No One Nose

bandeclay.jpgAs I was walking the treadmill. (pause) Yes, walked the treadmill; I zapped through the infinite (40) channels that the gym was offering, looking for something to ease the pain and sweden the time. Call me crazy, but the Adventures of Bert & Ernie show is just epic! I started laughing in the gym (luckily I don’t give a frak) to animated clay characters.

The episode was hysterical, there’s this character who just shoves funny glasses and nose to everybody, without their approval. A bit that was especially interesting, was then Bert asked Ernie, where is that guy. And he said, No One Knows (Nose.) The thing is, the show was dubbed so he said “אף אחד לא יודע” (Af Echad Lo Yodea.) Literally, it’s the same joke, exact same principal applies on both. But what is truly amazing is that Knows phonetically sounds like Nose. In Hebrew, Af is either Nose or Nobody (lt. none). Knows translates to Yodea. I think it’s insane! Episode was great too. Loved it! Gym flies when you’re Disney-channeling.


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Games Make Holocaust Look Scifi

Heavy Robot Nixon bombarded Vietnam’s ghouls; Napoleon raided Flesh Eating Pharaoh‘s tombs in early days. It sounds ridiculous, but with enough time, it will happen. See what happened in the a decade: id’s Return To Castle Wolfenstein featuresd zombie Nazis, conquering Europe by the masses. When I’ll ask my grand kids about World War 2, what do you think the answer is going to be? Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. A bit over 60 years ago, more than 6,000,000 Jews (and higher numbers of other nations) were slaughtered by Nazi Germany. With time passing, people remember less and less of it. Luckily there are many videos and coverage of this war, so nobody can deny it never happened. It is said that this war was of the European jews; a few years ago I have discovered that my dad’s grandparents were sent to a labor camp. It was a complete shock to me finding out so late. My family is not European.

Alas, zombie nazis are just the beginning. Earlier this month I saw this very funny game called Stalin vs Martians. It’s an utterly stupid rts, but the concept is refreshing. Wait, why is it different, aliens not zombies? I’ve never been against violence in video games, but now I’m starting to worry that future generations will lose interest in history and what will stick will be old screenshots in their memory. Maybe I’m thinking too far, but look at us, 2,000 years later and we have no idea about the pyramids or Jesus.

Last but not least, I’m uploading a screenshot from the original Castle Wolfenstein game (1981). It is, and always has been, one of the most scariest games I have ever played. It had a really strong concept: if you get shot, you die. You had to work your way through bunkers, bribing and killing officers. If one fired up the alarm, you’re done for. If they shot your leg, you are done for. One mistake and the game is over. There is no save/load, and you can’t idle much. They don’t make games this serious anymore.

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Posted in Rant | 2 Comments

Twitter Killed The Blogger Star

2709378784_9086f66e94_o.jpgDating back to Oct of last year, I have neglected my blogging completely. The OCD hasn’t worn off, it just moved from blogging to micro-blogging. The new flavor of addiction sums up to one-liner status updates on twitter.

Follow me on Twitter is the new mantra. And like a journalist finding his way back home, I’m now considering myself recovering from this ill addiction. So this is a dummy blog post. Just a warm up for getting back in shape. My home is here, blogging. Everything macro fades away. Good to see everybody again, missed ya!

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Total Darkness

The black photo shown below is no error. It’s how it was really like.

Along with a friend, I went to the Dialog In The Dark (heb), a truly life changing experience. In a one hour tour, we were guided in a completely dark environment by a blind guide. The tour goes through 7 locations you are familiar with as a person, such as a public garden, your house and a bar. We were eight people moving around without seeing anything, only equipped with a walking stick. It’s amazing how you perceive stuff when your visual sensory system is off. Personally, I thought I’d go crazy in the first 10 minutes, and I almost did. It never grows on, and even after an hour of black, your brain still generates random white dots, trying to make up for what’s just not there.

I advise everybody to experience this. It has so many implications on your life, that you just can’t miss it.

total darkness

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Another World demade!

An excellent post at Pixelation called pixelartists worldwide to collaborate in a heroic task of demading their favorite games. Follow up the original post for the full list, but here are my favorites:

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At The End of The LHC Tunnel

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Meanwhile, at the other end of the LHC tunnel, sits and waits Lester and plays Minesweeper.

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Big Brother is alive in Sydney

The thumbnail in blue is of a photo I took in Sydney, Australia. This horrifying ad can be seen all over the city and calls people to give their friendly government-man a ring when they are -a little bit- suspicious of their friends, spouses and family members. Of all three Big Brotherish phenomenons, this one scares me the most. Think of a kid who needs some privacy and locks himself in a room to browse some adult rated websites; a husband who cheats on his wife (I don’t endorse it, but it happens and quite often). Regardless the situation, such ads discourage communication between humans and solving problems between themselves. Higher authority hould never come first.

Big Brother is live in Sydney, AU

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and now.. 3rd Appearance in Newspaper

Third newsprint to feature… me! Yeah! My friend Bianca suddenly stumbled upon a photo of me in Timeout Tel Aviv magazine. This shot was taken two weeks ago; I decided to go with my casual Threadless look. ’nuff said, enjoy the article :)

Oh! Btw, I’m also happy to tell you all that my blog, this blog, the very same blog that you’re wasting your time on right now, has its pagerank rate bumped to PR5! Yeah! It means I’m important, you are my friend; so you are important as well :) Love you.

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2nd Newspaper Appearance

Right! I just made my second appearance in the newspaper. This time it’s the real estate section of The Marker newspaper (delivered daily.) Actually, it was in the newspaper on thursday, /and/ on the weekend edition on friday! What’s it all about? Read the entire explanation on the flickr photo page (just click on the image blow.)

It’s quite funny how this thing catches on. Viral marketing put to practice! Today I had another photo shooting, this time it was the casual me with my threadless panda shirt! yah! I’ll post the scan when I get a copy this weekend.

Totally forgot. My -FIRST- newspaper appearance was back in 1997 (I think.) I got first place in a programming competition (Turbo Pascal) and won my school a trophy (and got me enough money for a x2 cd burner!). The school got a treadmill, which I never got to see, cause I skipped sports class in favor of more computer time ;) Oh, the irony.

2nd Apperance in Newspaper

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Big City Life

I can’t get this damn song out of my head!

Yeah, I’m big in Japan, .. I mean Tel Aviv. That’s what I said. (Checking my watch,) I have been here for two weeks now! As it happens, I _walked_ to the cafe I’m sitting in right now and writing this email. Every now and then something pops up in my mind and I tell myself /this has to be blogged/. I’m a guy from a small town, and it really shows. Naivety turned into paranoid.

Too many people here. And I notice them all. I have already visited far larger cities, such as New York and Tokyo, but the noise outside is in a foreign languages and blends nicely with the white noise cars make. Where do all these people come from? Where are they going? How come everybody is sitting in cafes and restaurants at daylight, nobody’s working? I don’t get it.

Wow, there’s so much to tell, so much to show. I’ll take it slowly, here’s one photo I took. More on my flickr stream.

Old bikes for sale

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New Blog Launched

My …. fifth blog, Coding Aloud has been launched. Yay!

Previously named “Code-o-strophe”, Coding Aloud is a blog aimed for programmers and web administrator. I will share as much as I can about everything I’ve been through managing my 1000 websites. First post is already up, so make sure you visit:

http://coding-aloud.blogspot.com

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Che Che Che Changes!

Total lost of momentum. I really hate it. Productivity level is a lot lower, and I can’t seem to find a way to organize and prioritize my to-do list. It’s been ages since I posted about creativity, so let me just fill you guys up with what I’ve been up to in the past 2 months.

1. Flimmr is almost ready. Need to kick things into gear and get this baby on the road.
2. My awesome Facebook framework is working perfectly, with a first use:
3. Rubik’s Cube for Facebook; turn a photo from your fb album into a rubik cube and send to other people / post to profile.
4. Call4Advice.co.il is launching soon. I’m proud of it!
5. Dumpr has plenty of new features; including a pro account!
6. RSS Feed for your Flickr contacts’ favorites (not yet public)
7. Started a new blog (not yet public) called “Codeostrophe – Coding Aloud”, which will feature plenty of how-tos and experimental things with amazon s3/ec2 and facebook.
8. Got SWFUpload to work with EC2, awesome!

Christmas is around the corner, and there are a few things I need to nail down before it hits. Plenty of work work work. Works is the only thing between me and Australia! ;)

Hugs everybody. Send me love emails!
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A Month Later..

It has been a bit over a month since the villa security was breached and my wares stolen. It has also been a month without an entry in my blog. It all feels so temporarily. The whole work-work-work momentum has been lost, I still don’t have a camera, no playstation, my new laptop feels like a bastard child and keeps annoying me, and my home theather system is still apart and stored safely.

I have learned from this experience; I think this is what they call learning-the-hard-way. I now have insurance over my stuff, but it doesn’t keep me asleep at night. I have 3 extra keys in my keychain, my windows have been shut and locked for a month (I open the door in the mornings to get fresh air in,) every noise outside rushes me to the windows to see if the motherfuckers have come back. And I must say it’s quite difficult to gain your concentration and focus back when you have 5 cats playing outside.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But it still feels like shit. I’m scared of leaving my apartment alone, even thought they pretty much took everything that can easily be sold. Mofos. This post concludes this period, I promise I won’t blog about it again (unless it will be on the news that some asshole got electric shock from a laptop missing an esc button!) ;)

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Time Displacement Release v1.0

Hey little green men.

As promised, I’m releasing my real-time Time Displacement swf with sources. You can play with it online right now: just click on Allow and make sure you unpacked your webcam and connected it to your box. It requires Flash 9, if you don’t have it, then that sucks (get flash9 here). Flash 8 was too crappy for me to downgrade my code to :)

Enjoy!


The .fla (source code) is released under the GNU Public License V3. Download: Time Displacement (sources). If you have any updates or improvements, please share them back with the world; and if you make something neat out of it (ie, make it to digg frontpage, or a facebook app) then you rock! \m/, please drop me a line!

Cheers!

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All That, And A Pillowcase

I’m very proud of the title. I love it.

I have no idea why I am blogging this today. Here I am, sitting in utter darkness, all windows shut, locked and curtained. The door is blocked by a 50kg cabinet, the lights outside are on, inside off. If that were a d&d game, I would be an elf, paranoid level 9.

I wish I could hook up the camera (the one remained) and upload some photos, but my linux (which remained) doesn’t like pnp much. I’m getting mysterious here, so I’ll just spell it out. Today, Tuesday the 23rd, my apartment was broken into. The motherfuckers used a heavy stone (20kg imo) to BREAK the door and get inside. When I got home, the laptop was gone, my Canon Powershot and my mother’s Nikon, my Playstation 2 and my sweet sweet ipod 30gb black (with lots of photos and unbacked music.)

Fuckers rot in hell:
1. The laptop has a 30 minutes battery, lets see use that
2. The laptop has two keys pulled out. They are in a matchbox somewhere in this mess. Press the ESC button and get an electric shot. (cat pulled the keys.)
3. They took the ipod and not the elastic case ($2, fuck you!)
4. Took the playstation without the joystick
5. But took the memory card with guitar hero done 28/30 on expert, and GoW2 with fish-costume bonus :’(
6. My mom’s new Nikon with unbacked birthday photos

It’s almost 2am now and I’ve been sitting over 2 hours in bed. Every time the wind blows, I rush to the windows and look for visitors. It’s a shitty feeling and I knew it would come. I’ve had this before, but last time I had a door to support, and only one way in. This time it sucks bad.

A while ago, my friends Roni & Gil dropped by to see how I’m doing. They were missing sleep and still spent a lot of time driving around and bringing me a very delicious plate of sushi. I’m in tears, and I can’t express how important that was for me. Thanks, guys.

Tomorrow is another day. And I will re-start life again. It’s funny how I always say that I should keep a webcam recording, but never write the code to..

Expect photos soon!
Hugs everybody.

Posted in Life | 1 Comment

Genius Apple2 on The Internets

Yeah, Mission Accomplished! This user generated content has finally paid for itself: a marvelous youtuber called chaos5482.

So, for your viewing pleasure. (Almost) The Best Moments of Computer Game History:







Also found on YouTube: King’s Quest Playthroughs.

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