Recently in Ramblings Category

Still mulling over this on.  On other news, the movie Ninja was crap.  I dislike armored ninjas.

There are a couple of things I’m thinking of lately.  Firstly, I want to upgrade the look of this site.  It’s been a while, and I think it’s time to make sure that the look is upgraded to reflect the seriousness of all the objections that I usually make in this place.  Wordpress has premium themes all over the place, and I was shocked to discover that Movable Types doesn’t really have a comparable marketplace.  As I’ve said elsewhere (read: Twitter), if you don’t have people selling stuff on your platform, you’re pretty much toast.  I’ll still keep a look around, but not being incredibly optimistic.

The other thing is I’m thinking of starting a book blog – a site where I’ll chronicle my reading journey.  It’s not a high-falutin review site; it’s not like I’m a thoughtful and prolific reader.  The genesis of this site has more to do with the fact that I’m forgetting things at an alarming rate, particularly on the things that I’ve read, what I felt before, during and after I’ve read them.  The fact that I can only recall one or two scenes from the entire book of Raymond Feist’s Magician (which I did not enjoy), makes it very difficult for me to formulate coherent points to defend my position, not just on this book, or any other that I’ve read.  And no, I don’t think that forgetting the majority of the book is really a point in and of itself.

I dislike the fact that we spend so much time reading, and only a sliver of the knowledge contained from the effort is retained.  I recently read Daniel Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, which is a fabulous book about how we make decisions, why our supposedly random decisions are in effect pretty predictable after all.  The book is endlessly fascinating, but I can’t remember most of what I’ve read, and it’s distressing!  The same with Freakonomics, and will undoubtedly be the same when I read Outliers, or Lolita, or whatever.

So the book blog is primarily a personal journal of what I’ve read, along with stuff that has to do with my reading adventure.  It’s not going to be regularly updated, but that’s ok, since it’s primarily a tool for me to remember stuff.

We’ll see how it goes as the days roll along.  I’ve had this in my head a couple of weeks now, and the task of coming up with a name for the blog is messing with my sleep.  This is an itch I desperately need to scratch soon.

I’ve recently purchased a couple of games from Valve Software’s Steam service.  The service is enormously convenient – a good selection of games, constant stream of special offers, and they make it ridiculously easy to spend.  All well and good.

After a while I started to think about the fact that should the day come when Steam goes out of business, my purchased games go Poof! – as if I had never owned them.  This is because the purchased games themselves are contained within the Steam infrastructure – they are DRM-protected content that I will not be able to access without Steam.

This isn’t new, and we can see this all around us.  Kindle books are tied to Amazon’s device, and can’t be retrieved should Amazon goes out of business.  There are lots of ebooks sold today that are also encrypted in one of the many available DRM-enabled ebook formats (i.e. Microsoft Reader’s LIT, Mobipocket’s .mobi, encrypted .pdf files, etc).  In fact, my ebooks encrypted in the MS Reader format cannot be opened as there’s a problem with the activation process on my Windows Mobile smartphone.  Until recently, music purchased via iTunes cannot be played without the iPod (Apple has not too long ago made the majority of their music files unencumbered with DRM).

This makes me a little nervous.  One could argue I wouldn’t care about the games I’ve purchased by the time Valve goes out of business.  But if they were items which I owned, then at least I had the option to give it to someone, or archive it.

This brings to memory an XKCD strip that struck a chord with me: it’s meaningless to purchase a complete collection of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series on the Kindle.

The only thing that doesn’t come with DRM are actual physical commodities, e.g. dead-tree version of books.  I’ve not sunk in money in this area yet, but the pull is quite irresistible.  Especially for that perpetually-absent-from-storefronts copy of Hemann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game.

Ok, rambling over.

Ok, it’s not a podcast – it’s an NPR radio show.  But I get it weekly via the RSS feed. Anyway, I just wanted to say it’s my guaranteed laugh-a-minute podcast at the moment, and I’m loving it.

Go google it up.

I understand what he’s saying. He’s got a point to put across.  So why did I feel the way Tucker Carlson did it was so blatantly evocative of a simple ‘revenge’ act out towards another who humiliated him?

Summary: Years ago during the 2004 campaign trail, Jon Stewart appeared in CNN’s Crossfire where Carlson was a co-host, and basically told off Carlson that Crossfire was not doing enough to ‘hold politician’s feet to the fire’ and ‘hurting America’.  The clip of Stewart’s attack became an Internet sensation.  Two weeks ago, Stewart had Jim Cramer, a CNBC financial pundit, on the Daily Show and proceeded to rip Cramer up for what Stewart considered to be Cramer’s ‘responsibility’ to the American people to expose the warning signs within the financial industry that is the precursor to today’s financial meltdown. Carlson appeared in CNN after the Cramer-Stewart interview and, uhm, ranted.

Here’s a link to The Huffington Post where Carlson rips into Jon Stewart on CNN’s Reliable Sources.

And here are the clips of Jim Cramer’s interview in the Daily Show which prompted the tirade by Carlson.

Now this is what I call reality TV. 

See for yourselves.

Sure, this is old news already, but hey, it’s still appearing in Reuters’s list of most popular articles.

Chuck Norris has sued Penguin, the publisher of the book "The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 facts about the World's Greatest Human", which lists previously unknown gems such as:

• A cobra once bit Chuck Norris’s leg. After five days of excruciating pain, the cobra died.
• Chuck Norris can charge a cell phone by rubbing it against his beard.
• When an episode of “Walker, Texas Ranger” aired in France, the French surrendered to Chuck Norris just to be on the safe side.
• Chuck Norris was the first person to tame a dinosaur.
• Chuck Norris once visited The Virgin Islands. Afterward, they were renamed The Islands.
• Every piece of furniture in Chuck Norris’s house is a Total Gym.

Obviously, these are all fake truths made in the name of fun.  I think Norris was widely denounced as a complete dunderhead when he sued, saying he was as funny as wet burlap, and that may be true.  However, it is stated that he believed Penguin and the author of the book of “misappropriated and exploited Mr. Norris's name and likeness without authorization for their own commercial profit.”

This case reminds me of JK Rowling suing to prevent the publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon.

I’m not saying he should be suing, I’m just saying he may be all fun and smiles while the Chuck Facts is free to float around in the Internet without commercial implications, but he kicks ass when someone compiles all these things and sells it as a book, possibly even without compensation to the original writers of these gems (I don’t know) or to Chuck himself.

There's nothing more interesting to the audience of a sport to hear a smart-alec commentator who acts as though he knows everything be proven wrong.  Well, at least it's interesting to me.  I mean, take a look at the football pundits.  They didn't take Joe Fanboy off the streets, oh no, they actually have qualified experts who've actually kicked a ball in front of live spectators who paid to watch them play the game.  That's great.  Instant credibility right there.  But that doesn't stop them from being wrong, and sometimes, horrendously wrong.

I always grin at the guy who goes, "There's no doubt about it, there's too much quality in the [insert footie club] side", or "I can't see them losing this", and when the match is lost, they go, "No one could have expected this, [insert the above footie club] played well below par, etc, etc".

Nothing wrong with experts making mistakes, of course.  I'm just saying it's entertaining to have them get their faces rubbed in.

So here comes my point (yeah, I belaboured it, so bite me) - if you like this, and if I were a sports commentator, you'd be having some fun at my expense.  I have written off Lee Chong Wei after his not-again loss to Lin Dan at the All-England.  As usual, supporting Chong Wei was an exhausting affair - you kept holding your breath hoping he'd whack Lin Dan, waving your arms and all that only to find that you've been doing it the whole match and you get tired. 

So I watched the Swiss Open final warily.  If there's such a thing as watching a badminton match nonchalantly, I was doing it. And if I was the sports commentator, I would be reiterating the fact that Lin Dan has won the last [insert number] encounters between the two.

But Chong Wei won.  He played the game I was screaming at him to play from my living room during the All-England final last week. 

If I was a sports commentator, I'd be saying, "Lin Dan played well below par, etc, etc."

Maybe I should be a sports commentator.  Hey, ESPN, want someone to relieve Gillian Clark?

The new version of Wordpress (version 2.7) has an auto-upgrade feature that allows automatic updating of your Wordpress if there is a newer version (in my case, it was 2.7.1).  A quick Tools –> Upgrade –> Automatic Upgrade and voila!  It didn’t even take a minute.

This are the little things that make Wordpress so usable and effortless.   Wins many, many points with this this usability freak.

There is no choice, as I haven’t got the chops to design one of my own.  But I don’t understand why it would be so difficult to find a minimalistic theme that doesn’t have a white background?

Yet again embarking on a personal project on a whim.  I’m not spending 10 hours on this thing.  It’s either up by then, or not. 

It has been a while since I’ve written anything here.  Quite honestly, it was almost forgotten.  When time is at a premium, you’re working (almost) endlessly, nurturing a new pet project, plus you have a little kid running about the house demolishing everything in sight, taking the time to update your blog seems like the last thing on my mind.

A short story.  Indulge me.  Or not.

During one of my jaunts through cyberspace earlier this week, I came across this new product called Microsoft Live Writer, which is part of Microsoft’s Live Essentials download package.  It’s a blogging frontend (much like the ones LiveJournal have for the longest time), and most importantly, getting kudos from pretty much everywhere.  It’s meant, as far as I can see, to be a frontend for their own Live Spaces blogging platform, but it comes with functionality to connect all the major blogging platforms.

I have two places on the cyberspace where this might come in handy, so I downloaded it to give it a whirl.  First up was Bookbabble, which is a Wordpress blog.  It connected pretty much effortlessly, and I’m starting to like the looks of things. 

Then I tried to configure for rambleville, and I find that I’m no longer able to log into rambleville’s Movable Type administration page.  Nevermind the Live Writer, this means I can’t post anymore even in the normal fashion! 

To cut the long story short, I found the solution here, and finally got my normal Movable Type login working correctly again.  I was also finally able to get Live Writer to connect to rambleville (which is how this post is being written now).

So I want to say two things:

1. I must say Live Writer is pretty impressive.  A much better proposition than writing on the web interface.  Download it here.

2. Movable Type is starting to seem very flaky to me.  I didn’t change anything for the longest time (as you can see for yourself by checking the date on my previous post), and in that time something has happened that screwed up the system.  This isn’t by any means the fault of SixApart (creators of MT), but the impression is MT isn’t all that rock steady.  Wordpress, by contrast, appears easier to use than a toothbrush.  I’ve set up about 3 blogs on Wordpress, and have never had any problems at all.

I purposely chose MT with the express intention of gaining experience on both these platforms so that I know the pros and cons of each.  At this point, I would say Wordpress, especially coupled with Fantastico integration, is pretty hard to beat.

You know, the tiny PCs that are smaller than subnotebooks, but larger than the HTC Shift? You know, like the Eee PC.

I think I may have the perfect application - to take notes when you watch Discovery Channel, The History Channel, Discovery Travel and Living and National Geographic Channel. They throw so many facts at you, and while you're sitting there being awed by the steady stream of revelations, you struggle to decide whether to store this tidbit of information into what's left of the limited storage space called memory. And as the debate rages on in your brain, more info gets lobbed at you.

"Shit, I didn't know the Chinese started using crossbows approximately 3000 years before it was invented in the west! Oh, and all 300,000 of the ancient arrowheads found in the tombs are exactly the same? That's mass production, and it's 2000 years ahead of it's time! Ah, and they have the properties of a modern bullet? Oh my, amazing. Let me try to remember thi... what? They are applying modern military formations since the Ching dynasty? Oh wow. Which place... oh, and the concubines are doomed to die in the forbidden city?"

What you can do is to have this little beauty handy, and type away into little documents, which can be readily retrievable when needed.

It's been a while since I posted, true. There are a lot of things to do since the launch of my new side-project, Bookbabble, and sometimes finding the time to write what I felt when I finally saw The Forbidden Kingdom, or when I splurged out wads of dough for an unreasonable number of books, can be a little tough.

But, I saw this today, and think it is one of the funniest thing I've ever seen.

Dinosaur Comics, and xkcd are two of my favourite webcomics. Check them out, please.

Penny Arcade's funny too, but these 2 are on a higher level, methinks.

This snippet from George RR Martin about The Road encapsulates in its essence what I think is so wrong about how some people feel about genre fiction in general:

I think I speak for virtually all fantasy and science-fiction writers that it's a constant annoyance for anyone who works in these fields, that whenever a great piece of work is produced, you get reviewers saying, ''Oh, this isn't science fiction, it's too good.'' Most recently, that's happened with Cormac McCarthy and The Road. Which is definitely a science-fiction book, and yet it's winning all these prizes and people are saying, ''No, no, it's science fiction.'' Well, it's literature and it's science fiction. It's a breath mint and a candy mint!

There are those who think I'm being defensive simply because I love genre fiction. I would think that would be too shallow a way to look at it. I'm about experiencing anything and everything you love in reading. To anyone who would come to me for advice, I would never ever say don't try something just because it happens to be categorized in a certain way. Encouraging the sentiment that a particular genre is somehow 'beneath' an arbitrary literary bar frankly reflects poorly on the proponent.

Everybody is partial to their genres when reading (and make no mistake, award-winning novels are a genre by itself). So when someone crosses the genre gaps, that's great. So I'm just amazed at people who'd tell others, "Oh no, that's not science fiction. That's bloody McCarthy, so it can't be considered science fiction because it's so well written!" Oh please.

I've read as much as (if not more) contemporary fiction and prize winning fiction than the next person, and here's what I've learnt:
The one and only thing that separates the wheat from the chaff in literature is the author, regardless of the subject matter.

Go on. Come and tell me I'm wrong.

I realized two things: you blink and a week goes by without you blogging, and I end almost all my blog posts with exclamation points.

This is going to be a departure from my usual highly informed, balanced, opinionated and intellectual articles, people, because I want to raise an alarm.

I'm trying to get into Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 on the PS2 and despite countless valiant attempts in three days of playing (albeit in bursts of about 1 hour each day), I have *NOT* been able to win a single match. A SINGLE MATCH. Not one.

I have not been playing video games for a while, I admit, preferring instead to do more mundane things like sterilizing baby bottles and filling up compartmentalized milk powder containers in my spare time. Occasionally I do different things like sending an email or five to various people in a strange place called 'work' (who can be quite persistent, I found) or when I decided to pay more attention to my personal projects, or indeed, deciding to (gasp!) read.

Despite all that, I remain, and always have been, a talent in gaming. In my heyday there are no games I could not master in minutes, and start clearing the field with petulant flicks of my wrist (or fingers, depending on what I was using at the time).

True, I may not kick ass in StarCraft, and some may recall with glee the occasional thumping I received at the hands of people who do nothing but play these games, but computer AI has never got me down for long.

Imagine my tension at being beaten repeatedly in PES2008. I simply cannot understand how a team whose name I can barely pronounce much less recognize can beat Barcelona (which has been renamed to something else due to licensing concerns, I imagine) by the ludicrous scoreline of 4-0. It came to a point where I didn't know what the hell to do with the ball at my player's feet! So I stand there, hands inert, player motionless, while I wait for a spark of inspiration. Which quickly turned into a spark of panic as the opposition nipped the ball from my player's feet and going for goal.

This is crazy.

Mark my words: There is never a truer gauge for aging than your inability to play video games competently.

I will beat this game, if that's the last thing I do. All while juggling PoP, baby, reading and learning in the spare time I have not working or sleeping. You know, piece of cake.

I seldom let my hair down and write about something as inconsequential as this how-my-day-went post, and I assure you that at least 5 blinks will go by before I succumb to such an impulse again.

I will return to regularly scheduled programming (I'm not a screenplay writer in Hollywood, so something as silly as union strikes will not hinder my writing, so you may relax, gentle readers), and serious thoughtful posts (for me, at least) will resume shortly.

And no I did not forget to write about books. Like George RR Martin, I too have indulgences in sport that I must, well, indulge in.

I'm very seldom at these social-networking sites. I love Web 2.0, but who really has time for sites that requires you to get friends to add you to their lists?

I have a Friendster page setup some years back, but I barely used it. I have less than 10 friends, and most of them aren't even friends - they are family. Admittedly it was fun - for a couple of days. Then I left it to fester.

A couple of days ago I joined Facebook - a good pal of mine dropped me an invite. Having heard so many good things about it on TWiT, and reading so much news lately on it in the tech world (its rich API and supposed 'openness'), I decided to take the plunge and add yet another login-password combo to remember.

The interface - fabulous. Then I got bitten. And dropped-kicked. And had things thrown at me. And werewolves and slayers came to get me. And there suddenly there was a room for me to decorate. There were walls and mini-feeds and notifications and pokes and stuff.

Interesting. A platform for custom applications, with an emphasis on spreading like viruses in a packed disco hall. I installed this and that, and added and found friends.

Three days now, and I realize that I've been doing the same thing for different people. Now hang on a minute. That's it?

Isn't there a way for you to say something about yourself? Some form of self-expression? Is it all just fighting and beer-drinking?

I must be missing something. I'm pretty new to these social sites, but at this point I'm still wondering about what the fuss is about.

I'm going to stick to Facebook until I figure it out. Otherwise, all these reading of notifications and requests is beginning to remind me of unread email at work, and that's bad.