A tip of the virtual cap to Albert Hoffman, accidental discoverer of LSD and unwitting accomplice in the social unrest in the US in the 1960’s, who passed away yesterday at the ripe old age of 102. Who knew that a little lysergic acid diethylamide and a healthy lifestyle would contribute to such longevity?

Kidding aside, Hoffman’s discovery and passing are a minor but worthy footnote to the whole counterculture movement in this country that was so formative for my parents and by extension me. Here’s hoping for happy trails for him off in the neverafter.

Been doing some work on some photos because there’s been an explosion of facebook requests from my old college friends who’ve recently discovered our fraternity group on Facebook, and I happened across this gem from the distant past:

Mix a japanese pop soundtrack with the art style and humor of Katamari Damacy and drop dead simple controls and you get Doeo, a lovely little flash game on my favorite gaming portal, Kongregate.com. Doeo’s appear, and you roll your mouse over them to make them disappear, scoring points for doing so and for chaining together sequences of them. It couldn’t be similar and it’s charming and fun, a perfect friday fun link.

Digital Rights Management is such a crock. In today’s example of why you should never, ever ‘license’ DRM’d content, check out what’s happened to the customers of Microsoft’s MSN Music business. Microsoft is turning off the lights on the service and ceasing support for the infrastructure which provides the ‘keys’ which allow you to move your content from machine to machine. You can burn CD’s to rescue the content off the hardware (while reducing the quality), so you won’t permanently lose access to it so long as you take that step and accept the quality trade off, but you should never have had to do that in the first place. As I’ve warned before, stay away from services licensing DRM’d content. Emusic, Amazon, and others now offer unencumbered mp3 files at higher bit rates than Apple and the other DRM-encumbered music merchants. iTunes may be convenient but it’s supporting an untenable business model. To those who would say say Apple would never pull a similar move, companies don’t get much larger than Microsoft, and they just did it. Vote with your wallet folks.

Imagine being an 11 year old boy with a remote controlled car with an integrated webcam that you could look through using a wireless headmounted display while you drive it, effectively driving in first person mode. How cool is it that such a thing actually exists? Now imagine being a 41 year old man-boy trying to come up with a rationale for purchasing such a toy….

I was in a fraternity back when I was in college, and there’s been a sudden burst of activity related to a facebook group that was created for the frat. I got an email today that an old friend had uploaded a photo of me which cracked me up, so at the risk of much mocking, I post it here for everyone’s enjoyment. This was taken in roughly 1991 during a fraternity rush, during which we ‘murffled’ our hair to make it stand up on end dramatically. Check out the mane I was wearing that night:

I’ve played most of the Call of Duty games at this point, including the various console ports. I’ve played through 2 on the PS2, and 2 on the PC (three if you count one of the expansion paks for the original game) and I played through 4 on the xbox 360 right after Christmas. I enjoyed that so much I went out and got COD3 for the Xbox 360, and played it through over the last couple of weeks. It’s nowhere near as good as 4 was, but it’s decent at what it is - a formulaic WWII console FPS. What novelty it has you can tell was tacked on because of the WII and PS3 motion sensing bits in the controllers, because there are these interactive sequences like ‘plant this bomb on the anti-aircraft gun’ which require sequences of button presses and twists, which on the wii or PS3 would have been actual motions with the controllers. They’re weak on the 360 because they feel contrived and because you can exploit them for a limited invulnerability by sprinting for the objective and initiating the sequence, which mostly keeps the AI from shooting at you so you can charge into insane situations and survive. The other new addition to the formula is scripted moments where you get jumped from around corners by enemy soldiers, which starts a ‘quicktime event’ style melee combat where you have to press the right buttons at the right time and speed. It’s basically as weak as it sounds, made worse by the fact that each of them requires whacking on the shoulder buttons, which it’s not easy to do quickly. There are also driving sequences and sequences where you control tanks or other heavy weaponry. These are just ok, and not as good as the ones in COD2, but they’re not bad either.

I didn’t try the multiplayer, because I already have the superb COD4 for that, not to mention Team Fortress 2 on the pc, so I figured why bother.

You can score the game for under $20 for the PS3 and the 360 if you shop carefully. At that price it’s worth it if you’re a fan of the genre, and who isn’t - after all, shooting nazis never gets old

We had perfect weather this weekend, with temperatures in the low high 60’s and clear blue skies. Susan and I took advantage of this and went hiking in the green mountains in vermont about 40 minutes north of Bennington:

It was pretty much perfect - the hike made its way up a steep grade but at an angle such that it was never too strenuous of a climb. We saw a beautiful ice covered lake, followed a roaring brook for over a mile that the dogs had a blast frolicking in, struggled to follow a poorly marked appalachian/long trail section that was covered in sometimes deep and slightly treacherous snow, climbed an excellent quartz rock seam, and looked out over a Vermont valley with stunning views. There are more pictures if you’re interested, including a couple of movies and (after tonight) a panoramic shot of the view from the summit.

Ever seen Ghost in the Shell? It’s taken many forms over its existence (Manga, Anime, TV series, anime sequel, multiple videogames), but it’s best known in the US as a superb anime that came out in the 90’s. It was one of the first anime to (almost) achieve mainstream success in the US, and it deserved the cult status it achieved on video. It’s a meditation on the nature of existence wrapped up in a sci fi action movie that takes place in a blade runner-esque near future. I thought it pretty cool that Spielberg’s Dreamworks Pictures optioned it for a 3d feature. Here’s hoping they bring this project to fruition, I’d love to see a competent live action Ghost in the Shell.

Evernote is an excellent little personal knowledge base. It runs on macs and pcs, will soon run on iphones and blackberries, and runs on the web. You can always get at your stuff no matter what platform you dump info into, and you can control what gets synced to their servers and what stays local on your machine. You can also control the availability of materials, making some publicly available and other stuff private.  It’s also got incredible image recognition/OCR software integrated in it, so you can do things like hold a business card up to your laptop’s camera, import it into evernote, and then later search for the person by name and it will find the card. It’s even ok at recognizing my horrible handwriting.

I have 10 invites to their beta. It’s free - their business plan is to eventually start charging on the volume of materials you store on their server, so in one sense it’s going to be free forever if you’re frugal. If you want in on the beta, leave me a comment and tell me what email address to send the invite to and I’ll get you set up. If I don’t hear from anyone after a week or so I’ll hand them out over on inviteshare.

I should mention that it’s worth running through the short screencast on the homepage of the evernote site to get a sense of how it works. It’s really cool tech.

This week’s diversion features Dirk Valentine romping through some simple flash-based platforming action. Run, jump, shoot - it’s not too complicated. Beyond the unusual steampunk setting the main novelty to be found is in Dirk’s chain gun, which doubles as a platform builder. The graphics are also above average. Anyway, check it out!

Hurrah! The weather’s warmed up to the point where I can ride my bike to work again, yesterday being the first day I was able to manage it. I used some muscles I hadn’t been using so I was a bit sore, but really it’s minor. It’s also better for Soolin this year because when she can manage it Susan has graciously agreed to pick her up on her way into work and drop Soolin off in my office. Three cheers for the return of the warm weather!

How much do I love Rockband? So much that I’m considering dropping ~$75 on a professional drumkit pedal to replace the flimsy thing that comes with the original drumkit. Check out the Omega Pedal. And if you haven’t been playing Rock Band, you’re missing out. It is hands down the best party game ever made, and it’s fun in its own right just playing by yourself.

Susan and I went to a theme party this weekend in Portland Maine. Just got back a couple of hours ago and posted a quick picture. We had a blast.

I’ve noted other studies highlighting similar conclusions about the benefits of drinking red wine and black tea if you’re a type 2 diabetic. A recent article over on sciencedaily.com is more evidence that type 2’s should consider adding both tea and red wine to their diet. Check it out, and tip a glass or two back this weekend.

Here’s a fun little friday diversion. You, a shotgun, abstract shapes flying by in a virtual skeetshoot. Hitting multiple targets increases the score. Not much to it but that’s the beauty of it - simple, arcade blasting fun. Get to it! Flash based, btw, and found over on the superb kongregate.com, which is the flash-based casual gaming portal I’ve mentioned a few time.

I bought a Thermaltake USB hard drive cartridge system for work last week after almost losing all my data on my laptop. Techreport has a lengthy writeup which I basically agree with, but a bottom line statement would be, for ~$50 this thing is excellent. I got it and a 500GB drive, partitioned half as OSX journaled file system and half as fat32, then backed up my mac and pc at work, using time machine on the mac and Cobian backup on the pc. Cheap, infinitely extensible, and cleverly designed. Well worth a look if you’re in the market for a backup device.

(stupid product name though)

Leopard is the latest version of Apple’s Macintosh operating system. Last Wednesday I decided to install it. Little did I know what I was in for.

Like most folks, I have limited backups of stuff, and my mac laptop is the home of some pretty critical data - project timelines for my staff, project sheets for each of the major projects we have, a huge knowledge base full of all kinds of info related to my day job, and more. So I go to install the upgrade, choose the ‘archive and install’ option, and let it start. An hour later it pops up a very helpful ‘the upgrade has failed for unknown reasons, press to restart’ message. Aigh! I press to restart and the machine won’t boot from its drive. I boot from the OS dvd and it can’t find its drive. Needless to say I freaked out. Many machinations later and I could get it to recognize that it did, in fact, have an internal drive in the laptop, but the volume was hosed and it wanted to reformat. I couldn’t let that happen. With some trepidation I handed it over the our support folks for a look see, more because I lacked the time to continue looking into it than because I had exhausted all my options.

To their credit they did manage to restore my drive. Interestingly, they could never get Leopard to even recognize its existence, but they tried booting from a Tiger OS dvd and it recognized the drive straight away. They didn’t even have to run disk tools - once Tiger had ‘touched’ the drive, it was back to its normal state, and the machine was working fine again.

I have no explanation for how the above happened. I do now have a laptop running Leopard, and I now have several backups of it since the whole experience put the fear of ‘OMFG I lost all my stuff!!!’ into me. Leopard is pretty great once it’s running, but of all the OS X releases this one was by far the worst in terms of the upgrade process. Back everything up is my advice to anyone thinking of upgrading. It came out during this process that I was the 8th machine that was being upgraded to Leopard on our campus, and it was the second one to have a serious issue. The other one actually had data loss too.