Now it appears Newsweek has implemented in a really funny way. When you enter the code on the front page^**, all of the headlines and story abstracts are replaced with stories about zombies. Even more hilariously, if you look through the code you can see they tried to hide all of the obvious variables under the guise of building an object for debugging their advertisements. Now that’s dedication to an Easter Egg!

It would appear a lot of people have caught wind of this one too. I have a feeling somebody’s in trouble. That’s too bad.

UPDATE via NPR: A spokesperson did send the New York Observer a statement. They said, “”It’s true that our programmers had a bit of fun and hid the Konami Easter egg in the site,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “It does not affect the rest of the site’s functionality. Now that we’ve all had a laugh, we will be removing it.”

So no one’s “in trouble.” Good.

* I realize the counter says something like 3,800 right now. It was approaching 10,000 a while ago, but I accidentally deleted the files and the counter was somehow reset.

** It seems they may have taken this down. No fret though! If you type this into your URL bar while viewing the front page, you should still see the zombification: javascript:adDebugContent.render()

My Handmade Guitar Pick Project on Kickstarter

With the recent attention surrounding ESPN and their use of the Konami Code, I thought it would be fun to make a JavaScript library that allowed everyone to take advantage of this time-honored cheat code:

http://konami-js.googlecode.com

By adding just a few lines to your site, you can set it up so the Konami Code does…  Well, pretty much anything!  The default behavior is to load a new web page, but if you’re fluent in JavaScript, you can change the konami.code() method to do whatever you want.  Checkout some konami-js examples.

Try entering it now: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Enter

I’ve played guitar for most of my life and somewhere along the way I developed a taste for really thick, really expensive guitar picks.  Now, really expensive is relative – $10 is not a lot of money, but $10 for a single guitar pick probably seems ludicrous to some people.  Regardless, I couldn’t help myself.  Once I found Wegen and Dugain I stopped using those ordinary 25-cent picks you can find at the corner music store. The extremely heavy gauges (~3.0mm-5.0mm) and beveled tips make every note sound rounder and fuller to my ears and just seem to compliment my bizarro, pseudo self-taught style.

What Prompted This Project

Still, the mightiest of plectrum love affairs can never topple my thrifty tendencies coupled with my love for projects, so I decided to find a way to make my own. Using acrylic, laser cutters, a lot of sand paper and some trial and error, I eventually came up with picks that were more than just an adequate replacement – I actually prefer my own picks over the ones I was buying for $10 a pop before!  I loved them so much I decided to use them for the first installment of my Weekend Project Project and start a little side business selling them online.

The Result: Roma Guitar Picks

If you like custom guitar picks or just like to look at pretty, artsy-crafty things, you should check out Roma Picks. I used acrylic because it’s cheap, lightweight and produces a remarkably warm and musical sound. I chose the material mostly on a hunch that that’s the same material used for Wegen picks. Whether or not it is, I’m sticking with it because it works very nicely.

The website is dead simple and mostly a gateway to my Etsy store at the moment, but I think it will be a fun side project to have in my life. I only have six picks up at the moment, but I have many more waiting in the wings as well as some creative design ideas and interesting materials I can’t wait to try out.

Promotional Stunt!

As a promotional stunt, I’m going to offer to send a free, random pick to the first 3 guitarists who contact me. Just put “Free Random Pick” in the subject line and send an email to contact [at] romapicks [dot] com with your mailing address.  The free picks have been given out!  Thanks!

Weekend Project Result

Success. I built the site, started accounts on Etsy and Twitter, scanned some photos of the picks and did some very basic promotional stuff (Stumbleupon is great for quick traffic boost) and now my project is out there in the real world.

RomaPicks.com

The nature of these endeavors varies wildly, from art projects to tiny side businesses I’ve thought about but never taken the time to get off the ground properly.  Regardless, the idea is every Friday I choose one of my neglected projects and focus on it exclusively for the rest of the weekend.  It may not have to sparkle and sing, but by Sunday night or Monday morning, I have to try and get it to a state where I can say it’s done; that it no longer exists solely as an idea; that it lives as something slightly beyond proof-of-concept and delves into the realm of an acted-upon concept.

So, without further ado, I’ll present the result from last week’s installment of the Weekend Project Project in my next post…

I discovered a new JavaScript library that makes creating vector graphics across multiple browsers much simpler.  It’s called Raphaël and it looks really promising.  So far I’ve tried to implement it in a secret side-project of mine and I’m impressed with the results.

To test it out I made a simple “doodle” program based on one I wrote a couple months ago that uses jQuery .  You can see it in all of it’s clunkily coded glory and even help me with some strange behavior I ran into using IE7. Reply to me on Twitter if you have any clues.

Here’s a video of the correct behavior.

Here’s a video of what it’s doing in IE7.

Update: Benjamin Thomas took a look at my code and figured out the solution.  The quick fix – add a “return false” at the end of the onMouseMove event.  He explains it better on his site.