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Tag Archives: super mario bros

Welcome to warp zone

Monday, August 17, 2009

When I was a kid I played a lot, and I mean a lot, of Super Mario Bros. My grandpa once asked me to explain the game to him after he’d watched me play it for the nine thousandth hour. I tried hard and couldn’t do it. There’s a lot that defies intuition. Like how [...]

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Filed in autobio, hardware, math, music, science, software, video games | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

The desktop metaphor is, like, so five minutes ago

Saturday, May 23, 2009

When you grow up playing video games, like I did, the primitiveness of office software user interface design comes as a shock. The desktop metaphor was a brilliant stroke back in 1970 when they thought it up at Xerox PARC, but I feel like it has outlived its usefulness. User interfaces are the first line [...]

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The Minus World and the Blue Screen Of Death

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

When the computer crashes, it hasn’t stopped working. It appears to be stuck because it isn’t responding to you, but it continues to hum along as fast as usual. The computer is too busy to take input because it’s in a loop, executing the same short list of instructions over and over. It’s hard to [...]

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Filed in software, video games | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)