Blogs

I was saddened when I heard the news today that Tim Ryan passed away. Once upon a time, my career was in theatre and Tim, Kate, Bridget, Maralyn, and Laurie were part of my family of colleagues and friends. Kate and I were in a CBC TV show when we were teenagers. Laurie was my musical director on a number of shows, Bridget and Maralyn were never far away from the antics at the school.

Guru is a place of constant change and evolution. I hope you're ready for some!

As of Monday, our Web instructor extraordinaire Beth Quirie will be handling blogging duties here at Guru, as I'll be out of the country for a month doing God knows what. Our Executive Director, Owen Brierley might pop in from time to time - as he has been - to post as well. I'll see what I can do about getting some mystery guests involved in our Web 2.0 initiatives as well.

So, have a good month of November, everybody. I want to hear all about it when I get back.

If you're a Google user, then you've probably seen how often Google changes its standard branding to match an event or holiday. And if you're not a Google user, then what are you using to search the Internet in this day and age?

Save the date!

It's technically the day before Halloween, but I'm not in the business of coming into work on Saturday. On behalf of everyone at Guru, have a happy and safe Halloween! Remember to have your parents check all of your downloads for razor blades before you use them, wear a proxy that allows you to see both ways when you cross the street, and wear reflective banners on your website for safety!

To honor this scariest of holidays, I'll leave you with a terrifying webpage. Enjoy!

While we're all Mac lovers here at Guru, many of us use PC's, or have PC operating systems installed on our Macs. However, I completely managed to let the release of Windows 7 slip under my nose. As it turns out, the latest from Microsoft started shipping last week, on October 22nd, though some people I talked with today told me Amazon has still not shipped copies to some people.

After suffering a slight release delay, the Blu-Ray version of Gary Hustwit's Helvetica follow-up, Objectified, is finally shipping on October 27th. The Blu-Ray release joins last week's DVD release, and can be ordered at the Objectified shop.

This comes from Mario Klingemann, aka Quasimondo. His goal was to write an algorhythm that would allow somebody to send an image in text via Twitter's 140 character limit. The above picture is his latest effort, using Chinese characters to take full advantage of UTF-8 encoding.

This last weekend, independent game developer 2D Boy celebrated the 1 year anniversary of their first game, World of Goo, by hosting a "name your price" sale for the digitally-distributed title. The game, which normally sells for $20, scored 57,000 paid downloads with an average price of $2.03 each.

I know some of you, like me, love to search endlessly across the net for random bits of interesting information. Now, someone's made a game out of my favorite pasttime.

Shuffletime is a browser-based game service that tasks players with following popular links to various web pages. Once there, players have to answer a specific questions pertaining to the link within a time limit to earn coins. Apparently, coins can be cashed in for real prizes, but the challenges themselves are the real incentive here.