I have a cold. This started last night, about an hour before bedtime. My sinuses went from “normal” to “wtf?” in no time flat. Now that groggy, headachy, sore-throaty, chilled-to-the-bone sort of floating misery. Hooray.

This is one of the mixed blessings of working out of the home, I suppose. At my old job, I’d just call in sick and stay home playing World of Warcraft all day, taking sporadic naps and just making sure I got lots of tea. Now that I work from home, however, if I’m well enough to play World of Warcraft, I’m physically also capable of working. Mental fitness is a whole other story, of course. I’m already starting to think I’d be best to just get a NeoCitran in me and call it a day.

Later I’ll adjourn to the sofa with the laptop and some tea for a healthy dose of Food Network background noise.

Check this out: iWork Community. I love it when people share stuff. Not much there now, but I could see that becoming a valuable resource over time. I need to make a new template for invoices, if nothing else.

Places I didn’t know about:

• http://planet.clearairturbulence.org/
• http://live.linuxchix.org/
• http://www.bloglines.com
• http://planetplanet.org/
• http://www.livejournal.com/users/dria_rss/
• http://www.blogsnow.com/
• http://blo.gs/

Etc etc etc. It always disarms me when I found out that people I don’t know actually read my various ramblings, but hey, I guess that’s what the interweb is for.

Apparently a lot of you are running old versions of Firefox. You should go update.

Rehashing someone else’s journalism does not make you a journalist. That is all.

This article is funny, and educational. I’d really like to see these guys write a whole bunch of basic tutorials about design like that — they’re entertaining, very useful, and educational without being preachy.

Also, they poke fun at Jakob Neilsen.

1) Sin City is great. Go see it. I’m already looking forward to getting the DVD and watching it again, then watching the commentary track. Usually I don’t care about commentary tracks, but this one will be interesting. It’s really a piece of art.

2) There are a lot of people on the internet who seem to care way too much about really stupid things. The examples of this are endless, so I won’t bother going into specifics. Mostly I just want to say that a lot of folks just need to get a grip.

3) There are a lot of people on the internet who care a great deal about things that aren’t so stupid. Sifting these few delicious grains out of the deluge of chaff is hard. I’m becoming increasingly impatient with the internet and the content it provides. We need some sort of system that can help with this. Google is good at what it does, but it does not help sort by quality. Technorati and Blogdex and other similar services also suffer from the quantity-over-quality disease. There has to be a better way.

4) House M.D. is a good TV show. You should watch it. Hopefully it won’t get cancelled.

5) The new Battlestar Galactica, I’ve decided after long consideration, is the best sci-fi television series in history. I’m not kidding. It blows all the Star Treks clear out of the water, and I actually liked some of those. Firefly is the only other sci-fi series I can think of that even comes close.

6) I am sad that Enterprise has been cancelled, but not nearly so sad as I was about Firefly.

7) I wish the Max Headroom Show would just come out on DVD already. Come on, people.

8) Over the past couple of years I’ve realized that geek culture is now mainstream. Games, Comic Books, Bad TV Shows, Computers, and all that. I guess there were a lot more of us holed up in our parents’ basements playing Space Invaders, reading X-Men, programming NPC-generators on our Commodore 64s, and watching Kung-Fu than I thought. I wonder what constitutes “geek culture” now that will become mainstream when today’s young geek hits her 30s? I bet I wouldn’t recognize it if it hit me in the face.

9) I like ecto.

10) RSS feeds change how I use the internet. I am not entirely sure I like these changes. With RSS feeds, I do not browse, I scan. I also find myself relying on them, when there are a large number of sites out there that do not have them or to which I haven’t subscribed. Push technology just ain’t all that, no more now than it was in 1997. There’s a lesson in here somewhere about quantity over quality again, and how the sheer quantity of poorly-filtered (it’s not really unfiltered any more) information forces us to skim reams and reams of garbage simply because we don’t have time to dig through it all to find the stuff that’s actually worth reading.

11) We need much, much better filters. Also, librarians.

Apparently all the cool kids are starting to buy Macs. In my experience, this is true. Many of the people I hold near and dear are now using Macs as their primary computers. Many other people I know really, really want a Mac (likely a Mac mini to start). These are not purely arty types, either — we’re talking some high end hackers, here.

I am a recent convert, of course. Once upon a time, not so long ago, I said something along the lines of, “I hate iPods“. The problem, of course, was that I had never actually used one. Then, I did.

It was at that point that I realized that computers, portable gadgetry, and the software that runs it all doesn’t have to suck. This was a major revelation. Like suddenly experiencing a headache-free day after a lifetime of migraines. Now, of course, I love iPods. I also love iTunes. (I’m currently using iTunes to listen to David Byrne’s radio station.) I own my very own iPod (40g 4th generation) now. I have come alarmingly close to buying both an iPod mini and an iPod shuffle, but have managed to resist so far. If they ever issue an orange 6gb iPod mini, I will probably cave in.

This is where the halo effect kicks in (iHalo). Shortly after buying my iPod, I found myself buying a G5 PowerMac. A few months later, when I was changing jobs (finally), and was asked what sort of laptop I needed, I giddily requested a PowerBook. And thus, the conversion is complete. We are a pure Apple household at this point, save for two legacy Windows machines we keep around for gaming (but use less and less).

It’s not just because iPods are cool, of course. Macs are solid hardware running UNIX with a phenomenally well-designed and easy-to-use front end. They really are the best of all possible worlds, unless you start wading around in the ideological mosh pit surrounding free software. I’m not going to go there, however, since right now I’m just happy to have a computer that doesn’t suck.

Anyhow, if someone asked me what computer I would recommend, be it for hardcore hackery or simple web surfing, I would strongly suggest getting a Mac. Even more so now with Mac OSX Tiger on the way. Oh boy!

Looks like Matthew Good brought his weblog back. It was sort of gone for a while, but now it’s back. I like Matt’s music. He also gets angry about things that people should generally get angry about. Also, he looks like Gordon Freeman.

I just stumbled across a random Dungeons and Dragons reference on the interweb, and it reminded me of something that I’ve been looking forward to since I was a D&D-playin’ C-64 hacking teenaged geekette: The ability to quickly and easily create modules for a computer version of D&D.

Once upon a time I, and legions of my like-minded brethren, believed that Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights was going to be all that and more. NWN did ship with a full editor suite, and the community has, over the past 3-4 years, produced some amazing modules and add-ons for the game. The editor, however, misses the mark for the “quickly” and “easily” parts of the equation by a very wide margin. I have spent altogether too many hours trying to create modules with the editor, but it is so clunky, anger-inducing, and esoteric that I have never been mule-headed enough to actually finish one. I strongly suspect that I’m not alone, and that’s with a decent technical/programming background. The best and most creative DMs I’ve known are not so technically minded, so the barrier to entry for those who would most benefit from such a tool is astronomically high.

So, the great promise of NWN never really bore fruit. People still use the editor, and more people do benefit from the results, but even so, the modules are prone to bugs (oh god, the bugs), crashing, lost save games, lost progress, and so much more. In the end, it’s a sad and frustrating system.

Here we are in 2005, surrounded by technology on all sides, and we’re still waiting for a game system that really puts the creative tools to make cool games in the hands of those who would best be able to use them.

Expanding on that, I look forward to the day where someone puts out a system that allows fledgling game-designer wannabes (like myself) to create persistent, massively-multiplayer game worlds. Sort of a NWN-like editor system (only significantly less painful to use) only for designing whole worlds and game systems that we can then host online. The “massively” part doesn’t even have to be that massive. Even if a world only hosts a maximum of 500 concurrent connections, that would be a good start. I strongly suspect this is a lot harder than I think, and I’m pretty sure it’s awfully hard. Someday someone will pull it off, and upon that day I will rejoice.

I’m also looking forward to the day where TV is less stupid and more like iTunes. I would happily pay for a service (either subscription, or piecemeal) that would let me download and view commercial-free TV shows on demand. Gleefully, I would pay for such a thing. Our current alternative, which is becoming very popular, is to not watch TV at all, but instead wait for TV shows to be released on DVD. We buy lots of TV shows on DVD and then watch them on our own schedule without the annoyance of having to fastforward through commercials. I’m hoping some giant mega-corporation comes up with a TV-on-demand service like this in the near future. There is TV out there worth watching, but the current delivery mechanism sucks.

Finally (for now): I’m looking forward to someone (probably Microsoft, since they own the rights) doing something interesting with the Shadowrun franchise. Think “Matrix Online” only gritter, cooler, and with 100% less Keanu Reeves. Mmm. And street shamans. Booyah.

Three stories just jumped out at me (via RSS feed through ThunderBird).

First, Lawmakers: Hands off Web logs.

“Curtailing blogs and other online publications will dampen the impact of new voices in the political process and will do a disservice to the millions of voters who rely on the Web for original, insightful political commentary,” said the Online Coalition, a group of bloggers and online activists.

Second, Apple Wins Trade Secrets Legal Dispute.

A California judge on Friday ruled that three independent online reporters may have to divulge confidential sources in a lawsuit brought by Apple Computer Inc., ruling that there are no legal protections for those who publish a company’s trade secrets.
…
Free speech advocates and attorneys for the reporters criticized the ruling, insisting that all journalists should enjoy the same legal protections as reporters in mainstream newsrooms.

Third, and not related to the first two, AOL Eavesdrops, Grants Itself Permission To Steal Your AIM Conversations.

Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.

Off the cuff, underinformed commentary?

First, I applaud the democratisation of the media. Big fan. With that, however, is the caveat: buyer beware. For every weblog out there that’s actually worth reading, there are 10,000 that suck (including this one). Informed reading is becoming increasingly important in this age of sound bites and 11 o’clock sensationalism. For example, don’t believe everything you read on Slashdot. Hoo boy.

Second, having a weblog doesn’t make you a journalist. If someone told me something he shouldn’t have because of an NDA, I would be a fool to think that I could claim the same protections as journalists if I published it on this website. Anyone with a computer and a phone line can set up a weblog in about 30 seconds, and that sure as hell shouldn’t afford them the same protections as accredited journalists. That seems to go against my favouring of the democratisation of the media, but not really. I just think that anyone who is going to claim to be a journalist better not be doing so just to save themselves some legal grief. Journalists have rights, yes, but they also have some responsibilities. If webloggers are going to claim the title of “journalist”, I think they should require some form of accreditation, if only so they understand that there are ethics and responsibilities involved.

Third, well, to the third I can only say, “thank god for IRC”. Might be time to set up a secure private network somewhere.

WikiNews, Wiktionary, WikiQuote, and, of course, the ubiquitous Wikipedia.

It’s some good stuff out there. I use various bits of it on a daily basis.