Sculptural Stuff

A while back I started reading a humor blog called The Sneeze. I don't remember how I found it now, but I put in my RSS feeds and went on about my business. Today it came up with pictures of some really cool sculptures and a link to the sculptor's blog as well. Worth checking out.

And on a still somewhat sculptural note - I love some of these tiki mugs. I'm not sure if I like Radar Vic or Malicious the best, but I'd be happy to drink out of either. Is it too blatant to point out my birthday is next month? No, I don't think it is!

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Marketing Thoughts

So another SuperBowl came and went. I didn't bother to watch this one, but y'know what is really starting to bug me? The whole "Superbowl ads as cultural events" concept. I mean for days before the paper (and the internet, so don't get all 21st century smug on me) were hyping the commercials - and assessing the consumer reaction is a major news story today. I have a lot more understanding of somebody who watched the SuperBowl for y'know the football game, than somebody who watched for the ads.

The only real counterargument I can see is that the ads are actually *art*, which I can see I guess. But I don't really buy it. First off, what percentage of TV ads have any lasting cultural impact? Yes, fine the 1984 Macintosh commercial. Then there's . . . I'm sure there's a few more, but it's a tiny, tiny percent. Ads may be a necessary evil of the broadcasting system, but that doesn't mean we should celebrate them, or treat them as news.

So you want to be Mr. Snooty "I'm too good to watch football"? Good on you. But don't go to YouTube and watch the SuperBowl ads later. That's just ridiculous.

On a similar note today at lunch I was reading the latest Wired magazine, and it had an article about Yahoo "lost" the "search battle" to Google. It was an OK article, but something occurred to me that I think is significant and Wired didn't touch on it at all. If you go to Google's homepage you get a clean elegant page. Their logo is colorful, and even playful, but the overall impression is "quiet competence". Go to Yahoo's homepage. It's cluttered. I just looked: it has what I would describe as "Fisher Price My FIrst Icons" all over the place, ads, and a bunch of stupid crap. The overall impression is somewhere between "ad executive on the loose with FrontPage" and MySpace.

Setting up the new computer I set up Flock on two different OSes. Flock defaults search to Yahoo and I realized I considered that almost broken. It's not so much that I think Yahoo's search results are inferior - truth is I've never compared the two. It's that going to a Google page makes me feel like a professional and going to a Yahoo (or is it Yahoo! ? A telling question.) page makes me feel like I need a new set of Crayolas.

In conclusion, Stay off my yard! (shakes walking stick) Darn kids!

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Why, yes I WILL have some of that delicious Kool-Aid!

I got a new computer this week. I had known for a while my Windows box wasn't cutting it anymore, but I wasn't doing any heavy Windows development so I let it slide. That's no longer true, and it took very little pushing for me to go "OK that's it."

My old box was pretty old - 1 Gig of RAM and a Athlon 2 Ghz single core. The video card wasn't bad - I had upgraded that last year to a GeForce 7300, but it was AGP bus, not PCI-E.

The upshot of this is for a long time I used to upgrade my PC rig every year or so, and on given year I could recycle a lot of components, but this time I haven't upgraded the core components since . . . 2003? Maybe 2004. It's been a while. So this time there was nothing other than the sound card and the DVD burner I would have been willing to migrate. Since I have to buy everything, might as well get a preassembled box, right?

Here's the kicker. Ask me what the best Windows development box is these days?:

Mac Pro Box.JPG

Yes that's right. I bought a Mac as my Windows box. Crazy? Like a fox I tell you. These days, with Boot Camp (and Parallels Desktop! OMFG - how insane is this software?) So first off, what did I buy? It has 2 dual-core 2.66 Ghz processors, 2 Gigs of RAM (1 Gig default from Apple and 1 Gig bought from a third party vendor), a 500 Gig SATA drive and an ATI Radeon X1900. Kept the two LCD monitors, naturally. It came with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, but right now I'm using my old faithful MS Natural Keyboard and the wired Mighty Mouse (so they play nicely with the KVM switch as well).

If you're not up on all the Apple stuff, Boot Camp is the software that lets you dual-boot between OS X and Windows XP. I partitioned the drive into a 200 Gig NTFS partition and a 300 Gig HPFS+ partition for OS X. I installed XP Professional on the Boot Camp partition, but I haven't really used it for anything yet. That's where Parallels Desktop comes in. I expect I'll use Boot Camp a fair amount for gaming and working on heavy 3d apps. But for basic "let's do the security patch update shuffle" Parallels lets me run the *same XP install* virtualized onto my OS X System. At the moment I have XP running in a window, VPNed up and running the big Perforce "suck all the data down" task. (Looking. Parallels seems to consume about 20-30% of one core to do that. Leaving me THREE cores faster than than my old Windows box completely unloaded, plus 70% of the last core for XP to waste doing dumb crap.) Now RAM is a bit skinty - and the XP box only has a half gig of RAM allocated and that probably won't fly for development. I might go ahead and bump the RAM up to 4 Gigs. We'll see. Parallels can even do this crazy mode where the XP desktop disappears and the Windows apps just run straight on the OS X desktop. When I do that I end up with the OS X dock and menubar on the left monitor and an XP Start Menu on the right taskbar. It's cats and dogs, playing together! It's crazy I tell you!

So anyway, introducing TinyGod:

The name is a reference to a very old Penny Arcade strip. It humors me to A ) reverse the Mac/PC polarity of the "Tiny God" reference and B ) call that behemoth of a box "TinyGod". But I'm a geek like that.

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Flash Fiction

With the aid of an anonymous donor, Escape Pod is presenting a contest for the best SF story of 300 words or less. There are no restrictions on theme, plot, or structure. The goal is simply to present a strong idea-based story in the minimum space possible.

Escape Pod ยป 300 Word Flash Contest!

I should have mentioned this earlier, but I only got around to checking it out recently myself. Escape Pod is running a contest to get some great short "flash fiction". The contest itself closed for entried at the end of January and the first few groups of voting have closed, but there's still a lot of fiction to come, and you can always read the stories that have already been through voting. 300 words is an interesting challenge, and there's some good stuff in here. I have two pieces in but I submitted them at the end so it will be a while before they post. And no, I'm not saying which ones they are. :-) Anyway, check them out here.


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