As of about noon today, I’ll be offline for roughly a week - no internet access from (either) home, no computer access, no nothing. The move is in its last phase and I’m headed off to MA tomorrow morning to get myself moved into my new place in Hadley. I got a ramshackle old 3 bedroom farmhouse less than 5 miles from work, thank god for a little elbow room after a year and a half in my cottage. Anyway, I think I’ve responded to all outstanding emails - if I missed yours, apologies, I promise to reply as soon as I’m back on the net.

The server will not be going down as Andrew has graciously agreed to let it live on his network until I can get things up and running in MA. Please be kind to the machine until it’s back on my own network, especially in the evening hours when Andrew is likely to be playing Battlefield 2 and not too happy to have his latency increase - stay out of the image gallery unless you absolutely must, and if you must, do so during the day.

If you need to get ahold of me, use the cell phone number found from the contact links above.

So I’m in the midst of moving. I went with a pod this time. So far so good, I’ll post more as soon as the process is finished. But the reason I’m posting is this site may come and go over the next several days and at some point between now and March 1 it may go away for several days or possibly even a week or more. Much depends on Charter internet service in MA - we’ll see how quickly they turn around my order for service, and whether they block port 80.

The webcams will be down as well, yes, even the working one, as of tomorrow morning when I bring down my media server.

The one downside to using pods is I will lose access to my stuff for about a week. Good thing I got some practice keeping myself entertained with the recent power outage - soon enough I’ll have no access to any of my toys and be stuck sitting around a barren cottage. I’d go hiking but the weather’s looking to be pretty cold so I doubt that’s on the agenda. We’ll see how it goes. For now you can expect infrequent to nonexistent updates here until after the first, barring some alternative arrangements (like parking my server in Andrew’s basement for a couple of weeks).

So we had a minor natural disaster - 70+mph winds came blowing through and knocked out power in the region. Figures Saratoga Springs and Greenfield Center suffered the worst damage in the entire region. Parts of Saratoga had no power for three days and I lost it from Friday morning through late Saturday night. So what’s an internet geek to do in such a case? Well…

• Read a novel. Actually, 1.5 novels. I started Kim Robinson’s ‘Red Mars,’ then decided it was not to my taste 1/3 of the way through, and switched to Octavia Butler’s The Fledgling. Given that the only candles I had in the house were tea lights, and they were scattered everywhere around my living room, I figured a vampire story was appropriate. It was a decent book too.
• Lacking any news at all for more than 24 hours, start to imagine that you’re having a repeat of the widespread power outage from several years ago.
• Curse the lack of gasoline in your car and your inability to acquire more.
• Realize you should have withdrawn some cash from the bank since you have no way of getting any more. Vow to always keep $200 in cash hidden in the house from now on.
• Curse well water, pumps, and the lack of flushing toilets or water of any kind. But especially the toilets.
• Daydream about the hot shower you so badly want.
• Muse in wonder at just how quickly the fabric of modern society crumbles with the lack of power.
• Lay around on your couch thankful that you have a gas heater that’s still working.

Fileplanet has teamed up with Sony Online Entertainment to give away free copies of Everquest II with a month’s subscription. If you’ve never tried a massively multiplayer online game, here’s a golden opportunity for you. Check out the details over on Fileplanet.

I played Everquest II shortly after it launched and kept my account active for about 4-5 months. It’s not a bad game. Its main issues were a lack of solo content (they’ve since addressed this), a somewhat silly combat mechanic (when you click on an opponent, you see all monsters that are grouped with it that will also attack if you attack the selected opponent. I’m all for trying something new, I just don’t think this new way of handling things is any good), and the fact that they launched at roughly the same time as World of Warcraft, which has become the 800 lb gorilla in the mmorpg market (5 million subscribers and climbing).

Everquest II does have a lot of things in its favor. While it doesn’t have same integrity of style that WoW does it’s still a beautiful game if you have a rig powerful enough to turn on all the effects. It’s got a huge, diverse world to explore. It has 6+ years worth of the original everquest’s content development to build on so there’s a rich, complex back story to it all. There’s also a lot of voice acting in the game and it’s really pretty well done. I’m always surprised by how much that adds to a game, too.

The upshot of all this is, this is definitely worth taking advantage of while the offer stands.

Now here’s something pretty unique - Prospero is a sort of peer to peer banking system. You create an account and then can either choose to lend others money by bidding on their requests for loans, or you can borrow money. To help spread the risk of users defaulting on loans you can also band together in consortia to help spread the financial risk across your membership. Consortias also help build a credit history for your members which increases your chances of succesfully getting other users business. This is pretty cool stuff. I’m immediately sure that this will be ripe for abuse in the same way that paypal and ebay have been, but despite this I’m sufficiently interested in trying it that I’ll risk some money on the concept. Anyone interested in joining together in a consortium to spread the risk? We could each put up $100 and see how it goes. Who knows, we could be the next Bank of America. Post in the comments if you want in.

[via Futurismic]

As a brief aside, whoever’s in charge of Prospero’s website has done a fantastic job - clear, helpful infographics and a nice clean style.

Rarely has a company so completely mis-managed itself. If I owned shares in Palm I’d be wishing for a shareholder lawsuit for managerial incompetence. For those who haven’t been paying any attention, last year Palm sold its operating system assets to the Japanese company Access. Yesterday Access announced that they were killing off further development of Palm OS and would fold a backwards compatibility layer for Palm apps into a forthcoming version of a linux-based operating system for handhelds and cell phones. This is the absolute end of the road for Palm. By the time this proposed OS is released there won’t be enough folks clamoring for backwards support for their apps to make it worth bothering with it, supposing it’s even released on devices you can buy in the US.

It’s really a shame. I’ve owned and used Palms for years, almost since they were first released, and my current model, a Tungsten|c, has an excellent design:

and has served me well for the last several years. But Palm completely blew it - they owned the market 5 years ago and proceeded to blow through a series of crappy product releases, a purchase of BeOS which amounted to nothing, all while failing to upgrade their OS in any significant way. Products like the ipods and devices running Windows Mobile focused on performance, connectivity and multimedia playback. Palm seemingly focused on….sucking.

Fortunately for me my new employer is providing me with a Blackberry. If that doesn’t work well for me I’ll end up buying a Windows Mobile device, probably one with a gps in it. Meanwhile, I bid Palm a sad farewell.

Meanwhile, anyone want to buy a Tungsten|C, in great condition with a few extra accessories?

I’ve mentioned this once or twice over the past year - the makers of the superb Red Orchestra mod for Unreal Tournament 2k4 won the ‘Make something Unreal’ contest and won a license for the Unreal Tournament engine. The product that came out of that, Red Orchestra, Ostfront 41-45, is just about to launch. The preload on Steam has started as of today, meaning you can sign in, buy it, and have it waiting on your hard drive when they launch the game, which is something I’ve done. If you do it now you get 10% off, the game is only $24.95. There’s also a gameplay movie on the site I’ve linked to if you’re potentially interested. I can offer that this and Forgotten Hope have been my two favorite mods of the last several years, and I have really high hopes for this game. It’s much more of a simulator than a run n gun action game, so keep that in mind if you’re considering it. I’ll post again if they offer up a demo or barring that once I’ve played some and have a sense of how the game is.

Dia is an excellent diagram creation tool most similar to Visio for Windows. It runs natively on linux using GTK+ and can (with some finagling) be installed on OSX using Fink. Things are easier on windows with the Dia for Windows binary installer. You’ll also need to install GTK+ for windows but that’s trivial. Instructions and links are on the Dia for Windows site. If you’ve needed a diagramming tool on Windows but can’t swing the cost of a Visio license Dia is an excellent alternative.

Check out What’s Up?, a novel flash-based visualization tool for news. As events make it into the global news stream they’re plotted visually onto a map of the world that’s broken up into regions. Mouseover a region when you notice an event occurring and you get a quick summary and can click through to the story, or turn on the balloons and the headline will pop up for big stories. This is pretty cool, though I found the balloons distraction more than helpful. This would make a perfect widget for osx too.

[via metafilter]

So, I came back from lunch last week and all of the sudden felt like I was going blind in one eye. I pretty quickly noticed that if I could squint I could see a very large gray spot in the middle of my vision in my right eye. I got in to see an ophthalmologist the following day who examined me and then referred me to a retinal specialist, who I saw yesterday. Turns out I have Central Serous Retinopathy in both eyes, though I wasn’t noticing it in my left eye because the blister was on the periphery of my vision. After 3-4 years of recurring health problems (hernias, diabetes and related stuff, debilitating bacterial infections) I finally had a year of no problems in 2005. So much for clear sailing in 2006. Anyway this is the bad news - I can’t see very well. The good news is while the causes of this are not well understood, in most cases it clears itself up within 6 months all on its own. I have to do a daily eye chart exam on myself to track the progression of the blind spot, and if things get worse it’s back to the specialist for more examinations and possible surgery. But if as expected things slowly get better, I’ll be in the clear by the middle of the summer, and the only lingering aftereffect of this will be that I get to see a retinal specialist once a year for pictures of my eye to make sure there are no recurrences or other retinal issues. The other good news is that my immediate thought when I saw the blind spot was ‘fuck, it’s the diabetes, I’m going blind already, despite such good control over it.’ Turns out it has nothing to do with any of that which was a tremendous relief to me. The last bit of good news was that a previously known condition I have in my right eye, Pigmentary Dispersion (sometimes a precursor to glaucoma) was basically unchanged and was no cause for worry.

There’s a sort of humorous aside to this in that when I was undergoing the first examination the doctor asked me if I had ever suffered trauma to my right eye, as it’s often a cause of pigmentary dispersion syndrome. At the time I couldn’t recall anything but then on the ride home I had this vivid memory of my jr/high school era friend Mark Ross plinking me in the right eye with a snail when we were in high school during a crazed snail fight (there were millions of them on the beach during low tide at Caumsett State Park). It broke my contact lens in my eye and caused poor vision for days in that eye. So, it’s all Mark Ross’s fault. If I go blind I’ll have to track him down and give him grief about it.

There have been clones of Simcity available for quite some time. Lincity distinguishes itself with a decent isometric tile set as compared to the other clones which use a rather spartan top-down tileset. There are binaries available for Windows and packages for a variety of linux distros on the download section of their site. Unfortunately to install on OSX you’re going to have to use Portage. It’s easy enough to install though if you’re not already running it I’m not sure Lincity is the package that will convince you to get it up and running.

Anyway if you’re a fan of the original first generation simcity, Lincity is an aesthetically competent clone and well worth checking out.

[via Digg]

Picturecloud is a new web service that offers free 3d object photo processing and hosting. Simply shoot 12 or more photos of an object from various angles, upload the photos to their server, and they process and host the completed 3d image, using flash to deliver it to your browser. This is great for folks who want to sell stuff on ebay, or have a 3d photo of themselves or their loved ones, or for tons of other possible uses. It’s free, well designed and easy to use. This is not going to replace software I already own that does this kind of work and outputs it to QTVR, but for folks who only need the occasional 3d object photo or are unable to pay for commercial software and can live with the trade offs (flash only, lack of fine grained control over the output quality) this is ideal.

Check out Blurb, which combines a free, easy to use application (mac and PC) with a web service to provide relatively inexpensive full color hardcover book printing, including a color dust jacket. You can have a 120 page book shipped to you for under $40, and the website offers tons of templates to work from to help you with the design process. This is really pretty slick and perfect as a gift.

So via my previous post you have some sense of the harm corn syrup is doing to us. How did things get to this point, where corn syrup is found so pervasively in our foods? Check out this post for the details. The short version is: lobbying and government subsidies, with the Archer Daniels Midlands company as the villain.

This has come up a couple of times in email and IM conversations I’ve had over the past month or so, the fact that there is evidence that there is a link between the increased intake of high fructose (and other forms) of corn syrup over the past couple of decades and the increased rate of type II diabetes in north Americans. I had lost the link I had to the first research I had read on the subject. I watch a lot of medical RSS feeds and fortunately this came through today. It’s dense, but it lays out the case pretty comprehensively. The short version for folks who can’t spend the time to read it: read the labels on your food carefully. Avoid prepackaged, pre-prepared foodstuffs, soft drinks, and prepackaged sweetened beverages in general, and above all avoid corn syrup and all its derivatives. There was a recent article in the NY Times which showed that 33% of the kids born in NYC within the last 5 years will develop type II diabetes. It’s an epidemic and no one is immune - learn to watch what you eat.

All of this is just a part of it of course - a balanced, healthy diet and regular exercise are just as important, but the above stuff is actually the easiest thing to do - stop buying the 20 oz. cokes at lunch and microwaving that chef boyardee ravioli, your endocrine system will thank you.

Want to work in the exciting field of instructional technology? (No, really, it is exciting. We’re in the midst of radical change and there’s tons of opportunity in the field). My position is now posted in a variety of places. If you’re interested, or you know someone who might be, pass it on.

Check out the Gorillapod, a $25 octopus-armed tripod that allows you to fasten your camera to almost anything. This would be super-handy when I’m out hiking. I wish they mentioned the weight on their site though. Depending on what those arms are made of it could be fairly light or relatively heavy. This goes on my wishlist.

[via gizmodo]

Man, the medical establishment can drive one nuts. Check out the results of an 8 year study on the effects of a low-fat diet in this article in the New York Times. The answer? Not much at all in terms of the incidence of heart disease and various cancers between the women on the diet and the ones who were not. This is apparently one of the most comprehensive studies of this nature ever conducted, and the results have thrown things into confusion for dietitian and physicians trying to advise their patients, including folks like me. The article is well worth a look for anyone interested in healthy eating.

One of the side effects of the warm winter has been that Soolin has actually picked up a couple of ticks, including one in January which I would have thought was impossible. As a happy coincidence, Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site mentioned a cheap apparently very safe and effective tick removal tool, the . I just added this to my amazon wishlist - as soon as I’ve used it to remove a tick I’ll post a review. Even if it’s only mediocre though it has got to be better than my current ‘work at it with tweezers’ method of removal.

The original Day of Defeat, built on the halflife engine, was a really good team-based fps mod back in the day. Tons of folks still play it today in fact. Valve released a sequel built on the halflife 2 engine, and this weekend they’re offering free access to it. Check out their site for the details. It’s worth trying if you’re a fan of wwII fps. Personally I think it’s completely overshadowed by the superb Red Orchestra, which is also getting a retail sequel, even though Day of Defeat has much better graphics. Still, they feature different play styles, Red Orchestra focusing on tactics and teamwork whereas Day of Defeat is much more of a run and gun action game, so they both have their place on my hard drive and this is worth a look if you haven’t already purchased it. You can start the download today so that it’s ready to run by the time friday evening rolls around.

One word of caution. This probably requires one to register for a steam account, and some folks really hate steam. I think it’s the future of software distribution so there’s no sense in gnashing one’s teeth over it, but whatever, follow your own instincts there.