fell drastically in 2006.
  11. SORTA RIGHT: Apple launched their Intel-based machines very successfully, but I haven’t found anything that says their market share has increased. Some say it has decreased.
  12. SORTA RIGHT: Michael Schumacher did retire, but unfortunately didn’t win an 8th championship.
  13. RIGHT: I don’t have a link, but I seem to recall reading about Symantec suing Microsoft over security stuff in Vista.
  14. MOSTLY RIGHT: Not sure about big numbers, but TV shows made a splash on iTunes, and there are now dozens of online video stores. And for Americans, TV shows and movies are available on Xbox Live. And in general it was a huge year for video, thanks to YouTube.
  15. WRONG: No one bought TiVo.
  16. WRONG: The Liberals didn’t win the election.
  17. WRONG: Hard to say if Google stumbled in 2006. There wasn’t a big mistake, but maybe the little ones will add up.
  18. RIGHT: Looks like The Da Vinci Code was #2 at the box office this year!
  19. GLADLY WRONG: Thank goodness, the US did not invade Iran. The UN did recently impose sanctions however.
  20. RIGHT: I think lots of podcasting companies (pluggd, Podcast Ready, etc.) found success in 2006, ourselves included!

On January 7th I posted about multi-core processors. While it wasn’t in my list of predictions, it could have been:

Perhaps a year from now you won’t ask someone how fast their computer is. Instead, you might ask, how many cores do you have?

I think I almost nailed that one! Except that for the moment, the question is usually “do you have a dual core?” Close enough 🙂

I’ll probably come up with some predictions for 2007 later, and hopefully I do better next year!

Read: Predictions for 2006

Update & Happy New Year!

I just re-read my last post, and I realize now that it’s far wordier than I had intended. I guess that’s what I get for writing while sick. I dunno what I caught, but I am still recovering from something awful. No upset stomach, thank goodness, but a total lack of energy, alternating periods of freezing to death and sweating to death, and aching everywhere, especially my shoulder.

Here’s essentially what I wanted to say in the privacy post:

If you accept that your personal information will probably end up online at some point, you can stop wasting energy worrying about it. Then you can use that energy to contribute information you want people to see!

Ah, much better.

Happy New Year!

Thoughts About Online Privacy

Post ImageI just did a quick search of my blog and found to my surprise that I haven’t really written about privacy before. It’s a topic that is often discussed, especially as more and more of our lives move online, so I figured I’d have said something about it in the past. Oh well, now is as good a time as any. I’d have to say that my opinion about online privacy is different than most. First, here’s the usual perspective:

Chuck Sanchez, a 25-year-old Chicagoan, recently deleted references to his public relations firm on his MySpace page after everyone from a job applicant to his fiancee’s mother found the page.

“It’s simply not worth it,” he says. “I want my personal site to be just that: personal.”

I agree it’s smart (and let’s be honest, common sense) to be careful about what you post online. But attempting to remove references is futile. It’s almost as stupid as thinking that if you never post about something that it’ll never get online. That’s just a dangerous way to think about privacy.

When it comes to online privacy, I keep these two things in mind:

  1. Eventually, despite your best efforts, any information (personal or otherwise) could become universally accessible.
  2. The only way to protect yourself from the potentially negative effects related to information disclosure is to contribute to the stream of information, to maintain an active online voice.

That voice can be a website, a blog, a profile at a social networking site, or anything else that works for you, even a combination of these things. As long as you can continually contribute positive information to the stream of information, you should be fine.

Everyone makes mistakes. Usually you learn from your mistakes. Unfortunately, it’s primarily the mistakes that make it online and not the learning experiences that follow. When it comes to online privacy, you just need to maintain a balance between disclosure of the mistakes and your sharing of the learning experiences. If you do that, it’s much less likely that you’ll run into disclosure problems.

Another thought. Imagine a world in which all personal information was kept private. How would you know who to trust? It’s often the personal information that allows us to make decisions about a person. This happens consciously (such as when you are reading a resume) and subconsciously (such as when your opinion of someone changes based on their clothing). Now imagine a world in which all personal information is publicly disclosed. With complete information, it becomes trivial to make decisions about whom to trust, based on what is essentially pattern recognition. Of course, having complete information could have severe social consequences.

I don’t think either extreme is ideal, though I learn towards the side of full disclosure. And if that changes, you’ll be able to read about it here.

One more thing: in general, I’d say people are pretty lazy. If your “information stream” is pretty full, potential employers or other interested individuals will be much less likely to spend the time reading it all. And if they do, your contributions to the information stream should come in handy!

Read: Yahoo News

A Lesson From 2006

Post ImageLooking back I’d say I learned a lot in the last year. I guess that’s not surprising, as the saying “you learn something new every day” is usually pretty accurate. With business plan competitions, conferences, and of course school, I had lots of opportunities to learn new things this year. Instead of making a big list of the things I learned however, I’m going to share with you just one lesson:

I learned that running a business requires balance.

Of course you have to balance the business with friends, family, etc. That’s not what I am talking about though. When you are starting a business, you wear a lot of different hats. Sometimes you wear the programmer hat, sometimes the accountant hat, and other times the salesman hat. What I learned this year is that you need to find a balance between all the different hats! It sounds like common sense, but when you’re in the middle of things, it doesn’t come naturally.

I don’t know why, but for the longest time I figured that if we got the code for Podcast Spot done, everything else would fall into place. I focused only on the programmer hat, and ignored the rest. VenturePrize was the turning point for me. Before the competition, I pretty much focused on the programmer hat. During the competition, I ignored the programmer hat altogether. And now, I am doing my best to find balance.

It was an important lesson for me to learn, that’s for sure. To see what other people learned this year, check out Ben Yoskovitz’s excellent group writing project.

Read: Instigator Blog

Bright Nights 2006

Post ImageLast night I went with Sharon to check out the Bright Nights festival in Hawrelak Park. The event is always described as an “Edmonton tradition” and since I had never been before, I figured I should check it out. I came away less than impressed.

In general I’m short on patience, and it definitely wore thin waiting in the line of cars to drive through. It seemed to take much longer than it should have to get to the toll booth. So that was my first problem with event. My second problem was the advertising! Everywhere you looked – advertising. They tell you turn the radio to 98.3 so you can hear about the displays, but they lied. All you hear is advertising…”thanks to our sponsors” and crap. With all that advertising one would think they could lower the entry price, but no! Fortunately Sharon had a coupon, so it only cost us $10 as opposed to $15. That doesn’t take into account the wasted gas, however.

And finally, the displays weren’t that spectacular. Maybe I just had unrealistic expectations or something, but I didn’t ooh and ahhh at any of them. I did like the penguins on a snowmobile though, because penguins rock! Overall, I’d have to say that Candy Cane Lane has better displays!

I could think of better ways to spend $10 and over an hour of my time. I can now say I’ve been to Bright Nights, but I don’t think I’ll be going back anytime soon.

Boxing Day Shopping

I don’t think I’ve ever really gone shopping on Boxing Day as I am usually not in the city. Everyone told me that it is madness, that there are just too many people. I decided to go anyway, but I waited until late this afternoon. I went to Best Buy and picked up three games and a CD (first time I have bought one in ages…). The line was crazy long, and there wasn’t a lot of room to move throughout the rest of the store. It really was madness.

It seems to me that Boxing Day sales were much more heavily advertised this year than last. Will that translate into higher sales? Apparently last year broke records here in Canada:

Boxing Day 2005 was the single largest economic transaction day ever in the history of Canadian commerce (according to Visa). Individual big box stores can even gross over $1,000,000(CAN) on one single boxing day.

A lot of people don’t like Boxing Day because it is too commercial. I could care less. If I can get a good deal, might as well go! I feel bad for the people that have to clean up the stores though – Best Buy was a disaster this afternoon.

Notes for 12/24/2006

Ah Christmas Eve, here at last. Here are my weekly notes:

I hope Santa is good to you tonight!

Broadcast radio turns 100

Post ImageIt was on December 24th, 1906 that Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden produced the world’s first public radio broadcast. When you consider how many technologies have met their deaths in recent decades, it’s amazing that radio is still so prevalent today (Via Engadget):

On Dec. 24, 1906, Fessenden fired up his transmitting station at Brant Rock, Mass., a small village about 50 kilometres from Boston. Together with his wife Helen, a secretary and a small crew, Fessenden started his broadcast at 9:00 p.m. with a brief speech, followed by a Edison phonograph recording of Handel’s “Largo.”

Apparently Fessenden earned over 500 patents during his lifetime, had a U.S. Navy destroyer named after him, and was paid $2.5 million by the U.S. Radio Trust in 1928 for his contribution to radio technology.

Kind of odd that I’ve never heard of him before! As broadcast journalism professor Len Arminio says:

“Fessenden was a true Canadian genius,” said Arminio. “He got lost in the historic shuffle, and that’s too bad.”

Happy Birthday broadcast radio!

Read: Canoe