Yesterday, a special event was held in Lisbon at the Caixa Economica Operaria to pay homage to the Monthy Python Flying Circus and so during the night, a series of sketches and films were shown to many of the followers and fans of this great show. Unfortunately I couldn’t be there (aaawww) but I heard it was great fun and nonsense too. Except for the pack of midgets who tormented people from time to time… and some people who wanted to be lumberjacks.

Anyway, I found three small sketches on Google Video, I think they’re worth checking out for a bit of a laugh:

LumberJack Song
The spam
To Camelot Lego Animation

And if you’re looking for a movie I personally recomend Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it’s a great parody, really!

I’ve acquired my Xbox 360 middle january by importing from Spain, the deal was much more cheaper than buying here in Portugal and my console was bundled with lots of good stuff.
I must say that so far the console hasn’t made me extremely excited about these “next generation” games because so far they’re fairly good but not astounding, oh well, at least the graphics show a bit of improvement.

On the other hand i’m very happy about the integration efforts that Microsoft made with Xbox Live, the GamerCard and achievements over play are good ideas and the option to browse the Xbox Live MarketPlace and download trailers, demos, arcade games or retro games is a good “trumph card” on the side of Microsoft against Sony.
So far i’ve only bought a few games, mainly because they cost so much. But i’m hoping many 1º generation Xbox games drop prices soon.

Theres other stuff I can do related to streaming videos and photos but I don’t want to touch that point for now, I don’t have Windows Media Center so i’m not using all those capabilities but I was expecting to see Divx support and that is a big letdown.
Anyway, expect to see you soon on Live and if you want to show your gamercard with ease, visit MyGamerCard.net and have fun.

As promissed i’m announcing the redesign for the VideoGames Design and Programming Course of the ATempo Academy of Studies (in portuguese it’s “Curso de desenho e programação de Jogos”).

It gave me great joy to complete this redesign, I really liked teaching at the academy and I felt I needed to give the site a more “professional” look, I hope I managed to do that.
The XHTML and CSS fully validates and i’m proud of the final result, so if you want to check out the final work just point your browser to Curso de Desenho e Programação de Jogos and be the judge.
Btw, I couldn’t test the site in a Mac so any problems just let me know and I’ll fix it ASAP.

Last year I was lucky enough to be a teacher for the ATempo academy of studies, for the course in “Design and Programming VideoGames” (or “Desenho e Programação de VideoJogos” for those who know Portuguese) . We mainly discussed a few theories in game design and we had fun programming the games and applying the knowledge from theory on GameMaker.
GameMaker is an excelent program btw, it’s very intuitive and easy to use. You can make any type of 2D games with a little work and fun too, at least the kids I teached all had a great time making they little versions of Pac-Man or Asteroids. The main cause for this is the easy to use GUI and very well structured menus.

Anyway, I was asked to redesign the site which I did one year ago, I think i’ve learned alot since then so I’ll be showing the new design tomorrow or so. I think most will be pleased with the new design.

I’ve started exploring more about Ruby on Rails. Yesterday the mail man finally brought me “Agile Web Development with Rails”, written by Dave Thomas, David Hansson and many others. It’s a great book, i’m slowly installing all the necessary components and browsing the contents of the book but from what i’ve read I must say it’s a really good buy.

I like the simple language, the nice space between letters (opposed to many portuguese technical publications where paragraphs are very close together to conserve space and money on paper) and the way the various topics are presented in the book.

I’m going to post more topics on the matter soon, in the meantime visit the Ruby On Rails website and take a look at the presentations and examples, be amazed. :)
You can also visit The Pragmatic Programmers website and browse some sections of their books in PDF format.