From Tetris To Bejeweled

An interesting history of the casual block-pattern-making video game genre.

Screwed Up Views Of The World

"Silicon Valley has done a good job in telling the world what a wonderful nirvana the Internet is," he said. "But 90 percent of the sites aren't profitable."

-- a cell phone industry insider

Work Stuff

I'll be in Hawaii next week, along with basically the whole department. Hopefully there will be no search quality emergencies while we're gone.

Beat that, Genentech ;-)

Lacker Sux?

Untrue!

Rumors have reached me that Google Suggest provides "lacker sux" as a suggestion for "lacker". The shame!

A New Word

twitterati, noun: people who have lost touch with the real world while debating the precise meaning of Web 4.0

Let's start spreading this thing; I think it's got legs.

Concept Needs A Name - Ibits?

Another attempt to rassle up lots of individual bits (in the technical sense) of AI. This one's fun to play and in picture form.

Game 2.0

A couple interesting free online games - interesting because a large part of their appeal is their level editors.

Zelda Classic

N (yeah just N - inconvenient)

Analytics Update

So I'm running about 2.5 visits a day on this blog.

40% of visitors are here for the first time.

5% of visitors come from England, Canada, or Australia.

87% of visitors use Firefox. Get with the program, lagging 13%'ers.

45% of traffic is direct, 35% from Google, the rest are links from various places.

It's been months since I got any traffic from a non-Google search engine.

Terrible

"Your publish is taking longer than expected. To continue waiting for it to finish, click here."

-- Blogger

No thanks, I would rather not continue waiting for it to finish. Where's that option?

And if you don't click there, Blogger just stops trying to publish.

It should be one click per thought, max. This is like a popup asking "Are you sure you meant to click Cancel and not Okay in the previous popup?

And then you click Okay and start wondering what you just agreed to.

I imagine some corporate phrasing committee decided to remove all details in the error messages to avoid offending the segment of users that gets upset whenever they see a sentence they don't understand.

It Must Be True, I Saw It On The Internet

This is a covert snapshot of the insides of the factory where they build Super Mario levels.

Viral Classics: Part 1

This is part one of a hundred-part series.

Today's episode comes with a puzzle that is maybe interesting even if you don't watch the video. What if you had to build Stonehenge using basically a bunch of rocks and whatever equipment you can scrounge up at the hardware store?