Blogging…I’m pretty sure that term was invented by the same group of irritating people who more recently came up with “podcasting”.
I’ve had what I call a “vanity” website for about 9 years now. I have been posting stuff about myself, that interests me, or that I wanted to experiment with all that time. But I’ve never really called what I do “blogging”, even though my most recent website incarnation has looked an awful lot like a blog.
I am far from being a “trendy” kind of guy. I tend to be either ahead or behind the curve in terms of whats cool and whats not.
Case in point: I had my first “website” before the Internet existed…okay, it was a BBS, but it was up and running in 1980. Arguably it was a blog, since I posted opinion pieces, and it was as close to the ‘web’ as you could get in 1980. And it had a forum of sorts. I was 16 at the time, and in those days no one except a real loser had a computer.
Flash forward to 2005. Everyone is on the Internet. Blogs are the “new” cool thing. Years ago, all the trendy folks started buying iPods. I was pretty skeptical, and even recently I stated some rather negative opinions about the gadget itself.
But I finally went out a couple of weeks ago and bought an iPod. I was seduced…
Continue reading Lo, I have sunk into the depths of consumerisim…
Well, its that time of year again…time for me to break my computer in the name of geekdom…
For 2005, my objective was a bit different- stick mostly to upgrades that can be transferred to the next “version” of my computer- things that I don’t need to throw away in a year. Because the next upgrade will be large- in 2006, I expect to move to a new motherboard supporting PCI Express slots, which means a new video card, and while I’m at it, an new processor…ouch.
So, for this year I’m replacing my monitor, my memory, and my hard drive subsystem. In some respects, I wish I’d stuck to just those things but, since I had to reformat the hard drive as part of the upgrade (see later in this posting), it seemed like a good time to upgrade the OS…
I’ve been playing Halflife2 recently. Its a great game, fully deserving of all the praise its been receiving.
Unfortunately, it was crashing a lot for me. And I was seeing different symptoms, making it hard to try to debug
Continue reading Halflife2 Memory error/Direct X error ”fix”
Product warnings are getting silly. “Warning: product in this container may be hot!”…on a cup of coffee or a hot apple pie. Or how about “Warning: side effects of this product include drowsiness” on a sleep aid.
Its all about litigation: someone sued the product manufacturer once, and probably won, so the warning on the container is intended to prevent other idiots from saying they weren’t smart enough to figure out that coffee might be hot. Its all part of the gradual dumbification of our society…the assumption that we must all be freaking idiots, because there is so much evidence to prove it.
I was reading a little “joke” posting on Slashdot today, which lead me to the Enchanted Mind site, which I found has some interesting humour. But the thing that got my attention today was their list of warnings based on modern physics, which I shamelessly repeat here.
NEW CONSUMER LAWS
The combination of modern physics and consumer protection laws leads to a new wave of product labeling.
The natural universe is an amazing place. Our sun, which warms us at a distance of 96 million miles for billions of years. Black holes, with gravity fields so intense that light itself can not escape. And neutron stars… Continue reading ”Star” releases Staggering amount of energy…
I read a story today about some interesting observations being made using simple random number generators.
In a nutshell: some scientists developed a simple little box that is supposed to be a pure random number generator. This box design was used a couple of decades ago as a control system to see if people could somehow influence randomness with their minds. It was shown that ordinary people could apparently do so. A number of other scientists began coming up with more elaborate experiments to get to the bottom of this effect. Continue reading Psychic random numbers..
I was reading a news blurb in Astronomy magazine the other day about some new planets discovered around distant stars. Some of these planets are pretty weird.
An important couple of points need to be made first before I talk about the planets. I’ve got to mention that IANAAOAA (I am not an astrophysicist or an astronomer), so everything here is just a lay-persons perspective. From what I understand, scientists are not discovering these weird planets because they are the only type of planets around distant stars. They are finding them because the techniques they currently have will *only* find weird planets. Basically, the only methods they have at the moment to detect the existence of a planet boil down to detecting variations (“wobbles”) in the rotation of the star they are looking at. To make a star wobble enough to detect currently requires an extremely large planet (Jupiter sized or bigger) or a largish planet that is very close to the star. Future detection methods will hopefully allow detection of more typical planets
That said, some of the weird planets they are finding are really weird…
Continue reading New planets discovered…
I just finished watching Catwoman on DVD. This is the movie that Halle Berry starred in last year, and which received pretty much universally terrible reviews.
And you know what? I liked it. I liked it quite a lot, actually. And now I’m a bit angry…
Continue reading Catwoman…or why are people such sheep?