I was busy cleaning up some old boxes of stuff when I ran across this:
It’s a shareware floppy of Wolfenstein 3D, distributed by Atanak Software. Atanak was a local enterprise, churning out these things over in a suburb of Ottawa. Anyways, back in the early nineties, you could find these disks in odd shops across town. I remember that the hobby shops had them. At 99 cents, these were pure awesome in 3.5″ form.
Last time I talked about Rice Tea, I had this to say:
Back to Rice Tea, the production of the audio book has been very beneficial to me. I didn’t realize to what point some of the dialog was bad – I literally laughed out loud in some bits.
Shortly thereafter, I stopped recording the audio book. I was constantly pausing Audacity in order to change the wording in the novel, and after doing this for the umpteenth time, I decided that I would be better off just to get the bloody book right in the first place. I spent the next few months painstakingly going through every page of the text *multiple times* to QC what I had written. This effort concluded a few days ago with the release of revision ricetea_20-07.
Much of the novel has been reworked, with the dialog having suffered the brunt of the changes. So to everyone who bought Rice Tea before, you’ll now be receiving a complimentary copy of this latest version. I’m very satisfied with what I’ve produced, and I’ll be submitting this last version to Libraries and Archive Canada as part of my legally-mandated deposit.
You can get Rice Tea here.
Last weekend I went to Las Vegas to attend the seventeenth iteration of Defcon. What an amazing time.
I made a bunch of awesome friends, and saw some old acquaintances I hadn’t seen HOPE6 three years ago. I also met some people I had talked to online for the first time: Irongeek, verbal, JFalcon, rbcp, Wes, and Da Beave. In the weird coincidences factor, I met someone that had come to a few Ottawa 2600 while waiting in registration line. Neither of us knew that the other was attending.
Defcon is an annual event held in Las Vegas. I got to see a bunch of talks, including a very interesting presentation by Moxie Marlinspike on a very serious exploitable bug with SSL certificate handling.
During the day I would attend Defcon, while in the evenings I would visit Las Vegas with Nick & Ben, who were staying in the room right across from me in the Circus Circus Hotel. They exposed me to the real Las Vegas, and I got to try an In-and-Out for the first time. I also had a very nice dinner one night with Jason Scott and Irongeek.
Walking around was interesting. Planet Hollywood had strippers at 3AM in the middle of the casino area. Families would be out, with their little children, at 4AM. This truly is the city that never sleeps. I found the hotels very inexpensive ($35/night @ Circus Circus), but everything else – especially the food – was very pricey in the strip.
Attendees to the conference were handed badges as proof that they had paid. Unlike your typical conference badge, however, these ones contained reprogrammable microcontrollers, a microphone, and a LED. The program that ran on them made the light blink with increasing frequency depending on the ambient noise level. Reprogramming the badge to perform neat tricks was encouraged through the use of a contest. One team managed to make the device wirelessly control a miniature blimp through sound. Really neat stuff. The organizers had put together a number of such cool contests.
That bit of awesomeness really encapsulates the spirit Defcon. What I liked best about the conference, however, was the sense of community that was always present. I could just strike up a conversation with anyone, whether we were in lines, or while sitting down at a table. We could talk about where we were from, what we were doing, what we thought of the conference – and it would just work. There wasn’t this layer of paranoia, which is something I have encountered in local 2600 meetings.
Defcon was a great, and I’ll definitively be going back.
…as I quote the 16 year old girl on St-Laurent boulevard. I say “Ok,” and keep walking on. She rips the headphones off of my head, they drop on the ground (breaking), and I stand there looking at her. She walks off and gives me the finger.
Her friend looked embarassed. I put the phones back together, they work. Guess she was bored. That’s my fun of the day. *sigh*
This last Saturday was a milestone for me. I moved into my own apartment. No roommates – just me. With the acquiring of a solid post-university job, along with my own apartment, I’ve progressed from the status of poor student/youth to being my own man.