Posted in Canada, Personal, Tech on Apr 14th, 2008 No Comments »
Mike Holmes is well on his way to being my new idol.
If you’re reading this from Canada, you know Mike: the contractor who arrives at botched renovation jobs and works his magic.
So why do I love this guy?
1. He knows everything there is to know about construction. He seems to have deep knowledge of [...]
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Gaming and XBox, Microsoft, Personal, Silverlight, Tech on Mar 25th, 2008 2 Comments »
If you’re authoring multimedia applications in Silverlight, you might be interested in how each of the core game engine services for Legend of the Greasepole is now implemented for the Silverlight 2 Beta.
From C/C++ to a Provider Model-Based .NET Engine
Some brief history to explain how we got here: Greasepole’s first incarnation was manky C/C++ stuff [...]
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Gaming and XBox, Microsoft, Personal, Silverlight, Tech, Windows Live, XNA on Mar 25th, 2008 No Comments »
One of the reasons I’m pleased with the Silverlight version of Legend of the Greasepole is that it represents a reasonably-scaled multimedia application, and therefore a good way to learn about the Silverlight 2 runtime’s performance.
The Silverlight 2 Beta game engine runs rings around the game engine I tried to create using the Silverlight 2 [...]
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Canada, Gaming and XBox, Microsoft, Personal, Photography, Silverlight, Tech, Windows Live on Mar 24th, 2008 4 Comments »
The Legend of the Greasepole is a game that began its life on July 1st, 1996, when a group of Engineering students from Queen’s University in Canada decided they’d create a way to re-live their unexplainable annual tradition from the comfort of their long-suffering computers.
The release of the Silverlight 2 Beta has allowed the game [...]
Posted in Canada, Microsoft, Personal, Silverlight, Tech, Tech Events, WPF on Feb 25th, 2008 1 Comment »
I’m presenting at the Toronto Code Camp on Saturday about What’s new in Visual Studio 2008 for WPF 3.5 and Silverlight developers. My presentation will be an updated version of the presentation I gave at ObjectSharp’s Visual Studio 2008 At the Movies event, which hopefully you’ll find interesting and useful if you’re doing client-side [...]
Posted in Personal, Tech on Dec 11th, 2007 No Comments »
The Economist magazine has launched a series of online debates in a style they’ve dubbed “Oxford 2.0″ in which the proposition and opposition are represented by experts, and in between the rounds anyone is allowed to add input, from which the moderator can choose points of merit for consideration in the next round.
I was once [...]
Posted in Location-based, Mexico, Personal, Photography, Travel on Nov 19th, 2007 No Comments »
They say the hard part is controlling the kite. Focus on the kite, they said, and the board will follow.
But I have wind experience (windsurfing, sailing), and not board experience (skateboarding, snowboarding), and so for me, the hard part came when I tried to get up on the board in the water.
My instructor, Gerardo [...]
Posted in Belize, Location-based, Moose, Photography, Travel on Nov 9th, 2007 1 Comment »
I was wearing my I-Kuh-Fish t-shirt as I boarded the ferry from Caye Caulker to neighbouring San Pedro on Ambergris Caye. The captain of the ferry asked me where I’d found my shirt. He was surprised to hear it was from Dahab, in Egypt, where the shirt’s classy, timeless design is available at every tourist [...]
Posted in Belize, Location-based, Personal, Photography, Scuba, Travel on Nov 8th, 2007 No Comments »
The Blue Hole was, without a doubt, my single most memorable scuba dive to date.
Thankfully, one of our fellow divers, Australian Rohan Ashton (facebook / email: rohanashton(at)yahoo.com.au) was shooting photo and video footage during the dive. I am very grateful for his permission to post some of his footage here, because otherwise, I wouldn’t expect [...]
Posted in Belize, Personal, Photography, Scuba, Travel on Nov 4th, 2007 2 Comments »
This is my beach-front cabana on Caye Caulker in Belize. I sent the photo to Flickr using my wireless connection here - because the really cool guy who runs the cabanas at Ignacio’s offers wireless for free. So don’t believe anyone who tells you Belize doesn’t have the internets. Or gorgeous beachfront cabanas that go [...]
