Yearly Archives: 2009

Thoughts

Goodbye, Duke Nukem

When the Duke Nukem series came out in the late 90s, I was a huge fan. There was a time when I played it every day, and I knew almost every trick on each level. I even bleached my hair once to get the Duke Nukem look. Given that I was also working out regularly back then and had some fairly serious muscle on me, it was a pretty good approximation.

As with all such phases, my obsession with the video game passed on, but I still looked forward to the sequel, called Duke Nukem Forever. I waited, along with countless others, since 1997, only to find out last month that 12 years later, in 2009, work on the game stopped altogether.

It was, by all means, an expected conclusion to what had become a game industry joke and clichĂ©. Still, when I see the trailer for Duke Nukem Forever, released in 2007, I still feel regret for the promises made so many times that never came true. I’d have loved to play the sequel, if only for nostalgic reasons. This should have been awesome. Instead, it ended up in the crapper. What a shame.

[Video from Don MacAskill’s Duke Nukem Forever gallery at SmugMug]

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Events

First torrential summer rain of 2009

On a clear day on the 21st of June, 2009, the sounds of distant thunder made their way into the valley in which the city of Medias, Romania, lies. I checked the sky but not a dark cloud was in sight. In spite of that, the wind began to quicken, and the ruffling of the leaves gave evidence of the approaching rain. Soon, dark clouds appeared over the horizon, and within a quarter of an hour, filled the sky. Peals of thunder punctuated every passing minute. The wind began to blow the dust from the pavement right into the eyes of passersby. People hurried home, shielding their faces.

In another quarter of an hour, the rain started to come down, suddenly. It rained in buckets, with large, thick, heavy drops that hit with a thud and splashed heavily all around. It only lasted another quarter of an hour or so, and it stopped as quickly as it started, but everything was soaking wet. The thick cover of dark clouds slowly parted, and the evening sun lit up the terracotta roof tiles in a golden-orange hue.

I’ve witnessed many rains of all kinds in my time, in temperate and tropical regions, but this was one of the few that I noticed more than the others. I’m not sure why — perhaps because I’d been outside, cleaning up the yard. In the past, I tended to slide in and out of my car and into air conditioned places (work, home), where I was seldom in contact with nature. Now that I’m spending more time at home, and in the yard, I’ve slowed down to where I can sense things a little more. I feel a little of my boyish wonder coming back, and that’s nice; I thought I’d lost it.

A quick video clip recorded while the rain was falling is up in my SmugMug galleries. You can watch it there, or below, if you happen to be reading this on my site (embedded videos don’t appear in the site feed, sorry, nothing I can do about it yet).

http://blip.tv/file/3046222

See this video on blip.tv or at SmugMug.

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Places

In the garden – video

This morning, I took my trusty Olympus C-770UZ into our garden here in Romania and shot some video footage in super macro mode. I love the bokeh I get that way, and how close I can get to things.

I found an iridescent beetle sunning itself on some parsley leaves, a butterfly resting on some spinach leaves, two beetles getting it on, a bee collecting pollen on a squash flower, ants drinking nectar on a raspberry blossom, and more.

See the video on SmugMug, Vimeo or YouTube.

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Lists

Condensed Knowledge – June 21, 2009

This is a summary of articles I read and found interesting during this past week. The list is shared from among my feed subscriptions:

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Thoughts

Googling from different countries

I was watching this video on the Google Webmaster Central Channel, where Matt Cutts answers a question about the impact of server location on Google’s rankings, and he touched on an important point, which I hadn’t noticed until I spent a few months in Romania. In the video, he says that Google will return different search results based on which Google site you visit. For example, if you go to Google.com and type in “bank”, you’ll get different search results than if you go to Google.com.au and type in “bank”.

Back in January, when I arrived in Romania, I noticed the same thing. I Googled myself while in Romania, only to find out I was no longer the first search result that came up for my name at Google.ro or at Google.com. I thought that was odd at the time, because doing the same thing while in the US yielded the expected result. It never occurred to me that Google would yield different search results for each country, although that makes perfect sense now.

Here’s the interesting part though. As I spent more time in Romania, writing and publishing to this site, whose server is in the US, from Romania, the order of the search results for my name at Google.ro and Google.com changed. One day, I googled myself and noticed my name came up first, just like it did in the US. So, Google somehow learned — and I’m not sure how they did it — that I was writing from Romania, or that I was in Romania, and figured out that returning my site as the first search result for my name in Romania was the relevant thing to do. If nothing else, it reveals some of the complexity behind Google’s search algorithms and earns my respect.

google-search-raoul-pop

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