Friday, July 25, 2003

In one fell swoop, Robert X. Cringely describes a potential business that can (1) provide music downloads cheaply, (2) isn't illegal, and (3) pisses off RIAA. I love it. If I had $2,000,000 hanging around, I'd be all over this like white on rice.

Thursday, July 24, 2003

This email archive has a quick statement by an anonymous IBM source about how SWT (the Eclipse widget set) came to be and why they think AWT/Eclipse is teh suXor.

Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Rachel Lucas opens up on a particularly deserving specimen of homo stupiditous. It's so moving, I'm all teary-eyed. <sniff/>

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Some time ago, Kathy's brother Michael called and told Kathy about this new massively-multiplayer online role playing game, set in the Star Wars universe. After the two of them talked about it a while, she told me I should pre-order the collector's edition so we could try the game and see how it went. Being the easy sell that I am, I dashed right off to EBworld.com to order our copy and then I promptly forgot about it.

On launch day, the box arrived. We were doing other stuff that weekend (I forget exactly what now), and so didn't get around to opening the box and installing the game until Sunday. That meant that we went to bed at a decent hour both Friday and Saturday nights. That was good, because I'm pretty sure that was the last time I went to bed at anything like my usual bedtime since (about three weeks now). This game is really good. There are bugs, of course, and I spend a bit of time complaining about them, but I also note that I'm spending all my leisure time playing the stupid game instead of doing other stuff so it's obviously more entertainment than the bugs are annoying.

Here's how addictive the game is: after playing less than a week, Kathy said I needed to upgrade another desktop machine so that she could have her own character and we could play together. After pricing upgrade bits, we wound up buying a pre-made HP Pavilion system for her, and she's been playing since. That's right ... we bought a computer system just to play this game. We're insane, obviously.

While in the game one day, we ran into a friend of Kathy's brother who told us his in-game hobby was taking snapshots of the other characters to post on his website. "Well, duh," I thought to myself. "I should be doing that as well." So, here is my first batch of snapshots.