NES Nostalgia

A co-worker mentioned this little gem to me this week: 100 of the top NES games, playable in your browser with no download. It's implemented as a Java applet, and the games play pretty well, with only an occasional framerate stutter.

In addition to Super Mario, there's Zelda, 1942, Double Dragon, Tecmo Super Bowl, and 95 other ways to trigger a late 80's flashback.

If you find yourself addicted, many of these games are available from the Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console.

Commodore Nostalgia

Just got done reading "On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore", by Brian Bagnall. As someone who grew up right outside Commodore headquarters and learned to write code for both the C64 and Amiga computers, it brought back a lot of memories. If you ever read a copy of COMPUTE!, played a game by Epyx, or experienced a Guru Meditation Error, you'll get a kick out of this book.

The book paints a detailed picture of the various eras of Commodore technology, but it also provides compelling portraits of the engineers and executives responsible for Commodore's successes and missteps. You can really feel for the engineers who invested so much of their lives into the company with seemingly so little in return.

Some interesting factoids are revealed as well. The stories behind why C64 games took so long to load, how the Amiga chips got their names, and why so many Commodore computers were DOA are all covered in the book.

One particular thing that jogged my memory was the descriptions of the various marketing campaigns. I can still recall the strains of J.S. Bach's Invention #13, which was featured in one of the early Commodore commercials. So after finishing the book, I checked to see if any of these commercials could be found on YouTube. YouTube did not disappoint - enjoy the VIC-20, C64, and Amiga commercials in all their 80's glory...

Crunch Time...

Haven't had a post for the past two weeks - like some other Googlers, I've been pretty busy lately. Reminds me of a joke I heard before joining Google: "Your 20% time? That's hours 80 to 100 in the workweek". Fortunately, it's not quite as bad as that. I've got a number of (hopefully interesting) posts queued up which I'll be putting up this week.

I've been tagged

I've been tagged by Greg, from his AIM Info blog. The rules of blog tag are simple - tell 5 things that people might not know about you, and then tag 5 other bloggers to continue the chain.

So, here are 5 things you might not know about me:

1. My first computer was a TI 99/4A, circa 1981. I saved my BASIC programs on a tape recorder.
   
2. At college I studied Mathematics and Physics. I learned C++ after a friend gave me the book "Learn C++ in 21 days".
   
3. I used the same keyboard, a Microsoft Natural Keyboard, for over 10 years, including my entire tenure at AOL. The Natural Keyboards are the only keyboards I have been able to use for an extended period of time without discomfort.
   
4. I am a Philadelphia sports fan, whose teams, combined, have gone 92 consecutive seasons (since 1983) without a championship. That is longer than the drought suffered by the Boston Red Sox.
5. I am a b-boying (breakdancing) fan. Doing the worm at a company party is always a crowd-pleaser.

And my 5 tagees? I've picked 5 other bloggers from the Kirkland office:

• Steve Yegge
  
• Random Thoughts
• moblog
  
• Gayle Laakman
• Joe Beda's Eighty Percent.net

Interesting statistic...

I took my Jetta in to the dealer the other day for a warranty issue, and while I was waiting in the showroom I noticed one of the Jettas on the floor was covered with various stickers. The stickers were all of the form "VW owners are XX% more/less likely to ___________", with the "more likely"s being generally positive things (e.g. work out, read a book) and the "less likely"s being negative things. Apparently VW surveyed its owners and created a marketing campaign around the results.

One particular sticker (above) grabbed my attention. Some other related "more likely"s:
"72% more likely to chat online" and "102% more likely to have watched video online".

Of course, this is a marketing campaign, so who knows how carefully the survey was conducted. Nevertheless, if you find factoids about VW users interesting, there is a version of the survey on the Web at http://thejettareport.com.

White & Nerdy

While Weird Al Yankovic' "White & Nerdy" resonated with a number of us here at Google, many lamented that it excludes a good part of Google's diverse workforce. When asked whether Weird Al might consider a more inclusive version of the song, his agent was unenthusiastic:

"While Weird Al is willing to poke fun at all races equally, his profession is an artform. We trust that our non-white audience can simply enjoy identification with being 'Nerdy'."