Mighty Forces

Tonight I read online that an Apple store is opening in Madison on Saturday (at West Towne Mall!). And when I read that, I literally involuntarily drooled.

Clearly I need help.

I just got a call on my business phone, and the Caller ID said:

DONOT CALL LIST

Heh.

Lately I've become enamored of a mini-blog service called Tumblr. While Movable Type's interface has "evolved" to become prettier but almost impenetrable, Tumblr makes things simple - so simple that it makes you smile. You can easily post a quote, image, video, link, or whatever. It's really more of an online scrapbook than a blog, but for our short-attention-span times, it's great.

I'm trying it out, and I love the simplicity and the cleanliness of the template designs. Plus, it's dead simple to use. Try it out and let me know what you think.

In my aimless web surfing this week, came upon something really quite wonderful: a game called Passage. Give it a try; but read the creator's statement first.

Post title refers to something else quite wonderful, a song by Joni Mitchell. Check that out, too.

According to a study done at UC-Berkeley, we create between one and two exabytes of new information each year.

An exabyte is one billion gigabytes.

In an effort to stretch myself, if only a little, in 2008, I decided to get on the "Project 365" bandwagon, where you take at least one photo every day for a year. I've started a Flickr photo set with the first week's results. Should be an interesting experiment in a lot of ways.

Related: The incredible PicLens browser plugin has a new version that allows you to look at a bunch of photos on a zoomable 3-D photo wall. Fantastic. Check it out.

-TurboGrafx-16 game console
-LaserDisc player
-Sega Dreamcast
-HD DVD player (sigh)

In the latest case, I don't think I did too badly, because I waited until the players had gone down precipitously in price, and the only discs I have I got free with the player. Of course, the only reason the player was so cheap was that the format was in its death throes. And now, Sony has no incentive to lower Blu-Ray prices.

HD is a cruel mistress.

It's been a long time - years - since anything computer-related has gotten me excited with anticipation. Hardware and software both are in a becalmed state these days. Where are the real revolutions, the real leaps forward that seemed so possible say, 15 years ago? Maybe this is how the people who owned the first refrigerators felt. At first it was exciting and interesting - keeping things cold with electricity! Now it's just something that you want to blend in with your kitchen countertops.

But after years (!) of gestating, Will Wright's Spore is finally going to be released in September (of THIS year). And I'm beginning to get excited again about the possibilities. Designing any creature you can imagine, and shepherding it through sentience, society and galactic exploration. And not just creatures - buildings, vehicles, whole societies. With an interface that allows Pixar-level procedural animation to be done with a few clicks of the mouse. Plus, other people's creations will automatically be added to your game's "universe."

How cool is that?

I've noticed more and more people using Twitter. Can anyone tell me why they use it? Seems kind of like calling up your friend and saying, "I'm eating a sandwich. Look at it! LOOK AT IT!" But then again, maybe I'm just an old codger who came of age with the TRS-80 and doesn't understand all this new high-falutin' technology.

To me, though, it seems like one of those classic solutions in search of a problem, like anti-static spray.

Let me know where I'm going wrong here.

After ending up having to wait two weeks for the box to ship my dead Xbox 360 back to Microsoft, I took the (now filled) box to the UPS Store this afternoon. Even though Microsoft makes you use the plain unmarked white box to ship the console - supposedly to combat theft - the guy behind the counter took one look at the box in my hands and smiled, saying, "Xbox, huh?"

"Yes," I said. "Do you get a lot of these in here?"

"Yeah - about three or four a day," he said.

Three or four a day, at one UPS store in one town. Wow. Meanwhile, thousands of copies of GTA IV sit on store shelves, mocking me.

So I just started using Twitter, a little bit. Still not convinced about why or how to use it. But right now I'm just posting random thoughts, like this one from last week:

How can Barack Obama be a radical Christian, a Muslim, and a Marxist all at the same time?

Amazingly, some writer from Wired picked this up, and mentioned me in an article about Obama:

Report: Hoax Anti-Obama E-Mails Still Fool Dumb White Guys

Crazy.

After waiting a month, my repaired Xbox 360 finally came back on Friday.

"After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true."

-Spock, "Amok Time"

I've decided that I'm most likely going to move this site from Movable Type to WordPress. By some miracle, I managed to import all my existing posts and comments into WP, and I'm working on picking a design and tweaking things now.

I never much liked Movable Type. I think it's too complicated for its own good, and the selection of templates is abysmal, especially when compared to the flood of professional designs available for WordPress. I'm thinking of going with a theme called PressBox, although it has weird behaviors in Firefox 3, which has become my main browser.

Anyone who has thoughts on the two systems, please let me know in the comments. Thanks.