During the last presidential election I was very concerned that Gore might possibly lose and spent the entire night glued to the television, flipping between networks as the drama played out, finally drifting off to bed in the wee hours. The subsequent mess that was the last election had me obsessively calling up salon.com while I was at work and debating and speculating endlessly with my office mate.

Long story short, I’m not going to play that game this time, it’s just too much for me. I grabbed a copy of the recent Nova documentary ‘Origins’ about the history of the earth from formation of the solar system on, and I am again going to spend an election night glued to the television, but this time it’s all about perspective folks, and how ultimately meaningless this stuff is in the grand scheme of things. Or so I’m trying to convince myself anyway. I’ve also been trying to remind myself that this country survived the evils of McCarthyism and the ridiculous era of Prohibition – surely we can if we must survive another 4 years of the mental midget.

So. That’s about all I’m going to say about this year’s election. Of course I hope desperately that Kerry wins and encourage anyone reading this to get off their ass tomorrow and go vote. Beyond that, I’m trying really hard to let it go.

…and forgets to take a real camera 😉

I keep forgetting to blog this. My brother had a chance to go to Hawaii and he took his new camera phone with him, then filled his weblog with action shots of his adventures in Hawaii. You’ll probably need to scroll through his archives a bit to get to the photos since he’s posted quite a few since then.

It’s interesting the tradeoffs between spontaneity and image fidelity – most of the pics he posted shade way too far into the purple/blue end of the spectrum, leaving me wishing he had brought a real camera, but on the other hand if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to post them as they happened.

Anyway, worth a gander, especially if, like me, you’ve never been to Hawaii.

Here’s a clever idea – establish a wiki as the authoritative source of information about people, and allow the people themselves to self edit the content. Check it out over at Biojack.com. I’m not in there yet, nor is the famous photographer who shares my name. What amuses me is imagining the battles that will spring up around famous folks who are controversial, like, say, George Bush. Get bickering folks! Or at least, get yourself in there.

Check out the following paragraph:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey

Neat huh? Assuming it worked for you the same way it worked for me, ie I was able to read that paragraph about as quickly as I could have normally. Bad spellers untie, it’s apparantly irrelevant 😉

A little known fact to most of the folks who wander by here – for the past several years Toys R Us has run a ‘buy 2, get 1 free’ special on console videogames during the holiday season. This year it begins this Sunday, the 24th. If you’re looking to buy a few games as gifts, you can save yourself $50 by doing your shopping early and getting them at Toys R Us sometime during the next week.

Siblings considering this deal should be aware that the new Grand Theft Auto game or Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne for the PS2 are both excellent choices for me, or Paper Mario for the Gamecube.

here’s a cool little piece of…welll….I’ll call it a kinetic sculpture. Type in a word, watch it rendered out, then play with the bouncy string of letters. Somewhat similar to touchgraph, which I’ve mentioned a few times in the past, just in terms of aesthetics.

Nasa has released an amazing 3d terrain browser for windows. If you’re on a windows box with a reasonably capable 3d card, you simply must check this out. They use sattelite imagery to give you a photorealistic environment to navigate around in. Ever wondered what the volcanoes of Hawaii look like up close? Go check it out. Bottom of the grand canyon? It’s yours to fly through. This is amazingly cool technology. I immediately recalled twistory and tried to imagine what it would look like if it used an interface like this. When I run across headlines about the use of GIS data in education this is the kind of stuff I imagine, not the rather more dry (I know, I know, equally valuable….it’s still dry) kinds of uses it’s being put to today.

Check out Mark Pesce’s take on the future of tv. I happen to agree with his basic premise (broadband and the ease of distribution it brings will obviate the need for broadcast ‘networks’ – we’re all entering into an age when we can be broadcasters), and I’ve touched on some of the same points here in regards to music. I’m a little more skeptical that we’ll actually survive the big company’s court challenges to our rights to own and repurpose the content we acquire though. Still this is great reading, check it out.

My lease runs through May. I’m already beginning to watch the real estate market here in Saratoga Springs. My plan is to buy a house in the very early spring. I have a number of options – I can buy right in Saratoga Springs and walk to work, but I’ll be in a very crappy house in a very suburban ‘jammed up against the neighbors’ setting. I could live with this – the ability to walk to work and to dinner in town is really compelling, I was very envious of my peers at Bowdoin who could do this. I could also buy in the surrounding region and, as with Bowdoin, commute for 20 minutes or so to work. This could possibly get me a waterfront home on the Hudson, but it would put me far away from the conveniences like shopping and dining, and while I lived with a 20 minute commute for at least 7-8 years (4+ heading north to Bowdoin and 3-4 heading south to Portland), I would love to be rid of it. Or there’s one other option – I could build my own house after buying some land in Saratoga Springs or right near it. If I chose this latter route I could choose to do something really interesting and build a really unique home, say something like this (that site is great btw, they post all kinds of interesting and novel stuff). I’d definitely go for the double unit if I went with that model.

I’ve ordered the book I linked to, and over the next couple of months I’ll need to decide how I want to do this. The wrinkle with buying the land is that I probably can’t get that done and the house built by May when my lease runs out. My landlords are pretty cool and might let me stay a bit longer if I need to but I’d rather not have to go through that if I can avoid it.

So. More as things develop. I have to say right now I’m leaning towards the $150k house inside the city limits, with the walk to work, and use it as an investment, it’s bound to increase in value and I can move in a few years into a house I build, or onto the water up north somewhere.

As I mentioned earlier this week, I’m honoring the Independent Games Festival by talking about a bunch of excellent free and or open source games. Another example is one one I’ve linked to in the past namely The Battle for Wesnoth. This is an excellent turn-based strategy game. The game has continued to evolve at a rapid pace since I first linked to it in February of this year – it’s much refined and the included campaign is vaslty superior. If you like games like Heroes of Might and Magic or Warlords I can basically guarantee you’ll like Wesnoth. Check it out, it’s well worth a look.