Responding to Zoe, Kevin Thurman frets:
Over a year ago much of what is important now has changed. Things will change even more, the technology is just coming into it's own...wireless technology will be even bigger by 2006 and in 2008 a significant chunck of the "internet" department. This is just one area, convergence is going to make the world of the netroots even more complicated.
Does this mean we shouldn't even try? Not at all. This ever-changing world is the main reason we must train more people and organizations to use the interactive medium (internet) or risk losing our current advantage to the conservatives like we did with direct mail in the 1970s.
But it's always that way at the beginning. After the initial download of information, future twists, turns and changes are easy to follow and simple to decipher. All we need are staffers with a base knowledge of the netroots. They'll follow the future just fine. We needn't worry about keeping them current on tomorrow's tools, our only task is ensuring they understand the importance of today's. Once they've reached that peak, they'll strive for competitive advantage on their own.
I've been getting a lot of complaints about bounced E-mails and a fair number of promised e-mails that didn't show, so we're going to have to assume that the pandagon e-mail is, as usual, not so working. Hit me at eklein-at-ucsc-dot-edu and I'll definitely get them.
JESSE: I'll be at pandagon-at-gmail-dot-com.
Tech-capable readers, I need your help. Is there any way to export an AOL address book into a more conventional, less suckful, program? If so, how? We're dealing with Windows here, if it helps at all. If any of you can find me a fix, you'd really be doing me a favor...
I think the ombudsman at the Washington Post has a virus. I just got an e-mail from him entitled "^_^ meay meay!"
Although, you never know, he might just be a huge anime fan...
The e-mail of a spam I just got:
Does he/she think I'm cute? Which way do they swing? Why'd they have to tell me through an e-gold advertisement?
Why can't creepy anonymous people just be open about how they feel?
I was out buying extra controllers for my new XBox, and I decided to sit down and come up with the Five Best Console Controllers of All Time.
A few caveats: first, the controller must be first-party (built by the company who manufactures the console). Second, different iterations of controllers are counted separately - so the Genesis three-button is a different controller from the six-button, the Wavebird is a different controller from the stock GameCube controller. That having been said, let the ranking begin:
5.) Nintendo 64 Controller
Quite possibly the most unique controller design ever, its only real problem was the utterly useless L-trigger and bad D-pad. It was the first standard analog controller, and when games were built around it, it played like a dream. Unfortunately, the oddness of the setup (three handles, which ensured only two-thirds of the controller was accessible at once) and the fact that you needed to add a Rumble Pak to make it vibrate push it down the list.
4.) Nintendo GameCube Wavebird
The first standard first-party wireless controller, it is the best thing ever made for four-person play. Sit anywhere you want, play anywhere you want, take your controller with you so that nobody else can unpause the game...the ultimate frat-house pad. The shoulder buttons are wonky, the Z button is almost superfluous, and the button layout on the face can make for weirdly altered experiences in games that require multiple button presses. But it's wireless!
3.) NES Controller
It had a d-pad. And multiple controller buttons. And this "select" button thingee. It earns props mainly for being indestructable and for being the first major controller built for console games, rather than either being a joystick or some weird amalgam of a stick and a keypad. Plus, it came with a light gun. Why don't systems have included light guns anymore?
2.) Playstation 2 DualShock
Probably the epitome of the design started by Nintendo with the NES and SNES controllers, it's an incredibly well-balanced "traditional" controller. The analog sticks are incredibly well-placed - my only beef is the X-crossed D-pad, which isn't always as responsive on the diagonals as it should be. Also, the fact that you have to power on the analog sticks with many games is annoying.
1.) SNES "Dogbone"
Shoulder buttons. I knew I'd never like them. Now, index fingers at the ready is just *the* way to hold a controller. There were really no flaws with this one - it's the only controller I can do a Dragon Punch on to this day.
So, yeah, the list is Nintendo-dominated...but for a reason. They've always been on the cutting edge of controller design - the PS2 controller is the evolution of Nintendo's SNES design (which makes sense, considering the PS1 was supposed to be a Nintendo product), the XBox controller is the Dreamcast controller with a second analog stick and the annoying black and white buttons.
Worst?
5. Sega Saturn Original
They took the Genesis six-button controller, added shoulder buttons...and filed all the edges to points. It was disappointing because it wasn't anything new, but also because it physically hurt to hold.
4. Virtual Boy
Having to hold an entire pack of batteries while you played kind of sucked. And it was a mirror-image controller, so you had a D-Pad and two buttons on each side, which wasn't so bad, except that it didn't "feel" like a Nintendo controller. Plus, the whole thing kind of sucked in a pragmatic sense.
3. Phillips CD-i
Do you like playing video games with your TV remote? Do you like it when your remote doesn't have enough buttons to make playing any game worth it? The ultimate example of bad input design ensuring bad gameplay design - it was designed for those Full Motion Video games that were in vogue in the early 90s. Make a decision, watch some film, at a pre-ordained time hit the button to make another decision, sometimes you'll have to time it with the clip. Games made for people who want to watch movies, but feel guilty not performing any activity whatsoever.
2. Atari 5200
If you know why this controller sucked before I say anything, you are truly 1337. This sucked for one reason, and one reason only: the controller didn't center. When you use most physical input devices, they will reset to a "neutral" position when they aren't in use. For instance, your keyboard doesn't just keep typing "K" because it was the last letter you hit. The Atari 5200 didn't do this. Instead, it remained whereever you pushed it, and you had to drag it back to the center - which wouldn't have been so much of a problem if the things stayed sturdy, which they didn't after a while.
1. Atari Jaguar
It was a phone pad...with a Genesis controller smacked on top. I actually did own a Jaguar, and it was just a melding of every outdated concept possible. Actually, it was just every outdated concept by Sega possible. Awful, clunky, and plain silly.
Flames and disagreements welcome.
Yes, I'm tired of politics for the time being. Bite my shiny metal ass.
The Times has a surprisingly perceptive article on obsessive bloggers; people who become addicted to the daily routine of type/publish and find it taking over their lives.
There's a kink in the analysis that I want to talk a bit about. Society condemns addiction to very specific things -- alcohol, drugs, television, video games -- pursuits thought of as solitary and unfocused. Work, on the other hand, garners admiration for those obsessed with succeeding -- lawyers who put in 14 hour days and residents who work 100-hour weeks net appreciative, sympathetic whistles from their friends. The phrase workaholic is occasionally applied but only seriously considered in the most severe of case. The critical difference between admirable and detestable obsessions is productivity, the perceived value of your act is weighed before the time you spend on it.
So where does blogging fall? For people trapped in jobs they don't enjoy or situations that disempower, blogging offers an escape route from drudgery into productivity. Psychologically, opining on crucial issues of the day in a forum that, depending on your quality, offers tens of thousands of readers a day feels like a much better usage of time than performing a rote or mundane task where the best possible outcome is a penny in the cup of your company. As I see it, blogging offers a cure for the powerlessness many "cogs in the machine" feel.
Allow me to use myself as an example. I'm 20 years old, a college student. I keep up very good grades, am involved in a serious relationship, have a number of friends, work out every other day, am close with my family and generally maintain an existence that most would see as full and normal. I also spend 3-4 hours every day writing about politics for a web log with around 11,000 daily readers. It's certainly an obsession of sorts -- anything done for this long, with this frequency, for no money certainly qualifies me for addiction counseling. But is it a harmful one?
Probably not. It's improved my writing dramatically and given me an outlet for the political junkyism that formerly induced an aggravating restlessness. It's taught me what I want to do with myself (opinionated political journalism) and helped me cultivate contacts who'll probably be crucial to any success I later enjoy in the field. The time it sucks up has been stolen from other hobbies, some productive (reading, studying), others less so (television, staring at my toes). I've certainly been able to change the world, or at least people in it, in my own way -- and on a much greater scale than paper's read by my professors would have allowed for.
My experience may be different than most. I've enjoyed success far out of proportion to my talent, when I explain my hobby the mention of my audience's (you guys) size elicits those appreciative whistles we spoke of earlier. If I had no readers, or didn't write on issues of war and peace, would I still be able to rationalize it away as an admirable hobby?
That's the crux of the question the article poses. I fall on the pro-blogging side -- obsessing over a little read and rarely viewed website is symptomatic of other needs: a dissatisfaction with one's job or life, a need to branch out to an audience beyond one's immediate circle. If nothing else, this allows for real insight into one's self and can help steer us into situations that are more fulfilling; if such career changes are unattainable then the endless rhythm of "type...publish" can at least take the edge off.
What do you think?
Researchers have created a machine that can identify the redacted text on confidential documents -- no longer is a big black marker an impenetrable harbinger of secrecy. I'm uncertain that this is a positive development. There's often good reason for text to be redacted, be it for protecting agents or keeping missions obscured, and the government will surely respond to this potential security risk by changing how they release documents. Now, they might be able to find ways to foil the machines (Courier fonts apparently helps), but they also might decide a technological race isn't worth the time and a) stop releasing documents with confidential information under the rationale that security can't be assured or b) begin rewriting documents before they're released so the redacted text doesn't exist. The latter opens up more problems as potentially incriminating information can be simply deleted and there'll be no hint of its existence. It'd be bitter irony if the threat of encroachment on government secrecy resulted in more opacity than we had to begin with.
And plus, who didn't have a place in their hearts for the romantic mystery of a sheet of paper, drowning in black, with only a "this" and a "the" poking out for air?
Via The Talent Show.
Looks like one senior lawmakers love affair with an iPod might save digital music. Truly a Romeo and Juliet story for our time.
having just got an iPod (birthdays rock), I can see how the device provoked a change of heart. The damn things are just so cool.
Big ups (yeah, I'm cool like dat) to Hit and Run for the link.
From the Times:
Did you know that if you leave Windex on a CD, the CD starts to corrode? It bubbles, and the layers separate.
Luckily, it wasn't anything important (some promotional package for a magazine I've never heard of and wouldn't buy, including tracks by Some Band I Don't Like and A Bunch Of Angry Rap-Rockers Who Sound Like Every Other Rap-Rock Band Ever). Now, I can have fun with the AOL CDs I get all the time without ruining my microwave...
This is what I love about interest group politics. The Bush Administration decides to promote universal broadband access by 2007. Fine, great goal, I'm all for it. But this graf really says it all:
This is a good proposal for a variety of reasons, particularly if it gets funded. But it's just stupid as a giveaway to "internet-savvy" voters, who won't much care about it and don't vote on which politician is promising other people more bandwidth anyway.
Yesterday night, Pandagon passed 1,000,000 visits since we installed Sitemeter in late October. I just want to thank you all for coming back, day after day, to read our semi-coherent rantings. It's enormously gratifying to know you all think so highly of our writings that you take time out of your days to read and participate in our corner of cyberspace.
So in summation, you love us. You really love us. And we love you too. Some of you. You know who you are. Yeah, call me tonight, we'll do some "group-blogging".
Looks like Matt has just found the answer to the Mac user's file sharing wishes, Acquisition. Welcome to the party, big guy.
Honestly, can someone give me a good reason why PC's are better than Macs anymore? It used to be that we had no software, but now we've got an excellent program for pretty much anything we want to do. Our hardware kicks ass, viruses don't hurt us and Apple puts out blindingly intuitive and elegant software for everything we do.
I guess what I'm trying to say is switch, you know you want to.
I get a lot of e-mail from people saying the ads keep them from reading the page. Neither Jesse nor I know how to fix this problem so any suggestions would be helpful. In the meantime, I suggest downloading an RSS reader (or using Bloglines or Kinja) to view the site. You'll be able to read the full text of all posts that we don't break into two parts (you know the ones where it says "Continue Reading...") and of that group, you can just click the link to read the whole thing. I know it's not a perfect workaround, but until someone tells us how to fix this, it's the best we've got.
I've been playing FFXI the past couple of days, and I have mixed feelings about it.
I cut my teeth on graphic adventures and Japanese RPGs. Some platformers, action games, etc., but I always came back, and still come back to narrative-driven games. Now, one can argue, rather reasonably, that the narrative in most games is simply a mask for the type of gameplay in most massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG, shortened for obvious reasons) - but I've always viewed it that the gameplay was simply a way of making the narrative interactive, if done well. With MMORPGs, I feel like I'm taking on the two main goals of Japanese RPGs (1. Kill things in order to get better at killing things; 2. Run tasks for the purpose of attaining things and/or moving on to running harder tasks to attain better things) without the narrative rationale.
Basically, at this point, I feel like I'm running around doing random things for no good reason, with the main appeal being that I can run around doing other random things, except better, and potentially with more people. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong, I don't know.
AOL, Yahoo, Earthlink and Microsoft are suing hundreds of spammers for violating anti-spam laws.
The attorneys responded back with hundreds of e-mails offering to settle the case for as low as $30, and other legal problems such as debt owed to creditors, civil fines and back tax payments for as low as $20. AOL's spokesman, when asked for comment, popped some generic Cialis and went off for some "alone time".
I got the best spam E-mail ever. I'm gonna share the licketylove:
What's up? Did I tell you about the party I hit up the other day? It was doppee! I found this n e t s i t e that slings this stuff called sillyest. It's like vighagra times ten. You don't even need a script to get it either. I was like a rockstar for 2 days straight. It was even better than that time we went to the clubb in lake titicaca!
they had some sort of prommotioncommotion thing going on when i hooked some up, i think it's still on sail too.
get ahold of me this weekend and we'll hit up clubb atlantis.
clickityclack here to check it
“For a warrior, to be inaccessible means that he touches the world around him sparingly. And above all, he deliberately avoids exhausting himself and others. He doesn’t use and squeeze people until they have shriveled to nothing, especially the people he loves.”
~ Carlos Castaneda, the lingering poet of ashtabula, oh
VeriSign is trying to restart its awful Site Finder service again.
I look forward to the fight. Bring. It. On.
Bringiton.org doesn't resolve yet, by the way. Yet.
Mozilla Firefox huh? A "revelatory experience" is it?
Mozilla: Doing today what Apple did a year ago.
And don't even get me started on Explorer. Has Microsoft seen fit to include tabs yet?
There's a brand new, fast spreading worm going around. Watch out for it:
Mydoom is wreaking havoc with businesses and home computer users, said Steven Sundermeier, product manager for Central Command, an anti-virus company in Medina, Ohio. Sundermeier said the worm is spreading fastest in the United States and Europe.
The virus spreads in an e-mail message that looks like it was garbled during its journey to the recipient's in-box. The body text urges recipients to click on the attached file if the contents of the message are damaged or unreadable. The virus launches when the attachment is opened.