13 Mar 2007
Today is a good day. Tecmo Bowl was released on the Wii Virtual Console. Seriously. It's awesome. Most of the player names were removed, but it's the same game as I played 1000 hours of as a kid. I'd forgotten how simple and addictive the game was. So awesome. So, so awesome.
Speaking of the Wii, thanks to a couple of cool tools called Mii Transfer and the Mii Editor, I was able to transfer my Mii character to my computer and output a couple of decent images. Hopefully, that'll let me eventually finish the overhaul of my main page that I'm working on. Maybe this weekend, if I get some time.
If I'm not playing Tecmo Bowl. Lawrence Taylor is a beast.
04 Mar 2007
The last week has been extremely hectic. I'd thought I'd kind of caught up on life in general last weekend and early last week: getting a bunch of laundry done, paying bills, getting the brakes in my car fixed, grabbing some cheapish plane tickets out for my friend's bachelor party.
The looming proverbial monkey wrench, however, was my Tuesday visit to Cambridge for jury duty. I've been called once before, ended up sitting in a room in Fitchburg for a few hours before getting sent home. I was hoping that Tuesday would be similar--grab the T over to Kendall, hang out for a few hours, get sent home and have a quiet day.
All pretenses that I might have a quiet day were scuttled when, within an hour of being there, I was in a courtroom being asked if I was fit to serve on a double-murder trial that would last approximately a month (if you've been paying any attention to the news, you know which trial it is). I didn't get impaneled on that jury, but an hour later, I was in another courtroom, and sitting in the jury box for a trial expected to last a week long.
At first, I was a little annoyed, but I sort of realized that if I was all that upset, I was no better than all of the people I scoffed at as they repeated lame excuse after lame excuse to get out of sitting. Somehow their time is more valuable than mine. That's just generally douchebaggy.
So I don't mind sitting so much. The only tough part is that I'm working half-days so that I don't have to burn any vacation time (though that might change this week, since I'm getting run down). Mornings in Cambridge, back on the T, drive to Burlington for work. It makes for long, somewhat stressful days, but it also means I haven't had a whole lot of time to work on some of the projects I've wanted to.
I have started playing around with the layout of the blog a bit. If you notice, the right sidebar is reorg'd a little bit, with a little widget that lets you see my shared items from Google Reader. I've slowly started formulating the layout for the new and improved ryantoohil.com (I'm playing with CSS as a bit of an experiment). I also revamped my little basketball statistics tool with a nicer layout and look.
The MacBook Pro has come in handy recently, as I can sit comfortably, get inspired, and quickly whip something up, rather than having to overcome the inertia and walk into my somewhat cold office. It's also going to come in handy for jury duty, should I end up as an alternate, because I'll have a bunch of time to kill while my fellow jurors deliberate.
Hopefully, I'll have some more time in the next week or so to play around with some of my ideas (the home page, maybe another podcast, some posts here). The trial is expected to wrap up mid-week, so hopefully I've only got a couple more days of back and forth.
There's some fun news: Ben Folds is playing with the Pops orchestra on May 9th. Tickets go onsale tomorrow, which means I'm going to have find someone to buy me tickets since I'll be listening to testimony and not near a computer to get a couple of seats. Since I missed on The Arcade Fire (who are playing the next night at the Orpheum), I'd like to get a seat. I'll have to work my mojo tomorrow.
24 Feb 2007
I've been reading a lot of search engine stuff in my feed reader recently. I used to be deep into the search engine optimization knowledge, but at some point, I realized that it was, at some level, just scummy. Not the idea that you'd understand how engines work and do the little things to make your site rank appropriately. No, it was the other stuff, like link exchanges and link buying and the general dishonesty that comes along with that. When I go to a search engine, I want to actually find what I'm looking for, not have to dig through a bunch of crappy sites that think they deserve my traffic.
It got worse when AdSense came along, and it got even worse as Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and the other social networking-type sites got big. Now, not only were people gaming the engines, they were throwing up lame articles and gaming other systems to get both the search juice and the traffic. Their spammy site gets the best of both worlds, and the rest of us deal with more spam--just not of the email variety.
This week was a big to-do about one of these SEO/SMO guys who got banned from now-Yahoo! owned blog widget because he was posting how to hack it (and, quite frankly, being an all-around douche). So, a guy who games the system for a living was bitching about being banned from a free tool that he'd been posting how to hack. Topping it off, a whole bunch of other SEO folks (many of whom I've been reading for a few years now) hopped on and defended the guy.
I just don't get it.
I understand that the whole idea behind this widget (MyBlogLog) and behind other sites (like Digg, Flickr, etc.) is community. You build a community and you get more than just the functionality of the widget, you get the benefit/fun of the community. It's all so Webtwopointohy.
Finally, a voice of reason came through my feed reader. I'm hoping we're reaching a tipping point. I'm hoping we're reaching the point where every sales and marketing guy out there looking to score some quick money doesn't look at every new site and widget as something to game and make money. Now, I'm not against making money. I'd love to create a site that has some value to people and figure out a way (ads or not) to make some money. But the group of folks who exist solely to put up a site with ads, get it on Digg, and get enough sheep to click on it need to go away. They used to be called spammers, and it's about time we go back to calling them that.
23 Feb 2007
Lost is nearing the midpoint of its third season, and I'm nearing the endpoint of caring. After a phenomenal first season, and a second season that meandered but eventually built up steam to an interesting season finale, the third season has been disappointment after disappointment. While the Others are interesting, the pieces of the story, the revelations, the so-called answers have been so incongruous and so minor that it seems rather obvious the writers and network are stretching the story out to ridiculous lenghts.
Every article during the first two seasons talked about not wanting to be The X-Files and never answer major questions. Well, at least The X-Files answered something each season. Each mythology episode of The X-Files at least furthered the overall story. I just don't feel like Lost is moving in that direction. The backstory device is running thin the 3rd, 4th, 5th time they revisit a characters backstory, revealing such intriguing story items as "the meaning of Jack's tattoos" and "how Locke lived on a drug farm."
There's a chance that Lost's uninterrupted run will lead to the show hitting its stride again, but I've got less faith this time, given that at least the "bad" episodes in season two were fun to watch. There's just not been anything particularly great this season.
Lost is still ok. It's not as good as Veronica Mars. It might even be worse than the exposition-heavy Heroes. Where those shows differ from Lost is that they're at least advancing their stories in ways that make you want to turn in each week. Lost, to me, is falling to 24 territory: a show where I could just read a recap of an episode and how it fits and be happy enough to have not spent the hour wondering why the show isn't better.
I do think, though, that like The OC, if the show doesn't pick up by the end of its third season, I'm not sure I'll be there for the start of the fourth.
21 Feb 2007
Finally, Episode 3 of the Podcast To Be Named Later. The sound quality is craptastic since I used the mic built into my MacBook.
However, you'll hear some awesome music by:
Hallelujah the Hills
Taxpayer
and ...
Dear Leader.
Mostly Dear Leader. Like a lot of Dear Leader.
I'll put up a full track listing later.
20 Feb 2007
It's been a busy few weeks. The biggest news is probably my latest purchase: I got my first non-PC in the form of a MacBook Pro. I'd been looking at getting a laptop for a while, mostly because my existing laptop is old, underpowered, has a half-working keyboard, and had been resigned to sitting on my stereo so that I could stream music to it. I couldn't even bring it anywhere, as the battery life was simply miserable.
Working at a web hosting company, spending a majority of my day ssh'd into a Unix box, I'd gotten very comfortable at the command-line again, much like I was back in my college days. Between the command line and the browser, I didn't really use any major Windows applications at the office or at home. I use MS Office, occasionally, but I don't even use that at home (where I use OpenOffice). My PC is still a great box, but it was a glorified game machine.
Taking it one step further, I'd realized how much of my life really is in the browser these days. My mail goes to Gmail; my calendar is Google Calendar; my RSS feed reader is Google Reader. A few years ago I ranted that I couldn't see ever moving completely to a thin client/browser world. Granted, it was in the middle of a major Comcast outage, where they weren't sending any traffic to Yahoo!, which is pretty significant. These days, while there are minor outages, it's rare that I can't get to my data online. When I can't, I can get it via my cell phone (and once Google gets Calendar working on a phone, I'll be pretty much set). Finally, with Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo!) exposing your data in interesting ways (RSS, iCal feeds, private HTML), you can always pull it down into your thick client and access it offline, should you need to.
I've also had a desire to get creative again, whether its restarting the podcast (which will happen), blogging more, working on my website, or just generally brainstorming other ideas, I've needed a way to get untethered from my PC. It's cold in my little office during the winter, and I can't neatly multitask in front of the TV. With most of the creative ideas requiring the authoring of at least a little bit of code, I was looking for a laptop that would let me use my friendly Vim application to hack some HTML, CSS, or Perl.
All that put together lead to me looking at a Mac. Not because they're trendy, but because it's the nicest Unix machine you'll see. OS X is a very pretty, and functional, interface on top of a Unix backend. I can take my laptop to work and scp files from a terminal window to our data center at rates that greatly exdeed anything I can get over FTP. I can pop open a terminal window and quickly turn on apache and mess with some Perl code before I upload it to my website. I can open up GarageBand and pull together a podcast a little more easily than I can in Audacity on the PC. The ability to neatly run Windows in either VMWare or Parallels while inside of OS X is what pushed me over the top. (Actually, it was one of my co-workers showing me IE running in coherence mode inside Paralells, which meant he could have IE next to Firefox next to Safari on his desktop, allowing him to test 3 major browsers at the same time. Very cool.)
So, I pulled the trigger and picked up a MacBook Pro. It took me a little while to get used to the differences between the Mac and Windows, but the learning curve to being productive is really shallow. I've nearly replicated all of the functionality of my Windows PC, but with the ability to do it from anywhere in my house. I can listen to music streaming from my iTunes library while I type this up, waiting for Heroes to buffer up enough on the DVR so that I can watch it without commercials. Soon, I'll probably throw together another episode of my podcast, which I can do significantly more easily now that I don't have to start up a bunch of different applications (I'm still figuring out how to make the built-in mic work, as it seems to record to quietly).
So, I hope that my new found freedom will allow me to be a bit more prolific. With work and general life stuff, I've had to cut back my posting at The House That Dewey Built -- I've sort of just become the tech guy and will let Jeff and the new folks concentrate on posting (though, I might have to throw something up there when the feeling hits me). I've got plans to at least throw something up at ryantoohil.com and let it be my testing ground for learning more CSS and JavaScript. I'm feeling a bit more invigorated, which is nice.
I actually want to build my home page around my little Mii off of my Wii. I haven't gotten a good screenshot yet, but here's an approximation. And yes, I'm a huge dork.
Hopefully, this desire to be creative will last. I'm going to try to get something up most days this week. I'm thinking that I'll finally revisit the "So you want to have a web site" series. I'm planning on getting up a Dear Leader-centric podcast.
If you're still out there reading, feel free to leave a comment. I'm curious to see how many are actually reading this. Checking my logs, I've got at least two readers in Google Reader (1 is me ...) and 2 in NewsGator. If I was smart, I'd move to FeedBurner so I could track it, but I've got no desire to do that just yet.
That's all for today. Heroes is starting, and I'm hoping that they'll recover from their recent doldrums and put together a fun episode that doesn't smell like fish.
10 Feb 2007
I've got lots of stuff percolating around my brain, but I just haven't had time this week to write any of it down. I'm hoping to get back to a more regular schedule shortly.
In the meantime, I can tell you that I'm very deaf but very giddy after seeing Dear Leader, Taxpayer, and Hallelujah the Hills last night. All three bands were awesome, but Dear Leader stole the show by putting on what may have been their best live show ever ... including a ridiculously good cover of "Born to Run".
Phenom.
27 Jan 2007
After now having at least 2(!) people besides myself using the little Greasemonkey script I wrote to allow quick adding of Evite invites into Google Calendar, I've finally added my script to userscripts. Maybe I'll eventually have 10 people using it. Then I'll be famous. And maybe rich.
22 Jan 2007
The Patriots just lost, ruining what was a pretty good weekend.
Rather than dwell on that, my friend Liz from back at the Reg tagged me with the whole "write 5 things that people don't know about you" meme. So I gotta give it a shot, which isn't easy, given that I'll pretty much share damn near anything with people if they ask me ... or in many cases, even if they ask me not to.
Here goes.
Umm ...
Hmm ...
1)Â Ok, maybe this one. I don't cry easily, but I get watery eyes and throat lumpyness extremely easily. Like, you know, when watching the comeback in Major League. Seriously. In comparison, each time I've broken bones (my nose, my thumb, and my pinky), I didn't even know they were broken for long periods of time (10 minutes, 2 days, and like 1 month, respectively). Not a tear or even a watery eye.
But show me the last 10 minutes of Little Giants and I'll be all choked up.
Maybe that helps me figure out number 2.
2) I have a pretty high tolerance for pain. I'm not sure if it's some sort of genetic thing, or physiological, or simply my own insanity.
Going back to movies ...
3) I have no problem with violence in movies, except in two cases: against kids or against animals. You can chop off heads in horror movies, or slice people in half, or have them burned alive, and I generally won't bat an eyelash. Shoot a kid? I'm halfway to shutting off the movie. The last movie I can remember the violated the code was Project X (which I've still never seen the end of). Face/Off came close, but they only killed one kid, so somehow that was ok.
4) I pick. I pick everything. If there's a weird bump, or pimple, or scab on me, I'll find it (usually without even thinking about it) and scratch it off. Don't even realize I'm doing it. I'm just predetermined to seek out a bumpless existence. Worse yet, I do it *to other people.* Seriously.
Hmm ... number five. Let's see.
5) I think I'm abnormally patient or maybe understanding of people who work checkout lines or are waitstaff. Even if they're awful and are ruining my day, I generally can't bring myself to be confrontational or complain. Even if they deserve to be yelled at and punched in the back of the head, I'll generally apologize as if it was my fault and leave them thinking they were in the right.
Maybe I can summarize this one: I'm a giant wussy douche.
Now I'm supposed to tag five other people, but I don't even know five other people with actual blogs, so I'll tag the two I do know: Mindy and Julie. Oh, and I could actually tag Brett, too.
Wow, I've almost completely forgotten about the Patriots losing. Or not. They smell like fish.
16 Jan 2007
So, back before Christmas, Brett had been singing the praises of this little Nintendo DS game called Elite Beat Agents. He described the game exactly as it was: "you tap the screen to the beat of songs and you help these guys like cheer on people to solve ridiculous problems." To which I replied (paraphrased): "Ummm, no thanks. You smell like fish."
Then I tried the game.
And the little light bulb went off in my head. I got it. It all made perfect sense.
Elite Beat Agents is the most fun game I've played in, I don't know, forever. Basically, it's Guitar Hero for the Nintendo DS. The game sets up these little scenarios, like say, two "socialites" getting stranded on a deserted island. Then the "Material Girl" by Madonna starts playing, and you tap along to the beat, hitting these little circles in order, occasionally dragging a circle back and forth over a path. If you tap along in time, you win. If you don't, you lose.
You hear someone describe it, you think it sounds ridiculous. You see someone play it, you get a little intrigued. You play it, you're hooked.
It's one of those games where you get frustrated because you can't get by a song (let's say, "Canned Heat" by Jamiroquai, since that's the one that kicks my arse), but you keep trying, since you get a little further each time. On your 5th try, you finally pick up the beat and you breeze through.
Everything about the game is silly. The song selection ("Sk8er Boi", "YMCA", "Material Girl", "You're the Inspiration"). The scenarios are silly, except one about a girl who's dad DIED and his ghost brings her a teddy bear, which is sooooo out of place in the game that it's awesome.
I can't do it justice. This game is astounding. A Technorati search turned up 4000+ mentions of the game.
You won't understand it until you try it, but to get an idea, check out this YouTube video of the "September" level.