Hot Koehls » for fun

For fun: “Invisible cursor” game

Frank — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:07:47 +0000

I typically hate the random flash games that go around the web, but I stumbled on one today that’s actually pretty fun, if only because of the mechanic at work. It’s called Invisible Cursor.

The game randomly spawns targets for you to click, but you can’t see the mouse cursor, forcing you to “feel” your way to each target. You do get a quick highlight of the cursor location each time you click, but it’s really brief and is accompanied by a screen flash and the target shattering. Oh and you only have a few seconds to shoot your next target.

It’s got all the depth of most web games (i.e. none), but the effect of trying to hit targets without seeing your cursor is very similar to playing a first person shooter. Lots of motion on the screen and you need to be accurate, thus demanding fast response times and a lot of eye-hand coordination. If you suck a sniping, I suggest you play this for a while to improve your aiming skills.

My top score right now is ~~164~~ 408. Feel free to brag in the comments if you beat me.

Merry Christmas!

Frank — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 14:48:18 +0000

Here’s wishing you and your family a very merry Christmas. If you haven’t already, enjoy the best Christmas song to come along more than a decade:

Ads as entertainment: Office Max Rubberband Man

Frank — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:46:52 +0000

I was reminded today of Office Max’s classic series of commercials set to the tune of Rubberband Man by the Spinners and starring Eddie Steeples who now stars on the television show My Name Is Earl. I absolutely loved these commercials when they came out; you can’t help but dance in your seat with that happy song and Steeples’ fantastic physical dexterity.

A great advertisement is one that propagates itself. Make it funny, engaging, insightful, interesting, and people will willingly pass it along for you. So many marketers complain about the inability to keep peoples attention. You can still keep it, you just can’t deliver crap anymore.

Case and point: I’m writing a blog post about the Rubberband Man series, I readily found all the commercials online, including a “Making of” video, and it’s been over two years! That’s damn good advertising.

Enjoy some positive vibes before you get back to work.

Office Max Rubberband Man

Office Max Rubberband Man — Back to School

Bullet dance beat

Frank — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 04:35:38 +0000

I wanted to post another post in the “for fun” category on Friday, but couldn’t come up with anything decent. Late-night stumbles to the rescue! Better late than never, right?

Anyway, what kind of a beat would you throw down using the gun sound effects from Call of Duty 4? Serpento has one idea…

Cat in a box

Frank — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:09:42 +0000

A recent computer repair delivery left me with a huge box full of packing peanuts.

This turned out to be a pretty fun toy for my cat Fox this afternoon, despite his reluctance…

Seriously, guys…

Frank — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:27:42 +0000

In my life as a full-time employee, I ran a membership management system for an international non-profit that organized over 40,000 volunteers at the local, state, and national levels in almost 30 countries. It coordinated physical material deliveries (part of the system was a full shopping cart installation), managed electronic documents, and delivered news to all those volunteers. I built the system myself from scratch (minus said shopping cart), and ran it on my own for almost three years.

When I wasn’t coding it or maintaining the server, I provided tech support for the office staff and customer support (including phone calls) for volunteers.

I was the only technical person in the whole place.

I can count the number of times that system went down as result of anything other than a hardware issue on one hand.

Much as I love it, I fail to see how a minimally configurable 140-character obtuse message board can fail so often!

Update: Alright, it’s back up. Good recovery this time, but you still have to reset the “Days since an accident” sign back to zero.

Audio clips of GLaDOS from Portal

Frank — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:05:17 +0000

The best part of playing Valve’s Portal was listening to GLaDOS “encourage” you throughout the game. The lines she delivers are just fantastic. Recently I found a site plugin containing all her memorable gems, which I have plugged into this post. Enjoy.

Geeky insider joke embedded in 1and1 email

Frank — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:51:28 +0000

So I was testing some updates to Fwd:Vault’s mail processing logic today, and I was using a billing message I received from 1&1. While tracking down a bug, I noticed a fantastic header line in the raw message:

[...]
Message-Id: <357619014-200908300000M9422000.7395000$357600000@GB.billing.1and1.com>
X-Billing-Backreference: 357619014-200908300000@@9420000.7395000.357600000
X-Binford: 6100 (more power)
[...]

Let’s hope it’s more stable than Tim Taylor’s usual fare of Binford 6100 tools.

Get Inspired: JK Wedding Entrance

Frank — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 22:12:44 +0000

Just the latest entry in my get inspired series, my wife let me in on this one. It’s apparently made the news and ended up in more than a few facebook posts, so I am (as usual) just late to party. Oh well.

Always dance, and always do it to your own beat. Have a great weekend!

A bit of bad Google math

Frank — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:33:03 +0000

The following screenshot was taken from the documentation for Google Page Speed (aka the Google version of YSlow), under the section “Parallelize downloads across hostnames”…

I don’t know about you, but I love looking at half-delivered web pages.

Let’s hope the guy who wrote this isn’t also responsible for the search engine’s built-in calculator.