Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Stuff I got from Comic-Con
I went to Comic-Con, not really expecting to get much other than a fun time walking around the booths. However I was pleasantly surprised by the following awesomeness:
Autographed “Penny Arcade 2″ by the PA boys.
This was a SPECIAL treat. I love all things Mike Mignola, and was not expecting to even see him at the con. As we were about to leave, we walked by a booth, and I saw a few guys milling about in front of Mike! I walked over, cursing myself for not bringing my Hellboy vol. 1 with my anyway. Luckily he had some special ‘08 Con prints, and I was able to get this personalized. Horrah!
This was another special treat. Lego + WB teamed up and had people visit 3 booths to play the upcoming Batman LEGO game. Each booth gave us a part of Joker. Once each was collected you turned Joker in to get this box and Batman! Cool!
Anyway, Thanks Tim for bringing us!
there once was a thing called plurk
and it was pretty interesting. mainly, I’ve found that when you expect it to react in a certain way, it already does (ie. muting conversations). we’ll see how it grows on the web and me. hit me up! http://www.plurk.com/user/revoked
My future contains more Ones and Zeroes
Ever since Freakonomics stopped putting their full-text of articles into their RSS feed, I pretty much stopped reading their well written articles. However, that is not why I am writing this post today.
Today, I did click into a post (this one: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/a-nuclear-president/) It spoke of how the Nuclear option is becoming more and more of a possibility for America’s (and the world’s) future power resource. I for one am “a-ok-lets-go” on the Nuclear solution (until we figure out perpetual energy, yeah.. anyway..), however that’s also not why I wrote this post.
What the Nuclear subject got me thinking about was the affect that the lack of energy will do to our lives. In my opinion this change would initially center around transportation. Over the years, change in transportation has always come about because of growing population, however this coming change will be caused by dwindling access to cheap energy. Normally you would come to the conclusion “well you have to get from one place to another don’t you?”, I mean “everyone has a car payment” right? Death, Taxes, and a Car Payment. Well, what if the only reason you had to deal with transportation was to get food.
Consider this, digital communications has come so far, so fast, that nobody seems to be completely caught up with it. We have not only plain-jane voice communications (zzz boring), but a myriad of video communication options, and excellent text communication. On top of all of this, we have had (for YEARS!) secure point to point communications. What does all of this add up to? In my opinion, a move forward in not only employers allowing their employees to “tele-commute”, but also friends and family communicate more and more via ip communications. I mean, it’s already happening!
I recently had a discussion with a friend who is now allowed to tele-commute once a week, and she works at a pretty well known company. I can only see this spreading as the cost of transportation goes up in not only time, but now cold hard cash, at dramatic rates (see here and here).
Ok, so we’ve all seem the movies. Video communications has been around since a Space Odyssey, and so far either retail offerings have been craptastic, or lackluster. Well, what happens when it costs you $15 or $20 to drive 30 miles to see your family? Maybe you’ll just call them on the videophone this week (hey nintendo, make a video-phone on the Wii dangit!). Or how about going to work? What about all those people driving over 50mi a day to work? It will become completely unaffordable, forcing employers to allow their employees to work from home.
So, what does all of this lead to? It leads to me to the conclusion that I with have a job for a long time, that’s what. At-home workers means more and more ip-based communications, from text/speach/video, to asset and document sharing, all types of collaboration software from planning your next housing development, to planning your next company party; it will all need to be online. In fact, I’ve seen a few condo/townhomes lately with secluded office counterparts to the main house. I think we’ll see that more prominent in the next 10 years. And THAT to me is exciting. Screw jet-packs! The internet ftw!
ps. if you want to see an excellent portrayal of a digital-based future, check this out.
The Grand Experiment
So, last summer we cancelled cable. We had gone three months with watching a total of 3 hours of entertainment. With our television costing ~$100/month, that was $100/hr for those three hours. That didn’t add up for me, so we started The Grand Experiment. That experiment being a media-centered couple, removing the few hundred odd channels of 24/7 media from our lives. The idea was, with that extra $100/mo replace it with purchasing digital copies of our media and streaming them to the television, in addition to purchasing dvds of shows.
This went well for the first couple of months. The downside was that not all of our shows were in digital format we could (legally) watch on our tv. So we thought hey, download the media, then we’ll make sure to buy the dvds when they are released. This sounded like a good idea, however in practice we didn’t realize the toll it would take on us.
First of all, we were required to use less-than-desirable means to procure said content (ie. Bit-torrent, Usenet). The issue was, we started worrying about plotting ourselves on the MPAA road-map of litigation. So we started using applications such as Peerguardian, to cover our tracks. The lowdown of all of this was that it really took a toll on us, on top of that we worried about our “vote” being counted, and then there was the X factor of channels like Discovery, National Geographic, Etc. that had very interesting programs unavailable outside of the cable/dish networks.
SO, the experiment is over, I picked up our cable-boxes again and we’re back to regularness. It was very weird to get rid of cable, and now it’s weird to pick it up again. I feel sort of bad that we failed. I don’t like cable companies, and I think that their fees are high. But, I don’t really see any other alternatives. leh sigh.
note: I would have switched to directv, dish, fios, etc. however my apartment doesn’t see the south sky, and verizon hasn’t offered fios at my complex.
Cross-Posting FTW!
Since my blog doesn’t see much traffic and this might actually be useful to some of you (though I’m sure most of us know all about it) I figured I’d duplicate some content. Content injection in t-minus 1 second. Bam!
I’m no photoshop wizard, far from it. So if I overlook anything, please comment. The purpose of this tutorial is to share a very basic aspect of photoshop that made a huge difference in my photo editing process once I found out about it. I’m not suggesting this as a solution for a multitude of problems, it has a specific implementation and there are other tools in photoshop that do different things more efficiently, but this one is certainly handy. Also, screenshots! That’s worth the price of admission, isn’t it?
