mighty forces

Tiny victories

Today I managed to get my inbox down from 437 items to 44. I consider this a personal triumph, if only a minuscule one.

This is true

On FreeRepublic, where apparently they have nothing better to do, anti-gay trolls have made 180 comments (!) so far on a post about a British commercial for Heinz that shows two men kissing.

Why, whenever I peruse the Freeper’s “HomosexualAgenda” category do I think of “doth protest” and the classic Onion story?

Google Street View rocks!

Because my office entrance is currently in an alley (!), it’s often difficult to give people useful directions on how to get here. But now, because of the magic of Google Street View and a screencap program, it’s simple.

Voila! Ain’t technology grand? Now I just need a better office.

Upgrading

I’m thinking seriously about moving Mighty Forces to WordPress. I’ve never really liked Movable Type; I think it’s too complex for its own good, and the design templates available for WordPress are much more numerous and way better looking. I’ve managed to import the Mighty Forces content into WordPress, and now I’m in the process of tweaking everything.

Any thoughts on the two systems would be appreciated.

UPDATE: Impulsively I decided to go ahead with the switch. Styles may be a little wacky around here for a while. But the change is exciting.

UPDATE II: With this template, in order to make a comment, you need to click on the post title to go to the post detail page. Please let me know what you think of the new design (until I change it, that is .

Spock was a smart guy

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”

The internet can still surprise 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.

Adventures in video game repair

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.

What’s the point of Twitter?

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.

Spore

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?

Items in my early adopter graveyard

-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.