Moore's Law

The thing about Moore's law - for science fiction it's a stone cold motherfucker. I was just reading a book (which shall remain unnamed) that was first printed in 1982. It's a good book, but I've been trying to ignore a series of typewriter references. This book even says something along the line of "he did most of his writing on the computer of course, but the typewriter was still necessary for filling out forms and the like." Well - I just hit the scene where a police detective realized someone broke into his office and accessed his files (this is 2007 by the way). He goes into his trash can and retrieves his old typewriter ribbon and reads off it - to determine what the person copied from his files. Honestly you can't suspend disbelief when you read that. You just can't. It's not like you can blame the author - who could predict Adobe Acrobat and web forms in 1982 - two years before the very first Macintosh? My nephew is in fifth grade. My suspicion is that if I handed him a typewriter ribbon he wouldn't be able to identify it. (Hmm - I'll ask him next time I talk to him.) I wonder what he would make of Resident Evil's save system?
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And it's fixed

Ok, the comment error was fixed. Oddly enough one of the mailqueues changed in such a way that Apache couldn't send mail anymore. So that error was MovableType complaining (not very intuitively) that it couldn't send me an email alert about your fascinating new prose. Seems to be OK now. If anybody gets any odd messages let me know . . . .
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Comments

Yeah - comments are being weird and spitting out an error message. They do appear to be posting. I think the failure is that I'm not getting my "new comment on X" email. Either that or maybe the RSS is borked? I'm looking into it but as far as I can tell you can safely ignore the error message. Please let me know if a comment doesn't post successfully.
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PSP Day 4

Well, I loves me some PSP. Honestly - Nintendo is screwed in the handheld space. They've been warming over ancient technology for years now, and Sony has them with their pants down. Nintendo's response was to fragment their install base into two different camps and completely screw the pooch on multiplayer. The DS is awkward to hold, and has very few games that are anything other than 2nd class ports. I bought 5 games for the PSP - and every one of them supports wireless multiplayer. Only one tops at 2 players (Lumines) - the next fewest is Untold Legends at 4. I have more multiplayer games for my PSP than my DS, I have more games for my PSP than my DS. How is it that I'm comparing a launch console to a six month old device? Go look at the upcoming release calendar for DS and PSP - honestly what is going on there. The DS is a Virtua Boy. It had better outright be the Revolution's controller or Nintendo is going to orphan it and fast. Mario Party GBA comes out next week. Now, historically I would snap this up for Karin. Ready for the kicker - it doesn't even support multiplayer on the DS - because the DS can't interface with GBA link cables. Nice. So they put one of their strongest multiplayer franchises on the GBA six months after the DS launch so that everyone who traded in a GBA for DS can't play. Smooth. Anyway. The PSP is phenomenal. Can't stress that enough. And if you have a PSP buy Lumines. Great game. In fact, can anybody tell me what other games Tetsuya Mizuguchi has done besides Rez? Based on Rez and now Lumines I would buy his other works on faith. In other news I gave up on hoping Netflix would carry games and subscribed to GameFly. I got Republic Commando (which I haven't even booted yet) and Donkey Kong's Jungle Beat. Jungle Beat is awesome fun - although you have to play it in short doses or your hands really hurt. I was worried it would be too short but it's a good enough party game that I'm going to buy it. If you have a bongo controller I strongly recommend at least renting Jungle Beat. And if you ever have groups for party games I think Jungle Beat would be an awesome game for passing the controller around.
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Applecare

So yeah, the HD in my laptop is shot. It's still under warranty so Apple is replacing it, but that's 7-10 business days from Monday and then I'll have to reinstall applications and the like. (sigh) I'm not sure what that means for Pic_A_Day in the interim - probably it will be down. In theory I could download the GiMP for Windows and use that to edit pictures, but it's debateable how I feel about that. Tonight is the Snowblind ship party and tomorrow is PSP day! Huzzah for both of those!
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