Plenty happening in and around the avd world this week. Computer crashes. CMW Photos lost, but some got to blog about it. The Surreal return of 64 colour video games. A successful project by some Dynamic Dudes. Still no small steps on iLoveLamp or the table. But, we took a huge step towards keeping things on Trac.

Recently, the bootROM on my work macbook failed. I’ve now got an iPaperweight. Instead, i’ve been using an old iBook and external LCD (the lcd on the iBook is broken) to function at work. Once the office quiets down I’ll be able to get a new macbook from the systems department.

But, there’s a bigger loss than the macbook. My CMW photos were on the hard drive. Typically I’ll put them on my main file server. But, because of the hectic CMW schedule I put them on the macbook. Hopefully I can get the harddrive from the first macbook to recover the data. Fortunately, a couple of the photos live on at that Much Blog.

Also of note this week, planning for the first Surreality Labs 8-bit video game began. The game is going to be a clone of an old time favorite of mine. A game I used to play daily and dream about nightly. Lode Runner.

The Surreal version will feature the same kind of gameplay found in the original but with a new cast of characters. Let’s face it, white stick figures are boooring. The eventual goal of this project is to create a video game to be released with the Vii platform.

The Vii platform is a video game system being developed by Randy. He’s building it for a summercamp program designed to expose children to electronics and engineering.

Each year Randy spends massive amounts of his time designing an electronics project for the kids to build. He also organizes and facilitates all of the logistical work involved

in putting the kits together.

Another group of dudes saw a successful project finish this week… the Dynamic Dudes completed a short bit of video work for a firm downtown. Kudos to them for completing the project on an extremely tight timeline.

Finally, Randy still hasn’t included the colour light sensor mod to the iLoveLamp… something about doing work to help children. But, he did manage to setup a Trac server for us to use on projects.

Surreality Labs can now track project information and digital assets in a single web-based environment. Sweet!