So we had a meeting this week about the gaming stuff I mentioned earlier in the week, and the faculty member we pitched it to was sufficiently interested that we are going to proceed. This means that someone will need to play the Sims Online on a regular basis and build a ‘character’ with sufficient wealth to buy a house and all the accouterments. For the first time in my professional career I could have been in a position to be paid to play games on a regular basis….and it isn’t going to happen, mainly because I find the Sims to be such a boring game. One of my coworkers is going to handle building up the character instead of me. Now to see if I can find an angle to interest the boss in first person shooters, he he he.
Category: General
Let’s shake things up in Instant Messenging land
Uh oh….. AOL has just been granted a broad patent covering the concept of instant messenging networks. In theory they could now use this to sue Microsoft and Yahoo and the other instant messenging networks for infringement. I’m very curious to see how they handle this one. I’m also happy to point out that it was ICQ, the original commercial pioneer of IM, that filed the original patent claim. Take note all you hosers who split over to AIM.
😉
Health situation showing improvement
My health is definitely improving dramatically. Last week I went in for my first round of bloodwork after about 3 months of rigorous exercise and a month and a half of medications. I got the report back last night and things are looking really good. The original report, basically every category, about 30 of them, I was out of whack – bad cholestoral too high (like way too high) good cholestoral basically non-existent, etc etc. Now everything is at normal or better than average, with the exception of the good cholestoral which is still too low – but not terribly so, as compared to before. I need to eat more fish and nuts and I am doubling my dose of fish oil pills (which are unfortunately disgusting) and hopefully that will take care of it.
The best stat out of the reports – in the first report, I was 4.8 times as likely as an average male of my age to suffer a heart attack. As of the new report I am down to .7 times as likely, ie I am healthier than your average human. Yee ha!
😉
Now I just have to deal with 30+ years of rigorous daily exercise. doh!
Paid to play games.
For the first time in my professional career I’ve spent a few days playing games while on the clock. On the one hand I totally love this. On the other hand it’s a great tragedy as the game is the sims online, and while I appreciate its design goals and think it’s fairly well implemented, I can’t stand it, it’s like playing dollhouse or something.
We’re investigating using online gaming as a tool to aid teaching foreign languages, the theory (in part) being that full immersion in a locality where everyone speaks only the foreign language will force the students to learn quickly in order to be able to succeed in the game world. If all goes well we’ll be using one of the Spanish language courses next fall as a test case for this approach.
xmas list posted
Hey family type people: you can stop clamoring for it. My xmas list is posted. You should also be able to find it from the right nav for the time being.
Workblog
I think I’ve mentioned snipsnap before, it’s a way cool combination of weblog and wiki software. I’m even considering replacing movabletype (the software I use to run this site) with it once snipsnap gets into its beta phase. But for now I started one at work to use for knowledge management. I swim in a sea of data (about systems I manage or have accounts on, projects I am working on, programs I am working on or managing the development of, initiatives I need to follow, yada yada yada) and I have been looking for quite some time for some form of knowlege management software. Snipsnap is the closest I have seen to what I am looking for. You can check out my (mostly boring so far) instance of snipsnap at:
Please keep in mind should you choose to get an account that this is a work resource and is read by my boss and co-workers. No profanity please, and no links back to this site!
Advent of the hydrogen economy
Ok, so it’s not quite all that, but this is actually pretty important. The first commercial relatively low-cost hydrogen fuel cells are now on the market at:
the Airgen website
[edited 2005]
A search bot warned me the link that used to be above to the airgen website no longer works. Here’s an updated link to the same product:
http://fuelcellstore.com/products/ballard/airgen.html
This is tech I’ve commented on before – fuel cells are efficient little producers of electricity and ultimately there is reason to believe these will become very common. They’re already sitting in the bowels of large commercial buildings in the form of multi-million dollar backup power generators. The airgen is I believe the first solution that can be had for under $10k. When these get down to under $3-4k I will have one.
Now to solve the problem of hydrogen distribution 😉
Return of the surround sound
Finally! Eureka!
As most of you know, I dropped a huge pile of cash on a really good receiver earlier this year (A Yamaha v2200 for anyone keeping score). I had been very pleased with it until I bought a new DVD player. Once I wired up the new DVD player, Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 sound playback stopped working for the PS2 (my other DVD player) and I could not get it working for the new player, even though it supported it and would report that it was outputting it to my reciever.
This was driving me nuts. I went through three rounds of ‘pull stereo stack away from wall, re-wire everything, pound wall in frustration.’ Finally I did the unthinkable and sat down to read the manual carefully. Typical of consumer electronics the manual basically sucks, plus this one is like 120 pages long, so it took about half my Saturday. But I finally got to the bottom of it. It turns out the receiver is among other things a configurable video and sound router. Despite the fact that the inputs are labeled in the back (so there is a sound and video input for the dvd player, and one for the VCR, and so on) you cannot count on the inputs actually being for the component they’re labeled for. I bought the reciever as a floor model and apparantly someone went in and reconfigured the sound in and outputs, and even worse they renamed one of the sound inputs, so when I selected Cable/satelite on the front of the reciever, I was selecting the cable/satelite video feed but the audio feed was from the DVD.
No wonder I was unable to puzzle this shit out without the manual.
Anyway long story short once I renamed all the components back to their original names and got all inputs programmed correctly (which in this case simply meant back to what they are actually labeled) everything started working. Hurrah!
New photo albums posted
I posted a bunch of new photo albums over the weekend. I haven’t had a chance to add captions and descriptions to all of them yet, but the photos are all up. There are shots of the Christening I went to in MA a few weeks ago, photos of the trip to NY, the pumpkin Samantha and I carved at Halloween, and of Thanksgiving supper this past weekend.
They’re mostly of interest to the family but check em out if you’re interested. Use the Gallery link at the top of the page to see them.
Oh, and I’ll post shots of Samantha’s birthday party sometime later this week.
I’m not quite dead yet.
So…sorry for the long span between posts. I’ve been going through some health stuff. Things seem to be stabilized at this point, now it’s just a matter of adjusting to all the changes, which is mostly what I’ve been up to for the past month. I promise to get back to my regularly scheduled allotment of snarky posts now 😉
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