Entries in Offbeat (8)
GeoCities Closes - A Sad Day for the Internet
October 26, 2009 ; "Ugly Yahoo ads still intact")
We all saw this coming. After years of providing free web hosting services, Yahoo is finally closing the door on GeoCities.
Long gone are those nostalgic moments of doing a Google search only to find a geocities page (complete with an ugly tiled background, and animated gifs) that hasn't been updated in 10 years.
Before it went down, I managed to snap a quick screen shot of what was left of the original Memories of Hyrule page.
Memories of Hyrule, Offbeat, Tech News 10 Random Thoughts
March 1, 2009 - No matter how good your code is, once it becomes legacy code, the person maintaining it will hate you.
- 9 times out of 10, the Copy → Paste → Modify approach to programming results in more work than just coding it all from scratch.
- Coding in Objective-C just feels awkward. Sometimes I think they did things different from C/C++ just for the sake of being different.
- The idea of weakly typed languages annoys me.
- I tend to do my best work around 2AM. They should make it a law that all programmers are allowed to set their own hours.
Offbeat, Programming Rants About Software by Bill Gates
October 12, 2008 [Originally published 06/25/08]
While perusing the Internet, I came across an email that Bill Gates wrote back in January 2003. I did some searching and the email seems to be legit, so read on, it's hilarious.
DOOM is Evil!
October 11, 2008 
[Originally published 05/17/08]
I've always been one to defend violent video games. I always viewed them as harmless fun. I now must retract such statements. Apparently Jack Thompson is right. These games are pure evil and I have proof!
We all know that DOOM is all about killing hell spawns. Little did we know, however, that DOOM is in fact a spawn from Hell itself! Nevermind the graphic violence or the metal soundtrack presented to the player. DOOM's evil goes beyond the surface, into the mechanics of the application itself.
Better Book Covers
October 11, 2008 [Originally published 12/16/07]
In my last post, I talked about some of the Stupid Book Covers in my collection. After that, I figured I should also go ahead and talk about some of the book covers in my collection that are actually good.
Behold! More covers!!
Literature, Offbeat Stupid Book Covers
October 11, 2008 [Originally published 12/10/07]
One thing that I've noticed over the years is that Computer Science books usually have covers that have nothing to do with the subject at hand. Some covers just have a colorful design with no real picture, some feature random animals, and others are, well, just plain stupid.
Here are some of the worst book covers that I have in my personal collection.
Literature, Offbeat Mind Control
October 11, 2008 [Originally published 02/08/08]
There is an urban legend in the IT world about a screen saver called Dazzle. Basically it's a bunch of colorful, seemingly-random, geometric shapes that form on the screen. Dazzle has the ability to keep a viewers attention for long periods of time. This is where the myths come in.
