TechgnosisWeb Prime

… and you still say you’re undecided and need a reason not to vote for Bush? Well, here’s one hundred reasons (and one opinion) that might help you out. Tuesday’s almost here, and it’s our one chance to keep America from becoming the cartoon villain that the rest of the world is starting to see us as.

… so much money to own any of these.. or even all of them.. So freakin’ cool: Doc Martens made up to look as they would if the Endless wore them. (The Endless, of course, being the characters created by Neil Gaiman, who is our lord and saviour, now and forever.)

… main screen turn on.

Well, I finally got my grubby little mitts on a PDA again: this time it’s a HP iPaq 2215 Pocket PC. Pretty sweet little machine, been playing with it a bit today, can’t wait to get down to doing some serious customization in there and start carrying around a few dozen eBooks all the time. And it only cost me $100, which is really nice considering this machine normally goes for $379+, new. Sure, it’s used, but it’s in pretty much perfect shape. Only thing I need to buy is a charge/sync cable for it, an d I allreayd found one online for $7 including shipping. I’m still thinking of stopping by CompUSA and seeing if by any chance they have one for a decent price so I don’t have to wait on the shipping… Anyway, I’m sure I’ll be gushing regularly about it here, so I’ll stop now.

… my favorite blog ins the whole world, BoingBoing, is endorsing John Kerry for President. Boo-yah.

Well, it’s the end of an era. Or something. My stint as a staffer over on MedNights is over, effective tonight, I allready emailed E about it. I really, really hate doing it, since it means letting both her and the players down, but frankly, I just don’t have the energy for it anymore. I’m exhausted every night. The extra long commute to and from work is taking a lot out of me, and I’ve been having trouble sleeping for the past month or so. I can’t remember the last time I got a good night’s sleep. I’ve almost ended up in a ditch while driving to or from work several times this past week alone, from nearly passing out at the steering wheel. At the end of the day, I just don’t have enought o give the position. The Mage folks deserve and need someone who can give them real time, and I don’t have any time or energy to give anymore. Yeah, I know, it’s kinda hypocritical of me to say that and then go and join NaNoWriMo, but, to be perfectly frank, hammering out 2,000 words a day on a bad detective novel is easier than staffing a Mage sphere on an online mu*. Plus, I haven’t mentioned it yet because I don’t want to jinx it, but I *might* be getting a new PDA soon, and that means I would be able to write from pretty much anywhere, even when I’m at a client’s place, which I can’t do with the mu*. So, if any players out there read this, you have my sincerest apologies, I really did want to help, but, I simply can’t. I don’t have the time, or the energy, and with my leaving, maybe someone will come along who *can* give those things. Also, by leaving, I hope to avoid the Mage Curse.

Goddamit. Just for the record, I hate Monster. She put the idea into my head to take part of National Novel Writing Month again this year, despite the fact that I failed so miserably last year. And now I’ve got an idea for a novel, and I’m signed up, and I’m gonna have to give it another shot. Crap.

So you know, it’s gonna be a hard-boiled detective story with sci-fi elements. No, the fact that I’m playing Anachronox right now has nothing to do with it. Shut up.

This has just made my day: Feral Robotic Dogs.

Apparently this group of folks takes robotic dogs, like the Aibo, MegaByte, and others, usually relegated to the toybox or the scrapheap, and upgrades them, reporgrams them, instills pack behavior, and then sets them loose upon the world. Excellent!

… maybe it’s quick.

Well, I’m just about fully caught up with my on-life once more after the Cable Modem was installed last week. Got everything set up, resumed staffing duties over at MedNights (and received a very warm greeting from the players, too.. seems they missed me. Silly people. Also, some of them have been reading this, so, hey, welcome, read all you want. Just one favor, please? Call it a blog, not a LJ. I pay for my domain and my hosting and use WordPress, so it’s not a LJ. It’s a blog. Thank you kindly for your cooperation in this important matter.)

In personal matters, Natalie and I finally got our cosutmes for the upcoming Halloween Party over at Jancelot’s place next week. Natalie had been stressing out something fierce over not having any costumes yet, but we managed to snag something. I won’t post up what we’re going as yet, since I figure some of the people who are going to be at the party read this, and I don’t wanna spoil the surprise. I’ll try to take some pics of the party and our costumes and post them up then, though.

Games? Well, I’ve just started playing in the Beta for MapleStory, yet another quirky little korean MMORPG, similar in spirit to Ragnarok Online. The main difference? This one’s in 2D. Yup, cutesy adorable korean-style beasties and adventurers hopping and fighting across a vast 2D platformer world. Quite fun, cute, and hey, it’s free. Go try it out. I’m Fourthfate on there, Channel 7 usually.

Finally, I hate to admit this, but the new William Shatner album, Has Been? Err.. it rocks. Not every song is pure gold, but a lot of them are pretty damn good. Some of you might recognize the title for today’s entry form one of the songs on it.

Whitout a doubt, this is one of the scariest articles I’ve ever read. Here’s a snippet:

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ”if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.” The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

”Just in the past few months,” Bartlett said, ”I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.” Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush’s governance, went on to say: ”This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them. . . .

Read the rest: TheNew York Times > Magazine > Without a Doubt

Seriously.. get Lewis Black as your running mate, and my vote is yours, dude. Anyway, the blogosphere has been jumping all over this in the past couple of days, so I know I’m late to the party as usual, but I just read the transcript and watched a Torrent of the show, and I needed to share: John Stewart is incredible. Case in point:

He was on Crossfire, CNN’s ‘Political Debate’ show, the other night. The people on the show were expecting him to plug his book, make with the funny, maybe do some witty commentary on the Bill O’Reilly vibrator scandal (FalafelGate?). Instead, John procedded to rip them apart with brilliant sharp-tounged commentary about their lack of intelligent discourse, their lack of journalistic integrity, and how their partisan pandering is hurting the U.S. It was freakin’ brilliant, not to mention hilarious. I have a feeling Stewart will not be getting invited back to the show. Here’s a few choice quotes from the transcript of the show:

STEWART: Here’s just what I wanted to tell you guys.

CARLSON: Yes.

STEWART: Stop.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.

BEGALA: OK. Now

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: And come work for us, because we, as the people…

CARLSON: How do you pay?

STEWART: The people — not well.

(LAUGHTER)

BEGALA: Better than CNN, I’m sure.

STEWART: But you can sleep at night.

And then:

STEWART: I didn’t realize that — and maybe this explains quite a bit.

CARLSON: No, the opportunity to…

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: … is that the news organizations look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity.

(LAUGHTER)

And i haven’t even gotten to the good parts yet! Observe:

BEGALA: Well, it’s because, see, we’re a debate show.

STEWART: No, no, no, no, that would be great.

BEGALA: It’s like saying The Weather Channel reduces everything to a storm front.

STEWART: I would love to see a debate show.

BEGALA: We’re 30 minutes in a 24-hour day where we have each side on, as best we can get them, and have them fight it out.

STEWART: No, no, no, no, that would be great. To do a debate would be great. But that’s like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition.

And then:

STEWART: It’s not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. And I will tell you why I know it.

CARLSON: You had John Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you’re accusing us of partisan hackery?

STEWART: Absolutely.

CARLSON: You’ve got to be kidding me. He comes on and you…

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: You’re on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: What is wrong with you?

And finally, right after that:

STEWART: You know, the interesting thing I have is, you have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.

CARLSON: You need to get a job at a journalism school, I think.

STEWART: You need to go to one.

The thing that I want to say is, when you have people on for just knee-jerk, reactionary talk…

CARLSON: Wait. I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny.

STEWART: No. No. I’m not going to be your monkey.

(LAUGHTER)

BEGALA: Go ahead. Go ahead.

STEWART: I watch your show every day. And it kills me.

CARLSON: I can tell you love it.

STEWART: It’s so — oh, it’s so painful to watch.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: You know, because we need what you do. This is such a great opportunity you have here to actually get politicians off of their marketing and strategy.

CARLSON: Is this really Jon Stewart? What is this, anyway?

STEWART: Yes, it’s someone who watches your show and cannot take it anymore.

And there’s lots more pure gold in there, but you’ll have to read the transcript or watch the video of the show to see it… it was brilliant. They kept trying to get him back on track to plug his book or just begging him to be funny, and he responds with “No. No. I’m not going to be your monkey. “ Absolutely amazing.

Well, everyone’s favorite search engine, Google, has just released a beta today for Google Desktop Search. Basically, you download it, it installs, spends a few hours indexing everything on your hard drive, including emails, IM messages, documents, and visited web pages, and then you can google your computer just like you google the web. Pretty damn nifty, at least from the screenshots, and answers the eternal question of ‘Why can’t I search my computer as easily as I search the web?’.

Of course, it’s fairly useless to me. It’s Windows-only for now, although that’s not that big a problem, but it also appears to be IE-only as well, and I’m not about to give up my Firefox. It searches emails, sure, but only Outlook/Outlook Express. Thunderbird users like myself are left out in the cold. Likewise for Eudora and other clients. It searched IM messages, but only for AOL IM. I use Trillian/Miranda, and AOL is the only type of account I don’t have, as none of my friends has an AIM account. So, again, no good for me. And it searches through your office docs, but, you guessed it, only MS Word, MS Excel, and MS PowerPoint. No love for us OpenOffice.org folks (and you’d think searching the OOo docs would be easier since they’re coded in pure open XML, while MS’s formats are closed, proprietary, and a damn mess, according to people who’ve had to work with their internal formats). I guess I’ll have to wait until they get a bit savvier and introduce a version that works for people that are smart enough to move beyond MS’ virus honeypots.

Well, as you might have noticed by the sudden rash of random postings and late night responses to comments here on the blog, the cable folks finally cameby and installed my spiffy new cable modem! Finally, I have Net access once again from here at home! I can surf! I can blog! I can mu*! Ph34r me l33t onl1n3 sk1llz, j0!

Which OS are You?

(Yeah, I know I just did the typical ‘What ______ are you?’ Quiz blogger thing. Bite me.)

I just gotta share, ’cause I know several tabletop-obsessed friends who will likely get a kick out of this announcement: Settlers of Catan is going online.

Well, that’s one of the more inappropriately suggestive titles I’ve ever had the misfortune to use… anyway, I know I’m supposed to be off line, but I just ran across this article from Salon.com that discusses the possibility that Bush may have been wearing a radio receiver during the first presidential debate a week or so ago. Fascinating reading (just do the ‘Free Day Pass’ thing to read the whole article for free).

… and not a modem to cling to.

Just a quick note to confirm that, no, I still don’t have a Net connection at home. The Cable Modem folks promise that they’ll stop by sometime this week to install it. Excuse me if I don’t feel like holding my breath.

Anyway, to those of you who’ve been breathlessly anticipating my return, I have to ask you to wait just a little more. I’m crossing my fingers for them to show up with my spiffy new connection within the next couple of days, but in the meantime, work hasn’t left me with much time to post here or go anywhere online. I’m gonna have a lot of catching up to do when I get back.. See you folks soon!