October 2006 Archives

There are a couple of things in my head that is just bubbling under the surface of my brain - just wanting to burst out splattering my work desk, monitor, keyboard, stationery with sticky gooey brain juice.

I've been writing up on some articles that I wanted to publish, and it's currently stored in a Thought in my otak. I've not time to finish them up at present because I'm torn between visiting and participating in BAR, spending time with my wife, writing on my blog and finishing up my latest little side project (I can't tell you as yet). I'm favouring the latter at present, because it will eventually help me earn some (semi)passive income, and therefore gets the bulk of my attention.

But there are some compelling stuff that I wanted to explore, plus some general thoughts about weak teammates, jealous teammates, difficult customers, the importance of well-honed people skills in dealing with everyday situations.

Damn, that did sound like weaseling oneself out of a tight spot, doesn't it?

The impending arrival of Vista, and why it doesn't bother the Linux crowd (now this is something that's incredibly interesting).

I've mentioned to friends and family, online and offline, about what makes a good blog. I think I know, but that doesn't mean that I have executed the formula as well as I would have liked for rambleville. And there are various reasons for that (I wouldn't get into that), but I think there is a unifying focus in my articles now. A theme.

Just like Dilbert didn't start out as a satire on tech-vs-business corporate culture right off the bat, rambleville evolves as it finds it's voice. One thing I have done from the beginning is a conscious decision not to make this into an online diary - reporting on my daily activities. rambleville is not a reflection of my life as I live it, but more of a reflection of my life as I think it, as I'm living it. That is to say, what I think about things as I encounter them in my daily life, whether at work, leisure, pleasure or thoughts.

So. I've inadvertently spent more time than I had wanted to on this entry, and I must be back to work. PoP is patiently waiting for me, and is anxiously eager to meet the world.

What is cooler than watching a Romulan warship cloak in your favourite episode of Star Trek? Why, being able to cloak yourself, of course!

Apparently we're another step closer to achieving the ability to cloak objects. At this moment the technology is pretty damn hot (literally), but eventually when they get this down to pat I'd think it's be pretty damn cool.

Of course, if we extrapolate - what the possibility of this actually being available in the hands of the masses is another question. Even if it were available, what would be the sort of legislation and governance that needs to be developed just to keep this thing from going out of control.

More likely when they perfected this technology, we'd never hear about it again. Military uses, I'd imagine.

This little reading I found is utterly fascinating - Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Virtual economies attract real-world tax attention.

I remember my attention was first brought to this a long time back, when Slashdot ran a story about how EverQuest's economy equals that of a small country, with it's own GDP! This is incredible - the first thing I remember thinking about is the fact that there is this group of people who wrote and distributed an online game, and basically created an economy that crossed the boundaries from virtual to real. If you extrapolate that, these people actually created real jobs for gamers - those who are willing to take it to the extreme, of course.

All someone has to do is invest a significant amount of time online in this virtual world, and in the case of Everquest or Worlds of Warcraft for example, keep leveling up the player character and pick up ever more rare, powerful and special objects. Once accomplished, all this gamer has to do is to find a willing buyer for the items (or even the character itself), and voila! Real world transactions.

Theoretically, someone could actually make a living out of this. Well, probably not at the current scale, no, but a virtual world where people hang out just like they do in real-life, like the Metaverse in Stephenson's Snow Crash, would make this very viable.

It's not hard to see why there are fanatical gamers go berserk when their virtual characters are killed online - the time they invested simply vanishes... In fact, I remember there was a case in South Korea (I think it was, anyway - for scary gamer anecdotes, say South Korea and you're probably not too far wrong) where a gamer killed in real life the person who 'killed' his online game character.

I'm really killing myself here.

http://img108.imageshack.us/img108/6285/image010bn7.jpg

I also bought Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott.

This constant book-buying has got to stop. I will write something about addiction a little later.

One of my favourite authors, Neil Gaiman is up on CrankyGgeeks. Neil talks about the usual things, but there were two things that fascinated me:
1. How Neil said that he thinks having books online while concurrently selling it in bookstores are okay, and his response when Farmer asked him why he doesn't do it himself. I think I could have answered that one, but then I'm not Neil, and obviously I've less of a risk of shooting myself in the foot and pissing of millions of fans around the world.

2. That CrankyGeeks is a weak IP show. It's really more of the same from the TWiT family of personalities. It's nepotism. They are flooding the internet with the same content from the same points of view, but via different channels. It's an entirely new topic in itself, one that I will talk about soon.

Damn, that reminds me... I need to talk about Sally Yeh.

This article in the Internation Herald Tribune entitled As books go online, publishers run for cover talks about an underlying issue about ebooks, and gives us a preview into why ebooks really matter.

If you don't know why ebooks will take over the world, I'll explain my position. Soon. Wait for it.

Magazines are an anomaly. Books are simple and direct - they are bricks made up of pages, and you store them on the shelves, proudly displaying them for personal gratification (or chuck it under the bed. Whatever).

Newspapers are also simple and direct. They are time sensitive, and when you're done with them, you're pretty much certain they are heading for the recyclers (or the bin. Whatever).

Magazines are strange. They are a breed that is a cross between books and newspapers. Magazines have articles in there that are either so good, or so relevant, or so timeless, that they should be stored and saved for posterity. They also have stuff that will expire with time, much like newspaper articles. But, you can't buy them, read them once and toss them out just like that the way you do with newspapers - they aren't exactly cheap. So what do you do with them?

At present, this very question is as difficult to answer as the meaning of life.

I've just been forced to do some housecleaning (stop sniggering), and found that I have to grapple with something that I have been procrastinating with for some time - what to do with my stacks of magazines. Stacks of them - Hardware Magazine, Men's Health, Personal Money, various digital photography magazine, PC Gamer, Reader's Digest, National Geographic Magazine, TIME, Linux Format, plus other countless magazines that were running an item or two of interest - lying on the floor and stored in A4 paper boxes. All screaming for attention.

Sometime back, I told myself no more frivolous magazine buying. I successfully cut it down to only 1 monthly magazine that I buy with regularity: Hardware Magazine. I let my hair down on occassion (TIME magazine specials, various tech magazines), but on the whole, I've done well.

My past is staring at me now.

I've 4 tall, stout, ebony wood shelves that I'm terribly proud of, but they hold books. Putting magazines on them seem like... travesty. I can't chuck them onto card boxes either. You can't see the contents, and the mags are stored there until they rot or the boxes do. Worse, when you finally open the darn things, they are relics from a different era (much like my Internet Magazines from published by Jaring a million years ago. The stuff they talk about is so out of context now, it's like going back in a time capsule).

What do I do? What do you do?

I'll shove them off the room at the moment, leaving my comics collection that is still sitting in my library - a brown carton box that is so out of place.

Oh wait, that's another problem... sigh.

Another trip to the warehouse sale allowed me to get these: