April Fools 2010

Here is the text of the April Fools message that was posted on Blazing Games. Note the first letter of each sentence and the date at the bottom. I (Billy D. Spelchan) am still president of the company, and as this month's release shows, we are still slowly transitioning to HTML 5. Flash will probably be our main development tool for the next few years, though.

At Blazing Games, we are proud to announce a deal between ourselves and Microsoft. Sadly, Billy D. Spelchan has agreed to sell his shares of the company and has terminated his position as President of the company, we wish him best of luck with his future endeavours. 

Part of the deal will require that all of our Java and Flash games be replaced with Silverlight versions of these games. Work on this transition has already begun and the non-silverlight games should be removed from the site by the end of this week.

Rich Internet Media in the form of Silverlight is the future of the internet. HTML 5 features simply do not match the power and potential of Silverlight. Our former president's views on open standards clearly are outdated.

Internet Explorer will become the browser of choice for viewing Blazing Games. While we will not be taking any moves to prevent users of other browsers from accessing our site, testing will only be done on Internet Explorer 8 running on Windows 7. We recommend that visitors upgrade their machines to Windows 7 as soon as possible.

Lots of people, such as our former president, have the mistaken feeling that making a deal with Microsoft is the equivalent to selling your soul to the devil. We hope that crazy superstitions such as that are not going to impact our existing visitors enjoyment of this site.

For those of you who feel you can no longer support the site, we thank you for your consideration for other people by making site bandwidth available for the countless new users we will be receiving from a high placement on the Bing search engine. Clearly Bing is vastly superior to that googol thing that our former president used.

Our open source efforts will continue, though we will be switching from the virus-like GPL license to the much more business friendly Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).

OSX users do not have to worry about Silverlight as Microsoft has assured us that they will always support the OSX version of Silverlight. While not all the advanced features of Silverlight will work on the Macintosh, OSX users always have the option of purchasing a copy of Windows and installing it on their Bootcamp partition.

Linux users are urged to give up their anti-capitalist ways and install Windows on their computers as that is what their machines were designed for. Those Linux users who are running old, obsolete hardware should do their part to restore the economy by purchasing new hardware capable of running Windows 7.

Small changes to our games, such as changing the One of those Weeks' Blue Screen of Death into the Linus the Penguin of Doom and changing Coffee Quest into Clippy Quest will be done at the request of our generous corporate partner but feel that such minor changes will not alter the enjoyment of those games.

M. Caton
President,
Blazing Games Inc.
April 1, 2010

Ubuntu 8.04 released.

Modern Light Box was just posted on Blazing Games. I was originally going to post a strategy guide for Light Box today but then I found out that Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was officially released today so I decided to change the topic for today. Actually, when I think about it, perhaps giving readers a chance to play the game and figure out their own strategies before giving them mine might be the best way of doing things anyway. I will probably post the strategy guide next week. Today I am going to talk about Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is a distribution of the Linux operating system. Linux is a free open source operating system that has become a major contender in the operating system space. Like OSX, Linux is a version of the Unix operating system but unlike OSX you can run the operating system on any computer you like. One arguable downside to Linux, however, is the fact that there are a number of different distributions, each with it's own advantages and disadvantages. Ubuntu is a distribution that is focused on making Linux usable by everyday people in addition to all the geeks that gravitate towards Linux. It has grown quite a bit in popularity which is good. Not only can you download the distribution for free, the disks can also be ordered and they even have a program where you can obtain the disks for free.

This is the part where I describe the latest version, except I can't. While I have tried a couple of times to upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04, the demand for the upgrade is so high that just like the Nine Inch Nails Ghost download (they have just released a new single that is freely downloadable from the nin.com website), I can't get it. I am sure that in a day or two all the situation will have calmed down and I will be able to upgrade my Linux machine. If you are interested, you can go to http://www.ubuntu.com/ to get your copy. It would probably be best to wait a few days before doing so.