Computers: June 2003 Archives

Finally! I've been planning this site revuild for the past six months, and due to a variety of ever-changing distractions, it's taken until today to get this shit done. The NW Hauntings site, if you don't know, is my pet project to document haunted sites and ghost stories from throughout the Pacific NW. I started it way back in...I think it was '95(?)...and never really got around to keeping it updated, mostly because each page was manually created, and I'm lazy. So I upgraded the server and got mySQL running on it, and now the whole thing is PHP & mySQL database-driven dynamic content. Yay!!

So if you have time, check it out, and let me know what you think.

If you don't understand the subject, congratulations! You can probably read (either that or you're completely illiterate, and you can't understand a word I'm writing here). My latest rant is about the death of grammar and spelling in the computer age. See, back when I was in school (read: college), the Internet was just beginning to become popular. And the majority of emails, chats, and web sites that I encountered could be read and understood by a normal human being. Granted, the spelling and grammar were never perfect, but at least people tried.

However, with the advent of Instant Messaging and cell phones with text capabilities, and the general shortening of attention spans, Internet shorthand has begun to kill grammar.

Now, maybe I'm being a Luddite here; maybe this is just a natural evolution to the language. But reading some of the stuff that's coming from high-school and college-age kids these days is frightening. Hell, the FBI has even hired three teenage girls to help them understand and join in on Internet chats (source).

The problem is, unfortunately, not as simple as blaming the Internet. There's also television (which pulls kids from books, in turn pulling them away from examples of good grammar), overcrowded schools (where kids can't get enough attention paid to their individual progress), and even standardized tests (how can a multiple-choice test really take into account a child's writing skill, or lack thereof?). And, of course, there's the parents. My parents encouraged me to write well. They encouraged me to write, edit, revise, and rewrite everything that came out of my brain and on to paper. The final responsibility for all of our children lies with the parents. Always.

I've been thinking a bit about my Buddy Lists lately. Once upon a time, back when I was a lowly Guide on AOL, I used to have a BL that was hundreds of people long. And at least 20 of those people were always online at any given time. Now, my BL looks pretty pathetic - there's only about 30 people on there, and most of them are rarely online (or perhaps they've just blocked me for no apparent reason). Granted, I haven't really been a regular online chatter recently - life sometimes gets in the way of things like that. But still, I miss chatting it up during slow times here at work, or when I'm rebuilding something at home. Or hell, when I'm bored at any time. Oh well...I suppose that a Buddy List being depleted really isn't the worst thing that can happen to you. Maybe I'm just growing up....nah!

Anyway, if you read this blog and want to chat with me (for some godforsaken reason), my Yahoo! handle is sirsnarky, my AIM handle is SnarkyBoy, and my ICQ is 897161. Managing all these is pretty freaking simple with Trillian - if you use multiple IM systems, it's an invaluable tool!

Okay, let me say first of all that I'm not one of those people in the world that have 80 hours a week to spend sitting in front of a computer, existing on a diet of Red Bull and Pizza Hut, with the occasional McDonald's chaser.

But I'd like to play online...

Therein lies the rub. The kinds of games I prefer are generally adventure or role-playing games. Not the shoot-em-ups where there's little-to-no story. Unfortunately, there's nothing out right now that lends itself to my type of gamer - the 10-hour/week adventure/RPG'er.

There was some possible promise in The Sims Online, but I beta tested it and quickly determined that it was crap, at least as far as I was concerned. What they were thinking when they required interaction and such to drive your money (and thus development) is beyond me. Similarly, the relationship process was seriously lacking.

That's why I was excited to read a review on MSN of a new game that's currently in open beta testing - Second Life. I've played it a little bit, and aside from some lag issues (which I've come to expect in practically any online beta), it definitely fills in many of the gaps left by TSO. You can build practically anything your mind can come up with, there is a very detailed scripting engine that allows you to do practically anything you want within the game world. Hell, you can even change the world itself - morphing and sculpting the land. Bottom line - it's awesome, and they were pretty smart in offering (to beta testers, at least) a lifetime subscription option that's actually reasonable.

The only problem with Second Life, though, is that there's no script, no adventure. As fun as it is to meet people and talk, laugh, and generally have fun, I do occasionally like a little action in my games. I must admit that I like fighting with virtual creatures...so if that makes me a violent sicko, so be it.

Which is why I'm looking forward to Star Wars Galaxies from Sony. Although I haven't had any opportunity to beta test this one, from all the features and feedback information that I've read, it looks to have a really great balance of socialization, design/building mechanics, and fighting. Oh, and it's in the Star Wars universe, which means I'll probably buy it even if it sucks. However, I'm still betting that within 6 months, the whole game world will be dominated by those with lesser lives than I, who spend 10 hours a day online fighting with Tusken Raiders and such.

So...what's a wanna-be online gamer to do? There's a hopeful answer coming in World of Warcraft, which is being designed by Blizzard especially for my kind of player (with benefits to those with no lives, I'm sure).

And there's always Neverwinter Nights - which I'm looking forward to maybe playing online when the new expansion pack comes out. The original campaign was fun and all, but I'm really hoping that there's enough new stuff in the expansion pack that it might be worth making my own campaign. I did start one with the original, but got bogged down by a lack of variety in the creatures and items.

That's it for now...be kind to your enemies, as you never know when you'll wind up working for them.

Friendster

Okay, so I finally bit the bullet and signed up for this thing. So far I'm apparently connected to 15,000 people that I don't know, all through one friend. Pretty impressive, huh? Anyway, not that I'm all that excited about it - hell, I'm not even sure I really understand fully how it works. But I'm there now, forever and ever, amen.

Alrighty!! Finally got my server rebuilt. I was running out of drive space on several of my partitions (thanks to a horribly underinformed initial install of RedHat 7.2 oh-so-long ago), and I couldn't get PartitionMagic to work on the linux box. Looks like it might have a problem with ext3 partitions. Oh well. After six straight hours of work, I've backed up the system, scrapped all the partitions, and reinstalled Linux from scratch. Now everything looks to be working (fingers crossed), so I'm a happy camper, off to bed with me!!

On one of the sites I frequent, there's been a recent backlash against "bloggers", and considering that I just set this one up last week, I started to question why I decided to do it. I'm not really a developer, so I don't have useful information on upcoming or existing projects to relate. I'm not famous, so I don't have throngs of people hanging on my every word. I'm an occasional writer, but I really don't feel comfortable sharing most of what I've written with complete strangers.

So why a blog for me?

It's not ego - I really couldn't care less if anyone in the world out there reads anything here. It's not pretension - my opinions are just that, opinions, and as such as as valid as anyone elses.

I guess what it really is is simply a way for me to keep something resembling a journal (something that I've tried off and on over the years and failed miserably at each time), and maybe the fact that it's somewhat public will keep me updating it. I'd hate for someone to wander over to my site, find the blog, and see that I haven't updated it in six months. That would suck - for them and for me.

So, for what it's worth, if you found this blog by happenstance or design, I hope you like what you find. It may not be earth-shattering or tought-provoking, but it is a reflection of me.

I've been in the process of ripping all my CDs to MP3 format, so I've got my own little jukebox on my computer. So far I'm up to 269 albums, for a total of 26.3 GB. Had to postpone it all for a couple weeks when I ran out of disk space.

Oh, and I rip all my CDs at 256k...for those of you 128k'ers out there that claim you can't tell the difference, I say to thee NAY! 128k drops a lot of the low and high definition that's the whole reason for having digital music. I can tell the difference, and only deal with 128k files when there's no alternative.

O'Reilly Network: Liebowitz finds that MP3s are hurting the music industry [June 05, 2003]

Not to detract from the article itself - Liebowitz does an excellent job of examining the facts. But the one thing that is missing is the simple economics of disgust. CDs now cost about the same as they did (adjusted for inflation - perhaps actually more than they did) when they were first introduced. The associated production costs have, of coursed declined drastically (who in 1990 would have imagined being able to burn your own CD on your home computer!?). So why am I paying $18.99 for the new "Weird Al" CD (okay, so I found it online for $13.99, but locally it was $16.99-18.99)?

What the recording industry continues to turn a blind eye on is the simple fact that they're charging an arm and a leg for crap that people aren't interested in paying for. Why buy a new CD for $18 that only has one or two songs on it that I want? C'mon, folks! The top-selling CDs for the past several years (over time, excepting out the 1-2 weeks' worth of new release) have been the "Now! That's What I Call Music" collections. Why? Because most people will pay $18 for songs that they know they like!

The recording industry will continue to slowly siphon off its own profits until it realizes that they only have three viable options to regain the market: (1) create a per-song kiosk system that allows me to create customized CDs for ~$1/song; (2) lower overall CD prices to no more than $12/each for a new CD, $10 for a back-catalog disc (I remember the days when ALL CDs at Circuit City were $11.88 or less. Who killed that? The industry, when they threatened to pull their distribution channels!); and/or (3) follow Apple's lead and make a real effort to create an online distribution model.

Unless they do that, they're already dead; they just don't know it yet.

I read an article in this month's Washington State Bar News (http://www.wsba.org/) that touted wireless networking as the "next phase" in law practice flexibility. And, to their credit, while they did address some of the more obvious concerns (like WEP encryption turned off by default, and SSIDs broadcase by default), but didn't really address the bigger issues of snoopers, network security in general, or of liability concerns.

Now, you'd think that since this is a laywer publication, they'd focus on this stuff. But they didn't. **sigh** I guess it's my fault for choosing a profession that's so far behind technically that many firms still use WordPerfect for DOS, yet still want to appear trendy and "cutting edge".

Okay - this is much better. Chose the "Trendy" style from www.movabletype.org. Still needs some tweaking, but at least it's better than the default!

Okay, so here's my first shot at creating (and keeping up) and actual blog. Just set up and installed Movable Type, and although it isn't as cool as SnarkyBlog was going to be (and alas may never be), it should do the job well. First things first, though, I need to destroy this "style" and make a new one. How boring can this be!? Nobody's going to want to read this - they'll take one look at it, at the Times font at the top, and fall asleep. Oh well...