This article was written by Clifford Stoll for NEWSWEEK Magazine in 1995, back at the genesis of the Internet.  A friend of mine sent it to me and we both got a kick out of it.  But I could do one better, I said!  I could turn the article into more self parody using the power of Hyperlinks and 20/20 vision 15 years in the future!  (With apologies to Maddox.)

Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from [...] Continue Reading…

Early morning mining in Eve Online with Edgegamers corporation.

(Click for zoom.)  Cyrana Jones near the camera, with Kidona mining in the background with Selene Aecil running the orca.

OK, so it’s a bit old, but I just saw this on Burger King’s site, and I almost cried I laughed so hard.

http://www.bk.com/en/us/campaigns/star-trek.html

Only Burger King could get away with making fun of themselves and Star Trek, at the same time.
The Kingons may be an advanced race developed after intercepting BK commercials.

‘Ensign Cam Sanantonio, the communications relays located in this system have been offline for the past 47 hours.”
I visited a pergium mine.
The loading screens are full of interesting tidbits of background data on the game, and Star Trek.

Awesome ship names:

Captain Akbar of the USS It’s A Trap
Captain Joseph Stalin of the USS R
Captain Saxton Hale@NinJarate

Today’s bug:

After finishing one of the missions, I warped out.  The game then decided to send me back into the instance, but luckily realized that I had completed it… and I didn’t have to do it all over again.

Cryptic is offering a Lifetime subscription for $239.00.  Unfortunatly, they want you to buy it before it launches.  I don’t know if I can (1) rustle the cash that fast, or even (2) if I want to yet.  With any luck, they’ll run the deal a bit longer than “launch day.”  Heck, I’m ALREADY spending $80 for [...] Continue Reading…

So, I finally have my grubby mitts on Star Trek Online… I’ve been waiting so long for this.

This post will contain first impressions, a bug and recommended update thread, and some stuff I’ve really enjoyed seeing in the game.

I downloaded the game, installed it, then went to work!

Really.

But then I got off, went home, and spent the next hour and a half struggling for a Newbie Slot (apparently the number of slots available for newbie mission runners is finite… and so is the patience of all the screamers on the forum pissed that they have to wait for their turn during launch-hour of early Open Beta.
First Impressions
Star Trek Online is going to sap all my free time, for months to come.  The game is well designed, nice to look at… it’s a ton of fun, even with [...] Continue Reading…

Having just reinstalled Gentoo as my Linux-Of-Choice (I’m dual-booting Windows for gaming), I keep running into various painful snags of the WTF persuasion.

One of them is AWN, the Avant Window Navigator.  It’s a small dock I use to replace the bottom bar of the Gnome desktop for applications;  I find the icon-centric display to be more useful than the wordy buttons of yore.

On Ubuntu, AWN automatically detects my NVidia Xinerama configuration and sets itself in the center of the left hand monitor, as I want.

On Gentoo… not so much.  It plonks itself right in the middle of the dual monitor, becoming quite annoying.

Per the FAQ entry here:  http://wiki.awn-project.org/FAQ#How_do_I_reposition_AWN.3F  I was able edit gconf key /apps/avant-window-navigator/bar/bar_pos.  Set to “.15″ it’s at least mostly set correctly.  It’s not perfect, but it’ll do until I figure out how to make it work correctly.

I get so tired of the commercials, every year telling us that in order to keep our friends we should, nay Must! give Large Retailer X large loads of cash for gift cards. In this post, a very special SoftLayer entry pulled from history for this holiday season, I discuss the folly of gift cards. I live in America, and as any American knows, we pipe Christmas Music and Christmas TV and Christmas Movies directly into the brains of as many people as possible to attempt to keep everyone safe during this difficult shopping season. Admit it: when you and your neighbor are running to Electronics in hope of getting the last Wii from the shelf, sometimes the only thing stopping you from dumping a bag of Skittles in front of him or knocking over a Lego display is the constant [...] Continue Reading…

Epic story. A must read. http://woofertime.com/woof/62461 #woofer #web-bookmarks #

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Mr. Gorbachov, Tear Down This Wall! http://tinyurl.com/yasygcg #fotw #

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Mr. Gorbachov, Tear Down This Wall! http://tinyurl.com/yasygcg #fotw #

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