"A few weeks ago, 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems of foreign intelligence services were captured by [Iranian] intelligence forces along the country's borders. These trained squirrels, each of which weighed just over 700 grams, were released on the borders of the country for intelligence and espionage purposes....
Even Boris Badanoff can tell you, you have to be careful of "Moose and Squirrel!"
I have a shiny new laptop at work. My corporate IT folks ghosted the standard corporate app suite to my hard drive, downloaded some special applications that I have licenses for (such as Microsoft Project) migrated my MyDocuments, email, and other data folders and gave me back the machine to configure to my hearts content.
Even though all my data is there, it always takes a while to get a computer just the way I like it. I have a number of little applications that make life easier, and many of them do not come from corporate. I was at a conference last week when one of the presenters made a good point: "How many of you use Google?" Who gave you permission? Consumer applications are as much a part of my job toolkit as are the corporate issue applications. When I started listing applications I needed to download, and I was amazed at the length of the list. Some highlights:
Paula and I have played midway through the fourth episode of Sam & Max from Telltale Games. I've waited this long to post something about the series because of my fundamental blogging laziness, a reverence for the old Sam & Max Freelance Police game, and reservations about the new episodic gaming format in general. It's taken me a few months to overcome all three weaknesses.
Not that nostalgia for the glory days of Lucasarts adventures is a bad thing, mind you. Those games deserved all the praise they get, as I think I mentioned in a previous post. But sometimes fondness for the old can blind you to the goodness of the new.
That's not the case here. Telltale games have gotten it exactly right: They deliver compact, well-written adventures on a monthly basis. (They got the third episode to us a week early, in fact.) I settled in to the game right away, and was soon rewarded with more wacky one-liners and obscure non-sequiturs than I could shake a mixed metaphor at. Sam and Max are back, and the episodic format suits the rabbit and dog duo extremely well.
This season ends after another two episodes. I hope their experiment in reviving a classic gaming genre will be judged a success. It's a model that would work for all the adventure gaming greats. I'd like to see a few of my other favorites revived as episodic adventures, too.
I hate to encourage the development of yet another bad label, but thought I would posit the question: What will the buzz word for 2007 be? Web 2.0 is so 2006 (or heck, 2005!) what is the buzz for 2007?
Some thoughts from Read/Write web on that matter, branded Web 3.0 would be (that Web 2.0 is not). In brief: Web 2.0 + Context. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_30_4cpvs.php
Crystal ball time: What is the buzzword of 2007?
