Remem­ber the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series?

Books that would allow you as the reader to basi­cally choose the path of the char­ac­ter — writ­ten in either a first or third per­son perspective.

For exam­ple, let’s say your char­ac­ter came to a point in the story wherein he or she had to choose whether or not they would tip a cow in the mid­dle of Farmer Tim’s Field. Imme­di­at­edly fol­low­ing the text would be some­thing along the lines of:

Will you either:

A) Tip the cow.
(please turn to page 23)

or

B) Decide not to tip the cow.
(please turn to page 99)

The fun in these books was re-reading them after reach­ing the end or if the char­ac­ter died as a result of your deci­sion. Par­tic­u­lary if you were will­ing to go through it again and see an alter­nate end­ing to the story.

See­ing that we live in a dig­i­tal age some peo­ple have cre­ated sim­i­lar con­cepts such as Nick Piekos’ (of Blam­bot) Dead Ends.

Dead Ends “is an inter­ac­tive story. At times you will have to decide the best course of action for the char­ac­ters. Make a good choice and you’ll live to read some more.“
(more…)

One of my favorite tele­vi­sion sit­coms dur­ing the 80s was the wildly pop­u­lar show ALF (1986−1990). The series starred an Alien Life Form whose space­ship crash landed into the garage of the Tan­ner Fam­ily in Los Ange­les. Due to the fact his space­ship could not be repaired he was stuck on Earth with­out any hope of return­ing to his home­planet, Melmac.

The Tan­ner Fam­ily agreed to hide ALF from the alien task force and learns of his planet’s favorite meal; cats. Although the Tanner’s cat Lucky is con­sid­ered a del­i­cacy on Mel­mac, ALF tried his best to not eat him even though his attempted to sev­eral times dur­ing the series.

The show as men­tioned amassed such pop­u­lar­ity that it pro­duced a fever of ALF mer­chan­dis­ing includ­ing fig­urines, stuffed dolls, books, posters and even bed sheets (of which I owned I one time or another).

The his­tory of ALF’s con­cep­tion is a unique one. “The char­ac­ter ALF was orig­i­nally cre­ated by Paul Fusco in 1984. He already offered his con­cept of a sit­com about an alien to the Dis­ney Stu­dios and to the Muppet-creator Jim Hen­son, but they rejected it, when finally he had a meet­ing with NBC’s Bran­don Tartikoff.”

A pop­u­lar mis­con­cep­tion dur­ing the time was that ALF was per­formed by “90 cm (around 3 feet) tall Michu Mezaros. But he just por­trayed ALF in the first sea­son and part of the sec­ond sea­son only when he needed to be seen walk­ing. In nor­mal scenes and in the third and fourth sea­son the pro­duc­ers of the shows used other meth­ods that did not require a cos­tume.” (tvshows.de)

In other news …

An arti­cle on Yahoo News states that “the 7,385 sign­ers of the “Bring Back ALF” online peti­tion let­ter have finally got­ten their wish.” ALF will return to the boob tube with his very own show enti­tled Alf’s Hit Talk Show, cur­rently in devel­op­ment with Nick­elodeon and cre­ator Paul Fusco. 

In the arti­cle “Why I hate The Lord of the Rings” Larry Terenzi, con­tribut­ing author, states his opin­ion in regards to the Tolkein tril­ogy. He basi­cally describes his dis­plea­sure and monot­ony while watch­ing the films as well as the lack of story (in the movies, not nec­es­sar­ily in the books).

The best part of the arti­cle in my opin­ion is when Ter­nenzi calls the char­ac­ters ‘Merry and Pip­pin’ the ‘Cheech and Chong’ of Mid­dle Earth. 

The Amaz­ing Live Sea­mon­keys, “inspired by those lit­tle sea­mon­keys one could order out of the back of comic books. Pro­duced as a live-action car­toon, the sets reflected a style akin to water­color paint­ings used for back­grounds in 1950s animation.”

I had a few Sea­mon­key kits in the past and would sit there in front of the con­tainer intrigued that micro­scopic mon­keys could sus­tain them­selves in water. I imag­ined full-sized mon­keys shrunk to the size of a dust par­ti­cle with gills for lungs float­ing around and enjoy­ing their Sea­mon­key environment.

When I found out that Sea­mon­keys were actu­ally brine shrimp my world came tum­bling down. How could they trick us kids into think­ing tiny mon­keys could swim underwater?

As Vezzini from Princess Bride would say: “Inconceivable!” 

Snopes.com writes “A U.S. ser­vice­man wrote a poem describ­ing a soldier’s lonely night before Christmas.”

This poem is ded­i­cated to my brother, Navy Recruit Matthew Sagen cur­rently resid­ing at Greak Lakes, Illi­nois and to all of the ser­vice­men sta­tioned in var­i­ous loca­tions around the world.

Twas the night before Christ­mas, he lived all alone,
In a one bed­room house made of plas­ter & stone.
I had come down the chim­ney with presents to give
And to see just who in this home did live.

Then the sol­dier rolled over, whis­pered with a voice so clean and pure,
“Carry on Santa, it?s Christ­mas Day, all is secure.“
One look at my watch, and I knew he was right,
Merry Christ­mas my friend, and to all a good night!

Credit: James M. Schmidt, Lance Cor­po­ral (1986) 

When devel­op­ing a web page, it’s cru­cial to take into account your audi­ence. With that in mind, you also should avoid cer­tain prat­fulls espe­cially if you are work­ing in a pro­fes­sional environment.

We’ve all vis­ited these kinds of sites with blar­ing MIDI(Musical Instru­ment Dig­i­tal Inter­face) music and a rain­box color scheme. Its bad enough to have an appalling pre­sen­ta­tion but to cou­ple it with super­flu­ous sound will imme­di­at­edly cause the user to exit your site, run to the shower and cleanse them­selves of the experience.

Pre­vent­ing these kinds of blun­ders will in the long run con­vey a bet­ter pre­sen­ta­tion and you might earn a place in their favorites.

Jef­frey Glover’s web site, Sucky to Savvy show­cases sev­eral of the most abysmal mis­takes used in web sites. It also presents sev­eral savvy meth­ods to web devel­op­ment includ­ing fluid lay­outs, etc.

Worth a look for the novice and a chuckle for the expe­ri­enced developer. 

Since the New Year is quickly approach­ing we all have our res­o­lu­tions to con­sider. Some peo­ple might quit smok­ing, change their diets or change their out­look on life. As for me, with a new baby on it’s way new chal­lenges and bless­ings are just around the cor­ner. It’s some­thing that I’ve accepted and look for­ward to.

As explained in the book, Who Moved my Cheese? change is enevitable. It is some­thing that occurs in all of our lives whether we enjoy it or not. Acknowl­edg­ing the occurence is the first step while the most impor­tant being our adapt­ing to change. Whether you believe it or not, change is a good thing. It keeps things con­stantly fresh pre­vent­ing oth­er­wise “stale cheese”. Learn­ing to accept new obsta­cles and chal­lenges will ulti­mately shape your expe­ri­ences even­tu­ally bring­ing forth a new out­look on life.

Bot­tom­line: Throw out the mis­con­cep­tions that change is a bad thing. Rather, look at change as a nat­ural part of life that will in the end make you a bet­ter person. 

The NASA Earth Observatory’s mis­sion is “to pro­vide a freely-accessible pub­li­ca­tion on the Inter­net where the pub­lic can obtain new satel­lite imagery and sci­en­tific infor­ma­tion about our home planet.”

Amongst the wealth of infor­ma­tion found on the NEO site, the Blue Mar­ble “is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a col­lec­tion of satellite-based obser­va­tions, sci­en­tists and visu­al­iz­ers stitched together months of obser­va­tions of the land sur­face, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seam­less, true-color mosaic of every square kilo­me­ter (.386 square mile) of our planet.”

Detail | View the Blue Mar­ble (in var­i­ous media formats)