Looking at the recent mass of identical nonsensical comments on my last post (which are soon to be deleted) it looks like I’ve become the target of MT comment spamming. I really thought I’d be too small time to get hit with comment spam, but I guess I underestimated the depths to which spammers sink. I guess they won’t stop until they manage to spray everything on the internet with a thick layer of crap. I guess I’ll see if it keeps up or not before I take action. My options seem limited to either requiring registering to be able to comment (to those of you that occasionally comment: would you mind this?) or getting the MT-Blacklist plugin set up.
Monthly Archive for April, 2004
Even though I do 99.78% of my online gaming on the PC, I’m still pretty intrigued by Xbconnect, which was pointed out to me by a resourceful co-worker (one of the few people I know of at work that’s a gamer, which I find odd for a software company). Anyhow, Xbconnect is a program that tricks your Xbox into thinking it sees other Xboxes (Xboxen?) on a LAN when in fact they are on the inter-web. This lets you engage in Xbox Live style multiplayer action, sans yearly fees. When I heard about the program, I had really expected it to just be something simple where you had to know the IP addresses of the boxes you wanted to play with. Not so, it actually comes with a pretty good match making setup for finding people to play games against. Right now the only game I have to play online is Halo, but now that I can play online without signing up for Live, I’m thinking of picking up either Crimson Skies or Mech Assault now.
Finally got around to seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with Jolayne tonight, and not a moment too soon as it was only playing at one theater in the area anymore. Excellent film, made me wish I’d taken some cognitive science classes while I was in school. I just find it interesting, to try and imagine how we store data and even more interesting how we index and retrieve it. I’m betting I’m just using a CMap or some other piece of MFC garbage. That would explain a lot. (See, that’s me for you. Not that I didn’t appreciate the love and loss components of the film, but ultimately it left me thinking about hacking the brain) Anyway, back to the film. It was pretty much what you’d expect from a film with a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry (and that’s not a bad thing at all). Quirky plot that often folds back in on itself, matched up with visuals that could have come from a Björk video. I thought the bit with Elijah Wood’s character was a little under-developed and never really resolved, but Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet were excellent. Watching their relationship play out in reverse and slowly slip away was fascinating due to all the different subtle (and not so subtle) methods the film used to portray the loss of memories. Also nice: a bit part by David Cross.
[Listening to: The Dismemberment Plan - Memory Machine]
Came across this page today for something called the ID Sniper, a modified sniper rifle that fires a GPS tracking chip into a target (without the target being aware of it) to allow tracking of the chip. Supposedly it feels like “a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second.” The idea is to allow law enforcement agencies to keep track of suspicious people. Sounds like [a valuable tool in the "War on Terror" || a Big Brother control device] depending on your point of view. There’s one other thing though: it’s not real. It just seemed implausible to be able to hit someone with something as large as a GPS device at a high enough velocity to penetrate skin and still be unnoticeable. Their other product “JUJU the Citizen Eye” seems pretty obviously satirical. A quick Googling confirmed that it was indeed a hoax. The scary thing is though, that even though this one isn’t real, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if something like this were actually under development somewhere. It’s honestly not that far out.
[Listening to: Mogwai - Mogwai Fear Satan]
Ok, so I was reading this article on MSNBC about the deaths of US contractors in Iraq and it got me thinking on a tangent. In the article there is a quote from Halliburton on the loss of its workers: “There is no road map for something like this and we are doing everything we can to assist the families as well as our employees to cope with this huge tragedy.” The use of the phrase “road map” was what really made me pause. “Road map” is one of those buzzwords that seems to have caught hold lately in corporate and government organizations. For example, the road map for the middle east peace process. Its even in common use at the company I work for. It’s no longer enough to have a plan, you have to have a “road map”. Words and phrases like these arise all the time in corporate cultures. The CEO says something in a big company meeting, and by the next day you can’t get through a single meeting or even break room conversation without hearing it 10 times. It just works its way into the company lexicon and everyone knows what it means. Often the language will make the jump from organization to organization and you end up with the widely recognized buzzwords, like “synergy” or the classic Dilbert example, “proactive”. What really bothers me though, is that the spokesperson for Halliburton couldn’t express a statement of sympathy without slipping into corp-speak. I don’t think they used it out of ill-intent or disrespect, in fact they probably weren’t even aware of that choice of language. But to me, the edge of inhumanity that it gives to the remark is unsettling. I may well be making a big deal out of nothing, but after being surrounded by the language of corporations I find myself being extra sensitive to it.
[Listening to: The Get Up Kids - Overdue]
There’s a cool article from Lawrence Lessig in this month’s Wired on the potential for intentionally destructive technologies to arise and more importantly, the circumstances that would influence a group to use them. One of the reasons: “Our present course of unilateral cowboyism will continue to produce generations of angry souls seeking revenge on us.” While I’m not sure how plausible I find doomsday scenarios in general, I have little doubt that with the way our nation conducts its self internationally and the increasing amount of tech available to various factions that feel marginalized, a catastrophic event of that nature seems almost inevitable.
Tumiki Fighters is a completely and mind-blowingly insane side scrolling shooter based around the concept of adding the wreckage of other ships to your own as a power-up. Entire chunks of massive ships attach themselves to your ship giving extra firepower and absorbing damage. I’m also fairly sure that its entirely impossible, as it often fills the screen with ridiculous bullet barrages made even harder to dodge by the fact that you’ve got about 5 other planes hanging off of you at any given moment. However, that hasn’t noticeably decreased my enjoyment of it. The same developer has several other games, and its good to see that someone is keeping the super twitchy shooter genre alive. (via Penny-Arcade)
[Listening to: Pinetop Seven - Fear of Being Found]
Having been overlooked for the initial round of World of Warcraft beta testing (no doubt due to a lack of 1337ness and h4X0Ring on my part) it looks like for now the closest I’ll get is this World of Warcraft Television site. By television they mean in-game screen caps updated every 20 seconds whenever one of 4 lucky bastards who actually got picked for the beta happen to be playing. Which is not nearly enough I should mention. In fact, the only feed that I’ve found to consistently work is this one. Still, its a generous sacrifice of bandwidth and maybe even frame rate on their part, so I guess I can’t complain too much. Actually, its not so much the screenshots that have me looking forward to this game but rather what I’ve been reading about it at places like the Penny-Arcade forums, where most people have been proclaiming it the most humane MMORPG to date meaning that it scales back on the amount of endless treadmill work that has been the staple of these types of games to date. Of course, games often are made more difficult after the beta ends but if this is really an online RPG that one can enjoy without spending 30-40 hours a week playing then I’m all for it and will likely be hooked.
I just found out about this fine web comic, A Softer World. (via Carrie) It’s an interesting twist, using photographs instead of your regular hand-drawn comics. Often, the images work to give the comic that extra little poignant push from “Haha” into “Haha… Oh.” At other times, it’s more like just “Oh.” without the “Haha”. I likes it. Also they have a fine collection of over-the-top-with-cleverness cover letters, something that reminds me a little too much of the impulses I felt during my long job search a couple years ago.
[Listening to: Pizzicato Five - My Baby Portable Player Sound]
Alright, so the Blogging Across the Midwest thing didn’t really pan out. For one thing, since I was driving the truck the whole way that didn’t really present too many opportunities to update. Also, since the whole trip ended up taking about 15 hours, I lost interest in lugging out the laptop at our stops. I don’t think you can blame me for that. The good news though is that the trip went well and that we got all of Jolayne’s things unloaded fine at her apartment. Even her cat seems to be adjusting well to the new surroundings.
Elsewhere