Head over to SimpsonizeMe to see what you look like as a Simpson character.

Once I master drawing the Simpsons, maybe I should master drawing myself?

I’m not sure how I didn’t see this before, being over a year old, but I missed it until some friends of ours forwarded it along.  A little slow up front, but watch the whole thing.  It’s worth it.

Okay, so from the department of “Really Weird Marketing Tie-Ins,” there’s a whole Gwen Stefani page over on the Hewlett-Packard site where you can print off Gwen Stefani stuff

• paper dolls, book covers, CD labels, her tour book…  Interesting, but I’m not sure I get it.

I basically spent the weekend playing Bioshock, which is a worthwhile endeavor by any standards.  Jenn worked on Monday, so I had all day to spend running amongst the citizens of Rapture doing damage and harvesting ADAM.

In all seriousness, if you haven’t bought this game yet, just go out and do it.  I think the last time I got so caught up in the plot of something like this to the point of sort of surreal obssession was the first time I had a real-time 24 marathon.  I don’t think I’ve ever been so caught up in a game.  (Yeah, I’ll take a full week off for Grand Theft Auto, but it’s not like I’m caught up in it like this.)  Even Jenn was caught up just watching the thing.  She’s started playing her own way through.

Once you finish - and you must finish - some things will happen that make you feel a lot like the first time you saw The Sixth Sense.  You’ll be all, “Holy crap, I can’t believe I didn’t see that!”  Not only that, but choices you make during the game impact how things turn out.  All of that makes it such that I’m actually going to play it through a second time to pick up all the things I missed the first time around and make different choices so I can see how things change.

I won’t print any spoilers here because I’ve got a lot of friends working through the game right now.  Suffice to say, I’ve got a new high-water mark for games.  I don’t know how they would do it, but if they can whip out Bioshock 2 or some other game just as immersive as this, it’ll be on the “buy” list.

I think the only thing I’ve been disappointed by with the game thus far is the distinct lack of merchandise.  I want a Bioshock t-shirt and they just don’t exist.  That seems to be a pretty common desire, looking at forums out there.  There was a Threadless contest and they’ve got some community-created versions, but nothing official.  I wonder why 2K hasn’t stepped up to the plate on that.

I have a pretty diverse group of friends, some of whom are developers and some of whom aren’t.  A subset of the non-developer folks have, at times, mentioned to me that they really want to learn how to program but:

• They don’t have a computer background.
• They fear it takes a long time to learn how to do anything good.
• They don’t have time to go to school.
• They don’t want to read thousands of pages worth of books before writing code.
• They’re intimidated by the seeming complexity of programming.

There are plenty of people out there who are self-taught programmers.  For non-developers who want to learn, don’t be discouraged.  Here are my recommendations for people in this situation:

• Start small.  Don’t try to build a 3D rendering engine as your first program.  Don’t try to build an RSS reader as your first program.  Don’t try to build a screen saver as your first program.  Instead, pick a small task that you do all the time and automate that.  Maybe once a week you copy last week’s status report and rename it to something new so you can start this week’s status report.  Maybe you manually read through a text file and summarize a report out of it every day.  Pick something small and repetitive to automate as your first task.
• Avoid GUI programming.  There are lots of great WYSIWYG tools out there for dragging buttons onto forms and having cool things happen, but these tools mask a lot of the goings-on from the developer and that’s not always a good thing.  If things work perfectly, no problem.  If they don’t… well, it can be a frustrating experience for the newbie.  Write something that runs at a command line so you won’t have to deal with the windowing environment.
• Keep focused on your task.  Your first program that prints something to the screen is referred to as a “Hello World” program (because, classically, the first line it prints is “Hello World”).  Do your “Hello World” and then get back to the task you chose to do.  Why?  Having a task to accomplish is a milestone.  If you’re just tinkering around in “Hello World” land, it’s hard to really see any results or feel fulfilled that you’re learning anything.  That’s discouraging and I’ve seen several folks just give up because they didn’t feel like they were getting anywhere.
• Use a scripting language.  You probably shouldn’t try your first program in C++ when there are so many far easier languages to use to accomplish simple tasks.  I’d look at VBScript, batch scripting, AppleScript, or some other simple, high-level scripting language of your choice.  (HTML is nota programming language, so don’t pick that.)
• Take online tutorials and do the exercises.  There are several free online resources to learn how to do simple scripting.  Take advantage of them.  When you see code examples or exercises in these tutorials, do them.  There’s nothing quite like actually doing it to help you understand.
• Get a tutorial book and a reference book.  Once you’ve picked a language (most likely after you’ve done one or two of the online tutorials) go to your local bookstore and pick up a tutorial book and a reference book on your chosen language.  The tutorial book will teach you how to do simple things in your language and will have a title like “Learn BlahBlah In A Week.”  Tutorial books are good to augment the online tutorials you find out there.  The reference book will help you as you’re working so if you need to look up what all of the options are for a certain thing, it’s right there.  When you’re starting out, a book might easier to deal with than trying to coordinate online help and your script across multiple windows/monitors.
• Don’t get overwhelmed and don’t give up.  Programming isn’t slam-dunk easy.  If it was, there’d be a lot of programmers out of jobs.  Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed by your efforts.  If you find that it’s becoming so overwhelming that it’s not fun anymore and you don’t feel like you’re making any progress, maybe you picked a task that was too difficult.  Instead of giving up, pick a smaller task or maybe break the task you’re trying to automate down into smaller sub-tasks and solve each one independently.  For example, if you’re copying and renaming a file and that’s too hard, maybe just do the copy part first and handle the renaming after you get the first part down.

For the developers out there, what do you tell people who ask you how to start learning to program?