If you read a book that changed your life in the best meaning of the phrase, please share what you know!

Please don't just post the book name, post the Amazon link (like I did below for Radical Honesty), so that we can check its ratings and reviews easily. Thanks!

the inspiration that I've been looking for to help get out of the rut that I feel I've been in lately, and to make some major improvements in my lifestyle.  Highly recommend for anyone looking to do more positive things in and with their life. 

-fhayes (January 04, 2007, 06:07 PM)

Along those lines I also recommend you buy the book Radical Honesty. Not an easy read but well worth the time invested!

Jay is Games is having another Flash Development Competition:

Here's the scoop: you, casual gamer / game designer / Flash whiz, design a simple puzzle game in Flash (version 8, AS 2.0).
...
But there is a catch. This time your game design must incorporate this theme: "grow".

You are, of course, free to interpret that any way you choose; however, the extent to which your game addresses the theme is left up to the competition judges to decide. Entries not meeting this requirement will be disqualified.

For full details Click Here.

The deadline is February 9th!

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Recently I've been talking to mouser and Tinjaw about making games and one of the ideas we've been tossing around seems perfect. A Tower Defense type game could be considered both a puzzle game (where to place towers) and a growth game (upgrade towers). We've been throwing around ideas trying to come up with something a bit more improved on what we've seen so far in the Tower Defense genre, but I'd love to hear any ideas anyone here can come up with for this contest (not limited to Tower Defense ideas) and I'd certainly like help designing the game conceptually so that I can focus most of my time on programming it instead of trying to figure out all the details of a fun working game by myself.

This site discusses ways to optimize your system beside from defragmenting.

To defrag, or not to defrag? If you're looking for ways to speed WinXP machines used by your customers, then the answer is Not.
...

So What Works?
Since defragging the disk won't do much to improve Windows XP performance, here are 23 suggestions that will. Each can enhance the performance and reliability of your customers' PCs. Best of all, most of them will cost you nothing.
1.) To decrease a system's boot time and increase system performance, use the money you save by not buying defragmentation software -- the built-in Windows defragmenter works just fine -- and instead equip the computer with an Ultra-133 or Serial ATA hard drive with 8-MB cache buffer.
2.) If a PC has less than 512 MB of RAM, add more memory. This is a relatively inexpensive and easy upgrade that can dramatically improve system performance.

http://www.techbuild...org/recipes/59201471

Here's a fun, easy to play, fast-moving game. There is no learning curve to play, just to improve performance. Give it a try when you have 5 minutes.

http://www.vivalagam...com/play/tunnelrush/

Here is a great article on 10 really cool, less well-known firefox extensions.

Firefox extensions do all kinds of things, but how many that you use actually make you more productive? If you think about it I’m sure that you can come up with a reason for nearly all of your extensions as to why your more productive for using them. That’s why I’m not going to hit at some of the obvious ones that most people talk about, like IE Tab, DownThemAll, or Tab Mix Plus. I went browsing around the Web looking for ones that even I have never heard of, but I made sure that they are useful. Now you may have heard of a few of these, but they were all new to me so I thought there was a pretty good chance that most of them will be new to you, too.

http://tech.cybernetnews.com...

Today i received a very good message. After 555 days of waiting, one of my most favourite games "Enigma" has got an Update to V 1.0. With additional 200 levels, making now over 900!

What is Enigma?
You rembember Oxyd on Atari or Rock-n-Roll on Amiga? That together is Enigma. plus much, much more.

Main thing is, to move a little ball (or more than one even smaller balls) with your mouse through levels. Solve puzzles, touch and match hidden colored blocks, find your way through mazes, move certain blocks to other locations to solve the level or get through to other parts of the level or even build bridges with them to traverse water. Then find keys and open doors, find other things that can help you solve the level up to magic wands that converts blocks into other material, search for secret pathways, don't fall in holes, switch lasers on and off, turn mirrors to redirect the lasers, beware of deadly blocks, take care on what floor material you are (influences the movement of the ball) or put and hold the even smaller balls in given positions.

You see: Oxyd and Rock-n-Roll plus a little bit Sokoban, a little bit puzzlegame, a little bit dexterity needed, a little bit actiongame, a little bit platformgame a.s.o. You can't explain it fully here...you have to try it! The whole game is non-violent, family friendly and so sth. for young and old one's.

http://www.nongnu.org/enigma