aphexddb.com

After switching web hosts I was too lazy to immediately port my blog over.  Since then I have really missed the ability to blog, now the situation is remedied! Also upgraded my OpenID server to support version OpenID v2 which nobody cares about except me! Now I can start forgetting passwords and enjoy controlling my own digital keys again.

This should be everyone’s inspiration.

I’ve switched back to the default theme and am going to try and debug things. In the meantime please make do with the ghetto-tastic setup.

Also, anyone know why WordPress 2.5.1 non-stop submits ajax rquests to save the current post? As I write this, Firebug is showing maybe 2-3 requests POSTS per second to:

http://www.aphexddb.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php.

Also, Media Temple (gs) service is terrible.

I’ve been outside. It’s overrrated.

Traditionally Outside receives extremely high ratings by those who like to see others play it, and these people are in many cases comfortably ensconced Inside themselves. Outside was released many years ago, it was in fact the first massively multiplayer game, and yet it has always managed to avoid the double-edged Retro tag. In its favor, continual user updates have kept Outside current; there are always new things to see and do Outside. Participants are permitted, to some extent, to modify their own areas of Outside, which is a large part of the fun of the game. However it seems that in the end one is modifying Outside largely for the sake of it, and having done it, there is a distinct feeling of “now what?”

In terms of the traditional target age content metrics, Outside is remarkably high in sex, violence and challenges to traditional values, despite the strong child-focussed marketing it receives. Many would go so far as to say that for a child to develop the ability to cope with Outside is essential, as long as the harm incurred is not too debilitating. Children injured playing Outside are usually comforted by parents, and soon encouraged to go Outside again; this leads to the conclusion that somehow Outside has escaped any and all of the usual moralizing that surrounds the videogaming industry. One might say that Outside gets a free pass from the Jack Thompsons of this world.

That aside, how does Outside actually rate? The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player’s ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players’ tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.

…. awesome!

via Metafilter

A friend recently hit me with some good advice via IM: “Hang in there Manfred.” (Thats a reference to Accelerando for those not in the know)

The way William Gibson describes the future seems to fit better every year. “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.” Most of the technologies that appeared in 07 were measurably cool: the iPhone, the end of analog TV, GPS in cars & phone / blue tooth proliferation, Moore’s law and multi-core CPU’s, etc., etc. These are things that a number of years ago I looked forward to the way I now look forward to neural nanonics, private space flight, bioengineering, and other amazing stuff. Now they appear rather blah, about as exiting as a car or television set. The future is already here alright. I guess I just need to be more patient.

However it was a good year in the reading department. Accelerando by Charles Stross, Spook Country by William Gibson, The Night’s Dawn Trilogy (paperbacks 1 2 3 4 5 6) by Peter F. Hamilton to name some of most interesting ones. Of course Cory Doctorow and the usual crowd had some excellent blog posts. Penny Arcade had some truly great comics reminding yet again that “my people” are out there and going strong. 2007 certainly had an abundance of daily slack to consume.

I’m still holding out hope for my tribe. I expect we will continue to kick some ass and make sure things end up OK, preferably with lots of super bad ass scientific stuff.

Here’s to 2008 and the pursuit of slack and knowledge!

Burnout means you’ve pushed your creative energy beyond the point of recovery. Like a well of water, creative energy replenishes itself slowly over time. A person who has pushed their creative well too hard for too long will, like its watery counterpart, one day find it empty. They’ve pushed too far. Usually by the time you notice something is seriously wrong, there’s very little left to work with. Burnout then is something, once experienced, a wise person learns how to avoid and manage (which we’ll talk about later). But right now, lets cover some of the common signs that you’ve become toasty:

• You dread getting up in the morning (unless this is not unusual for you)
• You don’t care anymore about something you were passionate about
• You saw the title of this essay and felt a ray of hope
• Inspired motivated creative people annoy you
• Everything seems gray and pointless
• You’re drinking more or eating more, or showing whatever your signs of depression are
• You find it hard to relax
• It seems impossible to do basic work you know you’re capable of

via scottberkun.com

When you coined the word “cyberspace,” did you envision that the term might be your lasting legacy?
Not at all. I thought the book would be despised to the extent that it wasn’t ignored. Now, on a good day, my career seems so utterly unlikely that I wonder if I’m not about to snap out of a DMT blackout and discover that I’m not actually a famous writer of William Gibson novels but that I’m working at a used-book shop that smells of cat pee and drinking beer out of a cracked coffee mug.

via Rolling Stone

They’ve got our future, damn it.

It’s not the shiny future of jet packs and food pills oh no, that’s not what Japan is about. Nevertheless, they’ve got it and they’re living in it, damn them. They’ve got express trains that run on time and accelerate so fast they push you back into your seat like an airliner on take-off. They’ve got skyscrapers with running lights, looming out of the sodium-lit evening haze a skyline just like the famous nighttime scene from Blade Runner except for the shortage of giant pyramids (and they’re building one of those out in Tokyo bay). And they shave their cats.

In the future we will all have shaved cats. And six story high pornography boutiques that sell Hello Kitty! novelty toys on the ground floor. And 200mph super-express trains blasting between arcologies through a landscape scorched by the waste heat of a hundred million air conditioning units. And beer vending machines on street corners. And skyscrapers cheek-by-jowl with temples that are modern reconstructions of buildings dating back to the eighth century (said reconstructions only slightly older than the Christopher Wren iteration of St Paul’s Cathedral).

via Charlie’s Diary

World traveler and adventurer extraordinare Cam Martindale has finally added video posts to his epic travel site. This guy has worked on the South Pole, trekked in Nepal, fought fires in Australia.. just look at the site already.

Offyonder.com

The Swiss and modern politics

The crime rate in cases of bodily harm, serious injury, and rape has risen by multiples over the past two decades. At the end of 2005, in which 29,952 convictions were made, only 48.8% of convictions were of Swiss nationals while the rest were foreign residents or illegal aliens, despite comprising only 20% of the population. And by the end of 2006, with 5888 people being interned in Swiss prisons, a whopping 69% were foreigners, mostly young males. Yet I have not seen these figures cited by such institutions of credibility like Reuters, unless used in a quote by an official who they’ve spent an entire article actively trying to discredit.

Terror networks are like the hydra

The place to begin is with the structure of al-Qaeda itself. Al-Qaeda’s cellular structure is a classic example of what is called a Small World Network. .That’s a fancy term to describe an organization where most members know only their immediate neighbors (or cell members) but can reach any other cluster of members by sending messages over a number of “hops” through members who are super-connected — that is members of more than one cell. The link-men make it possible for any given member to reach another through a very small number of “hops”, typically less than six. That’s why it’s called a Small World Network.. We call these super-connected members “hubs”. The diagram below represents this situation. It’s clear from the diagram that random members can communicate with the wider organization only through members who belong to two or more cells. With them they can communicate efficiently. Without the link-men they are cut off.

There have been over 100 automated Twitter digest blog posts and only about 25 actual.. well blogs. No more will I use the crutch of Twitter to supply my blog with freshness. From now on it it’s up to me, the lone blogger to suck it up and write original content.

Thus, expect non-too frequent updates.