• Robert B. Parker Has Died at 77

    Hours Categories Reading
    Comments 5 Comments

    As many of you know, I read plenty of detective novels. Today the news comes to me that Robert B. Parker has died.

    He of course, wrote all the Spenser novels (which became the TV show with Robert Urich), the Jesse Stone novels (which became the TV movies starring Tom Selleck), the Sunny Randall novels, a bunch of excellent standalone books, and recently a few Westerns — Appaloosa was filmed with Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen in a remarkably faithful adaptation now on DVD, and he sequeled it a bit ago with Resolution.

    Parker was a spare writer. His later work is almost exclusively dialogue. When I would read a Spenser novel, I would usually end up forcing a passage on my wife as an example of “here’s how to do it.” His economy managed to get across enormous emotional content, and his last books were way beyond being pulp.

    Luckily for me, I have a huge backlog of Parker books I have never read. I may go on a shopping spree, because I’m going to miss him.

  • The Haiti earthquake

    Hours Categories Misc
    Comments 19 Comments
    The National Palace
    The National Palace

    It seems that every few years there is a major earthquake somewhere I have lived. Now it is a major one near Port-au-Prince in Haiti.

    I hear the hotel where I lived for two years partly fell down. The hospital where one of my brothers was born has collapsed. Schools have crumbled, and even the Palace. I hesitate to think what the slums look like now, given that they were mostly cardboard and aluminum and rotting wood to start with.

    Haiti is not a country that can afford a disaster like this. Its infrastructure is almost non-existent. People literally use sewage as drinking water for lack of anything else, and vast areas of the country are hugely deforested. A common part of the diet is “cakes” made of clay and water.

    This page has info on where to donate and how to help: Impact Your World – Special Reports from CNN.com.

    Update: photos can be found here. And apparently, the UN headquarters (Hotel Christopher) collapsed as well. It’s not clear how damaged Hotel Montana is.

    How to donate:  per the White House, text “HAITI” to “90999” to donate $10 to the Red Cross, charged to your cell phone bill.

  • SF UX Book Club doing Theory of Fun

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 4 Comments

    Saw this go by!

    The San Francisco UX Book Club will hold its next meeting on Wednesday, January 20th at 7-9PM.

    The meeting will focus on “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” by Raph Koster. Kevin Cheng (http://kevnull.com/) will be moderating.

    We are still trying to confirm the venue. I’ll update that information later this week!

    Wish i could be a fly on the wall! It’s interesting to see the book used for UX design discussions.

    There’s a Facebook page where the event is getting coordinated. So if you are in the area, maybe you’d like to check it out!

  • Microsoft’s Kodu comes to the PC

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 4 Comments

    For those who haven’t seen Kodu, it’s a visual game development environment originally created for educators and running on the Xbox 360. It uses pie menus, and a game controller, and basically, a graphical language based around trigger events, to allow even children to develop games.

    ArsTechnica is reporting that Kodu now runs on the PC as a beta. There’s more details here at Microsoft’s news center.

    The inspiration for Kodu came from MacLaurin’s daughter. A few years ago, MacLaurin noticed his daughter, then 3 years old, watching his wife browse her Facebook page. He flashed back to his early experiences with a computer, comparing the passive experience his daughter was having to the coding he did to interact with the machine. It was a sad realization, he said…

    …MacLaurin and his Microsoft Research team set out to recapture that magic. Through the basics of programming, they wanted to teach youngsters how they could create new worlds from their imagination. Two years later, Kodu was a hit on Xbox LIVE and was being used in more than 60 educational institutions across the globe to introduce children to programming.