Dave Barry's Year in Review 2010 →
Let's put things into perspective: 2010 was not the worst year ever. There have been MUCH worse years. For example, toward the end of the Cretaceous Period, Earth was struck by an asteroid that wiped out about 75 percent of all of the species on the planet. Can we honestly say that we had a worse year than those species did?
Wonderfully humorous look back at 2010 from Dave Barry: health care, North Korea, the iPhone, BP, Chilean miners, and volcanoes. Delightful.
ObamaCare and the General Welfare Clause →
Mr. Randy Barnett and Mr. David Oedel, constitutional law professors at Georgetown University, argue that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional as it violates the "general welfare" requirement of Congress's ability to levy taxes.
Steam Game Library Stats
I was prompted by a conversation with a friend this weekend to take a look at my Steam game library and whip up some stats. The handy Steam Calculator says that I have 77 games with a (current) retail value of $1098.18. That does not, however, tell the whole story. This ugly Excel chart was generated with the help of my Steam receipts:
It shows that almost none of the purchases I've made have been at the full retail price. My actual total cost is $298.11, which for 77 games comes to an average cost/game of $3.87. Now, this number is skewed by factors like expansions (what must a box set include to be considered one game or two or more?) and a few indie titles ($0.49 for The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom), but you can see it's consistent across the chart. Essentially, I've bought award-winning, critically acclaimed games at indie-or-less prices, and I'm not going to complain about that. Steam sales have saved me $800.
Interestingly enough, this post ties in well with an article and discussion on Ars Technica about the correlation between price and expectation in indie games, where the authors point out the hypocrisy of paying $60 for a retail game, making CoD: Black Ops a billion dollar business, and refusing to pay $5 for indie games, whether on Xbox Live or Steam itself. It's a good read and made me question whether the price I pay for a game influences my enjoyment of it or if I am willing to pay more for a game based on the assumption that I will enjoy it. However, these stats seem to show that I am the exception to the premise; I don't pay more than $5 (on average) for either.
Comic Sans Criminal →
HTML5 + railing on Comic Sans. I approve. Plus, stickers!
What Did You Ship in 2010? →
I like Seth Godin's blog post a lot, but unfortunately, you don't ship too much software as a college student. So, I'm going to change it and simply list most of the things I did. There are a few accomplishments thrown in, too.
In rough chronological order, in 2010 I:
- Started this blog on Tumblr
- Toured Fort McHenry
- Lead the Gathering's first worship service of 2010
- Designed posters for the Hemispherectomy Foundation's "Dreams on Wings" Benefits in Baltimore and Philadelphia
- Survived snowpocalypse and/or snowmageddon (record snowfall in Baltimore)
- Helped plan and execute (and emcee'd) JHU's third Veritas Forum
- Spent a week in Colorado with UBC's spring break trip
- Was thoroughly disappointed in the final episode of Lost
- Researched and designed a presentation for Introduction to Proteins: "Quantum Mechanics/Molecular Mechanics: Computational Methods for Protein Analysis"
- Produced an application and paper entitled "A Parallel Image and Video Processing Application" for Digital Multimedia and Coding
- Was presented the Computer Science department's "Senior of the Year" award
- Was presented with a Diversity Leadership Award
- Ate pounds of crab at the Senior Week Crab Feast
- Attended the MSE Cocktail Party
- Graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
- Attended the wedding of two good friends in Indianapolis
- Bought a 2010 Honda Accord
- Drove said car 3,500 miles across the Western United States
- Started a job as a SDET with Windows Live Hotmail, Microsoft Corporation
- Attended the first concert at the newly reopened Golden State Theater, Monterrey, California featuring Tenth Avenue North
- Attended a good friend's wedding in Miami
- Introduced tabs to a beta branch of CheMVP
- Racked up an abnormal number of hours in video games:
- Batman: Arkham Asylum
- Halo: ODST
- Star Wars: Dark Forces
- Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II
- Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith
- Halo: Reach
- Alan Wake
- Halo
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
- Limbo
- Also racked up an abnormal amount of time in movies:
- Avatar
- Iron Man 2
- Inception
- 15 Netflix movies (TV seasons count one)
- 38 Netflix streaming movies
Happy New Year's, everyone!
IE's HTML5Labs →
The HTML5 Labs site is the place where Microsoft prototypes early and unstable web standard specifications from standards bodies such as the W3C. Sharing these prototypes helps us have informed discussions with developer communities, and contributes to a better implementation experience with draft specifications.
This goes a long way to reassuring me that faster iterations will be the case with IE 9+.
This film deserves to win the Academy Award for best live-action short subject. (1) Because of its wonderful quality. (2) Because of its role as homage. It is directly inspired by Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent classic "Man With a Movie Camera." (3) Because it represents an almost unbelievable technical proficiency. It was filmed during the New York blizzard of Dec. 26, and Jamie Stuart e-mailed it to me with this time stamp: December 27, 2010 4:18:18 PM CST.-Roger Ebert
2010 in Photos →
As usual, a great set of shots from the Boston Globe's Big Picture. Be sure to catch parts 2 and 3.
Science's Breakthroughs of 2010 →
A visible quantum device tops the list put out by Science, which includes six major advancements in genomics, and two each in physics and medicine.
Sources:
Science's Breakthrough of the Year: A Macroscopic Quantum Device
Science's Breakthrough of the Year: Runners Up
System.FormatException: The string 'True' is not a valid Boolean value.— C#
I say it is, C#. I call your bluff.