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 Our former president's views on open standards clearly are outdated.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

Spring Cleaning

I am the type of person who keeps his older computers until they no longer work. Even then I try to salvage some parts just in case I might need them in the future. Of course, I never have enough time to start on my other projects so the parts just sit in a drawer and age. My laptop computer is a MacBook, and I have two machines in my office. One machine is my internet machine while the other machine is my work machine. The internet machine is occasionally used for work, but for the most part is used for research and running processor intensive tasks so my work machine isn't burdened. The thing is, my older machine use to be my main work machine. I got my new machine last winter after my old internet machine died. It was a refurbished machine and was on sale so it was dirt cheap. When CS3 came out, the minimum requirements from my old work machine no longer were adequate to run it, but my new internet machine fit the bill, so I had to change machines.

The problem is that the new work machine was full of all sorts of programs and other stuff that I never got rid of. And Windows has a tendency to slow down as you use it. In fact, many experts recommending re-installing windows as a way of improving performance. With a lot of junk on the system, I figured that I should just start from scratch. So today (I don't know why, just a gut feeling) I decided it was time to refresh my work machine. I de-activated my copy of CS3 (see earlier entries for my rants on why copy protection sucks) and backed up my data. Once done, I inserted the restore disks and let it run. It asked if I wanted fix my current copy of windows or do a format. I wanted to be thorough and selected format. Once it started installing Windows, I started thinking about how it was going to handle my Linux partition. Sure enough, it simply got rid of it. This is okay as I had nothing important on there and was planning on installing ubuntu over it anyway.

I forgot how long it actually takes to install software. I am in fact writing this while the machine is trundling away. The clean start is kind of nice, almost like getting a new computer. Except, of course, it is not that much faster. Though with family coming down this weekend and a wedding to attend, I probably should have focused on getting ahead with Coffee Quest Revenge work. Still, my gut instinct was insisting that I do the cleaning today, so perhaps my subconscious is aware of something that I am not. Or perhaps I am just overly paranoid.