John Lindal’s Blog

OS X Dashboard Games

A few weeks ago, I was very disappointed to discover that VMWare still cannot run games very well. Even Doom, most venerable of 3D games, has a terrible frame rate. Unreal Tournament simply crashes. Thus, ended my hopes of an office LAN game…or so I thought. I just discovered the Crashdrive and ParadisePaintball widgets for OS X Dashboard. These are awesome!

Disney Magic

I enjoyed Disneyland as a kid. But I never truly understood Disney Magic until yesterday, when we took our 3½ year old daughter on her first trip to Disneyland. Her reactions to meeting Mickey Mouse (her primary goal, and clearly a transcendent experience), riding It’s a Small World, watching the parade and seeing Goofy (her secondary goal), riding the train and riverboat, etc. were priceless. And so not only did my wife and I not grumble at all about the ticket price, but we are also going to use Disney’s custom photobook system for this trip instead of Shutterfly. That’s the real Disney Magic: making parents happy to spend money!

Update (1/9/2008): The Disney photobook site does not appear to work.

Rhyming

I found myself thinking about Disney’s clip show House of Mouse this morning. We saw the same show in Norway, dubbed with the title Muse Hus, which when pronounced correctly (moo-se hoos), still rhymes. At first, I thought it was simply clever that Disney managed to make the translation rhyme. But this morning, I realized that it could also rhyme in German: Maus Haus. And in Danish. And in Swedish. I don’t know the underlying cause, but it seems too far fetched to claim that it is pure coincidence that all these languages, which have been diverging for hundreds of years, would maintain such a strong connection between the two words!