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Cinema: The BBS Documentary
Mon, 27 Jun 2005

He's been at this project for many years now, and finally Jason Scott (of textfiles.com fame) has finally released his BBS documentary. I remember years ago discovering textfiles.com and later submitted a few things from my BBS archives and correcting some info about BBS! Express ST, and even found the phone number of my old BBS in his files. Quite a trip down memory lane revisting so much lore from the old days.. One day his site mentioned he was about to begin on this new BBS documentary idea and I wrote to offer that if he wanted an interview I'd sign up any day (so I could brag about my Atari ST fidonet software and many BBS hacks :), but we sadly never did get together (my fault.. he popped by Toronto but I was out of city that week :( Just as well, since I was just a snot-nosed-brat in the BBS days, though I like to think I did my part for the scene. Heck, I still run a BBS, the worlds only online Atari ST BBS, so there. Anyway, with great anticipation I opened up the package I found in my mailbox this morning and I have to say -- this is cool stuff (and as you can see in the pics, it has sexy packaging.) My wife correctly points out that it sort of feels like those old physics educational videos you'd see in highschool - that makes me feel old, that this documentary is about something I was heavily into not so many years ago. Building an emulator to run my old BBS on so it can live on the net, and hacking the machine OS to support y2k etc.. that was months of work -- but I digress as this is Jasons story. Nostalgia always ropes me in..

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Going global local? What goes around comes around..
Sun, 26 Jun 2005

This entry is being written while sitting in a doctor's waiting room at 8am or so (for something normal don't worry :) -- written on my phone via ssh to a server. Cute, but it does crimp the style :)

I remember maybe 10 years ago I used to go out of my way to seek out local (Canadian or North American) goods, being careful to read package details and remembering which companies were Canadian etc. Nowadays I'm sure we're all the same, looking for our local flag or logo somewhere on the package but not really thinking much about it, since globalization has been around for many decades and we've become accustomed to Made in Taiwan being the mark of a good price. And why worry -- when globalization ran sidelong into the manufacturing industry, we survived, right? So with two identical products on the shelf we'll take one over the other if we notice a logo.. maybe.

Aside: I wonder if Google and other search engines are making people lazy; or perhaps people have always been lazy but I'm just noticing it now? :) A lot of people will email you and ask for help long before they read a FAQ or try mucking around on their own. Its 'easy' for them to make a request or look something up in google, but once they have to look at a website with their own eyeballs and they realize it'll take more than 5 seconds... out flies an email to the first address they see. Little does it worry them about the fact it costs someone 'else' that much more time.. after all, someone elses time is free right?

Aside-aside: Oh, I love ribs now. Measuring a restaurant is as easy as fetching its club sammich, and fajitas always make me smile.. but I've just discovered slow cooked tangy bbq'd ribs.. oh my _gawd_. Canada Day is next weekend and I see here this sign for something called the Ribfest - joy of joys!

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Sithestate and Sithmath
Fri, 24 Jun 2005

It seems to be accepted to not rant in public, but you know.. it is awfully good for the nerves ;) But first -- its going to be 34 degrees celsius today here in Toronto, feeling like 41 or more with humidity. Nice. Last night our sithestate agent took us to see a house in a pretty exclusive area, and gave us the guilt-session of the century when we didn't have any interest in it -- it was a very attractive house but just small and weirdly shaped and with a price-tag to make you swallow your own eyeballs. We don't need some expensive place in an expensive area...

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"Good day professor Falcon, how about a nice game of chess?"
Wed, 22 Jun 2005

Maybe Monday will bring a little vengeance to your friendly correspondants heart, as a Rogers repairman comes to figure out why our television (digital cable) signal is craptastic. While its annoying that he is to show up between the generous hours of 8am and 9pm, at least I get to take photos of him with his head in a nest of wires and blog his rear off.

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Kickin' down the cobble-stones
Tue, 21 Jun 2005

I'm betting few will catch that reference ;) I was mulling over some thoughts about how musicians might tick and the idea-flow meandered over to some work I'd done with electronics and suddenly out popped this blog entry. Sure, this is pure stream of consiousness and not following any academic standard, but hopefully you'll find the thoughts amusing. It all started as I was briefly (for a good tenth of a second or so) contemplating if musicians and performers and other social-oriented interactors worked in a more touchy feely way to how developers, sys-admins, engineers and tool-and-die makers function -- perhaps analagous to analog versus digital. (And you know, this helps me define why I hate Clippy the Microsoft-demon -- more often than not its not useful, but occasionally it is - but thats not whats evil about 'him'. He annoys not for his technical merits but for his social lack thereof -- precisely because he is trying to be a 'him'. Certainly we all personify the little bastage, the guy who interuptes the workflow which is a serious user interface no-no. Further, shaking his head at you and being all smug in the corner of your screen -- now thats just not acceptible when its at your house. He can take his bat and ball and go home.)

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Compo: New PDROM's console coding competition
Mon, 20 Jun 2005

There are a number of groovy coding competitions that pop up around the net every few months; there are the more known ones such as the obfuscated coding competition to the lesser known ones like the Interactive Fiction competition. I'm not sure if they hold a compo, but Retro Remakes is awfully close to my heart. The one I tend to 'participate' in (not really participate in the sense I make a toy that could actually win, but compete in the sense I drop a current neat hack in and see what happens) is the wonderful GBAX compo. But every once in awhile Kojote start up a compo over at PDRoms and this one sounds like a good one -- make a retro-style console game that runs on a retro console or GP32. Ooooh baby, I used to do a lot of hacking around on old hardware, especially classic arcade hardware like the Cinematronics or Atari Vector platforms, when I was building emulators of them. Its not like I have much free time, but learning to hack around on a NES (rather than emulating it!) could be a fun thing to do over the next 5 or 6 weeks until submission day.... hmmm.. Who knows, maybe I'll be writing Intellivision code next week? If only they allowed for Atari ST games I'd be in heaven .. but alas, go check out the PDRoms Retro Coding Contest and maybe I'll see you there!

It does seem fishy to include coding for the GP32 in there, since its a modern console where writing code is a walk in the park; obviously an easy console or two need to be there to get more than one submission but its tough to justify writing code for an Atari 2600 (one of the hardest machines to code for _ever_) when you could knock something up for the GP32. (Course, not many people have a GP32, but the GP32 community could right take over here...); and why allow the Odyssey 2 but not allow the Atari 8-bit computers... hmm.. I'm so picky :)

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Events: Father's Day 2005
Mon, 20 Jun 2005

Fathers Day came and went yesterday, and I'm glad I got out to see my parents. They live in another city an hours drive away - which isn't too far, but its far enough they don't pop by here so often, and far enough we don't pop by their place enough (except when I head out to the dentist, since I continue to visit the same practitioner I've been going to since I was a human..) I find it a little surreal dropping by the old haunt -- since we go a few times a year we get snapshot updates to our brains of the city, like a really low framerate movie played back slowly enough so you can witness individual frames clicking by. All we need to do is wear sunglasses tinted to sepia-tone :) You see a car-wash pop up here, a sub-shop vanish there, and slowly the places you used to run around in 30 years earlier turn into laundry-mats or new homes. But I'll always miss the area -- my smaller home town -- as you'll never know a place as well as the one in which you grew upm since you did all your thorough investigation and adventuring during your summer holidays from school. When've grown up and moved you've really made yourself a stranger to your new location (or at least to its low level details) since only a child can really know the small things.

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Cinema: Batman Begins
Sun, 19 Jun 2005

When we were but 6 or 7 my brother was into Spiderman but I always preferred The Batman for some reason - being just kids there was probably no rational reason to favour one over the other but we did it all the same. He had his Spiderman figure that could stick to the walls (with blue-tak!) while I had repeats of the man-in-tights 1960's Batman series. All was good in the world. But as I grew I always liked the Batman comics depicting a tough loner who relied on strength and intelligence rather than falling back to some gifted superpower - he was an icon for troubled youth everywhere.

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Literature: Reviewing (or drooling over?) the latest Parker, Nobody Runs Forever
Fri, 17 Jun 2005

If you're looking for books that are difficult to describe to someone whose not dipped into the crime noir fiction genre before, these are your best bet. Parker is the hardened (or hard-boiled) lead character in this series of books by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake being the authors real name) -- novels that are nearly impossible to put down once you've cracked them open. Literary cocaine, these are fast paced heist stories full of the sorts of characters you'd find (or love to find) in the underbelly of New York city..

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I have no joke here.
Tue, 14 Jun 2005

This makes me giggle. I'd just stumbled across that image years ago I think, but when posting its best to include some real information so I googled up the homepage for the book.. how about that. (I'm ever so pleased to have linked to 'this' and 'that'.) I'm not really sure what 'have adventures with wild African animals' means however, in the following: This BLB tells about 12-year-old Skeezix and his friends, Spud and Whimpy. The three friends repair a sunken rowboat in order to sail to Africa. They make it to Africa, have adventures with wild African animals, and eventually return home.

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Audio: You are in a maze of twisty little ringtones, all alike
Tue, 14 Jun 2005

I never quite understood the whole ringtone marketplace, but heres my take on it. Until relatively recently, cellphones were limited to rudimentary audio reproduction - beeps, whistles and essentially FM tone generation. I'm not sure if it was done in software or hardware, but you could play short MIDI tunes in place of built-in ringtones, which was terrible cool. (MIDI is the preferred notation and sequencing protocol that musicians use, so songs are available in MIDI format all over the place.) Cool stuff and people downloaded them like mad .. via SMS or MMS or phone-email or infra-red beaming or any number of methods, and thus an industry was born. With each ringtone selling for $1.99 to $4.99 for 'premium tunes', this was big business -- especially when most of the ringtones were reproductions of commercial music and totally unlicensed -- which soon attracted the long tentacles of the RIAA. At the same time as all this happened, the 'mp3' and mobile-audio phenomena grew up and ultimately created iTMS -- Apple's iTunes music store. Here (and in similar joints like allofmp3.com and the other copy cats) a real mp3 recording could be had for a fraction of the ringtone cost .. $1USD per song on iTMS and more or less elsewhere. This is for a real recording folks, and not some cheesie FM-tone MIDI knockoff made by a 13 year old in his basement. My take -- my question -- is how did these two things occur separately and end up with such radicly different pricing schemes? Who would pay three or four times the amount for a lower quality tune?

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Rant: Sithlords are everywhere
Mon, 13 Jun 2005

(Sung to the tune of Elvis is everywhere by Mojo Nixon.) I realize I should change this blog's title to "Jeff's near-daily rant" but I'm hoping to not be so angry all the time, though it has been a winner of a month I tell ya. (And I was quite testy with my wife yesterday afternoon and I'm eternally grateful that she's such an understanding and wonderful woman :) The original post title before I realized the potential for a Mojo Nixon reference was "Sithrealtors", as I rip into realestate agents and bankers. Easy pickings for a Monday morning.

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Gaming: Preview of 1893: A World's Fair Mystery
Fri, 10 Jun 2005

I've been meaning to post something about Interactive Fiction (what most people remember as 'text adventures') for ages, and I still will do that big illuminating article sometime. For now I just want to post about this relatively new adventure that is just so cool, and being IF I'm sure it needs the exposure. Definately check out the game here, "1893: A World's Fair Mystery". There are many fine sites about IF including the Brass Lantern, Magnetic Scrolls Memorial, etc etc, but as I'm in a rush let me at least refer you to the IFWiki project.

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Keeping up with the fluff ...
Fri, 10 Jun 2005

I must admit that when I decided to start a blog, I made some choices about what I'd post. A news site will post only news of course, while a company site will tend to chat about its new releases and such, a journalist's blog will go on about their new articles, and individuals will talk about their cute new puppy. Course, most of us are so busy that work and real life often blend together so I've tried to keep my soul and always be personal and professional all the time.. be it with my small business or while working for The Man or the like. But for my blog I decided that no one really wants to hear about the overly-personal things (like what I bought my wife for her birthday) but instead thought you might like to hear about some of the neat things going on in the life of a busy developer like me whose got his hand in a pot all day long, or perhaps in the general process I may have used to buy something for my wife. Personal, professional, but on the level.. check! So I've avoided going on about my own company since I figured you'd consider that 'wanking' or a cheap form of product placement, and I thought perhaps my daytime contract or compatriots would resent it. Or more to point, I'd just end up ranting and raving and foaming up at the mouth and you get enough of that already right? Perhaps you've not had enough...

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Coding: Unicode (or "How to disembowel and re-embowel your data in 21 days")
Tue, 07 Jun 2005

(With apologies to Stanislaw Lem for butchering a line of his.) (Rant on.) It is probably fortunate for the industry that many of todays computing technologies were birthed in the west -- or more to point -- birthed in a location where the local alphabet, counting system, punctuation marks and hints can all fit within a single byte of memory[1], using an alphabet called ASCII[2] (in nerdlish.) Sure, its made my life easier with all the popular programming languages having their keywords in English, but my point is that it probably assisted growth in the field by not having to tackle the issue of dealing with pictographic languages day one so inventors could instead focus on dealing with getting the machine to display to a screen instead of a lineprinter.

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Gaming: Reviewing Katamari Damacy for Playstation 2
Sun, 05 Jun 2005

I'm so proud -- not only did I find time to get into a game store and purchase a game but we find out its so good my wife got instantly addicted and played all day! (and I got 20 mins in too...) Yes folks, Katamari Damacy is as good as people have said, and in my opinion is a return to the old school days of creative entertainment - challenging without being stressful - an action puzzle game that entertains while making you giggle like a little kid again.

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Finally a hot weekend, time to kick back ...
Sun, 05 Jun 2005

We've had some absolutely beautiful and hot days the last month, but its rained most weekends which sort of put a damper (har!) on things. But this weekend proved to be both hot and humid so it was time to get some yard work done and relax a touch to catch up after some insanely busy weeks. The last two weekends were yard preparation work -- such things as hammering together a bunch of trellaces, mounding up some topsoil around our tree, weeding the lawn etc so this weekend we could finally plant some flowers and hang up flower pots and such. I also got into the game store and picked up a budget copy of Katamari Damacy, and we caught (finally!) the latest Star Wars so see those postings separately...

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Batteries: If Only You Could See the Things I Have Seen With Your Eyes
Thu, 02 Jun 2005

(OKay, that title might be a bit of a reach but it fully applies. Its Roy from Blade Runner lamenting over his life. Replicants in that story have a predetermined lifespan that cannot be adjusted. Another topical line is "I want more life, Father.")

I have a recurring concern about gadgets and batteries. Contrary to what some may think I'm fairly conservative about purchases, though I do like my toys. We only recently bought a digital camera for example, and I do try to avoid buying non-essential gadgets. (I do have to update more frequently than most people for PDA development work purposes so I worry that some people think I'm thrifty .. construction workers don't need to buy a new hammer every 6 months for instance, but IT folks may need to upgrade hardware in that same period of time.) My worry is that all of these gadgets will be dead soon nomatter what anyone tries to do about it...

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Audio: (Wireless) Headphones and a review of the Koss "The Plug" earbuds
Thu, 02 Jun 2005

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been into podcasts of late (in my case, mostly RetroGamingRadio and 1SRC's Jeff Kirvin though iPodder and other search services list an enormous volume of available podcasts. The trick is how to get the audio signal to the brain, and that means headphones, so I've done some research and tried a few products out and thought I'd share my experience and hopefully insight.

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