We have all seen terrible job postings while looking for our a position ourselves. Several people have already written articles on this including Robin at Shore Street Software. Some of the issues resolve around how job postings are formatted, what words they use and what programming languages they are asking for. In this post, I will be discussing something else: Timing.
Originally I had plans to write an article which did a comparison between several tech incubator programs that are out there which help launch products and ideas starting with nothing more than a simple pitch or video. I did some quick research to find a directory listing of all the incubators and then found this article. They did exactly what I was about to do which was list all the incubator programs, talk about what each one brings to the table, what they take away (usually a percentage of the company), and some of their key successes. Unfortunately, they miss out on two new key incubators: GrowLab & FounderFuel. See their features after the jump.
While working on my project at the University I noticed that my lab partner’s girlfriend was doodling away on her sketchpad. I asked her if she’d like to get into gaming and perhaps flash games. She loved the idea and quickly spun off several game ideas for us to make together. One such idea was PhatChef.
You: An aspiring chef, you get accepted into a prestigious culinary school using your mom’s best recipes. You have to deal with your fat and rude supervising chef until you can make it on your own.
We plan on finishing the game in the coming week or so, but until then here’s a sneak peak into the unfinished game.
So as any true geek, I often start weekend projects which often start from a fantastic Friday afternoon ideas and work on them throughout the weekend. For this particular weekend project I had envisioned a side-scroller game. I always start off my ideas with simple graphics and logistics. This helps me to focus more on the idea more-so than whether a specific color looks good or not. Besides, being color-blind doesn’t help in this endeavor.
For this game, I wanted a classic feel for the game-play yet have cool features such as burst weapons, radar stations and random paths for the enemy ships. I got 2/3 of the features done rather quickly before the weekend ran out. Check out the game and let me know thoughts and ideas! Perhaps the game has potential?
Note: There isn’t any collision detection and I wasn’t happy with the mouse behavior so you’ll have to use the arrow keys to navigate.
I have been working on some e-learning software with Dr. Ghislain Deslongchamps at the University of New Brunswick with the aim of creating interactive media to help students learn and understand NMR spectroscopy. The learning curve was steep but in the end I was able to build a template which allowed us to simply input real lab data in XML format and have the data be correctly interpreted by my Flash application.
