Shutdown Day

Well, I survived a whole day without my computer(s). I run a service for other people on one computer - so that one didn't get shut down, but all the primary computers in my house were turned off all day yesterday. Did I miss getting on my computer? Perhaps once or twice I wanted to get on my PC. I wanted to check the weather, check the movie listings, look for something to do downtown and even wanted to play World of Warcraft instead of watching TV.
Each time, I thought about how I did these things 20 years ago. For example, movie listings. We used to call up the theater and listen to movie listings on a recording. You'd call in, and have to sit through the movies you didn't care about until you got to the one you wanted to watch. If someone started to talk and you didn't hear the times you'd have to listen to it all over again.
For the weather, we listened to the radio, and going downtown ended up being preempted by rain. In the morning we cleaned up the garage, I played some basketball with my son and then it was off to Home Depot to pick up some garden and lawn soil. I sat and watched half a movie while my wife got ready to go out and we went to Tyson's Corner II for some cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory. When we came home we all sat down and watched RV on TV, and the night was over. I went to sleep two hours earlier than I would have than if I'd been playing WoW.
All in all, it was a good day.

New Betas - Old Social Networks

I got into the Tangler beta last week, and the Joost beta just today. Tangler is a message board/IM intertwined application, with plans to become the YouTube of the conversation topic. You'll someday be able to post a Tangle onto a message board to bring a discussion from Tangler to anywhere on the web. With an IM-like notification, and an easy posting system, they have some potential to change the face of the message forum on the web.
Through someone I met there, I signed up for Joost today and tried it out. Watched a couple of Mr. Magoo episodes....it's pretty neat software. It was very smooth, and slick, with content starting not long after I selected it. Hopefully the P2P pays off and they can keep the turn-around time up to the standards the beta users are seeing. The interface was pretty neat, especially some of the widgets you could put on the screen while watching other content.
I also got back onto my Facebook account after some friends hooked up on it. I uploaded some pics there, too. One feature I hadn't seen before is their badge feature - get a load of what it created here...

I guess the Blogdex script screws with that - I'll have to remove the Blogdex code anyways - it doesn't seem to work, and I doubt that it's very useful.

Play World of Warcraft ?

This is my character on WOW that I play most often (at the moment). Suggestions/commentary welcome. I'm built mostly for PvE right now as I level up. I will probably restructure for PvP at some point after 50.

Why People Think Government Is Corrupt

If it quacks like a duck..... Let's see - a city councilman illegally posts political signage on public property. Voting-age teenagers then defaced the signs with stickers proclaiming the illegality of the signs, not necessarily the smartest move, but certainly gets the point across..... So sooner or later the police are called in to resolve the argument. Now the teenagers may be charged, but what about the illegal signs? Well, the (local) government appears to be free to not only pass laws, but also to ignore them for their own convenience. The city attorney has directed the police to ignore the ordinance.

This is not so mind-boggling as it is stupid. The councilman who voted for the ordinance against public political signage no less than 3 years ago is now flaunting the fact that he is free to ignore the laws that he helped pass. So, in America, we can pass all of the laws we want, but our politicians are free to ignore them at their convenience? There should be absolutely no question in Glendora, California come this election. The police chief, city attorney, and city councilman should all be voted out of office. I don't know much about that city's political structure, but if articles of impeachment exist, they should be used....now!

Life is all about the trauma

I'm not normally a depressing person. I've never thought about killing myself. I don't consider myself emotionally sad, and I enjoy and value life. But this morning, I had a rather depressing realization that life is all about the trauma.

Every morning, my alarm clock blares at me in a high-pitched shrieking tone, rousting me from a comfortable deep sleep, where I dream of fantasies that I am too timid to ever exercise in reality. Smacking the alarm in an effort to stave off the real world for just a few more minutes, it shrieks at me again to get the hell out of bed. Begrudgingly, I open my eyes and stare at the time reflected in red light on the ceiling. A small shock to my system arrives with the realization that I must have hit the snooze button more than once for it to be that late. I quickly throw off the covers; another shock, this time one of temperature, as the cold air reminds me that it is indeed winter. I haven't even been awake a full minute and I've already been assaulted in mind, skin and sound. I turn on the bathroom light and my eyes scream out a fourth attack.

The day pretty much progresses like this for most of us. We take little time to notice the simple pleasures of living, with a constant walk from traumatic event to traumatic event. From the death of loved ones, to vehicular accidents, the daily news, personal problems and the problems of others. We live most of our lives in search of solutions to problems, rather than in appreciation for the time we spend in between. We react, rather than act. And this, my friends, is sad.

Site Redesign

Somebody needs a site redesign - and I think it's me....
I just went to add a widget for BlogLog to my site, and had no place to put it. Where I did put it screws up the whole site look. Guess I'll have something to work on when I get home.

Locked Out!

UPDATE: GameKnot (AKA ChessColony.com) has decided not to answer any of my queries regarding my account lockout. Another person at my office, who had purchased a lifetime membership, was accused of manipulating his rating. When they looked at the fact that he and I play from the same IP address (corporate firewall) and frequently at the same time (when we return from lunch, where we play chess, likely). That they have decided to give me the silent treatment for a week, and remove me from my team, I can highly recommend that you stay the hell away from their service.

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For some reason, Gameknot.com has decided to lock out my user account. The only thing that I can do with it is play the current ongoing games that I have. I can not look at team statistics, download my games library, contact team members or friends or leave messages on ongoing game boards.

I have sent a message to their administrators to see just how I have broken their rules and terms of service, or whether they have just chosen to stop serving my account (part of the terms of service says they don't HAVE to provide me with an account...fine with me!). I know that I have used this space to recommend GameKnot in the past. However, I will be appending that blog post with information about this turn of events to help others to avoid having to deal with their accuse-first-ask-forgiveness-later tactics. There is no way that I would recommend that you use their service under these conditions. This has made me feel like a third-class citizen.


UPDATE: I found from a message from my team captain that the reason my account was banned was because they think I MIGHT be a duplicate account of someone else who plays from the same IP as me (occasionally). This person happens to be a coworker of mine who signed up to the service based on my recommendation. He had been ACCUSED of ratings manipulation, his account put on restriction, and they're keeping his lifetime membership fees. I know that he has not lost chess games on purpose to manipulate his ratings. He may have slow played games on the site, or played only people rated lower than himself to watch his rating go up and down, but his account should have no bearing on my own.

Dark Energy May Be "Giant Sucking Sound"

Over the past many years, astrophysicists have been involved in a search for the energy that is causing the apparent accelerating expansion of the universe. You see, the observed expansion of the universe created a puzzle, because when you compare the gravitational pull of the matter in the universe, the universe should be slowing its rate of expansion. Instead, it is accelerating. This energy has been dubbed 'dark energy'. There really is no simple, quick way of describing dark energy theory, so I'll let Wikipedia fill you in on the theories to date.

An article on Eurekalert dtd 16 Jan 2007 talks about research being done to measure 'dark energy' to within 10%. Allow me to quote from the article:

In a third paper, led by the Danish team and released this week, the many new theories that have been proposed to explain the acceleration of the universe are critically assessed in the face of this new data. Dr. Jesper Sollerman and Dr. Tamara Davis lead the team who show that despite the increased sophistication in cosmological models over the last century the best model to explain the acceleration remains one that was proposed by Einstein back in 1917

You see, back in 1917, Einstein wrote the General Theory of Relativity. At the time he didn't realize that the universe was expanding, and because experimentation was not agreeing with his theory, he needed a cosmological constant (that he labeled lambda) to explain the differences between theory and experimentation. In other words, he got as far as he could go with the theory and put a label on what was 'left over'. Once it was discovered that the universe was expanding at an increasing rate, he took back his constant, and apologized for the 'biggest blunder' of his career. However, it was not recognized at the time that his cosmological constant would actually become explainable in terms of energy that we know about.
Let's skip ahead in the article:

In modern terms the cosmological constant is viewed as a quantum mechanical phenomenon called the 'energy of the vacuum'. In other words, the energy of empty space. It is this energy that is causing the universe to accelerate. The new data shows that none of the fancy new theories that have been proposed in the last decade are necessary to explain the acceleration. Rather, vacuum energy is the most likely cause and the expansion history of the universe can be explained by simply adding this constant background of acceleration into the normal theory of gravity.

Why don't people use their brains?

The Internet brings with it a humongous library of experiences and knowledge captured over thousands of years. It brings it right to your work desk, your home office, your cell phone and your laptop at Starbucks. Why don't people use it?
Today, this news article about a woman who died from "water intoxication" hit the front page of Digg.

I'll bet you didn't know that you could die from drinking too much water, did you? If you didn't, try this little experiment. Go to Google and type "can you die from drinking too much water" into the search bar. Try reading a selection from the first 5-10 hits you pull up. Now, with that knowledge in hand, do you think it's safe to hold a contest like the one held by 107.9 The End?

If the radio station had bothered to take just 10 seconds to check into the potential health hazards, instead of leaving it up to their rabid adoring fans to know beforehand about the risks, this tragedy could have been avoided. Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

Devil's Advocate and the iPhone

By now, you've heard of the Apple iPhone (or whatever they end up calling it after Cisco is done suing them). One of my readers (Yes, I have one!) asked what I think about the iPhone. Having nothing better to write today, I thought I'd expound on the pros and cons as I see them.

Why they'll sell:


• It's an Apple product. Brand loyalty amongst the Apple crowd is religious.


• It's a 'next generation' iPod. If you have money to burn, you get a phone with your iPod. Sure it will have less space than your iPod, but who really listens to 20,000 songs?!?!


• It's really cool looking. Nice interface, very nicely done user interface.


• It will just work. This is the Apple way. Whatever the device can do, it will work without too much trouble. You won't have to tweak it or know what IMAP is just to make it read your email.


• Partnerships with Yahoo and Google will make people go ga-ga over it. The integrated services that will be available on the phone should be pretty cool.


Why you'll be disappointed:


• $599 and a 2 year contract?!? Ouch. Buyers remorse will set in once you find out what you can't do with it and that you're stuck for the next 2 years with a device whose leading edge is lost to fast-paced competition.


• Slow network connectivity. Yes, it will speak Wi-Fi, but unless you live in a free wi-fi city, this will just mean it's fast when you're home or at work, when a desktop or laptop will be more convenient to use. Until 3G comes along, Internet browsing on a phone is an exercise in boredom. It's too slow to actually be useful, and the network connectivity breaks too often during a commute.


• No support for Open application development. Apple said it will run OS X, but it won't REALLY. The phone is going to run a minimalist version of OS X, just like Windows CE or Windows Mobile isn't really Windows XP, but looks like it. If you really want to gain access to hundreds of free applications, wait for the linux-based open source smartphone OpenMoko


• No expandable memory. 8GB is smaller than your iPod, so already you're going to have to cut back on your library, but now add your pictures and applications...I have an iTunes phone that takes miniSD cards, so changing up my song library is done with a quick click/pop/click. It's going to take effort to change out your library on the iPhone.


• No built in GPS. Again, the OpenMoko solution will have GPS built in to it. The device probably won't be as plug and play as the iPhone right away, but it will be more useful out of the box.


• No support for Blackberry Enterprise Server. The iPod won't replace your Blackberry if your company is so nervous about email security that they've invested in RIM's technology.