Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Blog

  • Bend snow!

    Snow! It’s coming down pretty good, as I’m sure all the Bendites know by now—though I think Rhys will be especially pleased. It’s coming down pretty good; I’m downtown, and looking out the window I’m seeing an inch or so, I think. Driving is pretty awful right now; normally I go home for lunch but I may be staying in the office for lunch for the next few days. (I already went home today; that’s how I know it’s awful.)

    And I know it’s technically not the first snow of the season, but to my mind, it’s the first significant snow of the season, and that counts more. :)

  • Ten rules for web startups

    Evan Williams has posted Ten Rules for Web Startups that’s sure to generate a lot of linkage and conversation. (He’s the guy that created Blogger.) Very good stuff. And laced with irony; like so:

    Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names. How many blogging companies have “blog” in their name, RSS companies “feed,” or podcasting companies “pod” or “cast”? Rarely are they the ones that stand out.

    Uhmmm… Blogger comes to mind. :)

    Combine this list with the TechCrunch wishlist that I posted about previously and things could start to get interesting.

  • The TechCrunch wishlist

    TechCrunch lists some companies they’d like to see move into the online space, kind of a wishlist of Web 2.0 technologies. The list is making the rounds on various tech blogs like it’s the Second Coming (which I can’t figure out, it’s not that revolutionary a list), and while overall it’s a decent read, I do have one point of contention:

    2. Blog/website Email Lists

    People can visit my site, and get the content via RSS, but I know of no quality service to allow people to subscribe to my site via email.

    …I want people to have the option of getting an email every post, every day, or every week.

    I also want to know that I and I alone control these email addresses so that they will not under any circumstances be misused. If I change services, I want to have an easy export feature to take these with me (OPML would be nice).

    I also want access to real time stats. The number of emails, type of subscription, how often they are opened and what things are being clicked on.

    And users need a very easy way to stop the emails.

    I’m willing to pay for this. Probably as much as $20 per month. A free version should be offered too that’s add supported and maybe doesn’t have the analytics.

    I read this and I thought, “Uh, hello? The 1990s called, and wants its listserv back.”

    Seriously, why the hell would anyone want to receive website updates via email these days? That just seems so backward-thinking.

    On the other hand, there’s a couple of the other items that I like: Portable reputations, and tailored local offers via RSS.

    And Richard MacManus follows up with a similar post, and in particular I like his first idea: more Web 2.0 products for eBooks. I’m not sure specifically what he has in mind for this, but I have some ideas. None that I’m gonna share here, though. :)

  • The Brew Site is a source for Topix.net news

    This is very cool: The Brew Site is being used as a news source for Topix.net, a news aggregator site that pulls news from sources all over the web—and just added blogs recently as a source. I saw my Stone Age Beer article show up on the Topix.net Beer News page (screen grabbed below).

    I don’t know why, but this seems to add a feeling of legitimacy to this whole blogging thing. :)

    Screen grab from Topix.net showing The Brew Site as a news source

  • New cell phone

    One of the things we did over the weekend (Friday night, actually) was get new cell phones. I had but one criteria: a camera phone. So I ended up getting a Motorola V330, camera and all. Sweet!

    Now I need to dust off that Flickr account and figure out how to email pictures to it, so I can start including them in my blog like the cool kids are doing.

  • Testing blog services

    I see today that the new WordPress.com free blog service went live. It’s a hosted setup, just like Blogger. Interesting, so I decided, what the hell, I’ve got a few minutes before I leave for lunch, so I just set up free blogs on both WordPress and Blogger.

    Why? Well, to test out the various services, and see how they work. I’ve always done the blogging thing from the ground up, writing and maintaining my own software, so I’m curious as to how well the free services work. And it makes me more of an expert in blogging.

    Actually, I’ve used WordPress before, in setting up my mom’s blog, so I’m already a bit familiar with it. So far the online service is very similar.

    First impressions—WordPress’s service is easier to use than Blogger’s. Especially for non-techie types; to add links in the sidebar, Blogger requires that you edit the HTML of the site template itself, whereas WordPress gives you their easy link management interface to do so.

  • Scooby, again

    Scooby's at the Front Door: Warning label

  • Interactive fiction

    Every once in awhile, I duck into the world of interactive fiction (IF; also known as the world of “text adventures,” for those of you who are appropriately old-school), one of my all-time favorite computer game genres, to get an idea of what’s new in the field and what’s been happening. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read that Wikipedia link; it gives a much better summary than I could and goes into fantastic detail.)

    I love interactive fiction, going way back—we had a bunch of Infocom games when I was a kid and for my money, those were some of the best computer games around, bar none (still are, to a large extent). My two favorite Infocom games are “Planetfall” and “The Lurking Horror,” though of those two I only ever finished “Planetfall”… but I digress.

    Infocom games were the shizzle (who says that anymore?), but I even enjoyed simpler text adventures, and even crafted a few of my own, in Commodore 64 BASIC. I actually designed, on paper, many more text adventures than ever made it to the computer; this is the same love of creating/world building that drives my desire to write fiction for a living, among other things.

    Anyway, back to the here and now. Interactive fiction exists today in a kind of unique space; here’s what the Wikipedia article says about it:

    …interactive fiction no longer appears to be commercially viable, but a constant stream of new works is produced by an online interactive fiction community, using freely available development systems… these systems allowed anyone with sufficient time and dedication to create a game, and caused a growth boom in the online interactive fiction community.

    Today, the games created by enthusiasts of the genre regularly surpass the quality of the original Infocom games, and a number of yearly competitions and awards are given out to the best games in the field….

    Yes, strange to say, there is a small but thriving community surrounding this arcane game form. None of them do it for the money—okay, maybe some who enter the competition for the cash prize ($500) do—which is what makes it truly remarkable (nearly everything about it is free—the games, the programs to play them, the authoring tools, the documentation—everything). They do it for a love of the craft.

    What’s weird is this week, the Wall Street Journal Online published an article on text adventures: Keeping a Genre Alive. Total coincidence; in fact, I was checking out the IF sites before I saw the article. That’s kind of a freaky wavelength. At any rate, it’s a bit of a look-down-the-nose take on the genre and IF community, but it’s not all bad.

    So, having “rediscovered” interactive fiction (and downloading and checking out the latest authoring tools), writing some will be added to my perpetual list of Things I’d Like To Do But Don’t Have The Time For. This like many other interests will fall off the list at some point (probably in the near future) and then be re-added when I rediscover it again. It’s a big list. I’ll post it sometime.

  • Dumbing down literature

    Does this sound like a good idea?

    Woe un2mnkind! The text message is trying to summarise the great poet John Milton and a respected academic thinks this may be a smart new way to teach literature.

    A company offering mobile phones to students has hired Professor John Sutherland, professor emeritus of English Literature at University College London, to offer subscribers text message summaries and quotes from literary classics.

    The hope is that messages in the truncated shorthand of mobile phones will help make great literature more accessible.

    So butchering the classics into text-messaging shorthand that are barely understandable will make them more accessible? Oh, this is so, so wrong.

    First of all, there’s no “teaching” of literature going on here; you might as well be getting summaries of last night’s episode of “Lost”—only reading “MadwyfSetsFyr2Haus” would not entice me to pick up Jane Eyre.

    Second of all, what does a professor emeritus of English Literature even know about text-messaging shorthand? Jeez, I don’t know much, but the examples they give seem contrived even to me.

    Third, what self-respecting teen would subscribe to this service? Here’s a hint—those of us who, as teens, were into literature and could quote from various works really, really weren’t a part of that crowd. If you wanted to be part of that crowd, well, you wouldn’t be getting literature on your phone, as it were.

    Via Slashdot.

    Update 11/17: CNN has a better article which has more on the pushback against the service.

  • Geekiest. Music. Ever.

    Okay, this will permanently brand me as the geekiest dork ever (I fully expect a “geek” comment from Shannon), but perusing WinAmp’s SHOUTcast Radio list today, I found the ultimate station:

    …wait for it…

    Commodore 64 remixes. From SLAY Radio.

    Yes, you read that correctly. Commodore 64 remixes.

    I’ve been letting it play in the background. It totally kicks ass.

    This strikes me as being a real Long Tail kind of thing.