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Host of Morning Edition since its inception, Bob Edwards has been abruptly “reassigned” from his position. During today’s program (just in advance of his interview with Charles Osgood, also his first Edition interviewee) he reminded us, with scarcely-veiled bitterness, that he has been with Morning Edition for 24½ years. Apparently allowing his voice to continue soothing listeners for another six months would have been Just Too Much for NPR, now inexplicably concerned with finding younger voices for their broadcasts.

Brian points me to an engrossing speech about Zelda given at the Game Developer’s Conference last month, by Eiji Aonuma, the producer of the franchise. The transcript is full of tasty little making-of anecdotes:

In Ocarina of Time I also took on the challenge of incorporating Adventure Elements into dungeon design, by which I mean giving each dungeon some type of theme, such as rescuing the trapped Gorons, or hunting down and defeating the Poe Sisters.

But what’s most captivating is the serious treatment of the guiding principles behind all Zelda games, namely Zelda Reality. I was also surprised—and yet, not really surprised—at the mention of interactive fiction as an influence (informing the relationship between player, puzzle, and narrative).

In today’s NY Times, Pogue eventually writes about palmOne’s new handhelds, but first takes the opportunity to explain the complicated corporate history of (what was once) Palm Computing by way of a lava lamp metaphor.

Palm, the company whose ingenious 1996 Pilot organizer spawned the current age of palmtops and smart phones, has a long and complicated history. But if you want the general idea, go look at a lava lamp.

Inside, you’ll see blobs of melted wax, colorfully separating and rejoining, splitting and recombining, as they float through illuminated liquid. Palm’s founder, Jeff Hawkins, and his team were one globule, breaking free of Palm in 1998 to found Handspring, only to be reabsorbed into Palm last October. Palm itself was another bubble, absorbed first into U.S. Robotics and then into 3Com in the 1990’s, spat out as an independent company in 2000, and then splitting itself in half last year along hardware-software lines. (The two resulting companies are called PalmOne and PalmSource. Confused yet?)

John Calhoun is the author of my favorite game ever for the Macintosh, Glider, the first version of which appeared in 1988. Other games he wrote include Glypha, Stella Obscura, MacTuberling, Pararena, Spaceway 2000 (co-authored with Jeff Robbin), and Silicon Casino. Ten bucks says you didn’t know he now works on Apple Computer’s graphics team. Among other things, he was responsible for the rewrite of Preview in OS X 10.3 that, in my humble opinion, kicks Adobe Reader’s ass.

I recently talked to him over email about the genesis of Glider and his career as game author.

—crunchable.net

This one’s for temple: “We all know what wardriving is – discovering wireless networks while driving some sort of ground-based vehicle. Warflying is kind of like that, except you are travelling at about 120 miles per hour and flying about 1500 above ground.“

erinmak: Lemonade and Lord of the Rings. “Why do we condition children growing up to believe that summer is relaxed and free, when as adults, they’re going to have to work through the best part of the year?”

iTunes 4.5 is out, and it includes two features that I know Chris has been dying for:

1. Lossless compression codec, with a 50% filesize reduction. (Chris is an audio-quality snob—I know he can’t hear the difference between 220k VBR and CD-quality, but whatever.)
2. Track joining. I seem to recall Chris having developed a mockup for this exact feature; now it’s built into the app.