New Years Eve
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This is one of the few holidays that is celebrated more or less “the night before.” For some people Christmas Eve is more important than Christmas, but as far as I know nobody really cares about the day before Easter, or The Night of Pre-Thanksgiving.
So, in the spirit of everything, I’m going to make my New Year’s resolution early. I, along with most people, have a terrible record when it comes to keeping resolutions. I’m pretty sure that in the past my resolutions have included excercise (whose haven’t?), work, or other silly things that take effort to do.
This year, I’m going to take a step in the right direction and make a resolution dealing solely with attitude: I will be less cynical.
Every year I seem to be a little more cynical around the holidays as I do more and more “critical thinking” about society and religion. Together, they’ve turned me into a pagan capitalist-hating social anarchist nutbag who can’t seem to really enjoy Christmas. My little epiphany gland is telling me that I need to start enjoying holidays (and the rest of the year) for the “goodwill” spirit of it.
Christmas should be like line dancing. It’s OK to be a collective embarrassment to life so long as people are smiling and have a good time.
Happy New Year, everyone.
Good news for IE users
Although I still recommend using Firefox as your browser, I finally got some much needed help from my friend at nmyworld and fixed the header in IE.
So today, you get a new header image plus the added fun of watching it work in every browser I’ve tried it on.
Yipes! An Essay?
I didn’t mean to write that much, but it basically sums up my opinion of Peter Jackson:
Batelle’s Prediction
I’m with Jeff Jarvis on year-end lists: they annoy me. But many smart people have been making smart predictions about “oh, the places we’ll go”, so I’ve been reading those over with some interest.
John Battelle posted about how AIMbots were going to change mobile content “stuff.” I wrote my two-cents in the comments, then decided they were probably worth re-posting. I also think it would be worth mentioning that I don’t mean just cell phones - I mean all mobile devices.
Anyways, this is what I said:
The biggest issues with this type of innovation are clearly going to be on the side of “consumer electronics.” Fred Wilson posted about consumer electronics being extremely closed off, and I don’t think cell phones are an exception.
While many phones do have AIM on them, I know that my plan personally charges me a “text message” for every outgoing and incoming IM, which basically makes it ridiculously, financially impractical.
I would love to be able to get standard RSS and content on my phone via AIMbots, but I don’t think that cell service companies are going to let go their stranglehold anytime soon. For that to happen, we’re going to need to see a lot of SF-like wireless networks show up, followed by widespread skype-phone consumer electronics. Once that type of “open” competition forces the market to change, I’m not sure we’ll see significant progress.
That’s probably not going to be 2005 or 2006. Of course I’d love to be wrong.
Get rich quick
Despite the fact that every get rich quick scheme ever only makes one person rich, and it usually isn’t you, I’m always looking for the opportunity to get in on one. Because you never know, it just might work this time.
I know it isn’t respectable money, and I’ll be roundy criticized by the upper class for having poor taste in art, but who doesn’t have that dream of whimsically stumbling upon millions of dollars. Accidentally find oil in your back yard? Instantly you can have a palace with palm trees and little men whose skin shines with oil as they fan you with branches plucked from your garden and feed you almonds all day.
I’m also extremely jealous of everone whose succeeding at “getting rich quick” (&easy). Peter Jackson counts in this cateory for me. He coasted to billionair movie mogul status by convincing The Suits to give him money to make movies of other people’s famous stories. Despite the fact that the Lord of the Rings took a lot of work, per se, virtually none of that work was his. He just sat around and played with cameras and CG. Also, he hired his own digital effects company for exhorbatent sums, so he was rich even if the movie flopped.
Finally, I’m extremely jealous of this kid. Simply by selling pixels on his web page, he has made more money in four months than Uganda did last year. He calls it the “million dollar homepage,” and he sells each one of a million pixels for a dollar. He has sold 911,000 pixels because he gets so much traffic that it’s worth advertising on. This is pure spectacle!
I hate him. I hope he chokes on the almonds.
WoW Guild Names
The other day I spent a good several hours playing World of Warcraft. Probably the first time I’ve spent over four hours in the game in months, and it reminded me how awesome the game really is.
I’ve also been impressed over and over again with guild names. Some people are just phenominally creative. There’s a list of the funniest guild names at Squidly.com, including my favorites:
Riders of Lohan
Two Dollar Horde
Spaceballs The Guild
Power Word Drunk
Gnomeland Security
I want to start one named “Girls with dementia who are lost gone wild,” but I don’t think we get that much space.
Check out the full list. Link ganked from WoW Insider
My early senility
Despite being young, progressive, and lucid in most ways most of the time, I feel like I’m prematurely senile when it comes to organization in life. No one can force me to keep a schedule—not even with pointy sticks.
I’ve mentioned this curious inability to keep a calendar before, but it only just occurred to me how strange it really makes my life. I was thinking about the things I wanted and meant to do yesterday, and mentally comparing them to what I had in fact done, when I realized they weren’t even remotely the same.
In fact, yesterday went something like this:
- (The night before I promised myself I’d get up early)
- My alarm went off at 11, I turned it off and slept until 12:30.
- I separated my laundry into light and dark loads, then washed them together.
- I decided to spend some time reading and writing, so I invited my friend James to come over.
- I meant to go throw the frisbee in the park with my friends Jeremy and Brittany
- I tried to return Perfect Dark Zero, because it sucks unbelievably, but they wouldn’t take it.
- I missed frisbee at the park, and threw the football with James instead.
- Went to dinner and then to see a movie, except no movies were showing, so I promised myself I’d go to bed before 3am
- At around 3:30am, I realize that I never put my laundry in the dryer, give up, and go to bed.
As a way of fighting this problem, I should really start carrying a small electro-shock device that zaps me whenever I change thoughts midstride. Or just take massive amounts of Ritalin.
Background noise
LiveJournal has the advantage of the friends system. As someone who’s midly obsessed with web stats, finding out how many people read my journal is an endless hobby. Unfortunately, it looks like web pages, simply by virtue of existing, get about 30 or 40 “visits” per day. Or maybe more. Or maybe less.
Probably more. My stats register somewhere between 60 and 90 “unique visitors” on a daily basis…but it doesn’t go much outside of that, even on days where I don’t write anything. On LJ, I know that at least 53 people skip over my entries on their friends page. Here…who knows how many people are studiously ignoring what I write?
It’s frustrating because I want to cut out all the clutter — I want to eliminate the google, yahoo, MSN, and other search crawls. I want to eliminate the visits form spam crawlers looking for e-mail addresses or posting bogus comments (of which I get more than readers, I’m sure).
But it’s basically impossible, because as far as I can tell the internet has its own sort of “cosmic background radiation” that generates all kinds of weird traffic in werid ways. The only solid data I have is feed data, and nobody really uses RSS feeds. At best people, use them as alerts for when to visit the site.
So in the end, I have to just guess. Isn’t that all there is to statistics, anyway?
Me and dogs
I clearly have the wrong reaction to dogs. I was walking through the mall yesterday (which was actually a lot more difficult than it should have been, since everyone and their dogs–literally–were there), and I saw a couple of middle aged women pushing their strollers through the throngs of shoppers crowding the hallways.
In those strollers, dogs. Little (not chihuaha little, like pug dog little) dogs wrapped in child blankets like surrogate children through which these women could achieve that motherly feeling that instinctually drives them.
But while most people reacted with phrases like “oh, how cute!” or “how much for those?” I found myself annoyed that anyone would even think to do something like that. Who buys a stroller for their dog and wheels them around a mall? Seriously! It’s a dog.
You leave it at home. In the car (with the windows down). It drools, shits, and humps things in ways that human babies can only dream of achieving. In short, it is not a child. And it is therefore not cute to wheel it around in diapers and baby blankets.
But this is clearly the wrong reaction. Because dogs are cute, right?
Relaxin’
Basically, I’ve spent a lot of my time hanging out with friends recently. Post-christmas I’ve got new books to read and a few new games to play.
I also need to get busy convering video files into an iPod playable format so that I can load my new video iPod with sweet sweet video content.
As an important note, I spent a *long* time looking for a program that converted video files to one of the two video formats that iPods will actually play. Most of the programs are pretty fancy, allowing you to rip DVDs directly to iPods and what not, but all I really want is something that takes an avi and makes it work on my pod.
It was harder to find that you’d expect. So if you’re looking for an easy way to convert video to play on an iPod video, use this free program. It works, and it’s free. What more do you want?
Merry Christmas
It’s not snowing, but that’s not really required.
I hope everyone has a merry Christmas. It’s also the first day of Hanukkah, so happy Hanukkah, too.
The best poll ever
I’ve been reading Theferrett for a long time, and it’s always an interesting blog. Yesterday, however, he posted the most interesting poll I have ever seen.
The question is essentially this: Matrix or Real Life.
Now think. Think hard. It’s not that obvious.
I choose the Matrix.
Early teleportation
I got my camera back yesterday, which made me really excited and forced me to go take pictures of various rainy scenery around my house.
I’ve gotten used to having this little SD card reader built into my laptop so that I can easily and instantaneously transfer images from my camera to my computer. My desktop, despite being awesome in every other way, is not similarly endowed.
As a result, I’m using my laptop* as a sort of extended SD-card reader to get the images from my camera to my desktop. My laptop, however, is in my basement/TV room, because there’s no point in having a laptop and a desktop sitting next to each other, esepcially when putting it here makes it available when I have friends over or when I’m watching TV. As an added bonus, my dad has covered the house with a wireless network.
So I’m sitting here in my basement moving about 100megs of pictures to my desktop, when it occurs to me that what I’m actually doing is teleportation. 
Teleportation is, essentially, taking something physical and transporting it to another place without, you know, moving it. You take something real (a picture) and deconstruct it into a digital / massless form (jpg image) then you use arcane magic (wireless network) to give that information to something in another location (my desktop) which can then reconstruct the physical original (print it).
Voila! Early teleportation.
——
* The cord that came with the camera for this purpose is being shipped, literally, from England. It won’t be here for another month, probably.
King of Silicon Alley
Unfortunately it isn’t online yet, so I can’t link to it, but the January issue of Wired has a little two-page article tucked in halfway through about Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs Inc.
It’s a neat little article on what he’s doing now and where he came from. More than that though, it’s a success story of an entrepreneur. I want to have a success story someday.
Wank for Peace
Hey everyone, hate war? Have a wank.
I guess it started yesterday, but…oh well.
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