So a recent hobby of mine has been taking words that are much too long and making shorter, unique versions of those words. There are some prerequisites though. For one, the shortened version must not be ambiguous. So for example, computer can’t be shortened because everything from com to compute means something else. There are some cases when this is acceptable just due to convention, for instance ref could be a shortened version of reference, but TV and everyday life has taught us that it actually means referee. “WHAT KINDA CALL WAS THAT, REF??” etc.

Another unacceptable example is purchase which would be shortened to purch. While there is no other word that matches that spelling, “purch” sounds like “perch” which already exists. No dice!

Shortened Wordy Goodness

1. binoculars → binocs
2. comfortable → comfy
3. details → deets
4. delicious → delish
5. favorite → fave
6. merchandise → merch
7. perpetrator → perp (by convention)
8. referee → ref (by convention)
9. tattoo → tat

This post will see lots of edits in the future, stay tuned! And LMK if you have any suggestions. Let’s make English more bettererereer!

The very talented Mazedude released this album a few years back. His goal was to showcase the terrific music that many American composers have contributed to the industry over the years, since the spotlight is typically dominated by Japanese composers.
It’s conveniently available in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats, so go get it!

I really must admit they let me down here. I thought for sure Video Games Live would have a July 4th show, but no dice. Regardless, they’ve got many tour dates coming up, and douche chills aside, it’s a really enjoyable show full of some great music.

But what does this have to do with America? Well, besides having mostly American venues, Video Games Live is also headed up by Tommy Tallarico, an American composer (that you may have recognized from some of the games in American Album), and Jack Wall (composer of Mass Effect, among others). ♩ My country, ’tis of thee ♩ … etc.

Contra is a classic NES game, widely known for its memorable music and fun, difficult gameplay. And the latest, Contra 4 for DS, was scored by American video game composer Jake Kaufman!

There’s also a Contra 4 remix project in progress right now. Check out the impressive demo reel to get a good idea of the awesome music coming your way (someday).

Seems like American composers are slim pickin’s! If you’ve got more American VG goodness in mind, please let me know in the comments.

Therefore, here’s a small collection of his presence in the geek world:

The Thriller music video is available on Xbox LIVE for free! What better way for Microsoft to honor Jackson than to spread some of his best work?

This is awesome. Fantastic music accompanying Jackson’s Moonwalker graphics in various other video games. Good times.

Digging the music so far? Then be sure to check out the perfect Thriller chiptune cover by the ridiculously talented Jake Kaufman. It’s an incredibly faithful version of the original, made to sound almost like it was played on an NES.

Lastly, GamesRadar has an excellent compilation of MJ in video games. It features screenshots of games he starred in, and shows (with examples) of how his music even affected music in games. Very cool!

Edit 6/29/09: This project looks promising!

Edit 7/3/09: talkRadar covers MJ.

Did I miss something notable? (I’m sure I did!) Please let me know in the comments!

For starters, the design is not great, which is actually accurate because I’m not that great of a designer. I also borrowed pretty heavily from Raptr, which also makes sense because I’m almost always heavily influenced by my surroundings (I also wanted the badge at the bottom of the sidebar to look cohesive).

And I wanted the mechanics of the site to reflect that I am primarily a frontend engineer, and that I adore and am quite good at JavaScript. To demonstrate this skillset, here are some of the features I implemented:

• This website is time sensitive, meaning that the scheme changes based on what time of day it is (in San Jose, where I am). The following schemes exist: night, sunrising, sunrise, day, sunsetting and sunset (click to view). This is updated every 10 minutes so if for some reason you leave your browser open, you’ll see the site change.
• This website is also weather sensitive. It fetches San Jose’s weather conditions every 10 minutes using the Yahoo! Weather API. If it’s foggy, a fog overlay appears. If it’s cloudy, clouds will drift across the screen according to how cloudy it is and their speed is based on the current wind speed.
• You may have noticed the little sharks in the footer! The number of sharks changes throughout the day (sharks are more likely to be hunting near dusk and dawn). There’s also a 1% chance that Jaws may appear! (There’s an Easter Egg hidden in the footer too — click around to find it!)
• The modules have maximize, minimize and close buttons. They have contextual tooltips, with a little help from Lakitu!
• The Mega Me in the header is wearing a shirt of my favorite game of the moment (I really want a real one) and he lets you know when I begin playing a game according to Raptr.

I’ve noticed that all the crazy animations can really slow a browser down (especially during a cloudy dawn or dusk). If this is a problem, try the red close button in the navigation towards the upper-right. It toggles all animation on the page on/off. (The other buttons within the nav do stuff too, try ‘em out!)

I have a whopping 16 ideas in my little Google doc that I wanted to implement before pushing this out the door, but I’m all about rapid releases, especially when programming for the web. So I’ll be updating again soon.

Anyway that’s all I’ve got for now. Please enjoy!

1. In January I launched dirtyBeta, a software release aggregator. It got little to no attention, which I expected. Its primary purpose was to serve as a portfolio website, something like, “Here’s the kind of thing I build for a living.” It runs what I (shamelessly) call MHP (Matt’s Hypertext Preprocessor), which is a PHP framework I made myself.
2. I did not get laid off in February, though I did post an emo blog, complaining about how the people I grew up with didn’t seem to care. I was, however, moved to YAP.
3. March was uneventful I guess, so I merely bitched about how boring the Internet was. (I have since changed my mind about that.)
4. My April Fool’s joke disappeared into oblivion without so much as a comment, so I just complained (again) about online communication problems. I think overall this has been fruitless, as even the people that read it still say “k” to me. Oh well.
5. May was again uneventful, but in the tail end I did finally give in and joined Twitter (though I had to poke fun at it a little first). I blame apotheosis for my concession; she was out of town at the time.
6. Like I said before, I have a shit memory, but it might have been June when I first started getting bored at Yahoo!, because you’d have to be bored to post about your online handle and its history. Sheesh, talk about something that didn’t need to be documented… It was also technically in June that I launched scriptNode, but…
7. July is when I started kind of advertising it, with an Ajaxian post on Spacius!. Very cool. (It has been going on two months since I wrote an article on scriptNode. Failed experiment? Let’s hope not.) Most of my energy went into writing for scriptNode after that, so not much in the blog until November.
8. In August I attended my first professional conference: An Event Apart. I also barfed for the first time in years. TMI?
9. It would have been notable to mention that in September I bought my first high-end keyboard (a MicroKORG), but I have since spent all my time on web development and video games… Then again, this was also the month that I couldn’t work on personal projects for some reason. What was I doing?
10. Man, was I not into October this year. By the time Halloween came by, I didn’t even want to dress up for Galloway’s party. Oh well… This month also held the first time I gave a feature idea to my buddy Brett. Hooray for video game synergy! (It was also in October when I first started getting into my ridiculous Donkey Kong obsession (thank Fuck that’s over).)
11. I didn’t write in the blog again until November, at which point I went over my recent highs and lows. The fact that I gave a shit about politics during that period is still quite shocking to me.
12. And finally, in December I accepted an offer to work in the video games industry, a lifelong goal of mine. My first day at Raptr is January 5th; I’m really looking forward to it!

Here’s to hoping 2008 is even better than 2009. Happy New Year!

For starters, I see very little innovation there. Sure, there are innovative startups as well, but there are hundreds of new ones every week or so, and a majority of them seem to be, “something only something else” or “that thing only it’s web-based.” It’s a noisy, crowded industry with a very low quality ratio.

Business models are very important to me as well, something many startups severely lack. A business model must be sensible, robust, realistic, valuable and of course profitable to earn my respect. Most business models seem to be of the newspaper or magazine variety, in that they just show (related or not) advertising to its audience (see: Yahoo! and every other popular website on the planet that displays Google Ads or similar). To me, this is a garbage business model. Users don’t want ads. Users ignore or block ads. It’s probably a necessary evil, but mostly a nuisance that everyone involved wishes they could do without.

I realize I’m generalizing here; I’m sure your startup has a strong business model that doesn’t depend on heavy traffic backed by ads…

There are of course some companies with obvious business models like retail sites. They have products to sell. People show up and buy things that they want. It’s win/win for everyone involved. There’s no trickery, nobody wants to hide anything on the page, and the money has a clear, respectable source. Absolute win.

Other models are equally as respectable but perhaps unintended from inception. The good folks over at Homestarrunner and XKCD seem to also sell products. Their first and most famous products would be their terrific entertainment products. People love them so much, they end up buying apparel and toys in large enough numbers to support their makers. Excellent! The model is clear, profitable, and everyone involved is perfectly content.

Enter startups. I’ve seen many with no model at all. They make an online product and there it sits, waiting for hopefully millions and millions of people. Then that becomes the product. I’ve heard of many startups whose entire plan is to make something cool then get acquired, which to me is like having winning the lottery as a retirement plan…

Then again, I’m an engineer, not a businessman.

Given that, I’m also an engineer that’s been lucky enough to be kind of choosy about what I’m working on. Out of ads platform, front page, real estate, search and Widgets, I went with Yahoo! Widgets simply because it sounded like the most fun to work on. And I believe that it was.

After the layoffs in February, I was moved to the Yahoo! Application Platform, which is very cool, but just not my thing. I’m not a big social networking guy (with some exceptions), though I do see how important it is in Today’s Internet… and to my new company, Raptr (a social network for gamers, no less).

I certainly don’t have to work on a product that is “my thing” but I do think it helps. I’ve noticed the difference, as I’ve got four pages of notes that I want to work on at my new job.

If you know me at all it should come as no surprise that I left for a video game startup. That’s what it came down to, really: “Which product would you rather work on?” I wasn’t unhappy at Yahoo!. I wasn’t even looking, really. And indeed, I will deeply miss many aspects of the job, including free custom-mode coffee, the terrific connections, the foosball!! and the ability to impress people with where I work.

But it came down to what I wanted to be working on every day. And while I was fine working on YAP, working on Raptr sounded like more fun. And that’s when I saw the light: startups are all about enabling developers to work on stuff they love. I’m surprised I didn’t notice this many months ago when my friend Michael Galloway quit Yahoo! to work on his passion.

I think about stuff like meetings and ideas and what I’ll be working on now, and I’m excited about it. Working in the video game industry has been a lifetime goal of mine, and I’m happy to fulfill that goal in 2009. Raptr enabled this for me, but Yahoo! certainly made me legit in this industry, for which I will be forever grateful.

So unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard the fantastic news: Barack Obama will be our next President! Now, if you know me (and you probably do if you’re bothering to read this), you know that normally I don’t give a flying fuck about politics. I believe that individual votes don’t matter. I still believe this, at least on the Presidential level for sure. But this election was important.

First off, I think it’s about goddamn time we elected a non-white President. This country has an awful history of racism. We’ve made strides and are trying to improve, but we’ve got a long way to go. This is an important milestone. We’ve shown that, while there are ignorant idiots in our country, we aren’t all so thickheaded.

Next, this is the first election in a long time where it wasn’t, “Ok, who sucks the least?” This was totally the case during the last election. Choosing between two evils is not fun, and hard to get excited about. But when you’ve got a clearly charismatic leader with a passion for positive change and a deep message of hope, well then it becomes important. America finally had the opportunity to make a good decision, and they made it. I’m proud of us.

Low: Proposition 8

But you know what? Votes can matter. The smart voter will take the time to education him or herself on the relevant proposed legislation and vote on local elections. Typically these votes matter more because they’re thrown into a smaller pool and they tend to be much tighter than elections where the whole damn country is voting.

Which brings me to proposition 8. This awful piece of legislation is unbelievable. This is actual copy from the proposition:

Eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California…

What the hell? Did we read that right? Eliminate the right??? Since when is America about eliminating rights? We are supposed to guarantee rights, for fuck’s sake! I understand people that think marriage should be kept in the church. But they’re missing the point. Marriage has been a legal affair for a long time now; it’s no longer between your, your spouse, and your God. Telling your neighbor what to do is unacceptable, wrong and unfair. I love California, but I am deeply disappointed in this state for passing some of the worst legislation I’ve ever seen. Disgraceful.

Furthermore, it looks like it just barely passed, by a margin of around 3%. I don’t understand how it’s acceptable for the very slight majority to remove rights from the minority. That’s democracy at its ugliest. America, intelligently, is not a pure democracy. We’re a Federal Republic. Where we use it, we shouldn’t allow democracy to fail us like this.

High: YAP

YAP released last week. That’s very exciting, considering it’s been almost a year since my last Yahoo! release. The only live software that I implemented is the Developer Tool, which is built on symfony and worlds above the last version. The really cool part was watching people get excited at Snap Summit. We fielded lots of questions and our product was well received (which is more than I can say for Profiles; that kind of made us nervous!).

Low: More Layoffs

Well, I made it through one round of layoffs. But not everyone I knew was unaffected. Time for another round, and I’ve only been with the company for about a year and a half. Sheesh…

High: Donkey Kong High Score

I’ve been obsessed with King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters for a while now. I’ve seen it I think four times now since buying it, and I talk about it constantly. It’s so good! Go watch it.

Anyway, I’ve been playing the game for a while (the real version can be emulated using MAME) and I was looking for a way to compete. Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell are insanely good at a much harder game so I didn’t want to compete with them, just amateurs on a smaller level.

So then I found a shitty flash game at Big Money Arcade! Very cool. The game itself is awful. It’s choppy, poorly programmed, and has many bugs. One such bug will take all of your lives with a glitch in the barrels. It’s insanely bad. But, it allowed me to satisfy my craving to compete. The current high score when I first visited was only 73,900. On my first try, I landed 32,800, so I was like, “Dude, it’s in the bag.” My high score ended up at 184,700, which I was very pleased with.

So for the next week or so I was hitting the high score page everyday, waiting for someone to beat me. I wanted to play again! But what’s the point in competing with yourself? Well, finally the other day, a German fellow named domi08 beat my high score with 223,100, which is a respectable distance from my last high score. I was excited! Couldn’t want to get a free couple of hours to win it back.

To win a high score back properly, you have to destroy it! I got 315,200, almost 100k more. Niiiice right?

Low: Donkey Kong High Score

Well, the next damn morning Andrea woke me up to let me know that my high score was already gone. Sheesh! This guy must be more obsessed than I am! The worst part is that he won by a measly 300 points. You call that winning? Sad. When I get it back, it’ll be by a good margin. That’s how you win!

… Anyone else notice the stark contract between important issues and dorky bullshit in this post? Jeez, I’m pathetic.

Thus, scriptNode! But before I really announced it or put it out there hardcore, I wanted it to have some substance: a few weeks worth of articles and maybe one really cool project. Well, today I finished that project: Spacius! A Space Adventure.

Spacius! is a game made entirely in JavaScript, except for the sound, which uses Scott Schiller’s exceptional Sound Manager 2 flash API. It doesn’t use anything complicated like canvas, which means it works great in every major browser. That’s quite a feat, I think, and I’m very proud of that.

What’s more deeply satisfying, though, is seeing Spacius! on the front page of Ajaxian. Very cool, and thanks Chris! Anyway, from here on out, nothing too technical will be on this blog; I’ll reserve that for useful articles on scriptNode.

Many a year ago, I was reading a video game magazine (I was probably a young teenager), quite possibly Nintendo Power but more likely EGM, because I actually had a subscription to that. Anyway, I saw the name Richter Belmont in the magazine, and for some reason, immediately loved it. For those unfamiliar with the name, he’s a character from one of my favorite video game franchises: Castlevania!

The name Richter in the real-world is probably more obviously associated with the Richter Scale, which is also another very cool reference. Those that know me well know I’m fascinated with natural disasters (tornados, earthquakes, and to a less natural extent, atomic bombs). Less interestingly, richter also means “judge” in German, which is neat (and like a good American, I have German blood in me).

It’s funny how my attachment to the name grew, because at first I thought it was pronounced “rich-tur”. When I found out it was actually pronounced “rick-tur”, I loved it even more! So over the years I plugged “richter” into various video games when they prompted me for a name, and sometimes people would see this and it kind of stuck. When the Internet was born and required handles, this was an obvious choice for me.

One of the problems with the Internet, however, is that it’s too damn popular. Richter is a relatively common name, and almost invariably taken, even by a site or service that’s not that popular. On a somewhat related note, I am known to troll idle in certain IRC chatrooms, where friends of mine will greet me in odd ways. One such derivative of my name was richtaur, which is basically a me-dinosaur (insert artist rendering here). And that’s where richtaur came from.

So, there is the (very verbose, sorry) history of my nickname/handle. I’m very happy to see that I’m the (as of this writing) 5th G result for richter and the 1st for richtaur! Nice! (Note: links removed because I think they killed my ranking.)

(Note: please don’t call me richter or richtaur in person. This is real life, people. I also hate the name Matthew. I understand that friends and relatives will always know and call me by Matt, and that’s fine, but I really prefer co-workers to call me Hack or Hackett. It’s not that I hate the name Matt that much, really, it’s just that I work with 10,000 other Matts. Thanks!)

Marge: Homer, has the weight loss tape reduced your appetite?
Homer: Ah, lamentably no. My gastronomic rapacity knows no satiety.

Hilarious, but lost on many people upon initial viewing.

Furthermore, as a web developer with a demand for standards, I find them irritating. If I want to type out something quickly (as in, say, this blog post), it defeats the purpose, because we all should be using this syntax:

<acronym title="JavaScript">JS</acronym>

… but it seems like a majority of web devs don’t. It’s a shame.

Next, there’s ambiguity. Here at Yahoo!, we use YML and YML, which are completely different (and right about now I’m betting you’re glad I actually use <acronym> because otherwise you wouldn’t know WTF). Notice a problem here? And then some people say explicitly Y-M-L, and others pronounce it “Yam-ul.” Confusing!

Lastly, there’s preference. I’ve noticed some people use BBIAB and others use BIAB. The difference is minimal, sure, but I’ve known some people that get really annoyed with that extra B in there. And me? Not only do I hate acronyms in general, but I get very irritated when people send “k” to me. I have a difficult time articulating exactly what bothers me so much about this, but I think it’s something along the lines of, “holy shit are you seriously so lazy you can’t put an ‘o’ in there to make yourself easily understood?!”

So acronyms have their place, sure, and sometimes are used quite well. But do not sacrifice being clearly understood for a few measly keystrokes. And once you’ve read this, please, don’t type “k” to me and expect me to still be courteous to you.