Monthly Archives: December 2007

steamloller

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I’m getting ready for a long flight, so I decided to install Steam on my backup laptop for the trip. Figured I can bum around in Portal and other games on the long flight.

Now, lots of people complain about Steam, but I don’t have a problem with it. It’s convenient, I don’t have to get my butt out of my chair, and it’s the same price as getting my ass out to the game shop, buying the game, then coming home. But Steam, the technology, seems to get updated pretty darn often….

I download Steam, go start pulling down a game, and no more than 30 minutes later…

Yup, you guessed it. New Steam client. I didn’t even get 5% of the way into downloading Portal.

Crazy.

wohbits 2007.12

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some neat tidbits from the past 24h:

bananas are going extinct

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I can’t believe I didn’t know this…bananas are going extinct. They have before (Gros Michel is no more), and will again (Cavendish is 100% seedless and hugely susceptible to a specific fungus now hell-bent on world domination).

We may be eating Goldfingers soon instead.

I guess it’s a good thing I love plantains!

owning your online experience

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ok, it’s probably painfully obvious at this point that I’m a bit of a net free-speecher – or at least, anti-corporate-net-ownership. [ed: I used to have the word ‘libertarian’ here, but this confused people due to its political overtones. I’m discussing an issue, people, not a political ideology. I’m no more Libertarian than I am Republican or Democrat.]

I hate online profiling, detest advertisements (to the point of not owning a TV!) and generally resist having my activity monitored.

Here’s a quick video if you’re not familiar with this concept, told in allegory:

Do something about it. Visit http://freespeech.org/ourweb/ to find out more. I don’t believe this is about republican vs. democrat, or liberal vs. democrat…again, it’s about owning your own online life and content.

fixed lj-pic comments

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If you’re a LiveJournal user, and you want your LJ picture to come up when you comment on my blog (and don’t have a Gravatar), enter your email address as <lj-user>@livejournal.com. This will display your LJ default picture instead of asking Gravatar for your picture/avatar.

If you’d rather use your real email address, you should head over to Gravatar and register, uploading your pic there.

mah chumby is teh kyoot

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Earlier this week I finally received my Chumby, a small soft hardware device with a color touch-screen, speakers, an accelerometer sensor and squeeze switch (amongst other features). It took until this weekend for me to unwrap it and hook it up.

There are plenty of other blogs describing the out-of-the-box experience, so I’ll just briefly mention my first impressions:

  1. The device’s build quality is good, but I had been hoping for more out of the squeeze sensor than what’s built in.
  2. Just in case you didn’t pick it up from other posts, this is a tethered device – requires a “wall-wart” power adapter. I may look into short-life-span battery power for the thing, primarily because I see this developing into an audience-interactive MIDI controller (assuming I ever perform live again).
  3. It was very, very simple to get up and running.
  4. If you have a full-length WPA2 password on your wireless, be prepared to “type blind”. The entry box isn’t large enough to display every character. On the confirmation screen it will display the entire password for you.
  5. Yay Linux.
  6. Yay SSHD built right into the control panel (through a hidden screen).
  7. I need to re-study ActionScript. At least there is an open-source flash development alternative. The last place I used this stuff would have been for former employer DentsuFUSE and the Dentsu Ad Museum (anyone in Tokyo know if the exhibit is still running?)

The following picture should say it all (yes, that’s ICHC on the chumby) :

ecchi and chumby

If Ecchi approves, it’s a guaranteed hit.

canada: say no to a canadian dmca!

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Anger. That’s the only thing I can feel when I see that Canadian elected officials are looking to introduce more ridiculous, ill-thought, completely-against-legitimate-use copyright legislation. And of course, because I’m so incensed with most of the news outlets that I don’t hear about this stuff except through trusted sources, I had to go digging in places I don’t normally look to find out about:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/07/canadian-dmca-introd.html

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/07/canadians-tomorrow-i.html

http://www.cbc.ca/searchengine/blog/2007/11/last_chance_to_ask_the_industr_1.html

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2431/125/

Quoting Cory:

Tell your friends. Tell your family. If you care about the net, this could be the most important thing you do this year. Take action and save the country.

Quoting Michael:

The next 60 days are absolutely crucial. If Canadians speak out in large numbers, the government may rethink its current strategy of fast-tracking the Canadian DMCA.

Do everything you can. This isn’t just about trading CDs and movies anymore, folks. It’s about controlling your own words, your own music, your own actions. Write your MP today. And if you’re not a Canadian, yeah yeah, I know you told us this day was coming, but we avoided it for at least 10 years. Now’s our chance to learn from the mistakes of the US DMCA and enact some intelligent legislation.

saint expedite

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Good news: I’m now a certified PiMP. All of that hard work is finally paying off, somehow. Yet my daily grind seems about the same as usual…

Bad news: Something else that is taking far longer than it should to resolve is causing me quite a bit of pain and suffering. Being a New Orleanian, I should pray to St. Expedite, though a learned friend tells me I should really be focused on St. Erasmus.

P.S. Oh, and after some of y’all complained, my site is back to being XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant. Hooray.