Category: Other

Slashdot: Atari Announces Official Portable 2600. “Portable” is an exaggeration; the unit has no screen or batteries. It’s just a joystick that plugs into your TV and plays 10 classic Atari games. It’s also an exaggeration to say that Atari is making the thing; they’ve licensed the rights to JAKKS Pacific, a company that have already made a similar product. Press release here; get it before it succumbs to Yahoo bit-rot.

Personally, I would only consider such a monster if it had the entire Atari library in it (considering that each game was only a maximum of 4K in size, that should be feasible) and if the “joystick” were identical to the old Atari 2600 joystick. Super retro kid stuff…
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AP (via NYT): “Right-wing Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, whose anti-immigration party stunned the public with its strong showing in local elections last March, was shot six times and killed Monday as he left a radio interview.”

Adam Curry (the former veejay turned expat techie): “To reiterate: Pim Fortuyn never called for a ‘Ban on immigration’ or ‘Removal of Muslims.’ Unfortunately the memes were set, and the largest news organizations in the world are copying incorrect information and propagating it shamelessly. These organizations used to employ fact checkers. If they still do, then they should all be fired immediately.”

This is why newsblogging is important—it makes it possible for us to get the voice of the man on the ground in a way that would have been unthinkable in a world where only the pros disseminate the news.
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Long day today; hard day. Lost my cool in a very bad way at some good friends tonight, who I hope are still friends.

Happy Earth Day 2002. With Ashcroft in Justice, attempts to drill the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge, and backing away from international environmental treaties, this little gem from Walt Kelly in 1971 is still relevant:

Courtesy Phil Wolff, here’s a different kind of Kellogg weblog… He writes,

“[Macro error: Can’t call the script because the name “includeMessage” hasn’t been defined.]
”
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Today is a day on which I’m keenly aware of the passage of time. Partly because I’m blogging when I should be packing. But mostly because of a quick string of email I just exchanged with an old high school friend, Paul. I seem to get in touch with him regularly every other year. He and his wife Shannon just had their first child, a boy. Say hi to Lex Colton:

It’s important for me to remember that there are more important things in life than the day to day grind. Some days you get to meet a whole new person.

Infoworld: Troubled Andersen close to finding a buyer. Bad news for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. What are they hoping to get out of this, anyway? “Economies of scale?” I like the random quotation from Larry Lipsher of Lipsher Accountancy Corp, based in China: “The larger and larger the accounting firms get, the more they’re going to come up with the sort of esoteric tripe that caused things like this.” A-yup.
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I’m in pretty bad shape this morning for no apparent reason. I didn’t sleep at all last night, I couldn’t breathe well this morning, and I think I’m feverish. So naturally I decided to go to school. After all, what fun is being sick if you can’t get anyone else sick with you? 🙁

It’s been a rough morning otherwise too. On the way to the T, I saw the wings of a pigeon, feathers intact but separated from their owner, lying on the sidewalk. And I got a lovely email from an old college friend tipping me off about one of our stranger classmates’ arrest record. The story gave me another visual I didn’t really need. Unfortunate kid, this Ilya. He was all of 14 when he started at Virginia, and apparently had a few screws loose….
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The Illuminated Donkey: “The Warblog of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Hysterically funny, though somewhat slanted at political blogs. (Also the meter is not quite as catchy as the original.) A sample:

Let us blog, towards certain well-examined URL’s,
The banner ad unfurls,
The caustic digs at less-than-sharp writers,
Punches are thrown as by heavyweight fighters,
Links that lead to endless arguments
And caterwauling laments
But here we raise an overwhelming question…
How to appear in refer logs?
Let us link to A-list blogs.

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The Sun: Turn your PC into a love machine. The pictures in the article (featuring the famous Sun Page 3 girls) remind me of another fine software marketing idea gone horribly awry: the Swiss “bra” ad for Windows XP. Otherwise a good summary of interesting pieces of MS’s product line. I have to say, I always use Visio as the start to a romantic evening.

…for not being a sysadmin any more. For a while I was a tech support supervisor, which I imagine is probably a comparably-stressful position. I can’t imagine having done that job for seven years.
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It’s a beautiful gray day in Boston this morning. I’m feeling on top of the world for no apparent reason.

Lisa is out of town, having taken her mom to London for a shopping trip. (!) I spoke with her yesterday briefly just before my cell phone ran out of battery. They got upgraded to Business Elite class on their flight to London on Thursday. I didn’t hear many details; apparently Business Elite is a mythical place with champagne, good food, and cheese plates. If the rest of their trip is a tenth as good she’ll be on cloud 9 when she gets home.

Oh man. In the days before blogging, when I used to get sensually excited about the serifs and descenders of well designed fonts, I never dreamed about a site as cool as nofont. Check out the typography experiments, the downloadable experimental fonts, the page design….
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Dave has kindly reminded me that grief is part of a bigger issue, male feelings in general. His Davenet on the subject from 1998 suggests that manhood = controlling emotions in our culture. He suggests that if the culture were more open to receiving male expressions of emotion, that men would be better at expressing their feelings.

I don’t know that I necessarily agree with the first point (though I’m not sure how I would define manhood otherwise), but I definitely believe the second. It’s a reinforcing loop. As men stay silent, the culture becomes accustomed to men not expressing their feelings. Eventually, expressing feelings becomes an exception, exceptions aren’t tolerated, and the cost of not expressing feelings becomes over time too high to bear.

How do we break the loop? Men have to stop being afraid of the cost. Everyone needs to stop treating expressions of male emotion like they’re antisocial behavior.
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