Author: grid

I have no idea if these are new, but they’re new to me.

The first is an idea that I’ll bet lots of people have had over the last few years… I remember wanting to do it about six months ago, but never making any motions toward it. Then I ran into this post on dive into mark where he mentions Bloglines. It’s a free web based RSS aggregator. I intend to sign up the very next time I’m bored and reading.

The second is the world as a blog. This neato flash map shows blogs as they’re updated all over the world. This site almost inspired me to add GeoTags to my site before I decided that was too much information. I suppose I could add generic tags for my city or my zip code or something, but that just doesn’t seem quite as fun.

Right now, it’s light on the other side of the world, but the world as a blog is picking up far more blog updates in the US than in eastern Europe, Australia and Africa. I wonder how accurate it is.

I have had dozens of ideas for entries the past couple of days, but a combination of illness and busy-ness has kept me away from blogging.

(You’ll notice it hasn’t kept me from moblogging!)

The busy-ness was mostly at work. I tend to squeeze out entries when I need a break from my projects, or when I have some downtime, and since wednesday, it feels like I just haven’t had time to even take a break, much less think about blogging. I was basically shoved onto this project that someone else had been working on, (they left on vacation). Without ever having worked on the project before, or even seen the specs or anything more than a quick glance over the person’s shoulder, I had to finish the project, clean up all these bugs in the site, and fill in a relatively large amount of previously untouched static content… for launch on friday. No problem!

The illness has been odd. I didn’t really feel sick until yesterday. But the whole week my voice has been in and out of “audible” levels. (I want to make some kind of neat comparison between my RL silence and my blog silence here, but a better way to do so is failing me.)

Last time I was sick (yes, maybe two weeks ago now?) someone made a comment like “aren’t you sick an awful lot?” And I responded, (or wanted to respond–can’t remember which) with a vehement “No!” I don’t feel like I’m sick all the time… but I’m beginning to wonder if maybe I am. I do have an (unhealthy?) aversion to going in to the doctor. (Mostly because they hardly ever seem to do anything more than prescribe antibiotics and/or tell you there’s nothing you can do but wait-it-out.)

Laura is back in town. I feel like I’ve had more people ask me why she was back so early than there are people I told she was going to be gone for a month… but we’ve probably explained to everyone by now (who cares) that her cheepo train deal didn’t work out because vancouver isn’t considered a part of canada to the train ticket folks. I was very glad to see her, and we’ve only had a smidgen of the at-each-other’s-throats crabbiness that we were experiencing so often last month. It was tonight, and I hope it was just that I had a shitty day at work.

Jason accompanied us to unicycling; just long enough for me to play a couple of seven-minute games of hockey, and then we all ate sushi a few blocks away at Taiko–this tiny hole-in-a-strip-mall sushi bar that has excellent sushi, even if the wasabi didn’t seem very authentic (or good) this time.

After Taiko, we came back to our place and watched Whale Rider. It was a good movie, but I teased laura that it didn’t have enough special effects. I would like to have seen more of the father’s plotline in the movie. I felt a little like there were some story elements missing from the finished product. Or maybe I just felt a little let down plot wise. But overall, an excellent movie.

I got sent an interesting article on world oil consumption today. It’s a fascinating read, and the conclusion is that in the next six to eleven years, the world will have to drastically change the way it produces energy. Oil is integral to more than just energy consumption, and it’s going to be interesting seeing how things play out.

As a kid, I remember hearing all about renewable energy, and thinking it strange how obviously better it was, and yet how little we used it. We are truly lazy creatures, but soon our hands will be forced.

As usual, I get caught in this weird brain loop whenever I start thinking about the future and what it’ll be like. I can’t really describe this… I just know that it’s something I’ve always done… I used to do it more, but haven’t as much lately. It’s really just a train of thought that somehow just keeps looping around the same track–the engine connected to the caboose; an ouroboros in my brain. It’s not that I don’t go anywhere, but that I keep visiting the same images and ideas, mostly snapshots or impressions from science fiction books I’ve read.

On New Year’s day I went to a board/card game party with my friend Beth, who has moved to Australia for her engineering job. She wanted to hang out that night, as she was leaving to go back to Australia in the next few days, and didn’t have much time left in the cities. The party was at Roo’s place, and he seemed surprised when, after giving me directions, I told him who he was talking to.

At the party we played Chez Geek, and this awesome pictionary type game called Squint. I had a great time, and now wish I had a way to get a hold of Roo to ask to be invited to future parties.

Coincidentally, I was invited a while back to a “war games” party hosted by this guy I know from some of JasonJ’s parties. (Hosted by a guy also named Jason.) Nate, Derik, Jason and I all went out there around 4:00 yesterday, and ended up staying till 11:30. (Yes, there were at least three Jasons at the party. I think there may have been four when we first arrived.) We played a really awesome card game called Guillotine for at least a few hours. Then we played Groo, The Wanderer–another card game. It was not quite as fun as Guillotine, but I would play it again. Before we left, I tackled the game Illuminati, which was particularly frustrating, mostly because none of the four of us had played it before. About two, maybe three hours later, I had to leave before the game was anywhere near ending. (None of the other people I’d arrived with were playing any more games, and it was getting pretty late.)

Jason is planning on having more of the same parties at his place, and I know I would definitely be interested in doing it again. I want to pick up one of those four-player chess boards for next time, as I think I could have convinced Derik and Foster to play for sure, and hopefully there would be at least one other in the crowd willing to play it with us. It strikes me that that would be the kind of party to get a game of 3D Chess going at too. I should build a board for that.

Earlier, I got to watch Nate scream, “Suck my nuts! Suck my nuts!!” at the TV after he beat a particularly difficult boss in Ape Escape 2. Now I’ve got to go join him and AJ for a rousing game of Mario Cart Double Dash.

It’s the new year, time to reflect on the old year.

I express myself best in lists, so here are some of my favorite things of 2003 (in alphabetical–ie, no particular–order), followed by some other statistically interesting tidbits.

best music of 2003:
* Cloud Cult, They Live on the Sun
* Fluke, Puppy
* Her Space Holliday, Young Machines (although it mostly just renewed my vigor for their old album, Manic Expressive.)
* Junior Senior, d-d-don’t don’t stop the beat
* Radiohead, Hail to the Thief
* Ulrich Schnauss, A Strangely Isolated Place
* Tosca, Dehli9

Favorite books I read in 2003:
* Blood Music, Greg Bear
* Jennifer Government, Max Berry
* Robota, Doug Chiang & Orson Scott Card

Number of books I read (completely) in 2003: 18

Greatest accomplishment in 2003: Finished NaNoWriMo. (50,000 words in one month)

Thing that upsets me the most that I didn’t do in 2003: Finish the novel I started for NaNoWriMo.

Number of pictures I took on my cameraphone in 2003: (approximately) 100

Number of days in 2003 I owned my cameraphone: 4

OK, so this wasn’t quite as all-inclusive as I’d originally planned. Happy New Year everyone!!!

Textamerica has taken its sweet time updating my page… and the pictures are hideously out of order, but otherwise I am quite pleased. The pics look damn good shrunken slightly from their natural 640×480, and I know this will be great incentive for me to take pictures galore.

I have plans to upload an ebook reader, putty (ssh client), and opera (web browser) to my phone in the near future, but I’m not sure I’m going to get around to any of those today. I have video games calling to me from downstairs.

After discovering all these funny rants over at the ferret’s domain this morning, I started thinking about how not-funny I am, and I felt pretty lowly all day. I don’t know why, but I just felt depressed and glum. (But you should read his stuff, it’s very funny.)

In the last hour, I have managed to get a little excited about starting up my very own moblog on textamerica. I finally decided to do it after finding that Jeremy worked some at setting up his own, and decided to go with textamerica instead. (I just wasn’t sure how much effort I wanted to put into it, and decided that if someone else has already tried, I’m just gonna take the easy route for now.) I also found out some more about how it works, and they have some pretty cool features.

(btw, I just sent my first pics in, so we’ll see how long it takes for them to actually arrive.)

I got to work this morning and listened to a four minute long voicemail from someone’s pocket. Nobody was speaking directly into the phone, but there was definitely an animated conversation happening on the other end. I kept hearing bits and snippets from cleches… “absence makes the heart grow fonder” was said at least once, followed by a few others. Of course, everything was muffled behind a constant fabric-friction sound. The caller must have been moving or something. The weird question for me is, who has my work number programmed into their phone?

I spent about twenty minutes copying numbers from Nate’s phone to my new phone yesterday. Thanks to those of you who have already sent me your #s!

Apparently irish-girl and Jeremy also have new nokia3650s! It’s some kind of camera phone revolution!

I still haven’t decided whether I want to sign up for textamerica.com yet or not. If you look at their fine print (terms and conditions) they own everything you upload to their server. Your images are their property. Yes, I know, what’re they going to do with them other than display them like they’re saying, but it’s the principal of the thing.

I’m starting to think a better solution will be for me to just upload a few select photos to my own site via my laptop once or twice a week. I know it’s not all automated then… and certainly not “instant”, but I might be able to write (or steal) some kind of script that grabs them from an email account instead. Anyway, bandwidth is still extremely pricy from AT&T, so an option that doesn’t use it is probably more practical.

Now I want to try out all the web browsers my phone can handle… but for that I have to have some kind of computer with Bluetooth, so I think a trip to best buy CompUSA may be in order over my lunch break today. There are these little USB Bluetooth adapters you can get for $40 or $50 bucks.

Hmmmm… my trip to compUSA may be getting expensive. A post over at mobilewhack has me really wanting one of the palm IR keyboards. Screw my laptop, this is the future, baby!

My phone is completely and totally dead. I shouldn’t have waited this long to get the nokia 3650 that I’ve been wanting. My plan for this afternoon is to run around to a AT&T store trying to find one that has it so I can switch.

What does this mean to you?

I’ve lost your number. Almost 100% for sure. Some of you I’ll be able to get your numbers from Nate or Laura, but I fear there are many of you I’ve lost touch with forever. So if you know me, head on over to my email page and send me your digits, yo.

Thanks!

I finished up Ratchet & Clank yesterday, in order to start the sequel, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando. It’s been sitting on our coffee table for two days now, taunting me, because Nate got it for x-mas.

I wasn’t too thrilled with the ending cinema or anything, but all in all, the first Ratchet & Clank is a damn fine game. After you beat it the first time through, there are new options and things that open up, so if I didn’t have the sequel sitting here to play, I probably would still be at it, trying to collect all the gold bolts and gold weapons and stuff.

So about 11pm I started the new one, and I went to bed when my eyes just couldn’t stay open anymore. I literally can’t remember the last time I was that engrossed in a game. The sequel is basically more of the same, but it looks cooler, and everything is just a little bit better. Essentially, it’s just an extremely well done sequel. The cinemas are if anything actually funnier than the first one, and gameplay is–wonderfully–exactly the same as the first one.

The thing that has most impressed so far me was this level where you’re running around a satellite trying to destroy these towers. The satellite is a sphere, and when you go to your map view, the game actually just zooms out and you can pan around the whole sphere, zooming in and out and stuff. It was fucking amazing. I kinda wish the whole game were done that way. I hope there are more levels like it.

Anyway, I have to go back pretty soon here and revisit my top 100 sci-fi video games… to add these puppies in at the top somewhere.

[updated a few minutes later to add this next part]

I wanted to add something about how I’m so glad the developers stuck to the “more of a good thing” approach rather than delving off into some other concept entirely as with that other 3D platform game we all know and used to love. Not only that, but R&C is more puzzle based and doesn’t rely as heavily on the actual platform jumping that gives the whole platformer genre its name. (Despite this lack of love, many of my favorite games are in this genre.)

Anyway, I hate getting stuck on a part of a game where you have to memorize some huge and silly sequence of jumps just to progress to the next point in the game. Nintendo hardly ever resorts to that kind of BS, (and when they do, it’s one of the later levels that you almost never need to complete to beat the game). And of course Nintendo invented the genre with Mario64. Hats off to ’em.