Pulp Free

I grew up with Pac-Man. The Atari days – and oh yes… spending many a quarter or token in the arcades. I loved just walking around watching other people play… Spending a great deal of time with my all-time favorite Discs-of-Tron. So it was only fitting that for the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, Google celebrated in style… Their very own playable version of Pac-Man on their home page:

While originally just available during the weekend of Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary, you can now play for as long as you want at google.com/pacman

Amazingly enough, the game on Google’s page is written entirely in Javascript, HTML, and CSS. Also from Google:

“To pay the homage that Pac-Man deserves as a ground-breaking innovation in the gaming world, Google equipped the doodle with many unique characteristics from the original Pac-Man game,” said a Google spokesman. “From preserving the distinct personalities of the ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde, to re-creating programming bugs from the original game, like a ‘kill screen’ on level 256, Marcin Wichary, a senior user experience designer at Google, and our resident Google doodler, Ryan Germick, remained as faithful to the spirit of Pac-Man as possible.”

I did chuckle to myself now that the weekend has past and most of the news stories about the beeps, noises and arcade music coming from coworkers computers have been posted… These gems from Derek Thompson:

• Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
• $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).
• For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.
• $298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

All this Pac-Man makes me want to go find that old cassette tape of Buckner & Garcia’s “Pac-Man Fever” – good times…

Since the exceedingly overuse of word clouds sprung up some time ago, I’ve been looking for a piece of that action. Of course, WordPress and any other blog systems have had those items built in for some time now… (Yes – take a moment to look at mine up on the right hand side there…)

But what I thought we be interesting is to not just have it related to blogs… But what about any sort of text… Essentially mathematics and statistics meet up with words. A look through some Web sites offered a little bit of hope. But it wasn’t until I came across Wordle did I find a site that was fun and easy to use… What did I use it for? Yeah – my blog! I’ll have to try out a few more text samples but for now, I’m happy with just the words from my own ramblings… Give it your own shot…

The geek in me likes to keep track of numbers, charts, bandwidth, speed, etc. You get the idea (yes – charts too!) So in the past few months I’ve found a few Web sites that let you test your bandwidth speeds as many times as you want. I hit them every once in a while if it seems like my Charter broadband is acting up again… (which – cross my fingers – hasn’t happened since Charter replaced all of our outside cable lines!)

There are two that are pretty easy. Speedtest & Speakeasy.

Just for grins – here is what I’ve been able to do today: