blueZhift Blog

Want to have some pre or post election day fun? Well a good friend just told me about a couple of web sites that show detailed political campaign contribution information. I think this information has been public record for a long time, but now the power of the web makes it very easy to access.

With a few easy clicks, you can see what your neighbors and coworkers really think because nothing tells you where the heart really is like where people will put their money. It’s particularly interesting when you see someone who gives money to both sides! What snakes! They don’t believe in anything, they’re just trying to buy a candidate! As a candidate, I wouldn’t soil myself by accepting contributions from such duplicitous people.

The only thing more disgusting than that is when you come across a pattern of regular contributions by appointed government officials to their political sponsors. These sure look like kickbacks to me!

Well have fun with these links!

Opensecrets.org

Illinois Campaign Disclosure

Yesterday Sony revealed more details concerning their upcoming portable games console, the Playstation Portable (PSP). The PSP will launch in Japan on December 12 for 19800 Yen. If U.S. pricing is similar, then this means the PSP will cost less than $200! Sony also said that battery life will be between 4 and 6 hours between charges depending on use.

Now first of all, the price is unbelievable. Obviously this is meant to be competitive with Nintendo’s upcoming DS which will launch at $149 in the U.S.. But there’s no way Sony will be making a profit on the hardware at $200 a unit. You can’t get a low end iPod for that much, and arguably there’s a lot more going on in the PSP relative to the iPod. So a wild eyed guess says that Sony will be losing $200 or more per sale! Granted, losing money on the console hardware and making it up on game royalties is standard in the games industry. But this is a lot of money to lose on an unproven console going against a very successful and entrenched competitor like Nintendo.

The other unbelievable thing is the 4 to 6 hours of battery life. Like laptop battery life claims from the manufacturer, this must be taken with a huge grain of salt. If the PSP video display sucks power anything like the one on my kids’ Leapster, cut Sony’s claims in half. At 2 to 3 hours, the PSP could prove to be a bit frustrating for the hard core gamer on the go. On the point of battery life, Sony had better be telling the truth or else they could become quite a laughing stock and the butt of jokes, much as the Apple Newton’s much touted handwriting recognition became when it proved to be less than advertised.

All of that said, Sony, you’re killin’ me! I still think that of the two new handhelds, the PSP is the sexier/cooler/hipper one to have. And at $200, it’s well in range. But Sony, why no movies until 2005? The Playstation 2 launched in Japan with very few games, but the ability to play DVD movies. That movie playing ability really supported early sales of a console that was rather difficult for developers to work with initially. And since Sony owns movie studios, selling more DVDs still helps the bottom line. So why no movies at PSP launch? Writing movies to the new UMD format shouldn’t be any more trouble than writing games to it, so I’m guessing that they haven’t got all of the bugs out of mass producing UMDs yet. So they simply made a choice to go with games over movies. Still, a few block busters from their library should not have been too much trouble.

Well, both Sony and Nintendo are taking big risks with their new handhelds. Sony’s seem to be primarily technical, while Nintendo’s is more of wtf to do with the second screen. This should be an interesting Christmas.

This past weekend I packed up the van and took my crew to Anime Reactor in Rosemont, a Chicago suburb. In short, this late thirty-something guy had a lot of fun! I got a lot of cosplayer pics, attended a good number of panels, and even got up the nerve to sing Shell during Friday night karaoke! Call me strange, but I love the cosplayers and artists, and I love singing Japanese anime songs. The main reason I like Japanese anime though, is because the stories are so much better than most of the crap on tv right now.

It didn’t surprise me that the kids had a good time too. They love anime, buying stuff, and pocky! What did surprise me a bit was that my wife was a bit flipped out by the fact that we’re significantly older than most of the con attendees. We were both resident heads at the University of Chicago years ago, and spent a lot of time with young people, so I was doubly surprised by her reaction. But I guess that was because the relationship was different then. At a con we only have to be parents to our own children. She finally loosened up and had a pretty good time too. The age thing didn’t really bother me, I was having too much fun to worry about that anyway!

After an initial mix up with the kids’ registrations, mostly my fault, and a big argument, I had thought that maybe this would be the last con I dragged the family to. But in the end, we all had a good time and I think I learned something more about myself and the family I love so much. This old dog still has a lot of tricks left in him.

For the past couple of weeks, iTunes and I have not been seeing eye to eye….yeah…. I’ve hugged, kissed, and sweet talked, so to speak, but the b**** just wouldn’t burn any of my playlists! First I’d get an error dialog that said the playlist was too long no matter how many songs were in the list and then if I click the audio cd button on that dialog to span multiple CDs, it would say that it couldn’t burn any of the songs on the list.

To make a long and frustrating story short, it was the IDE drivers. I’d changed to an Nvidia nForce 2 based motherboard, but had not installed the motherboard drivers. Why? Because the first time I tried this from the enclosed CD, it froze up the system. Everything else worked fine with the stock Windows XP SP2 drivers. So I wasn’t in a rush to check for newer drivers since I didn’t need the onboard audio and ethernet anyway. After trying everything else to solve the problem, I downloaded the nForce 2 drivers from Mach Speed’s web site, held my breath and installed them (after creating a restore point of course).

Now iTunes is happy again, and so am I!

A while back I was wondering why certain stories kept getting negative karma points, other than genuinely sucking big time. Well, I think I’ve found the reason, Googlebots! Googlebots are Google’s web crawlers, and for some reason they seem to have been hitting the negative karma link a little more than the positive link on this site. In any case, what the bots think isn’t important to me!

Like Captain Kirk, I take full responsibility for the actions of my crew. This blog isn’t in the root of the webserver which is where a bot will be looking for the robots.txt file. The robots.txt file that is there didn’t have the exclusion directive needed to tell the bot not to assign karma points. I’ve fixed this now, so by tomorrow the spurious negative karma points should be a thing of the past, unless of course this stuff really sucks!:)

When I first saw this book on the shelf at Borders, the title so intrigued me that I could not help but pick it up and take a look. After flipping through a few pages, I decided that I’d come back in a few days and buy it after finishing a few other books (mostly manga ) that I was reading. Well, you snooze you lose! I couldn’t find it the next time I looked, so I ended up ordering it from Amazon.

Anyway, once Hackers and Painters arrived in my office, I couldn’t put it down. This is a really good read that will encourage one to think in a new way, or in my case, validate some of the strange thoughts I was already having! Paul Graham’s audience for this book is primarily hackers, but I think that general audiences will find this interesting as well. As I told my wife, even the notes at the back are cool! After reading it through I suddenly have a desire to learn Lisp and rule the world!

Yeah, I know, as a book review this really sucks and lacks depth. But I just wanted to say that I really liked the book and it is a worthy read. Graham writes about technology and society in a way that will resonate with hackers and has really inspired my work over the past week or so. Check it out!

I’ve had my iPod for about a year now. It’s a second generation model and while I’ve heard of issues with declining battery life with age, I haven’t noticed anything like that with mine just yet. Nevertheless, I was very happy to read that now for about $40 you can get a replacement battery for 1st or 2nd generation iPods that will last up to 20 hours on a full charge. Click here for the full story. The battery can be purchased from Other World Computing, a long time Mac specialist that I’ve had good dealings with in the past. According to the story, installing the battery is fairly straight forward.

A story on Gamesindustry.biz states that Bill Gates will be the keynote speaker at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January. He is expected to make the formal announcement of Xbox 2 at that time. Lately, news coming out of the Xbox camp has been pretty good. Peter Molyneux’s action RPG Fable was released for the platform and went on to become the fastest selling game in Xbox history. Though this record is not likely to stand as Halo 2 has surpassed 1.5 million preorders for its November 9 release date.

And to that good news, I would add that the likelihood of backwards compatibility on Xbox 2 has increased with the recent release of Microsoft Virtual PC for MacOS X. Why? Because today’s Macintosh computers are built around the a PowerPC (PPC) architecture similar to that is rumored to be at the core of Xbox 2. Well this is more than rumor since early development kits are also based on PPC. So it is more plausible that backwards compatibility can be achieved using Virtual PC-like emulation. This could also get them around the challenge presented by going from Nvidia to ATI for the graphics chip set. Backwards compatibility would go a long way towards supporting the launch of Xbox 2.

So far from being dead, Xbox 2 is alive and kicking. This probably due in no small part to Bill Gates’ personal involvement or at least interest in the project. Gates didn’t make his money being stupid. Perhaps he realizes that if Microsoft is going to thrive in a post-PC, post-Windows era, it needs to get into other markets. Games are a natural progression and a huge growth market rivalling movies and television. If MS can get a piece of that pie, it won’t hurt so much when Windows and Office shipments start to drop off.

I walked to my nearby Border’s at lunch time today and found that just in time for Halloween, it’s Wicca Season! There was a whole little Wicca section prominently displayed at the top of the escalator. Hey! When did Wicca become mainstream? Here are the books for sale.

The Earth Path

Evolutionary Witchcraft

Hex Appeal

The Idiot’s Guide to Wicca and Witchcraft

Magical Almanac

Pagan Pride

Wicca for One

Since I didn’t have pen and paper, I decided to record a voice note of the titles on my cell phone. After doing this I felt I must have looked like some fanatic outraged by Wicca. I’m sure some of my more conservative Christian friends would probably be put off by this, along with Halloween as well. My feelings about Wicca are neutral. Flipping through one of the books I got the impression that Wicca is another largely harmless form of spiritualism. While I myself am a Christian, I believe that anything that can get you closer to God is a good thing. If Jesus taught us anything at all, it is that God wants us to get to know him personally and the form this will take will depend on the individual.

I was trained as an experimentalist, so in that spirit, this post is an experiment. I’ve been noticing that anything that I post with words like "Iraq", "Army", or "Navy" gets negative karma points, but never any comments. Now I don’t really care what people think of what I write here, well not too much…;) But I am curious. I suspect that W’s minions, official and otherwise, have bots scouring sites with criticism and doing what they can. No, I don’t go for conspiracy theories, but I do believe in experiment. So let’s see what this gets!

Iraq, blah blah blah, Iraq! Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines…blah blah blah. Iraq, W, sucks! Blah blah blah, yadda, yadda, yadda…. No more war! More war! Four more years, Iraq! Blah, blah, blah, George Bush, Iraq, blah blah blah… John Kerry, Dick Dick Cheney blah blah blah. It’s the economy Iraq!

Heh heh, let’s see what that gets! Now seriously, if the Internet has an ass, then this blog is the pimple on the pimple of that ass. So I don’t consider this to be all that important. IRAQ!!!!