Sixteen Dark Reflections
“Sixteen Dark Reflections” is a developing collection of free-form amateur poetry.
…so here it is: link to Google Docs.
Two more silly ideas
QuickThoughts
Design Reviews…
Often take up a lot of time but really, it's about first impressions. Is that font unreadably small? Who thought it a good idea to put that obscure graphic there?
QuickThoughts to the resque! You can upload a snapshot of your mockup and share the link with those whose opinion matters. They have 30 seconds to look at it and up to two minutes to write down their first impressions which You then use to improve the design.
I've set up a Kohana installation and coded the backbone of it. Now it's just the matter of coding in some usability features and doing something with the appearance of the site. In short, it's the question of exactly how lazy I am. I never seem to finish a project past this stage.
Assoc
Inspired by improv and http://oneword.com/. Basically just some JavaScript to bombard the visitor with random words at a very rapid pace. The words are written with a BIG font, on a green/red background.
The goal of the game is to react to the words by thinking of another word. There is no scoreboard. For example, if the visitor sees the word 'cat' on a green background, he must think of a word associated with cat, like 'dog'. When the background is red, the word must be completely unrelated, like 'spaceshuttle'.
As soon as the word is found, the visitor presses the spacebar and is presented with another challenge.
Feel free to steal the ideas and code it yourself. Just drop a link to the implementation.
[Amateur Fiction] Prey
I just finished reading The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance. My own scribble soon followed. The updated version can be found at gDocs.
Prey
The nearly-full moon managed to send another ray through the thick cloud cover, but soon the night was enveloped in darkness again. The weather mirrored his mood as he stalked his young prey. What a perfect night for hunting!
He’d chosen her because of the way she had acted with her now ex-boyfriend. He didn’t have the heart (so to speak) to hurt those who were kind and innocent, although he’d never admit it to his kind. Besides, he figured he’d be doing the world a favour in the long run. A mutually beneficial arrangement.
He deliberately let his feet hit a stray metal can on the pawed sidewalk. Her prey, a few dozen paces ahead of him, literally jumped around, but he had already taken cover in the dark abyss of a doorway nearby. He didn’t want her seeing him, not quite just yet.
He continued to follow her for several minutes, making occasional noises and eyeing her, making sure she had the tingling feeling of someone watching her, but never letting her actually see him. Only when she was all but running along the deserted alley – why did they never learn to avoid places like that -, did he decide to end it.
He stunned her with a silent command of dark Power and took his sweet time walking slowly in front of her, making sure she heard every clicking step he took on the pawed street. Unable to run, unable to speak, she stood there immobilized and trembling, waiting for the inevitable. Her screams were locked inside of her, her limbs unmoving and a heavy, a not unpleasant numbness soaking every fibre of her being.
He didn’t bother to explain or gloat as he looked into her terrified eyes, didn’t bother to tell her the reason she’d doomed herself in her fate, a fate yet unknown to her. He cradled her, kneeling, and held her head on his lap. The clouds shifted again and the almost white moonlight illuminated the dreadful scene below.
And then the light was gone and all she could see was the back of his head; his lips had descended to brush her unprotected throat. She couldn’t resist, couldn’t scream as he fed on her and the numbness in her spread longer, faster. She didn’t care about struggling now anyway. All she wanted was to explore the new sensation of drifting in the ether that had slowly started to surround her.
Summer of ’10
Believe it or not, this is the landfill site in Kunda. I'm far from an average photographer, but I think this one turned out all right. Taken with Samsung Monte just before the sunset.
Webapp idea: #nowplaying radio
An oppurtunity to learn Ruby on Rails. Use a Twitter library to fetch tweets with the hashtag #nowplaying.
Present the user with an interface with exactly one button: Play
Parse Twitters results and fetch songs from youtube (embedded player, ajax/iframe)
User clicks play, the #nowplaying radio begins.
Ideas for later: add features such as result narrowing, sharing etc.
Update:
I actually coded this during the day and got some insight into Rails. The coding part was actually quite easy, taking into account that I'd never met Ruby before, but the real obstacle was deployment.
Heroku is awesome, really, but the beginner – I – failed miserably with dependencies (twitter and youtube gems). Long story short, 2 hours of messing with git, Gemfile and bundle and I gave up. The app works, but only in localhost. Maybe I'll get help later.
About The Author
Ando “David” Roots is a college student and a software developer from Kunda, Estonia. Living, working and studying in Tallinn, he hopes to get his bachelor degree from the Estonian Information Technology College on IT Systems Development. 