Just a brief follow-up to my Casual Gaming post. I played a Nintendo Wii last week, and I liked it.

The Wii is just a fun platform for gaming. We saw casual gamers play it. We saw people who would never sit down and play a video game play it, and they didn’t even have to sit down! From what I hear, that’s the whole idea behind the Wii, to open up the world of gaming to people who wouldn’t normally enter into that world.

I didn’t get a ton of Wii-time, but got to try out Wii Sports, including bowling and tennis, both of which were a lot of fun.

By the time we were done, the kids were hinting about a Wii for Xmas, which ain’t gonna happen this year (recent automobile repairs made sure of that) but we’ll keep an eye on the platform and when the GameCube needs replacing, we’ll see what happens.

If all goes as planned, we should be mobile by next week with a 1GHz iBook G4/512MB/30GB/CD/AirPortCard…

Fact: Kids love nunchucks! Sure, some kids are into swords or maybe even throwing stars, but all kids love nunchucks…

Now you’re saying “Hold on there Mr. Maniac! Nunchucks ain’t safe!” To which I say, you just need to make them safe. Oh sure, you could just go out an buy Rubber Foam Nunchucks from karatedepot.com, but what fun is that? Wouldn’t you rather spend time with your children making your own (safe) nunchucks? Of course you would! What parent wouldn’t?

We can easily assemble kid-safe nunchucks out of some old cardboard tubes and some cord. The trickiest part is just tying the knot. Once you’ve got two pair put together, you’re ready for battle - I mean FUN! Let the kids solve their differences the way they do in kung-fu movies. Or get in on the game, and show the kids who the real martial arts master in the family is. These kid-safe nunchucks are just the answer to the often asked question: “How can I beat my sibling without hurting them too badly?”

(Disclaimer: Don’t be an idiot and hurt yourself or someone else…)

Since just before BarCampMilwaukee, I talked with a few people about what I call the “casual gamer” which is pretty much the opposite of the “hardcore gamer” in terms of behavior.

Now that the Wii and the PlayStation 3 have (more or less) arrived, I’ll give you my thoughts on this, but remember, this is the view from a casual gamer, not someone who is completely obsessed with gaming, just someone who plays once in a while and/or wants a fun system for the whole family to play.

First of all, the casual gamer cares about bang for the buck, not about the lastest and greatest. For instance, we can often find GameCube games used for anywhere between $5 and $20. Brand new games for the GameCube seem to run about $20 to $40. Keep in mind that a year ago you could get a new GameCube with Mario Kart: Double Dash and 4 controllers for about $200, and today you can pick up a brand new GameCube for $99. So like I said, bang for the buck takes effect, and you could put together a complete gaming system for the whole family for well under $300.

Now, the Nintendo Wii appears to be priced at $250, and is backwards compatible with the GameCube games, so if I was buying today, this is what I would get. It would make sense to “move up” to the Wii from the GameCube. I’m also influenced by the Nintendo titles, which are more kid & family friendly. (I have two daughters who love gaming, and the GameCube is perfect for them.) As for the PlayStation 3, it comes in priced at $500, twice the price. Now, it does have some impressive technology in it, but for the casual gamer, this is lost. The new games for the PlayStation 3 seem to be priced at about $60, and the used (well, used PlayStation & PlayStation 2 games) seem to be priced cheap, well under $20.

Jus the other day I was taking with a friend of mine, and found out he too was a casual gamer (he has 3 kids) and I told him how we pick up used titles for cheap, and he said he’s gotten some good deals on ebay, like 10 games for $30. I think Nintendo realizes that there is a place for the casual gamer, and they’re looking to serve that market.

Thoughts…?

In which I attempt to make hummus… In the process I learned a few things. That’s what I love about baking/cooking/making food. There’s always something new to learn.

It should first be know that I am The Internet Chef! This is how I do it: In the kitchen we have the “Kitchen Mac” which is used to access our home wiki for recipes, and for finding things on Recipezaar. When I want to make something new, I do a search on Recipezaar, take a look at a few recipes, and then pick the one I like the best. (Now, “best” is determined by many factors: do I have the ingredients? which recipe looks easiest? etc.)

So, on to the hummus. What’s that, chickpeas are also known as garbanzo beans? Wow, I’m learning already! Of course I bought organic chickpeas, and they need to be cooked, so I look up how to cook chickpeas and quickly skim the results, learning that “soak overnight in cold water and boil for 40 minutes” should do it. Cool! Now, since I only live near crappy grocery stores, I could not find tahini. What is tahini anyway? Wikipedia says tahini is a paste made from ground sesame seeds. More learning! So, I need to substitute… what do I have that is paste-like? Hmmm, peanut butter is sort of paste-like. Substitute! I also used sesame oil, hoping that might fill in for the lack of tahini (which is ground sesame seeds you know.) Oh yeah, I also forgot to buy garlic, so garlic salt and garlic powder to the rescue! Ok, they really are a poor substitute for garlic, so in the future I will definitely get garlic. Duly noted. Toss it all into the Vita-Mix and see what happens…

So, did it all turn out ok? Yes. I mean, it’s not the most flavorful hummus I’ve ever had, but it’s ok. I learned how to cook chickpeas (also known as garbanzo beans) and I learned that tahini is a paste made from ground sesame seeds, and that peanut butter is a (poor) substitute for it, and real garlic doesn’t have a proper substitute. All in all it’s a learning process, and next time I’ll know what to do, and it’ll turn out better, and the legend of The Internet Chef will spread far and wide… like a fine hummus!

My dear reader, it’s not often I ask you to do something, but I’m asking now…

Vinny, and old friend of mine (who taught me a lot about Linux, Perl, and Apache) is asking for help with something. See his Save Baby Gavin post for the full details, but the short version is that a relative of Vinny’s has a baby (Gavin) with end-stage renal failure. Which basically means that without a kidney transplant, Gavin will not survive.

So please check out the Save Baby Gavin site and help out if you can. Thanks…

Well, I myself didn’t do a ton of Perl hacking, at least in comparison to others in the room. (I did manage to fix up a bunch of my Perl-related bits and pieces for jEdit though.) Here’s a progress report from right before dinner.

Perl::Critic was worked on, they wrote new policies and also added two new committers to the project. The Perl::Critic guys also talked with Ken from Krugle quite a bit…

The folks working on Parrot fixed a lot of tests, and configure.pl, and did a lot of general code cleaning. They also improved the Tcl compiler, checked in Forth, and introduced a bunch of new people to the project.

Pete Krawczyk did some work on the long-neglected HTML::Tree, making many miscellaneous fixes and improving Unicode support.

Andy Lester made updates to ack. He said his goal is to introduce more of the general public to ack, and make it so that people don’t even realize it’s Perl-based. He wants it to be something people can just drop into their ~/bin directory and use.

There was some work done on Jifty to make it work without requiring a database. Jifty is a RoR-like framework written in Perl (even if they don’t like it described like that.)

That’s it for me… Plenty of Perl folks will be here until tomorrow working on moving their projects forward, but I’m outta here. Thanks to The Perl Foundation for making it happen.

Krugle is a search engine for code. Ken Krugler (the guy behind Krugle) gave a talk at the Chicago Perl Hackathon about about it, and was looking for feedback and suggestions on how to improve it.

Here are a few interesting points from his talk:

• Krugle has 20 million source files, which is about 1 billion lines of code
• Much of the code is sucked down from repositories and cached locally to allow for their browsing interface
• Sponsored results will always be separate from search results
• Krugle is not affiliated with Google (Yes, they got a letter…)
• Krugle will always compliment existing communities, and not diminish the value of those communities
• Krugle is build on open-source, the UI is theirs, eventually they will add API’s to allow you to take you data with you

And of course, there’s the question of the business model. Ken said they’ve gotten some money from VC’s, they also show sponsored ads, they’ve got a developer programs, and are working on an enterprise product.

Oh, they’ve also got a blog, like any new company should…

What the heck is Parrot? Parrot is:

Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for interpreted languages. Parrot will be the target for the final Perl 6 compiler…as well as variety of other languages.

I just talked to chromatic about Parrot. He’s just one of a whole bunch of Perl folks at the Chicago Perl Hackathon working on getting a Parrot release out.

I’m at the Chicago Perl Hackathon right now. I just talked to Chris Dolan about Perl::Critic, which is “an extensible framework for creating and applying coding standards to Perl source code…”

They’re working on writing policies right now, so you can choose what tests to run against your code.

It’s beyond my coding skills, but it looks like an interesting project. Hopefully they’ll make some good progress this weekend.

Back in July I wasn’t too sure how easy it would be to pull of BarCampMilwaukee, but we did it. It was hard work, but totally doable…

BarCampMadison is currently being planned for February 2007, and I’m sure that will go fine. Plenty of people involved in BarCampMilwaukee will also be involved in BarCampMadison, in one way or another.

But those Madison folks, they just had to raise the bar… they’ve announced BarCampUSA, which will be a 4 day event at the Jefferson County Fair Park in August 2007. The site says:

We are expecting 5000+ participants (our location can accommodate 20,000+)

Now that’s crazy… But more power to them! I hope they (we?) can pull it off. (Advice: you’re gonna need one hell of an internet connection to satisfy that many geeks!)

Earlier in the week Dana checked the city’s web site and determined we should go to the community center. We got there just after 7 AM. The line was short, maybe 15 people or so. There was a guy in front of us who heard me ranting about the media and the government, and then kicked in with his opinion, saying the media and the government mean to control us and keep us down (so far, so good) and he then suggested we watch some 2 hour movie on YouTube. I muttered something about not trusting YouTube since they do not have a history of respecting the rights of creators, and since Google, a large evil corporation now owns them, they really can’t be trusted. (I’m guessing the guy was not a Democrat, since he had a ‘Dump Doyle’ sticker on his long black trenchcoat.)

So we get to the front of the line and Dana is not listed, so they send her to register. I am not listed either. I give them my address, and one person tells us to go to Greenland Elementary School, while another suggests we go to City Hall and ask them. We opt for Greenland since I voted there previously when I lived a few blocks away. Greenland had a long, long, line. Not 15 people long, more like 50 or 60, and it seemed to be moving slow. It was just after 7 AM though, so maybe that’s why.

The voting process itself was pretty smooth and easy. At Greenland they had sample ballots on the wall so you’d know what it would look like. They handed me a ballot and a small slip of paper with a number (I was number 99 - I believe it said ‘voter 0099′ to be precise.) I walked to the little standup desks with sidewalls filled out the paper ballot using a black felt tip pen that was provided, and then brought it to a machine (it was not a Diebold, but I do not remember the name of it.) A woman instructed me to insert it into a slot on the machine, and I did so, and handed her my number slip, which she placed on one of those spike things people use on their desks to hold expired bits of paper. That was it, so we left… Hooray for Democracy!

Aaron’s writing is often fascinating. Now Aaron has money, and he’s not sure what he will do with it:

A friend told me to be sure not to let the money change me. “How could it possibly do that?” I asked. “Well, first you’d buy a fancy new car.” “I don’t know how to drive.” “…you’d buy a big house in the suburbs.” “I like living in small apartments.” “And you’d start wearing expensive clothes.” “I’ve worn a t-shirt and jeans practically every day of my life.”

This seems to demonstrate how different people see money’s use. Someone did comment on the idea that “Money doesn’t make you happy” by saying:

Money can’t buy you happiness. But it can buy you freedom. And freedom can buy you happiness.

Freedom = happiness. I agree with that. To me, having enough money to provide me my freedom would allow me to do things I want to do, without worrying if they provide sufficient income. I could make music, and films, and art and not worry about having to sell them. It would also allow me to attempt to improve things like software, the internet, technology, things that I think could help improve people’s lives. I’ve got dozens and dozens of ideas. It’s bascially all those things I try to do now with the spare 10 minutes I have each day, I could just expand that to 10 hours per day.

Right now, the chances of me selling a startup seem pretty slim. So I probably won’t have to worry about sharing Aaron’s problems any time soon…

I made some bread. Not money… actual bread, 2 loaves of bread. French bread.

I’m not saying this bread would win the approval of Aaron, but I thought it turned out pretty good. (It made great toast along side a pasta dinner, I used it for a sandwich, and we finished it off as french bread pizza.)

The most interesting thing to me was the whole process. It took about 2 and a half hours from start to finish. First you need to make the dough, then let it rise for 1 hour. Then roll it out flat, and roll it up, and cover it and let it rise for another hour. Then bake it. Then let it cool. Then you’re done.

It sounds like a simple process really, and it is, but it takes time. I was able to keep myself occupied during rise time, so I didn’t sit in the kitchen the entire time, but I had to be there for each step in the process. I like baking things. I wouldn’t doubt that after Make and Craft they put out a magazine called Bake. (Ok, they probably won’t, but they should.)

I understand the allure of a bread machine. I owned one many years ago, and if you’re into convenience, it makes sense. I also understand the whole “greatest thing since sliced bread” but I think people were referring to the fact that you could buy bread for so cheap, not that it was sliced.

It is just the fact that years ago people made their own bread because they had plenty of time, as compared to nowadays, where we are all (supposedly) so damn busy? Should making bread really cause me to think about it this much?