Playing Machinarium with my five year old
Posted on February 7th, 2010 @ 11:47 pm
Josh with his newly opened robot computer game, Machinarium
This Christmas, one of the gifts I got last minute for Josh, my five year old, was Machinarium, which I’ve blogged about before. It’s a game with fantastic artwork and robots as the main characters.
Naturally, it came as a download. But as smart as Josh is, I was pretty sure software without some physical representation. So while in Dallas for Christmas, I used my dad’s printer that will print on CD’s, and made a decent CD and case for it.
Josh opened the gift Christmas Eve, and he seemed happy enough to get it. Later I found out there was some confusion, and he thought it was his three year old brother Jackson’s game. He was even happier once that was cleared up.
I decided to use the game as a father-son bonding activity. So I told Josh that as long as he behaved, we would play it every Sunday afternoon for an hour or two.
The first Sunday we played, I did feel my patience being tested a bit, as I let him guide me in what to do. I did give him suggestions, but let him decide how to play the game. The game had some hint options built in, which I was fine with using. I did try to get Josh to actually figure things out before we resorted to the hints.
On the sixth Sunday we were playing the game, we beat it. Josh went ahead and gave some feedback on what he thought about the game.
Overall, the experience was fun for both of us. It was nice to bond over a game that you actually had to think to play. I was fairly impressed with how well Josh did. If you’re a father, I would highly recommend playing through a point and click game like Machinarium with your five year old.
Two cool products for CSS coders
Posted on December 29th, 2009 @ 8:43 am
Found a couple of products on Zazzle.com that I thought were funny. If you code CSS, you may (or may not) enjoy these.
Available for purchase here:
Disastrous Starcraft chest bump
Posted on December 23rd, 2009 @ 3:33 am
The two people who read my blog who are also Starcraft fans should enjoy this. The rest of you should skip ignore this post, as it won’t make any sense and is extremely geeky.
Great Scott!
Posted on October 30th, 2009 @ 9:28 am
One of my programmers just told me to check out today’s xkcd comic. He claimed it was curiously appropriate for me, considering I’m dressed up as Marty McFly from Back to the Future II for Halloween.
Not Doc Brown
Random BTTF related funny story: I came home one day and my kids were running around saying “Great Scott!” I thought it was hilarious, Leann didn’t. Turns out the got it from Oswald, and not Back to the Future. Ah, well.
Tags: back to the future, comic, geeky, hat, marty mcfly, xkcd
My Twitter account is worthless
Posted on October 5th, 2009 @ 9:06 pm
Well, actually it’s worth $467. Apparently…
Created by WhatsMyTwitterAccountWorth.com
Origin of Ctrl Alt Del
Posted on September 16th, 2009 @ 6:42 pm
Interesting short video on the origin of Ctrl Alt Del. But Bill Gates sure does not look amused when this guy shares the credit towards the end.
Smashing Magazine stole my image, and I like it!
Posted on September 15th, 2009 @ 11:10 pm
I’m a fan of Smashing Magazine, an online magazine for web professionals. It’s pretty popular and frequently ranks well among web designers and web programmers. Alexa* ranks it 1,081 among all websites on the online.
About a week and a half ago, I was checking out their latest articles, when I discovered a familiar looking image in their article, 10 Useful WordPress Hook Hacks. Sure enough, I checked out an article I wrote on T&S’s blog back in 2008 about checking your website in multiple browsers.
So why do I like it? I figured out the reason they used it is because it currently ranks #2 on Google’s search results for the phrase browser logos. So it’s a nice statement to our search engine optimization skills over at T&S. And since I’m currently doing all our optimization work myself, it’s a testament to my personal SEO skills.
Yeah, I’m pretty awesome.
* If you’re not familiar with Alexa, they’re somewhat like the Nielsen ratings, but for websites.
Tags: blog, geeky, seo, smashing magazine
Redbox rebooting
Posted on September 7th, 2009 @ 3:09 am
Sadly, my very first post wasn’t quite nerdy awesome enough to accurately represent me, so I’m reposting something I put on my family blog, ThePriebes.com, earlier this year. Back in January, Brent Fuchs and I happened to be at a Redbox right at 1am, and found it rebooting automatically. Cool stuff, even though it didn’t have our movie.
Since I posted this originally, I’ve talked to a guy who works for Redbox, and he assures me they’re all Dell computers. Kind of makes you wonder why they didn’t go with a Linux distro like Ubuntu. Probably would have saved them thousands and thousands of dollars.
