Frozen Wastelands of the Mind

Randy Pausch

2007-09-21T18:08:00.001-04:00

Randy Pausch gave his last lecture on Tuesday. Whoever you are, you'll want to watch this.

Moved to Redmond

2007-09-09T00:17:00.000-04:00

So I'm in Redmond now, flight was fine, blah blah blah.

I start work on monday. I've picked up a new cell phone (for free) which you can get the number from me upon request. I also have a phone at my place at home. I'll report on that later.

Here's some pictures of my sweet ass apartment.

I'm such a whore

2007-06-27T13:51:00.000-04:00

Interesting Article Contrasting Life at Google and Life at Microsoft:
Life at Google: The Microsoftie Perspective

Perhaps I'll write a similar article called "Life at Microsoft: The Apple Perspective"

Redmond, First Impressions

2007-06-11T00:11:00.000-04:00

You can really tell that logging, it used to be BIG here.

The place feels like Camp. Giant evergreens all over the place. I'm talking about Lush here. I found the architecture in California to be very Latin inspired. They like them some ceramic roof tiles down there. Up here the houses have a more... log cabin feel. Except these log cabins are fully furnished and decked out to the nines... and have fiber to the home.

The air is crisp. I found Silicon Valley to have a sort of hot mugginess to the air. The air here smells of life, and salt.

Also, they do not appear to know what HP Sauce is.

I took a drive around Microsoft's (enormous) campus. It's not so much a campus as it is "The area south of Redmond". Microsoft, is BIG here. Unlike the Campuses of places like Electronic Arts, Apple, Google... The place doesn't look like one giant mound of amenities to delight the eye. It looks like a business park in the middle of the woods, if you can imagine that. Despite the fact that you see Microsoft everywhere around here, the Campus almost seems tucked away.

I'm sure I'll have a lot more to say tomorrow.

Microsoft Surface

2007-06-03T13:35:00.000-04:00

For those of you who were promised the video of Microsoft's new Coffee Table,

you can get it here.

Lost and bored

2007-06-02T00:04:00.000-04:00

Often when I'm laying awake at night, I'll pick up my laptop and surf around the web. And surf is an appropriate term for that activity. RSS feeds, Instant Messenger Clients, Facebook. These are all tools to interface with people I actually know, or content I'm accustomed to. This content floats along the surface of the internet, bobbing away to be picked up by any idle passer by, and so the activity is fairly unsatisfying. I imagine that deep in some corner nooks of the net, interesting things are brewing. The world is wide and the web is deeper, but day after day the interesting new content bubbles only slowly up from under the sludge. It feels like I've seen everything on the internet that's accessible to mass consumption, like an endless summer of syndication.

The problem is, how do you dig beneath the surface? Not surfing but diving, exploring the maelstrom of life that lies beneath the waves, where mortal men rarely tread for fear of drowning. Where are the doors, and more importantly, where are the keys?

Sarcasm

2007-04-26T11:45:00.000-04:00

X-Posted from Cosmic Variance.

Nothing like a little bit of Sarcasm and Irony to brighten my day.

Warning: If you are a religious fanatic, you may find the above offensive. That is, if you get the jokes. Then again, if you're a religious fanatic, I probably have told you off long ago, and you're not likely to be reading my blog, are you?

It's funny cause it's true

2007-04-02T07:10:00.000-04:00

From xkcd

Google Paper

2007-04-01T14:15:00.000-04:00

Oh you crazy kids at Google. You expect me to fall for that?

I especially like the comment about trying to file one email in two different folders, but it wouldn't go.

RIAA Lawsuit Matrix

2007-03-30T09:45:00.000-04:00

Why You May Need an Online Persona

2007-03-29T14:01:00.001-04:00

Employers are realizing that what people do online can actually prove their value as potential hires, not just rule them out based on drunken photos or revelations of other past missteps. Last year we saw articles like Overexposed in the Blogosphere warning how people’s online behavior and misbehavior might ruin their careers.
An interesting article to be sure. Oh, and by the way, If your name is Angus McQuarrie, you automatically dominate your top 10 google searches.

read more | digg story

Get a Mac

2007-03-28T22:09:00.000-04:00

The Hole - video powered by Metacafe

47

2007-03-28T08:57:00.001-04:00

Hee Hee Hee!!!

Life Completion

2007-03-21T15:47:00.000-04:00

Apparently Jon's Post about Paris Hilton was mentioned by Andrew Potter on the Rebel Sell Blog. Supposedly I have friends who have actual ideas and can write about stuff. Who knew. =)

By the way, if you haven't read The Rebel Sell, you really should. It's profound.

This is excellent.

2007-03-16T11:44:00.000-04:00

Advise from an Old Man

Another steampunk Mod

2007-03-16T10:25:00.001-04:00

For those of you enamored with the Steampunk genre as I am, This is frigging awesome.

Resolve

2007-03-15T22:38:00.000-04:00

I'm resolving, when I'm done school (or maybe before), to start going to conferences and shows where really interesting stuff happens, as opposed to the ones I go to now, which seem to be more or less pedantic political bickering.

That thought gives me some hope actually. A glimmer of possibilities. Seeing the possibilities in 6D.

A thought, from Ze.

My new blog

2007-03-15T20:56:00.000-04:00

My very newest blog is now up and running. You can find it at GhostRazor.com

The template is still very blogger, but I've been tweaking and playing with the very latest in Web 2.0 technologies. My name is all over the internet. Kinda scary.

I've decided to divest myself of any speeches regarding video games, and stick them in the new blog instead. Non-video game rumblings will still occur here. For now at least.

If I could work for...

2007-03-10T16:42:00.000-05:00

If I could work under someone for my next Co-op term (September - December 2007) I would want it to be:

Warren Spector
Peter Molyneux
Will Wright
Sid Meier
Greg Zeschuk
Ray Muzyka
Gabe Newell

If only I didn't have to work this week. Maybe I'll go to GDC next year...

Don't see that every day

2007-03-07T09:02:00.000-05:00

Trying to install Numenta's new Platform for Intelligent Computing...
Guess I need to get that rackmount out after all.

Best TV Guide Ever

2007-03-05T20:31:00.000-05:00

I have a lot of trouble figuring out what's on TV. And by on TV, I mean on TV, on my channels, and being able to search by show, or whatever.

No more:

Friends, allow me to introduce to you: Couchville. Nothing better than a full searchable, local channel indexed TV guide running in AJAX. At last.

Conservapedia

2007-02-23T16:03:00.000-05:00

If you haven't had the pleasure of surfing over to Conservapedia, you really owe it to yourself to see the kind of idiocy that floats around down south. Conservapedia is the self-declared "Much-needed conservative alternative to Wikipedia" which is "increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American".

The founders of this little project seem to have a really big problem with the use of C.E. (Common Era) and B.C.E (Before Common Era) in dates. So much is this an issue for them, that the use of B.C. and A.D. is proscribed on both the front page in what is effectively the mission statement of the project, as well as in the The Conservapedia Commandments. As you can imagine, the quality of the articles on Conservapedia is rather deplorable, in nearly every case demonstrating the complete lack of a neutral point of view (You can imagine which direction the bias is skewed), and lacking any kind of factual accuracy whatsoever.

My favorite page is the Examples of Bias in Wikipedia page, which has a running list of, at time of writing, 27 problems the authors see in Wikipedia.

Lets take a sample look.

1. Wikipedia allows the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. and C.E. instead of A.D. The dates are based on the birth of Jesus, so why pretend otherwise? Conservapedia is Christian-friendly and exposes the CE deception.

I don't think the use of terms which don't engender a Christian bias in the dating scheme is really a conspiracy against Christians guys. Why does this irritate you so much?

2. The entry for the Renaissance in Wikipedia refuses to give enough credit to Christianity.

I really don't understand why you don't bother to call this Christipedia. This comment really doesn't explain what you're talking about, cites no references, etc.

4. There is a strong anti-American and anti-capitalism bias on Wikipedia

This point goes on to cite a single instance where a single entry does not refer to some deal the States made with the Philippines. It's unclear on how this demonstrates the anti-American bias in Wikipedia. I further don't understand why the author didn't simply add that in. That's the whole point of how a wiki works.

5. Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English speaking users are American

I really do enjoy this point quite a bit. I'm not sure why the spelling of words could anger someone so much, or how spelling demonstrates bias. I also don't understand how most English speaking users can be American, and at the same time have Wikipedia supposedly littered with articles which are anti-American (unless you guys hate yourselves?).

I could go on, it's worth taking a peek around, if for nothing else than the comedic value of a project which fails to understand the fundamental underpinnings of the format upon which it is based (in that it complains about single instances of content in another project of the same format, when the format is specifically designed to allow you to change that content), and exposes a profoundly deep and troubling psychosis within a number of our neighbours to the south. I'm heartened by the fact that I know that most of the US doesn't bear the opinions of the people who produce tripe like Conservapedia, but it's scary nonetheless. Of course, there's always the possibility that it's a parody site, given the level of stupidity it contains. I really hope that's the case (in which case it's no less amusing).

If you want to read some additional pokes, you might want to read comments by
Orac, Ed, PZ, Afarensis, Tim, Dr. X, and John

Sperm - Humorous CGI Commercial

2007-02-11T00:36:00.001-05:00

They could be dead

2007-02-09T06:59:00.000-05:00

In reference to this artifact of retardation:

Useless account

2007-02-06T11:07:00.000-05:00