Read the Bible in a Year

Whilst I have read large portions of the Bible, I have not been able to stick to reading it consistently.

For this year, it is my intention to read the whole thing. I have prepared a reading schedule that covers a couple of chapters a day. The biggest problem was fitting this immense amount of information into an index card that I could use as a book mark.

This is what I’ve created: View the schedule.

How to Use This Schedule

1. Look up the current day in the table using the day number across the first (or last) row, and the month on the left

2. The 1^st row in each month shows the corresponding book. Where names are unable to fit they have either been abbreviated using standard abbreviations, or references which are defined underneath the table

3. The corresponding cell below the book for each day tells you which chapter to start reading at. Continue reading up to (but not including) the chapter for the following day

4. On some days you will read more than one book. In these instances that day’s cell is split into two or more, but the cell underneath only provides the chapter number of the first book to start on

   

   Here, you would read 1^st Peter chapter 1–4 on one day then on the next day read 1^st Peter Chapter 5 (and onto the end of the book) as well as all of 2^nd Peter (reference mark ‘L’)

5. Please note that Psalms Chapter 119 and Jeremiah Chapter 25 are very long and are subdivided between two days. The single-dagger mark notes that on July the 5^th you should read Psalms 117–119:72 and Psalms 119:73 to the end of the chapter on the following day. Secondly, the double-dagger mark notes that on the 14^th of August, read Jeremiah 23–25:16 followed by Jeremiah 25:17 to the end of the chapter the next day

I had originally tried to create this using Pages, but it refused to split table cells anymore once I got down to Amos. Printing in browsers is generally very broken and inept, but you should be able to scale the schedule down to the desired paper size using the advanced printer settings.

If anybody could make some decent PDFs for me in A6, A7, Index card and Pocket Mod size, I’d greatly appreciate it, thanks!

What’s Missing on the Virtual Console?

I have a love-hate thing with the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console.
I love it on principle, but hate it in practice. It’s over-priced, unpolished and lacks the right games.

Super Mariokart

Why didn’t Nintendo release Super Mariokart on the V.C. alongside Mariokart Wii for a double-whammy of handling goodness? I saw a SNES + Mariokart bundle at a local game shop going for £45. The demand is immense.

Sonic The Hedgehog (Master System)

(Update: This is now on the U.K. Virtual Console)

Already released in America, but held up here in Europe. This is not the same as Sonic The Hedgehog on the Mega Drive. What the 8-Bit Master System couldn’t do with graphics, it made up with gameplay. The levels are creative and well designed, adding clever additions like the auto-scrolling Bridge level and my personal favourite the vertical waterfall level that (a bit like Super Mario Bros. on the NES) would not allow you to go back; which when climbing a waterfall meant that if you missed a jump, you died – there was no retracing your steps. The Game Gear version of the game however left this facet out as the screen was too small to do the tricky jumping sections.

The only letdown with the game is the lacklustre bosses. The 8-Bit system was just unable to fill the screen in the same way the 16-Bit Mega Drive could.

The strength and longevity of the 8-Bit systems even meant that it remained commercially viable for some time to release new games on the older Master System as Sonic The Hedgehog was followed up by a number of Master System-specific games that did their own thing, rather than trying to imitate the Mega Drive releases; most notably Sonic 2 and Sonic Chaos. (Both of which of course should be on V.C.)

Pokémon

What are you afraid of Nintendo? That somehow V.C. sales will prevent people from purchasing DSes?

Love or hate Pokémon, the original games ( Pokémon Blue / Red) stand alone as superb R.P.G.s in their own right, before all the Pokémon craze took off. If anything, the over hype / marketing / craze of Pokémon that followed soured the image of the games in some people’s minds.

Much like how Tomb Raider lost the plot when the marketing-men ran with the idea that everybody liked the game solely because of Lara Croft©, when the truth was that the first Tomb Raider was I.M.O. the nearest to perfect game ever created. Ignore what you don’t like about the Pokémon brand, and you will find an R.P.G. that will truly grip you.

That said, I am still of that crowd that swear by the original 151 and refuse to get with the times. Just keep remaking Pokémon Blue every five years, and I’ll be happy, thanks.

Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babel (Gameboy Advance)

Everything that made Metal Gear Solid great, in a Gameboy. Sheer 8-Bit brilliance.

Ys (Master System)

(Update: The Turbo Grafx 16 version of Ys Book Ⅰ & Ⅱ is now on the U.K. Virtual Console, but it lacks the difficulty level of the Master System version, and what took me weeks, only takes a few days)

Just the most immensely big R.P.G. for the Master System. Huge. How it was crammed into a Master System cart I will not know. The combat would be considered very weak now, but it struck a balance between Zelda-esque exploration and stat-based battles without being turn-based. Yes, you just “bumped” into each other until HP≤0, but the immense maze-like world you had to explore and the equipment upgrades made it worth it.

Commodore 64 games that matter

There’s about 6’000 games for the Commodore 64. During late 80s the U.K. was the centre of the gaming world, with America having to wait to get games released in Europe first (imagine that!). During those years, you could quite literally code a game in your bedroom and it become a top-selling game overnight. Many of the companies in the industry now came from those days of idea-tolerance. Your game’s hero could be anybody or anything – even if it was ridiculous. You didn’t need millions in V.C., a strong “brand” and “attitude” just to make an entrance into the market.

Do you honestly think you could get away with “James Pond” now?

Here’s some “missing” C64 games in the V.C. from my stand-point: (In no order)

• Stunt Car Racer
• Elite
• Any Dizzy games, especially Kwik Snax
• Mayhem in Monsterland (now available)
• The Sentinel
• Flimbo’s Quest
• Midnight Resistance
• Fiendish Freddy’s Big Top o’ Fun

Any other suggestions of your own? Mail me on the signature link below.

“Minimalist” Is Not the Right Word

Sam Ruby is moving to clean HTML (no divs, no classes &c.).
He describes this as Minimalist Markup.

Unfortunately, I have to find fault with this term. Just because some code is not full of needless bloat, does it then make it minimalist? No, it is simply as is it should be.

Just because my website is not full of ads, side bars, widgets and crap, it is not therefore minimalist.
Exactly everything is here as it was designed to be.

The same goes with the source code. Just because there are no class attributes, it does not make the code minimal. It still renders exactly as it would render had I used CSS classes.

I’m sorry if people are so used to terrible website design that they consider a website that doesn’t have this bloat as minimalist. That’s faulty perspective.

Whilst it’s obviously fantastic that he is moving toward sane HTML, I don’t see it as anything particularly special. This is how all websites should have been from the beginning. It’s only because of the terrible habits bred into us developers by IE4 and Netscape that it’s taken so long to get back into shape with standards again.

The class attribute is not evil, nor wrong. It doesn’t need to be avoided, it just needs to be used only when it is appropriate, and not as a catch-all for the failings of some browsers. The class attribute is simply a way to say that an element will have changed semantics from how it has been seen before. For example, a blockquote with and without a class attribute are semantically different; the latter blockquote is of a different class.

In my own website, it’d be perfectly correct (even more correct than it is now), to use a class on my <article> elements, since the semantics of each article are different due to different internal content (blog | tweet | photo &c.)

I decided to go totally without classes to show that it could be done and that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and that this would fit within my three guiding principles of design.

Sam, I’m in your debt. If there’s anything I can help with this new design of yours, I’m at your disposal.


Kind Regards,

Sentinel Returns: A Guide

Sentinel Returns is often described as genre-busting.
The concept is so off-the-wall, yet creative and well designed that it’s a game of elegance, but also of fear.

Sentinel Returns is scary in the way modern horror movies are not: calmness.
There is more fear in something malicious taking its time, than something that is too quick to ever see.

When I played this game back in 1998, I would restart the level if one particular music track was playing, I found it way too disconcerting. The game, whilst simple, is very atmospheric, dark and brooding.

The Sentinel itself is Lord Fear over the landscape. It slowly rotates at the highest point, observing the landscape around it, looking out for you. If it spots you, it will try to absorb your energy.

Blind panic usually ensues.

I recently started playing the game again, and decided that since the game can be difficult to understand for newcomers (and that more people really should play this game), I’d contribute a strategy guide of sorts to gamefaqs (writing in pure ASCII-code is quite fun). It’s going through their review process at the moment It’s now on their website, but a copy is enclosed in this blog entry (at the bottom of this entry, and as an RSS enclosure in your reader).

I hope you enjoy it, and that it enlightens you about how this odd game functions. I also hope it proves to be useful to those playing the game too!

If you’re into puzzles, particularly abstract ones, then this is a good game. It’s available on Playstation, or PC from any second-hand place you can find it. eBay, Amazon, Local Swap-Shops &c.

“These Things I Believe”

These things I believe is a beautiful mantra of software philosophy.
I agree with everything there.

Here are some choice quotes:

Are users dumb?

When software is hard to use, don’t make excuses for it. Improve it.

When a user makes a mistake, don’t blame the user. Ask how the software misled them. Then fix it.

The user’s time is more valuable than ours. Respect it.

Good U.I. design is humble.

A good software developer defends his work by actions - fixing it, improving it.
A bad software developer places the blame anywhere but on their own head.

What is the task of the U.I. designer?

Users do not know what interface they want. Users do not know what features they want.

Users know the tasks they want to do, and the problems they have.

We learn more by watching the user work than by asking the user.

The job of the U.I. designer is to provide what the users need, not what the users say they need.

It is to make tasks easier, not to provide features.

And my personal thoughts:

If you believe users to be idiots, then you will write idiot-software

I would go as far as saying that:

With intelligence, you can write good code.
But without philosophy, you cannot create art.

It takes love to write beautiful code (and a beautiful functionally interface), and there’s not much of that in this technology-world of pent-up, angry, aggressive and indignant geeks.