Published on May 21, 2004
in General.
I’ve mentioned innumerable times how much I loathe Time ‘Join the broadband revolution, erm, but with no upstream’ Warner. Despite my distaste for them, they’re actually one of the better cable monopolies. The essential problems are that they are a monopoly and they own content companies so their service offerings are compromised by their steps to aggressively protect their intellectual properties. Meanwhile the telcos, who everyone hated in the 70’s, have stumbled about over the past decade or so, unable to formulate and execute a rational strategy to deliver data services to consumers. Maybe things are slowly beginning to change for the better though. Supposedly by the end of this year a portion of Verizon’s customer base will be able to subscribe to 30Mbps dsl (10x faster than cable’s 3Mbps) and Verizon is also dropping over a billion dollars on an upgrade to their wiring capacity, with the intention of delivering fiber optic to our doors.
Sign me up is all I can say. Competition rocks, someone finally looks to be challenging the cable monopolies. One caveat though - goddamnit they better deliver asyncronous upstream bandwidth or at least something close to it at the same time. This isn’t a fucking broadcast medium, what it will take to get these companies to understand that I don’t know, but a first step is weaning them off their intellectual property holdings, it’s compromising their ability to offer service.
Anyway here’s hoping.
Published on May 21, 2004
in General.
Wednesday shortly after I got home from work there was a knock at my door. The only folks who knock on a regular basis are the Jehova’s Witnesses or other brands of jesus freaks who show up now and then, so I approached the door with some trepidation. On the other side of the glass stood a middle-aged woman with a government badge hung around her neck. I had one of those ‘oh shit!’ moments as I tried to parse her credentials - was it the feds, on my ass because of the server break in a couple of months ago where hackers managed to get at my mp3 collection? The fact that I routinely download tv shows and other media off the net, and somehow they got onto me?
In the end it turned out to be someone from the US Census Bureau, and they were visiting me on behalf of the US Commerce Department. apparently, similar to say the Nielsen’s, the Commerce Department surveys US households on a regular basis. My address got picked out of the proverbial hat and from now on they will be surveying me once a month. The data folks like me provide is used to analyze the state of the US Economy. So the next time you hear one of those news lead-ins on the evening news ‘according to Department of Commerce statistics, 24% of Americans now….’ you can think of me.
Published on May 18, 2004
in General.
I added several photos to my Misc. photos gallery, including:
My new car:
And a photo of the spring’s first kayaking trip:
That particular shot shows this very short stretch of rapids that I actually could not make it past on a tributary of the Royal River in Yarmouth. The water speed was not the issue, it was the submerged rocks and the fact that the water was only about 6-8 inches deep, leaving me unable to get a bite with my paddle. I must have tried getting up past this about 20-25 times using various approaches, all to no avail.
There’s also a pic of Nick, who came for a visit a couple of weeks ago, during which we went on a long bike ride over hill, dale, and treacherous swamp:
It’s not the best pic of Nick, but it was the only one I got so it will have to suffice. We followed a power line trail off of a road I bike along often. I was pretty sure I knew where the trail would come out (and I was) but what I wasn’t sure about was if there would be marshland along the trail similar to the trails that are near my house. There was, a lot of it. Nick and I spent about 1-2 miles of the bike ride hauling our bikes from hummock to hummock in the marsh. Still in all it was fun.
There are a few more pics to be had on the 5th page of the misc. photos gallery for each of the above subjects.
Published on May 15, 2004
in General.
So my beloved but well worn 1995 Saturn SL1 is nearing the end of its days. I’ve been shopping for a new car as a result, having settled on a Mazda 3 hatchback after much research. Anyway today I spent my morning at the dealership working out the details on purchasing one. After finishing that up I walked out to hop into the Saturn, go to open the door, and the door handle breaks in my hand. Methinks my poor Saturn is trying to tell me something ;-(
Published on May 15, 2004
in Gaming.
My absolute favorite genre of game is the first person action role playing game. From Ultima Underworld 1 and Underworld 2, to System Shock 1 and 2, to the more modern Gothic, I’ve absolutely loved these games. The most recent release in this category is Gothic 2, which is an absolutely superb game. It can now be had for a mere $20. Anyone with even a passing interest in this type of game should be all over this deal. It’s PC only mind you, and needs a reasonably powerful machine to run it with all the options turned on. If your machine fits the bill I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Everyone is chattering about this the last couple of days - google is experimenting with adding RSS feeds for usenet newsgroups - actually ATOM feeds to be precise. But while everyone is chattering about it, few are explaning how to use it, including google themselves. Fortunately Nick Bradbury has posted simple to follow instructions on his blog.
This is really cool stuff. By and large the mainstream audience has missed out on usenet, in part because like IRC it’s somewhat difficult to become comfortable using it, and partly because the signal to noise ratio stinks, what with the constant spam and flame wars. Still as I tell anyone when given the opportunity, newsgroups are a fantastic resource. Perhaps google’s efforts to provide RSS feeds for them will expose them to a wider audience. Meanwhile it definitely makes it world’s easier for me to parse hundreds of groups using the ‘watches’ function of FeedDemon. This is well worth checking out if you have even a passing interest - fire up that RSS aggregator and experiment.
Published on May 12, 2004
in Gaming.
So one of the cooler things to come out of E3 is free access to an upcoming mmorpg. For the 3 days of E3 you can play the alpha version of Guild Wars online for free, just head on over to their site and download the software. Their system is unique among MMORPG’s in that they’re not intending to charge a monthly fee and they’re streaming new content on a regular basis down to the client. The download is amazingly small as a result, it’s easy to get up and running. Mind that this is Win32 only. If you grab it and head online, look out for Tempus, that’ll be me 
Published on May 12, 2004
in General.
House, Trance, Techno, Jungle. What’s it all mean, and what are the differences between these styles of electronic music? Check out this cool guide to electronic music. It has samples of all the different genres and sub-genres and a sort of ‘tree of life’ or topic map showing the relationships and evolutions within each genre. Very handy if you’re interested in electronic music. Note that it requires flash.
Published on May 11, 2004
in General.
Yep, it is. If you’re a geek like me anyway. This week is the annual E3 exposition, devoted to all things videogame. The games we’ll be playing over the next couple of years get shown, as well as the hardware we’ll be playing them on.
This year there’ve already been several interesting announcements, including a major disaster for sony (EA providing online access to its sports games on Microsoft’s XBOX live service) and Nintendo coming with a new handheld. There’ll be plenty more, all starting tomorrow. If gaming is your thing, stay tuned, I’ll cover some of the major and not so major announcements.
Published on May 11, 2004
in General.
Check out this most excellent interior design utility written in flash. Thinking about moving the couch to the other side of the room but not sure how it will go? Use this to check before doing. Or just scope out a well designed flash app with a great interface.
Published on May 7, 2004
in Gaming.
My guess is that virtually everyone is familiar with the Internet Movie Database, but many may not be aware that many similar websites exist, each focused on a particular niche. Things like comics.org or Mobygames.com’s database of videogames. Anyway for a little friday fun I’ll point out the existence of the ipdb.org - the internet pinball database. When I was a kid we had two pinball machines and a jukebox in the basement, courtesy of my dad’s fond memories of the nickel and dime pinball machines of his youth. Kudos to any hamilton who can find either of the machines we owned in the database - while my memory of one of the machines in particular is pretty good, I can’t remember it’s name and have only a vague sense of when it was manufactured (late 60’s?). If you can find it, please note which one it is here. And for anyone else, if you messed about with pinball in your youth or have a fondness for it, it can be fun wandering through ipdb.org checking out the machines you used to play. Plus if you’re clever you’ll grab a definition file for them and get yourself a copy of pinmame so you can play a simulation of them on your computer.
Engage your imagination before heading over to the Register and reading this short piece on recent progress in the nanotechnology field. Ponder research into artificial intelligence and especially neural networks, and using the newly discovered manufacturing technique to build one that is as dense as a human brain. Would we get a neural network capable of something approximating human intelligence?
I have no idea, but it’s fun to imagine the possibilities.
Published on May 6, 2004
in General.
Now this is interesting. Once again, more coverage of the rising incidence of diabetes. What surprised me in this story is that the deaths from complications related to diabetes have exceeded those from complications related to AIDS, yet which disease has a higher profile? Not to take anything away from AIDS activists - clearly they’ve been very effective at raising public awareness about the disease. But equally clear is the fact that the diabetes folks should be paying attention to how they’ve been so successful and working to get the word out. Consider my small observations my contribution to the cause
Published on May 5, 2004
in General.
Just check namestatistics.com and find out. If you follow the link you’ll discover David is #6. I’ve always suspected I was in the top 10 given how many Davids I run into. I think I first clued into this during my Sophmore year in college - there were around 50-60 folks in my fraternity and 5 of us were Davids. How common is your name?
Published on May 5, 2004
in General.
Now this is comedy folks. You might not be aware that Governor Arnold recently sued a company for producing a bobblehead doll of him in full action hero attire, his case being that he owns the rights to reproductions of his likeness. He’s on shaky legal ground at best due to his being a public figure. In response to the case, Fair Use Press has produced a small downloadable book covering the issue. The cover of the book is guaranteed to make you laugh, but be warned it’s not work safe.
[link originally found on the almost always excellent boingboing]
Published on May 5, 2004
in Gaming.
In anticipation of the release of a sequel to one of the best FPS series, tribes, Sierra is releasing the original two games for free as a means of marketing the sequel which is due this fall. You can get Tribes 1 and Tribes 2, the entire games. Somehow I never caught on to the Tribes scene, I was playing Quake engine and then Unreal Tournament engine games during their heyday, but both of them are still played today and my guess is with their free re-release they’ll see a surge in servers. Plus there are a wealth of mature, polished mods for each (tribes 1) engine (tribes 2). Anyone up for some TeamSpeak action this weekend in Tribes 2?
Most folks are probably aware that Google is chock full of features that aren’t always easy to figure out from their minimalist interface - things like a dictionary for example (type ‘define:word’ and google will provide a definition). Enter soople.com, which provides simple access to google’s extended features. If you have trouble memorizing all the different commands at google, give soople a try.
Published on May 5, 2004
in General.
Have you read Watership Down? It’s a wonderful story of a band of rabbits forced to migrate to a new home. A fan of the novel has created a map and extensive collection of photos of the area that inspired Richard Adam’s work. Cool stuff if you’re a fan.
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