I have three main hobbies: photography, my webcomic and programming.  After spending a year working on my 365 Project, I’ve been taking a lot less photos as that part of my brain takes a break.  After working with Dan to get the story for INM worked out through May of this year and working on strips that will appear this March, I wanted to take a bit of a break from that.  The one bit of code I wrote for myself that I use on a daily basis is my flickr views code.

You can see it here online and get your own. It’s all my 365 project this time.

Because I rarely play games when they first come out, I had the occasion to play Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed II back-to-back.  As I’ve mentioned before ( near the end of the post ) getting to experience sequels one after another can yield some benefits over waiting years in between.  (Plus, in the case of stuff like Harry Potter (which I haven’t read yet) you don’t have the tension between books)  In this case, it was interesting to see how much had changed while keeping the core game the same.  There may be some very mild spoilers below, but I’m trying to keep it so that you can read it even if you intend to play the games.

It took a bit of convincing from Dan, but eventually I read the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels.  I knew right away that this was a book written for people like me.  Just like Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, people older or younger than me would never get the full appreciation of all the references.  I thoroughly hated the eponymous protagonist until I got near the end of the book and realized why he was so annoying.  So, once my brother got the movie on Blu-ray, I knew it’d be just a matter of time before I saw it.  I think the movie’s casting was spot-on.  The actors who played Kim Pine, Knives Chau, Wallace Well, and Young Neil were perfect.  Their delivery (and, to some extent, appearance) was exactly what I pictured it would be like.  Michael Cera was even a really good choice for Scott.  He wasn’t as perfect, but he did a good job and it fit his acting abilities.  Ramona Flowers’ actress was also good, although not as great as the others.

See it on their site and get your own here.

I played a lot of games this year.  Perhaps more than in any previous year since leaving high school.  Since I usually don’t buy games when they first come out, the winner will not necessarily be a game that came out this year.  I went to my raptr page and took a look at all the games I played this year.  Following is a list of the games and a little about what I thought of them.  At the end will be my pick for 2010.

Here’s your calendar for January 2011.  It’s a goose getting dry on top of a shelf of ice on a lake that was partially frozen over.  Click on the image you want then right-click to set it as your background or save it to your computer and then set it that way.

For Square Monitors:

[caption id=“attachment_4012” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Jan 2011 background for square monitors”] [/caption]

I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week.  So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me.  Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday.  I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page.  Here it is for you to see and for Google to index.  Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.

See it online here and sign up to get your own. They send you your most interesting photos from a year ago.

After writing my Boxee review based on my experience over the weekend, I tried to use it again Tuesday and Wednesday. There two shows that I watch Tues-Friday: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I’m not sure what API or screen scraping Boxee uses for these sites, but it needs to be improved. When I went to look for Monday’s episode on Tuesday, it wasn’t there. And Colbert didn’t appear to have any shows since mid-November. That tipped me off to check their websites and see that they did, indeed, have new episodes. Very disappointing. I don’t want to pay $200 for a device that works worse than a web browser on the shows that are important to me.