Some friends invited me to play NationStates. In the online game you get to create a nation, answer questions and deal with issues based on your own politics to shape the future of your country. And the game compares your country to the rest in your region. I’ve always wanted to be an unquestioned leader who rules with an iron fist and I watch the West Wing pretty regularly so I’m guessing that my nation will be pretty kick ass.

I’ve been waiting for this. Eclipse announced the Visual Editor Projects to deliver a framework for GUI builders with reference implementations for SWT and Swing. There is a flash-based demo on how to create some simple visual classes in Swing. Looks like a nice, standard GUI builder. The overall benefits of GUI builders are debatable, but I think it is important for two reasons. The first is that GUI builders can certainly be helpful in prototyping UI design or creating mock screens even if it’s not used for production code. The other is that without a GUI builder Eclipse doubters can still point out that there current favorite IDE has one and therefore they can’t possibly switch (even though they could buy SWT-Designer today, but we’re all spoiled with free IDE tools).

Last night I went to hear Belle & Sebastian at the Orpheum on an incredibly windy night. It was a solid show with a good mix of the older stuff and the better tracks from Dear Castrophe Waitress. I appreciate their efficiency. They just come out and play their music, with a couple interludes and a flashy light show. Stuart Murdoch does his little dancing, the crowd goes wild, he makes some witty remarks that are barely understandable in his Scottish accent. But I did catch his Red Sox vs. Yankees comment. He made a joke about Boston needing to be better than New York in at least one thing, and for an instant the crowd turned against him. The lesson being that even though Bostonians love you, insulting the Red Sox can still mean not making it out of the place alive.

It’s a little morbid, but I really want to see this exhibit entitled “100 Suns”. It’s a collection of 100 photographs from U.S. National Archives and Los Alamos National Laboratory archives of nuclear tests arranged by Michael Light. Unfortunately it opened in San Francisco the week after my trip, so I’ll likely have to settle for the book.

Behold the glory that is SSX3

I can attest that SSX3 rawks (like the kids spell it). The reviews weren’t wrong. It’s one of those games you can play forever, say, instead of studying for an upcoming midterm exam. My skillz (that’s right, with a ‘z’) have atrophied quite a bit since their peak senior year, so I guess I’m going to need to play a lot to regain them. And hey, I’m taking a computer graphics class, so this is really just research.