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Next Saturday, April 8th, my company Piximix will be participating in the 8th annual Chillin Productions event at Mezzanine. This event is part fashion, part club; there's DJs, drinks and designers. Its a fun event and definitely more like a party than a sale.
Mark your calendars and come find me at the Piximix table!
Wow, something about Comet has me on an old mac game kick. This morning I foolishly tried to delete the 'Notes' folder that the MS Exchange server "provides" as one of my mail folders. This caused my mail client to produce a dialog and then hang in that cool "snake trails" way; as I move the dialog around it creates a dense trail of copies of the dialog window that never get refreshed away.
It reminded me of this one puzzle in the classic mac game "The Fool's Errand". This game involved a bunch of puzzles cleverly woven into a story about a fool. The story incorporates a lot of tarot card imagery and concepts, but thats just a base. It novelized the macs then new menu interface by providing 5 menus for the 5 parts of the story. Each menu contained about 15 to 20 different parts of the story with many of them greyed out thus making them inaccessible.
Each part gave about 2-3 paragraphs of the story, and usually had a button you could click which brought up the puzzle for that section. Once you solved the puzzle, other parts of the stories became available. Additionally, there was one section that had a map with most of the pieces missing. Each puzzle you completed also resulted in a new map peice being added to the map. The map was all out of order so you had to figure out how to peice it together to unlock the final puzzle of the game.
I think I still have the disks for this game and I was even considering firing up my old Mac SE for it. However, I just found that its available for download here. Aparently this isn't the original version (something about the sound is messed up, but there wasn't much sound anyway). I encourage anyone who thinks this sounds interesting to give it a try!
So its Thien's 30th birthday this weekend and my usual desperate rush to prepare for these kinds of events, I am late with my plans. I've been trying to think of a fun thing to do for her birthday, and so I've been soliciting advice. It turns out I had to look no farther than Anil Dash, aka Mr Romance, for some great suggestions.
The one that I think I'm going to take up is 30 dinners for 30 years. These would be, of course, consecutive dinners and probably spaced up over the course of the year. So, I now ask you gentle notcomet reader, for your favorite restaurant. It doesn't have to be expensive fancy schmancy and it doesn't have to be in SF proper.
The tricky part of this is that Thien doesn't eat at the same restaurant twice. There are too many restaraunts in the bay area to try to be encumbered by repeat visits to any one of them, or so the logic goes.
So send me all your favorites! I promise to blog about them and let you know what we thought!
Last year I organized a trip out to the archery fields with some friends of mine. I hadn't shot a bow and arrow since I was in boy scouts, however I kept seeing the "Archery Fields" sign every time I was in Golden Gate Park. So, I decided to get some people together and go.
The day before, I called ahead to the San Francisco Archery Shop and asked if I could rent equipment for 12 people and maybe get some kind of basic instruction. Ed Rosario, the shop owner, sounded a little unsure. It was a little late notice, but he thought he could get everything together.
I was a little confused. I figured he owned a pro shop, either he has the equipment or he doesn't. The next day I stopped by the shop around noon (everyone was supposed to meet at 1pm) and Ed showed me his progress. He makes all his arrows!
So for 12 people and 6 arrows a peice, he was putting together 72 arrows. Impressive!
Once everyone arrived we headed down to the archery fields where Ed gave us some basic instruction on how to shoot. We managed to get enough lanes for us to pair up and have a target for every two or three of us.
And it was fun! Something about shooting an arrow feels almost magical. Maybe its because, the bow isn't plugged in; it doesn't use gasoline; it's not WiFi enabled. Its just a peice of wood with a string. I would highly recommend anyone remotely interested to take a trip out to the Golden Gate Archery Field, and stop by Ed's place to get your gear!
So my last post about playing Prince of Persia got me thinking about other games I used to really enjoy back in the good old days of my Mac 512K E. In addition to the original Prince of Persia, I was also enslaved to "Beyond Dark Castle".
I also had the original "Dark Castle", but it was never as much fun to me, maybe because you couldn't save your progress, so if you wanted to leave the computer, to say, eat food or go to the bathroom, you were stuck.
In Beyond, you could save your game, but you had to make it to this special control room to do it. Once you made it there, you had to pull one of 4 (or 8?) levers and then it would save your game. I liked that you could still die while trying to get to the save room. It gave it that little bit of risk, while not being uncomprimising.
The level shown above is where you ended up if you fell down to the bottom of the screen in certain levels. You ended up in the dungeon where you had to make your way down past bats, zombies and blades, knock out the tourturer, grab the keys and then run back up again to unlock one of the 5 doors at the top.
Can anyone in the SAKK office read enough of this fortune to know if its good or bad?
When I got it 3 years ago I didn't know any Japanese, and now I still can only make out the numbers (86?) and that something is 'very old'. I tied mine to a tree like everyone else seemed to have done, but then I heard later that you only do that if you got a bad fortune. Tying it to a tree is supposed to allow your bad luck to be carried away for you. Did I let good luck get taken away from me? Could this be why I can't get rid of the aphids in my house plants?