by Mike Shea on 21 August 2003
The article RSS Hitting Critical Mass mentioned a web-based RSS reader known as Bloglines. While I've been mainly been using my home grown Merovingian, Bloglines is an excellent server-based RSS reader.
I've been working on news delivery for cell phones now that I have joined the legion of yuppies with my Nokia 6800 internet-ready cell phone. AT&T's crappy pricing model is based on each kilobyte downloaded so now we have to strip out every character that isn't needed. My cellphone news page is built for the lowest amount of bytes needed to give information. I feel like John Carmack coding Doom for a Gameboy.
I wrote a Mobile Metacritic for my Nokia. Enter a game, movie or music title and get back hundreds of professional and consumer reviews consolidated into a single two digit number. Thats a lot of data density. I wish I could do the same thing with Amazon.
It looks like Nokia's N-Gage cellular based portable game system may be a hot item. They bought bits of Sega to help build their empire. The N-gage and the T-Mobile Sidekick seem to be the two hottest wireless devices I've seen. If the T-mobile was cheaper, it was $300 to my Nokia 6800's $50, and the coverage was better, I would have gotten it. Even Jakob Neilson admits that mobile devices are one generation from useful. Sony's mystery portable system better have some kind of wireless plan. We're about two years away from wireless portable Everquest.
Apparently a more well informed, better connected audience is the reason for blockbuster failings such as Charlies Angels 2, The Hulk, and Gigli. The more information we get, the better we are. Perhaps this will lead manufacturers and producers to the true best business practice: Make a better product.
People are still idiots. Wal-mart has pulled Halo and Grand Theft Auto in response to shootings in West Virginia, but not firearms or ammunition. I'm getting tired of even writing about it, but this is exactly the kind of reaction that will rip our country to shreds from the inside. Knee jerk political reactions to real life problems are destroying our freedoms. Its a giant game of smear the queer all over again.
Jeffery Zeldman had a great personal tale of the New York blackout. Blackouts like this remind me just how fragile my life has become now that I basically live on the web. I do handwrite my Everquest stories and thank Tunare for books!
Brado who is apparently still kicking it up a notch is going to have his first baby boy today! It didn't ruin my friend Ben or Mark but its still a shock to our childish middle age lives.
I never did mention my psychology experiment at my friend Mark's house. We were going to subject his one year old, Trever, to Grand Theft Auto Vice City for thirty six hours straight to see if he had any violent reactions. We had to call it off after two hours after he broke Matt's ear drums with a banshee's cry and beat his father into submission with a copy of Yoga Mama. It took another two days for this expression to leave his face. We were never able to tell if the game had any effect...
This Huge 10 Meg TIFF of the world's lights is one of my new favorite data-dense images. I could spend hours looking at this. Look at India and Pakistan or worse, North and South Korea. Scary stuff. Here are a whole bunch of other formats and sizes.
