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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.