Flags of Our Fathers & ESB SE turns 10

Yesterday we saw Flags of Our Fathers... on the 62nd anniversary of the battle of Iwo Jima. Whoah, eh? Total coincidence. :)

In other news, today marks the 10th Anniversary of the release of Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back Special Edition! Hoorah!

Tophtucker.com v5.0 is going online!

The first parts of Tophtucker.com v5.0 are going online now! I have some space issues, so I'm trying to do some spring cleaning at the same time. In any case, the new home page is now live, with more to follow in the next few minutes. :)

Super Bowl Ads

Yeah, I know, this is really late. But anyway--while overall I didn't think this year's Super Bowl had a ton of great standout ads, I'd just like to say that I loved all three Coke ones. "Vending" in particular is fascinating if you watch carefully... actually, there are a few kinda creepy aspects of it if you pay attention. Watch and see if you know what I mean. ;)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16566275/

Star Wars Anniversary Year: Ep. IV SE

As I'm ashamed to note I never mentioned before, this is a very special year for Star Wars fans: it's the 30th anniversary of the release of the original Episode IV. And now, today, we celebrate the first milestone: the 10th anniversary of the Special Edition of Episode IV.

Sure it was controversial, but it sure did clean up the film a lot. :)

See here.

Happy Anniversary, Ep. IV SE!!!

Congrats to Microsoft on Vista and Office 07

I'd like to congratulate Microsoft on (finally) launching both Windows Vista and Office 2007 today. Vista is certainly a huge upgade from XP, and while it doesn't surpass what's out there in a lot of ways, it's an important springboard looking to the future. I'm excited for Service Pack 1 already. :-D

As for Office 2007, I think it's actually pretty revolutionary. The whole ribbon, the ease-of-use -- I think it's a huge leap forward. Next up they need to get super-easy (as in, Google Docs-easy) collaboration in it and maybe an "Office Lite" online version to keep pace with Google on that front. But really, I've tried Google Docs, and while it's passable if the computer doesn't have Word, it just can't compare. I *need* the Word feature set... and keyboard shortcuts. Those are critical. :)

Meanwhile, MSN is *NOT* dead and Windows Live is *NOT* replacing it, no matter what some people may say. Read this: http://liveside.net/blogs/main/archive/2007/01/28/msn-revival-the-january-effect.aspx.

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Speaking of long-delayed products, my web site v.5 should be online in the next couple of weeks. But I'm in the midst of a huge History paper, so don't hold your breath. But look on the bright side -- it's been in development for merely 1/5th the time as Vista!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Sorry I've been silent recently. I don't really have any excuse.

But here's some fun reading:

Patrick Curry's 52 Game Ideas (one from each week of 2006)
http://www.patrickcurry.com/thoughts/?page_id=67

And this looks really neat:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/06/nikkos-r2-d2-skype-callin-and-media-playin-oddities/

Merry Christmas Eve!

Merry Christmas Eve!

(And Happy Holidays in general!)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I've been working on my web site and hope to have it (FINALLY) online by the end of this week.

Casino Royale

I saw Casino Royale on Friday night and loved it. :D

Happy (Belated) Halloween!

Exactly 24 hours ago (unless I'm quite mistaken) I was trick-or-treating. Yay candy!

Happy belated Halloween!

The Long Tail

Oh, and I forgot to mention this in that post:

Today I started reading The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, WIRED editor. (That despite the fact that I still haven't finished Star Wars: Dark Lord...) And it's really good. Very interesting. Neat graphs.

In essence, with e-retailers like iTunes, Rhapsody, Amazon, and eBay, if you put the product out there it will find a market, no matter how small, no matter how niche. And with little or no distribution costs and no shelf space to waste, in the past decade or so it's actually started to make economic sense. Rhapsody still regularly sells copies of it's 100,000th most popular song, and so on. The long tail gets very close to zero the farther out from the "hits" you go, but it never quite reaches zero, and you have so much quantity way out there in the tail that combined it can still make up a huge part of, say, Amazon's total revenues.

Very very interesting. And it applies to just about anything these days - Google, Netflix, you name it...

Last day of being 16...

At 4:30 AM Thursday morning I will officially turn 17 years old. Whoah. That's... old.

And I still haven't gotten version 5.0 of my web site online. What kind of an almost-17-year-old am I!?

Fear not, it's coming soon... I'm getting there... it's already more complete than the current version, which is missing pathetically large chunks of good ol' version 3.0, so I've just got some finishing touches to do.

It'll be up by Thanksgiving at the latest! And this time I mean it... I think...

Last day of being 16...

At 4:30 AM Thursday morning I will officially turn 17 years old. Whoah. That's... old.

And I still haven't gotten version 5.0 of my web site online. What kind of an almost-17-year-old am I!?

Fear not, it's coming soon... I'm getting there... it's already more complete than the current version, which is missing pathetically large chunks of good ol' version 3.0, so I've just got some finishing touches to do.

It'll be up by Thanksgiving at the latest! And this time I mean it... I think...

U.S. Population Reaches 300 Million!

As of mere seconds ago, the United States population has officially hit 300 million!!!

CONGRATULATIONS USA!

(For an analysis of the milestone, and a mildly depressing note that we may have [i]actually[/i] crossed 300 million months ago, see MSNBC.)

LOST (and autographed Path of Destruction)

Last night I finished the first season of Lost... kind of. I think I skipped more episodes than I saw. (That's what you get for watching with friends who've pretty much seen it all. :) ) Oh well, I still get the gist of it. And it's still really good.

"He just..... exploded."
"...yeah...."

Oh, and yesterday I walked into Barnes & Noble on the way home from school and happened to find an autographed Star Wars: Darth Bane: Path of Destruction sitting there right on the shelf. It was my lucky day... :)

Xbox News, Willy's Birthday and 4-Hour Deliveries

X06, Microsoft's annual Euro Xbox show, took place Wednesday and Thursday. There was a lot of big news, mainly:

1. "Halo Wars," a real-time strategy game set in the Halo universe and developed by the guys who made Age of Empires. Trailer here.
2. Peter Jackson teaming up with Microsoft Game Studios to create two new games, including one Halo-based one.
3. Project Gotham Racing 4 was announced.
4. Another Banjo Kazooie game from Rare was announced.
5. Bioshock, the next Splinter Cell game (after Double Agent), and two downloadable Grand Theft Auto IV "episodes" (to be released shortly after the main game) are now Xbox exclusives.
6. Assassin's Creed, an incredible-looking ex-PS3-exclusive game, was demoed live for the first time. The producer mentioned that the Xbox 360 version will actually have slightly better AI than the PS3 one thanks to better threading technology (whatever that means).
7. The original Doom is now available on Xbox Live Arcade.

Pretty exciting. :) The great thing about the Xbox Live Marketplace (the place for all Xbox Live downloads) is that Wednesday afternoon I had already downloaded trailers and demos of games just being shown at X06.

Speaking of rapid distribution...

I just learned of "LicketyShip Same Day Delivery." It'll get whatever gadget you order to your door within four hours. That's crazy. And incredible.

Willy's Bday

Willy's birthday was yesterday. One gift is now sitting on top of our Xbox: the Xbox Live Vision camera. It enables video chat during games (and outside them), picture messaging, custom display pictures, and gesture-based gaming a la the EyeToy. It also lets you overlay the current video on your Dashboard background with a few nifty effects, including a verrrry nice water effect that makes the image ripple when you move. (Not the text, mind you, only the background... rippling text with just get annoying...)

'Enemy of the State'; Bin Laden trail goes 'stone cold'

Last night we watched Enemy of the State on AMC. Quite a good movie, and incredibly relevant today, especially considering it was made in 1998 - the plot sounds like something that would be thought up today, not eight years ago. The amount of surveillance today is amazing, and not just on the part of the government. Thanks to Google, MySpace, and other wonders of the modern web, ordinary people have more ability than ever to spy on their fellow citizens.

Get a name, do a lookup on Google. Do a little phone book searching, or reverse phone book search if you start with a number. Find an address, get satellite and aerial imagery. And all of that can happen within a minute. Do a search on MySpace or Facebook and find even more. If their information is "private," ask to be their friend. Chances are they'll accept. If not, friend their friends to give yourself a little more credibility, so that it doesn't seem like you're coming totally out of the blue. It's creepy.

Of course, the government has far more capabilities, as explored by Enemy of the State. This morning I read an article on MSNBC about the ongoing hunt for Osama bin Laden:

WP: Bin Laden trail goes ‘stone cold’ - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com

Very interesting stuff. Sounds like it would make for an excellent movie a few years down the road...

Back to School

Yesterday was my first day back at school. School means homework. Homework means sad Toph. :( Oh well, it wasn't all that bad...

In other news, Tophtucker.com 5.0 should be online by the end of the weekend. Wohoo!

Now I'm off to sleep... tomorrow I leave on a one-night orientation trip... off I go...

The Red Sox, Little Miss Sunshine, and Blake Ross

The Red Sox are kind of falling apart. They won tonight, but in the press conference Terry Francona was about as depressing (and depressed) as I've ever seen anyone on TV be. As the NESN commentators put it, you wouldn't guess from the sound of it that the Sox had won. After each question there was a long silence before someone finally worked up the nerve to ask another question.

I can't remember a time when so many of the Sox's star players were injured. Manny, Nixon, Varitek, Schilling, Papelbon, Mirabelli for a while... Ortiz has heart issues, and Jon Lester has cancer, for crying out lound.

Little Miss Sunshine

On a happier note, we went to Little Miss Sunshine tonight and it was excellent. Steve Carell was excellent, as usual, as was the rest of the cast.

Blake Ross

Best known as one of the lead developers on Firefox. I do not use Firefox, and I don't like the fanatical tack some people take on the issue, particularly folks like those at Explorer Destroyer who advise webmasters to actually block access to their web site if the user is using Internet Explorer. What!? That's ridiculous... I thought Firefox was supposed to be about giving users choice.

Today, though, I read a couple of interviews with Blake Ross, and he seems like a very sensible fellow. He's not afraid to say that IE7 is actually pretty good. He doesn't categorically denounce Microsoft as evil tyrants. His arguments are logical. He's not cocky, he's down-to-earth, he understands that there's a middle ground. "We really are trying to make it less of a religious thing," he said in the Seattle PI interview. As he puts it, he didn't start Firefox to destroy Microsoft. It's more that the whole field had become too stagnant; that you can't let Microsoft rest on its laurels, because that just results in the proliferation of spyware and adware and all that nasty stuff.

I wish that some of the more zealous Firefox advocates would be more like that. :-\

Back from Taconnet

We return earlier today from Taconnet after our four-week absence. Our stay was great, as usual... pretty soon I'm going to update my Taconnet site with photos and videos.

In other news, I'm using Windows Live Writer (Beta) to write this. I'm just trying it out, but I might start using it exclusively if it works well, which it seems to.

That's all for now... ta-ta. :)