April 2008 Archives

Grand Theft Auto IV came out yesterday, and of course I bought it. I've always been a fan of the GTA series, although I never got into playing it. This was the first in the series that I could see myself wanting to play, and I was really excited to get home and get started. I didn't get all that far since I get home rather late at night (I work in San Bruno, live in Sunnyvale. You do the math), but I definitely see the appeal of the game.

It was obvious that this game was going to be controversial. It's not rocket surgery to draw this conclusion. Just check out the Ladies of Liberty City video. People are already talking about how horrible this game will be for our youth - how it promotes violence. Some fucktard stabbing some other dude in the neck while waiting in line to get this game just gives them more ammo. I doubt we're ever going to convince Jack Thompson that video games aren't the antichrist, but maybe I could find him another cause.

Remember those tickle-me-elmo dolls that came out a few years ago? There were many stories about adults - fine outstanding members of society, mind you, not the ghettoscum that's creating headlines about violence with GTA IV - being violent in their attempt to get a tickle-me-elmo for their kids. If a tickle-me-elmo can take a normally responsible, caring, loving parent and turn them into a foaming at the mouth, violent fucktard, then clearly we have a problem, Mr. Thompson. Sesame street is terrible for children! It's encouraging violence in their parents, their role models, and something must be done.

For the past two days it's been sweltering in my apartment. I don't get the whole "We're in North California so we don't need air conditioning" thing. It's been in the mid 80's. The mid freaking 80's. This may make me sound like a wuss, but let me remind you, I've got servers in my living room. While it's only 85 outside, it stays well in the 90's in my apartment until the middle of the night when things finally start to cool off.

I think I'm going to buy one of those window unit air conditioner units. I live on the second story, and I've never installed one of these things before. I can already play this disaster out in my head. I'm going to try to put it in the window, and it's going to fall two stories to meet its demise on the asphalt. This will not be good times. I'm willing to admit that I'm a fairly clumsy person. I have my moments of grace, but they are few and far between. Installing a window AC unit will not be graceful, I can assure you.

Until I get around to doing this, some of the servers are getting powered off. Both incubus and trollop have already been shut down. I thought about shutting down succubus, but that's my NAT server. I *could* let our SMC cable modem do the NAT for us, but that just seems so... unprofessional. Lame. Pedestrian? Whatever. All of my servers act as great heaters in the winter (P4 supermicros) , but this isn't so convenient for summer time. Mother nature, hello? April is not summer. Make the heat go away.

For those of you that have shells on incubus/succubus, you probably won't be able to access them until I get this AC unit installed, which won't be until the end of May. I've got too many expenses before then (BSDCan, Baycon, Dell XPS). I have to go furniture shopping in a couple of months when Igor moves out. All I own is a computer desk and a bed. I don't have any idea where I'm supposed to buy furniture around here. I am not buying it from Ikea. I wish the west coast had Rooms To Go. They may have had furniture that I'd label as throwaway, but it's better than Ikea and they had a neat delivery service. Any suggestions for good furniture stores in the south bay that deliver?

I was trying to explain why people should twitter to a group of geeks that don't live here, and I came to a sickening conclusion. I am turning into one of the Silicon Valley Borg. In light of this realization, here is my guide to becoming one of us (or rather, warning signs depending on how you see it).

1. Start reading Valleywag. It's a casual affair at first. You check it once every week or two. Maybe you only search for references to your employer. After a while, you add it to your RSS reader.
   
2. You start recognizing names. Names of people that no one cares about unless they also live in the valley. You may not have had a clue who Robert Scoble or iJustine was before, but now you're following them on...
3. Twitter. You can't adequately explain to anyone that doesn't use Twitter already why it's a good idea, but you can't help but create your own account. You start out only updating a few times from your web browser, but then you discover twhirl. Now you've got instant updates of Scoble, your friends, and...
4. Gizmodo, where you're scouring anything related to cell phones so you can figure out what's going to set you aside from all of the local iPhone wielding weenies. The iPhone is so trendy, it's untrendy. After all, you're watching Gizmodo and Valleywag for rumors as to when the 3G iPhone is going to be released. 60 days is what they are saying now. You're going to laugh at all the people with their 2G iPhones. Clearly, you will be superior as 2G is not nearly enough G's. You need those G's to send... uh... lots of text messages to update your twitter status! That is, until you start feeling dissatisfied with Twitter. Tweeting just isn't enough for you, anymore, so you create an account on...
   
5. Tumblr. You get confused about what you're supposed to be posting where, especially if you already have a blog entirely separate from all of this, so you try to post different content to each site until you run out of things to talk about entirely. In an attempt to drum up content that you think would be relevant to your valley peers, you sit on BART thinking about Mahalo (which, lets face it, no one really cares about), Yahoo!/Microsoft mergers, expensive escorts, and...
6. Facebook. As soon as you get home from your job which is probably at Google, since they seem to employ a good portion of the tech force here (let's hope you're not at Yahoo!), you start browsing jobs at Facebook, because you know it's the next big thing. You don't know how they are making money, but most people said the same of Google, too. How many people are driving around in expensive cars here due to getting on on the GOOG stock early on? Sadly, Google stock is starting to tank, so it's time to drop it like it's hot.
7. Update your twitter status, check to see if you have any new friends on Facebook, then go to Valleywag's happy hour. Pretend to recognize everyone there. Eventually, you will. That's when you should really start feeling scared. After enough time, you'll have forgotten that there is in fact a world outside of Silicon Valley. Don't feel bad - from what I remember, you won't be missing all that much.
   

I hate things that pop up, specifically on web pages. Not just pop-up advertising, but when you mouse over a link and then there's a little floating box that shows some "helpful" information, or maybe a miniaturized version of the page that is being linked to. It blocks the text I'm trying to read. I never click on anything in the floating box. I know how to open links in a new tab, thank you very much.

I'm an obsessive highlighter/clicker I click and drag and double click on random text as I read it. I don't know why. I hate this behavior in other people but I can't seem to stop myself from doing it. I'm noticing more and more blogs that actually do something when I double click on random text, like search for it. I hate those blogs. I never visit them again.

Is this the Web 2.0 that people keep telling me about, because it's really annoying and I want it to stop.