Finally, I have PC emulation on Mac fast enough to play Subspace / Continuum on my laptop. The original Subspace was circa 1997, the new Continuum is circa 2003 - think massively multiplayer Blasteroids. People are still meeting each other online in space and killing each other. Yay!

I swear I hadn't yet read Scoble or Arrington today before I wrote my little wist on the pre-Web-2.0 days. Seems like an odd gas cloud floated through the valley today or something.

Wow, I babbled a lot today. Felt good for a change.

I suppose I should do more with my Facebook profile.

Music podcasts are like when I'd manage to tune in some college or high school radio station that just happened to play exactly what obscure stuff I wanted during someone's pet show. I've found a few good ones, amateurish DJs and all.

Anne Zelenka: "Give me a chance to play with new technology, a bunch of smart online buddies, some money to pay the bills, and I�m happy. For a lot of us, it�s not about the money. It is STILL about the technology and more money floating around doesn�t change that."

When did the money (or lack there of) really stop or even slow the real tinkerers? Seemed like the post-boom days were some of the most productive, since all the distractions like launch parties and IPOs were muted. Not that that stuff ain't fun. :)

How interesting (to me): I just traced a member of one of my favorite synthpop bands (Iris / on last.fm) back to his demoscene and MOD tracker roots, finding a bunch of old tracks for download. I used to do a lot of MOD doodling in late high school and college, so I can really admire the skills in the proto-Iris sound.

For great (my) embarassment: Download DioHyperKin15.lha, play it with CocoModX for OS X (or whatever works on Windows these days for MODs). Return here and submit your mocking comments. (see also: DEMHypnogogicD.lzh and DEMOptimumGrin.lzh)

Finally, now that I've got a copy of WinXP running in a Parallels window, I'm seeing IE 7 for the first time firsthand. I'll probably be spending enough time with it to get used to it, but so far: no me gusta.

Michael Arrington: "In a few years, things will be beautiful again. The big money will be slumbering away, and the marketing departments will be a distant memory. We can focus, once again, on the technology. And the burgers and beer."

I wonder if what he's talking about is the thing about which I was being wistful a little bit ago? I can't really complain myself, since this latest sorta-boom is what plucked me out of Michigan and plonked me down in Silicon Valley proper. I experienced the last wave from remote, and I'm happier being present here now. I do like me some (turkey) burgers and (stout) beer, though.

As I noted last week, I'm just getting all sorts of incoming ego-search hits now that I'm making noise more regularly. I even see people I mention by name following the trails. For what it's worth, rather than rolling my own this time, I've been using reeferss.com to track my referrers over here. It consists of a script include on the page, and an RSS feed in my aggregator, and off we go.

Sometimes I miss the period from about 1999-2004. That seemed to be a heyday of nerdy blogging, like college and dorm days in the blagosphere. Kind of appropriate that I was a date-less bachelor living by myself in Ann Arbor for a good chunk of that. Radio UserLand 8 and early versions of MovableType; just discovering what HTTP referers could tell you; XML-RPC posting APIs and repeatedly reinventing RSS aggregator wheels. Web 2.0 hadn't quite hit yet, and the post-dot-com lull was still in effect. Seemed like a pretty productive period, nonetheless.

Just got a RAM upgrade from 1GB to 2GB in my MacBook Pro from the local overworked IT superhero. Holy crap, does that make a big difference. I don't really care that OS X is a bit of a memory hog - I like what it's doing with all that RAM.

With all this blogging going on over here, I still need to figure out a way to loop this activity back to decafbad.com. I figure the quick and often-revised nature of the writing over here is too much to just pipe directly over there. Maybe I need to do a "nightly build" of the day's items to an entry on my WordPress blog. I'd just hate for it to turn obnoxious like daily bookmark posts are to people who subscribe to my del.icio.us feeds anyway. But, this blog is like an outpost away from my home base - kinda like a cabin in the woods, where I tend to get things done. Sorta.

The interesting thing about working on del.icio.us is that my personal tinkering interests and work-a-day efforts are so closely overlapped, for the first time to this degree in my career. Depending on the day, that can be draining and frustrating or very rewarding. Mostly the latter. When it's the former, I'm prone to bouts of unhappy brain-frying. The most irksome part of it all, sometimes, is that I can't write anything about it. There's a lot of work going on, but it's not (yet?) my story to tell. Parts of the story might never be, and I most certainly don't want to spring a leak - not that there's anything that dramatic to spring.

Imagine my surprise: Jeff Barr's found a practical use for my now practically ancient S3 wiki. Wow, is that thing really only a little over a year old? It seems so long ago now since I lashed that thing together in a weekend. The projects got a lot of room for improvement, and having an actual vocal user only makes me want to circle back to it.

Quantifying too much World of Warcraft: I have started 10 characters, spread across 3 realms. Thankfully, I mostly only play Paytol, Level 52 Troll Fire Mage of Maelstrom and Schpooki, Level 49 Gnomish Affliction Warlock of Medivh. Being that my favorite thing has been to play with combinations in the game, I've had plenty of dabbling on the side as well. But, alas, most of my co-workers and other friends playing have already passed me in the game with their focus on single characters. I'd hate to add up all my play time (easily seen with the /played command), but I've yet to see any of the end game content added this past Fall and I'm starting to wonder if my interest in the game will hold out to the point that I will.

The main reason I started playing WoW is because the Best Man at our wedding - and my best friend in Michigan since High School - handed me the game on the day before we got on a plane to move out here to California. The point was to stay in touch, which has been fun despite the time zone difference.

Need to get back to writing at Ficlets. Want to make progress with FeedMagick. Been playing too much WoW and StarCraft after work-a-day brain-fried-ness. :)

Hello world. Starting to consider this opening my way on scribbling on the day's page and get it started.