You owe it to yourself to spend the next 4 minutes or so watching this clip. Photographer Robbie Cooper has a series of video captures (beautifully lit, I might add) of kids and young teens playing video games. Titled “Immersion”, one possible way to interpret the video is a damnation of the incredible magnetism of violent, borderline pornographic realistic video-games out today, and more importantly, the impact such immersion has on today’s youth. There are some particularly chilling, almost scary, clips, but the one that drove it home for me was the wide-eyed youngster in the Nike uni… no flinching from that one.
In addition to supplying free restaurant reservations (somehow if you earn enough “points” you can get a dining certificate), OpenTable.com is sponsoring a mini Restaurant Week, cutely named the Appetite Stimulus Plan. Running through the rest of the week, it’s a pretty nice way if you’re near a major city to eat at one of those fancy restaurants. Many are open for an even cheaper lunch as well. If you’ve never done one of these before, one caveat: you won’t get to order off the main menu, but a limited selection list.
Link for the restaurants in Boston, check the website for other cities. Not really Olin-related, but there might be some old Planet Olin lurkers who will want to take advantage.
Before I switched over to full time software development, I used to write functional specs for some of the applications at ATG. The most frustrating aspect of this wasn’t the text itself, since describing what happens when you click a button is pretty sweet, but being blocked waiting for the UI designer to update the wireframe models. He and I used Microsoft Visio, a bulky, awkward product on a good day, and we lost quite a few days to his creating prototypes. (It didn’t help that he was three time zones away.)
With balsamiq mockups, I think we could have definitely cut down on that; it looks impossibly spiffy and fast. It’s been a while since I’ve been on that side of things, so I’d be curious to see if any HFIDers out there have used this. is it as amazing as it looks?
Check out the YouTube video for jaw-dropping prototypin’.
