PAX was awesome. PAX was so awesome. From the keynote on Friday to the Omegathon final a couple of hours ago...it was....I don't know...I really don't know what to say. I can safely say this: life is unpredictable and comes at you in ways that are not always the most convenient, but if I have anything to do with it, I will be at at least one PAX every calendar year for the rest of my adult life. Will they continue happening for the rest of my adult life? I don't know...but I hope so. I'm just on a high right now and I so want the next one to start tomorrow. That is all I have to say.
-BG
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
That's no moon...
...it's PAX East, and it's a space station. This is a big event for yours truly. Even though I am pretty dorky and have been since the beginning essentially, I have *never* been to any sort of big dork event, like a Star Trek convention or a Star Wars convention or a computer game convention or anything. I think it has been because they have always been far away. I am a card carrying nerd. But am I enough of a nerd to buy plane tickets to and a hotel room in Indiannapolis, probably by myself, to go to Star Wars Celebration? No. But then PAX East came. It came right to my backyard in downtown Boston. So I'll be there bright and early Friday morning, with my computer no less, to see what the nerd herd really looks like.
I actually have mixed feelings about this thing. I'm excited for sure and very much looking forward to it. But I'm also somewhat apprehensive. What if these nerds are all, more or less, *real* nerds. As in nerds that like nerd things that I haven't even heard of, yet they all know about it and I am so dumb for not knowing. I kind of felt that way, just a little bit, at a few pre-PAX get togethers for Boston area people who are going. I guess what I'm saying is, what if I can't relate to them? That may be rough. I am a nerding nerd, big time. But at the same time, I like doing mainstream things too, like filling out my NCAA brackets and playing golf and, you know, guy stuff like that. Will there be guys like that at PAX? I'm afraid that there won't be...but we'll see.
Gonna wrap this up as Carolyn just got home and I'm hungry and kinda not really being in the writing zone tonight and all that stuff. Some quick things.
Superbad Update (Superbad is my PC)
hl2.exe Appcrash error is fixed. For some reason, just on Portal, the Valve logo screen (the bald guy with the valve in his head) causes a crash in Windows 7. But the same logo shows and is fine when you play Team Fortress 2 or Counterstrike. In any event, adding a "-novid" parameter to the Portal properties in Steam fixes it. That's usually how PC issues go. If something happens *every* time you do it, there's usually a very small dumb tweak you can make that makes it go away. That's why I love reading the endless posts of "Did you reinstall the game? Did you reinstall Windows? Did you (and this is always my favorite) run a virus scan?" People are just so stupid and I am so awesome.
What I've been playing
Just Bad Company 2 really. It's okay. My gripe with it is that, so far, there are numerous situations where I am thinking "what the heck am I supposed to do?", and then I'm dead. The game just leaves you hanging like that some of the time. And so you have to take the trial and error approach. I hate that. It completely takes you out of the game. But the graphics and sound are awesome (even though, and this just may be my headphones, the pronounced reverb on the sound effects are noticeably out of place in outdoor environments), and the real heart of the game is multiplayer, which I haven't gotten to yet. I'm in the "play the campaign so I know how to play online" stage. The rest of the time I've just been installing games in preparation for PAX.
Okay, I'm out. See you nerds later.
-BG
I actually have mixed feelings about this thing. I'm excited for sure and very much looking forward to it. But I'm also somewhat apprehensive. What if these nerds are all, more or less, *real* nerds. As in nerds that like nerd things that I haven't even heard of, yet they all know about it and I am so dumb for not knowing. I kind of felt that way, just a little bit, at a few pre-PAX get togethers for Boston area people who are going. I guess what I'm saying is, what if I can't relate to them? That may be rough. I am a nerding nerd, big time. But at the same time, I like doing mainstream things too, like filling out my NCAA brackets and playing golf and, you know, guy stuff like that. Will there be guys like that at PAX? I'm afraid that there won't be...but we'll see.
Gonna wrap this up as Carolyn just got home and I'm hungry and kinda not really being in the writing zone tonight and all that stuff. Some quick things.
Superbad Update (Superbad is my PC)
hl2.exe Appcrash error is fixed. For some reason, just on Portal, the Valve logo screen (the bald guy with the valve in his head) causes a crash in Windows 7. But the same logo shows and is fine when you play Team Fortress 2 or Counterstrike. In any event, adding a "-novid" parameter to the Portal properties in Steam fixes it. That's usually how PC issues go. If something happens *every* time you do it, there's usually a very small dumb tweak you can make that makes it go away. That's why I love reading the endless posts of "Did you reinstall the game? Did you reinstall Windows? Did you (and this is always my favorite) run a virus scan?" People are just so stupid and I am so awesome.
What I've been playing
Just Bad Company 2 really. It's okay. My gripe with it is that, so far, there are numerous situations where I am thinking "what the heck am I supposed to do?", and then I'm dead. The game just leaves you hanging like that some of the time. And so you have to take the trial and error approach. I hate that. It completely takes you out of the game. But the graphics and sound are awesome (even though, and this just may be my headphones, the pronounced reverb on the sound effects are noticeably out of place in outdoor environments), and the real heart of the game is multiplayer, which I haven't gotten to yet. I'm in the "play the campaign so I know how to play online" stage. The rest of the time I've just been installing games in preparation for PAX.
Okay, I'm out. See you nerds later.
-BG
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Time flies when you're having fun
My last post was March 15th? Wasn't that, like, three weeks ago? Oh wait, that was just 6 days ago. Okay, that's not so bad.
Just got back from a trip down to Chapel Hill to see the parentals with my girlfriend. No particular reason for going other than to break up the long stretch of not seeing them from Christmas to some time in the summer. It was fun. I have a hope, most likely of the irrational kind, that I have a chance of being somewhat decent at golf this year. I will definitely be playing, weather-permitting, the weekend after next. As long as I putt it from anywhere inside 100 yards, breaking 110 may be a possibility.
There are few situations better than being on a plane with a good book. You can't go anywhere...there is no "opportunity cost" from just sitting there and reading...so it is when the return on reading is at its peak. On this trip, I was able to spend a decent amount of time reading my current book, The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. It's great. As a resident of what we call the Universe, it's kind of our duty to read this book and make at least a good faith effort to understand how this thing we call the Universe, also often referred to as "reality", works. In any event, I have two questions for Mr. Greene, which I hope we can discuss in earnest one day over a couple of beers at The Warren Tavern:
1) I have just finished Part II, Time and Experience, and I have a question. It seems that there is open debate in the phyisics community today as to the merits of even exploring the quantum measurement problem. (A quick primer for the lay-people out there (such as myself): thanks to school curricula that seems to lag at least two decades behind the forefronts of science, we were taught that something like an electron is this little sphere...this very small "spec" of something. But it really isn't. It is actually a wave of probability. It's a wave that carries the various probabilities of the potential that the electron will actually be here, or perhaps there, when it interacts in some way with another object. I used to think of this as a "blur"...as in something we see in everyday life when something is moving very fast, such as those Sharper Image clocks where you see the time projected over this fiberglass wand that moves back and forth very fast. Looking at the blur, you don't see the wand itself. But, at any given moment, you know that there is a wand, and that it is somewhere within that blur and moving with a definite speed. But today I know that that is not a probability wave. In a probability wave, there really isn't a wand that is definitely here or definitely there. The only thing that is "in" a probability wave is a set of probabilities that, when you "look" at the wand, it's going to be here, or there, or there. I know that is weird, but just go with it for now. And the thing that makes that wave "collapse" to one point..the point where the classic electron that you think of actually is, is when it interacts with an outside object such as another electron, etc. There is no debate among physicists regarding the theory of how to know the various probabilities in the wave over time. But the actual mechanism of how that wave collapses to that one point, and why it collapses when it contacts, or is "measured" by, a foreign object, is a mystery. This mystery is called the quantum measurement problem). It seems that some say that understanding the "why" and "how" of wavefunction collapse is irrelevant, because we do understand that there is a wavefunction and we know how to correctly predict the probabilities within it. And it seems that those opinions are viewed with legitimacy. But isn't there a double standard here? Isaac Newton's laws of motion were fantastically accurate at describing the relationship between mass and gravity. But they didn't explain what gravity is, or the mechanic by which it works. Many accepted the laws as is, and the lack of the mechanical explanation did not prevent mankind from reaching remarkable heights based on those laws, such as landing a man on the moon. But some continued to question. And one of those individuals, Albert Einstein, discovered a deeper truth (the curvature of spacetime) that opened up a whole new world of scientific inquiry. All physicists today would likely agree that it is better that some questioned Newton's laws as opposed to simply accepting them. So my question is, why is it seemingly considered a legitimate view on the part of a modern physicist that we should just accept wavefunction collapse as a fundamental truth, when if it wasn't for the "unreasonable intellectual greediness" (p.213) of our predecessors, we wouldn't even be asking the question?
2) This one is much simpler. The simple question is, in the decoherence framework, what makes a wave "cohere" after it has decohered? I can't find the page, but there is a discussion in that neighborhood about the time, in billionths of a second, that it takes a spec of dust to decohere in various environments. But that implies that there is a spec of dust out there in space, in the real world, that has an uncollapsed wavefunction. How did it go from being collapsed to being uncollapsed?
3) And for that matter, how can we extrapolate from a single photon or electron to a spec of dust, which is made up of billions of atomic elements? The whole basis of decoherence is that probability waves, which are the true nature of classical "particles" such as photon or electrons, decohere as soon as they interact with a foreign photon or electron. So how could a whole spec of dust be "cohered" in the first place?
I can't believe I've been writing this for an hour and a half. Because of the time sent, I will probably send this to Brian Greene.
Hope that you all had a good weekend. See you out there.
Just got back from a trip down to Chapel Hill to see the parentals with my girlfriend. No particular reason for going other than to break up the long stretch of not seeing them from Christmas to some time in the summer. It was fun. I have a hope, most likely of the irrational kind, that I have a chance of being somewhat decent at golf this year. I will definitely be playing, weather-permitting, the weekend after next. As long as I putt it from anywhere inside 100 yards, breaking 110 may be a possibility.
There are few situations better than being on a plane with a good book. You can't go anywhere...there is no "opportunity cost" from just sitting there and reading...so it is when the return on reading is at its peak. On this trip, I was able to spend a decent amount of time reading my current book, The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. It's great. As a resident of what we call the Universe, it's kind of our duty to read this book and make at least a good faith effort to understand how this thing we call the Universe, also often referred to as "reality", works. In any event, I have two questions for Mr. Greene, which I hope we can discuss in earnest one day over a couple of beers at The Warren Tavern:
1) I have just finished Part II, Time and Experience, and I have a question. It seems that there is open debate in the phyisics community today as to the merits of even exploring the quantum measurement problem. (A quick primer for the lay-people out there (such as myself): thanks to school curricula that seems to lag at least two decades behind the forefronts of science, we were taught that something like an electron is this little sphere...this very small "spec" of something. But it really isn't. It is actually a wave of probability. It's a wave that carries the various probabilities of the potential that the electron will actually be here, or perhaps there, when it interacts in some way with another object. I used to think of this as a "blur"...as in something we see in everyday life when something is moving very fast, such as those Sharper Image clocks where you see the time projected over this fiberglass wand that moves back and forth very fast. Looking at the blur, you don't see the wand itself. But, at any given moment, you know that there is a wand, and that it is somewhere within that blur and moving with a definite speed. But today I know that that is not a probability wave. In a probability wave, there really isn't a wand that is definitely here or definitely there. The only thing that is "in" a probability wave is a set of probabilities that, when you "look" at the wand, it's going to be here, or there, or there. I know that is weird, but just go with it for now. And the thing that makes that wave "collapse" to one point..the point where the classic electron that you think of actually is, is when it interacts with an outside object such as another electron, etc. There is no debate among physicists regarding the theory of how to know the various probabilities in the wave over time. But the actual mechanism of how that wave collapses to that one point, and why it collapses when it contacts, or is "measured" by, a foreign object, is a mystery. This mystery is called the quantum measurement problem). It seems that some say that understanding the "why" and "how" of wavefunction collapse is irrelevant, because we do understand that there is a wavefunction and we know how to correctly predict the probabilities within it. And it seems that those opinions are viewed with legitimacy. But isn't there a double standard here? Isaac Newton's laws of motion were fantastically accurate at describing the relationship between mass and gravity. But they didn't explain what gravity is, or the mechanic by which it works. Many accepted the laws as is, and the lack of the mechanical explanation did not prevent mankind from reaching remarkable heights based on those laws, such as landing a man on the moon. But some continued to question. And one of those individuals, Albert Einstein, discovered a deeper truth (the curvature of spacetime) that opened up a whole new world of scientific inquiry. All physicists today would likely agree that it is better that some questioned Newton's laws as opposed to simply accepting them. So my question is, why is it seemingly considered a legitimate view on the part of a modern physicist that we should just accept wavefunction collapse as a fundamental truth, when if it wasn't for the "unreasonable intellectual greediness" (p.213) of our predecessors, we wouldn't even be asking the question?
2) This one is much simpler. The simple question is, in the decoherence framework, what makes a wave "cohere" after it has decohered? I can't find the page, but there is a discussion in that neighborhood about the time, in billionths of a second, that it takes a spec of dust to decohere in various environments. But that implies that there is a spec of dust out there in space, in the real world, that has an uncollapsed wavefunction. How did it go from being collapsed to being uncollapsed?
3) And for that matter, how can we extrapolate from a single photon or electron to a spec of dust, which is made up of billions of atomic elements? The whole basis of decoherence is that probability waves, which are the true nature of classical "particles" such as photon or electrons, decohere as soon as they interact with a foreign photon or electron. So how could a whole spec of dust be "cohered" in the first place?
I can't believe I've been writing this for an hour and a half. Because of the time sent, I will probably send this to Brian Greene.
Hope that you all had a good weekend. See you out there.
Monday, March 15, 2010
On my campaign against the Tyranids and other fine thoughts
I will be taking a swing at the final Dawn of War II mission (original, not the expansion) right after this post. This is a great game...and has been exceptionally great on my new PC, which I am happy to report is now fully functional (knock on wood) after the installation of a replacement hard drive on Friday. There is one problem with its (in)ability to start hl2.exe (which means Portal, Half Life 2, Counterstrike Source, etc.), but I'll deal with that soon enough. As I was saying, it has been a fun game. Towards the end of the campaign, when your squads are well geared and well specced, you can do some serious pwning. Having the dreadnought mow down an army of approaching tyranids with its explosive shells minigun barrage power is, in the truest sense of the word, awesome. As in, it inspires awe. So I will be giving this final mission a go. I am hoping that it is not the slog that some RTS final missions have been in my career. A blurb in the mission briefing says "You will need to defend multiple points in this mission"...that could be bad. But we'll see :) After the (hopefully) successful execution of that, I will check out the beginning of the Chaos Rising expansion, but will then switch gears over to Bad Company 2 on the 360.
A quick shout out to the folks at Tritton. I purchased the Tritton AX 720 headphones on Friday and whoa, they *rock*. For a set of headphones that are comfortable, sound phenomenal, and that connect digitally to a PC (analog also possible), 360, or PS3, these things are the deal of the century. If you are lucky enough to see them on the rack at Best Buy, buy them!
I read a story on Gamespot today about the Activision-Infinity Ward debacle. This really is such a shame. I don't know the details. Some say that Jason and Ray (the IW head execs) were illicitly using IW resources to shop a concept to EA, Activision's primary competitor. If so, that is bad, and Activision has a legitimate gripe. But something lower down in the story has me thinking that this is more about Activision doing what big corporations do best...which is being big, ignorant, greedy bastards. Apparently, the day after firing West and Zampella, they announced a whole slew of new Call of Duty projects, stopping just short of announcing new Call of Duty cereal. That's really sad. They just don't get it. Modern Warfare 2 was the best selling game of all time because it was made by Infinity Ward, the company they just killed! Gamers that know anything, which amounts to many, many, gamers, know that the only Call of Duty's worth buying were the Infinity Ward Call of Duty's...the real Call of Duty's. They know that they didn't need to the buy the Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2 expansions, the entirely forgettable Call of Duty 3, and Call of Duty: World at War, because they were made by other studios. So why Activision thinks that spamming Call of Duty projects developed by other studios will reap any real benefit confounds me. For me personally, it's the end of a fun ride of shooters that started with Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (developed by 2015 Inc. for EA...the project leads in 2015 responsible for MoH left to form IW and create Call of Duty), and culminated with Modern Warfare 2, which despite adhering to the same formula, was just as fun as it has always been. So long Call of Duty...you were good.
Have a good night everyone. I'll be gunning for you in Bad Company 2.
BG
A quick shout out to the folks at Tritton. I purchased the Tritton AX 720 headphones on Friday and whoa, they *rock*. For a set of headphones that are comfortable, sound phenomenal, and that connect digitally to a PC (analog also possible), 360, or PS3, these things are the deal of the century. If you are lucky enough to see them on the rack at Best Buy, buy them!
I read a story on Gamespot today about the Activision-Infinity Ward debacle. This really is such a shame. I don't know the details. Some say that Jason and Ray (the IW head execs) were illicitly using IW resources to shop a concept to EA, Activision's primary competitor. If so, that is bad, and Activision has a legitimate gripe. But something lower down in the story has me thinking that this is more about Activision doing what big corporations do best...which is being big, ignorant, greedy bastards. Apparently, the day after firing West and Zampella, they announced a whole slew of new Call of Duty projects, stopping just short of announcing new Call of Duty cereal. That's really sad. They just don't get it. Modern Warfare 2 was the best selling game of all time because it was made by Infinity Ward, the company they just killed! Gamers that know anything, which amounts to many, many, gamers, know that the only Call of Duty's worth buying were the Infinity Ward Call of Duty's...the real Call of Duty's. They know that they didn't need to the buy the Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2 expansions, the entirely forgettable Call of Duty 3, and Call of Duty: World at War, because they were made by other studios. So why Activision thinks that spamming Call of Duty projects developed by other studios will reap any real benefit confounds me. For me personally, it's the end of a fun ride of shooters that started with Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (developed by 2015 Inc. for EA...the project leads in 2015 responsible for MoH left to form IW and create Call of Duty), and culminated with Modern Warfare 2, which despite adhering to the same formula, was just as fun as it has always been. So long Call of Duty...you were good.
Have a good night everyone. I'll be gunning for you in Bad Company 2.
BG
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Blogging is hard
Blogging is hard. You have to have time to do it. I am realizing that I'm not going to have time. I have to figure out my annoying career problem. As much as I would like to escape into nerdism every night after sitting in a cube for eight hours, I can't. At the end of the day, that's just not fun.
I went to the second Boston area Pre-PAX party last night. It was fun. As fun as it was though, I think I've failed in my bid to somehow "make a name for myself" in this new community. The first problem was the pax forum nickname fiasco. I couldn't decide what I wanted my nickname, or "handle", to be, so I kept creating new accounts with new names (I don't even want to think about how much time I wasted doing this). And what did it get me? One of the admins banned me. Sigh. So, note to self...everyone in nerd-world knows that you never, ever, ever create a second account on a forum. Good to know. Even though you can change your name on Xbox live, or in WoW, or any number of other places, you can't change your name on forums under pain of death. Okay, got it. After a groveling note they unbanned me, but the damage was done I think. And I still hate my name. "Ganno". Seriously bri? God that is sad. And then today, I did the unthinkable. After finally getting into the PAX IRC chat room (second note to self - anyone who is anyone in nerd-world IRC's), but not seeing any messages, I *very stupidly* (I knew this was so stupid at the time), typed "Can anyone see this?" -- replied to eventually with a smarmy "I wish I hadn't." Sigh. Since it took a while for that to come up, I thought it wasn't working, so I disconnected. And then I went to reply in kind, but I had already dc'd. So to everyone in the room, it looked like I had left to run home to my mommy.
So, whatever, that's the end of my foray into nerd-world. I am still looking forward to PAX East (a big gaming convention at the end of March), but I really just consider it as a observe and report mission before anything else.
In Brian-world, I need to get serious about what is happening for me jobwise this year. That's the topic of another post though.
Right now, I'm going to play my second DoW II mission of the day. Ugh, I need this game to end already. It's a lot of fun...but it's gone on a little long. The last mission...the one where the boss was the Avatar of Khaine, was pretty tedious. Go into arena, wail on boss for a few seconds, and then run away before he blows up the ground we're standing on...again. And again and again and again. Here's hoping that this next one isn't so bad.
--Transmission ends
I went to the second Boston area Pre-PAX party last night. It was fun. As fun as it was though, I think I've failed in my bid to somehow "make a name for myself" in this new community. The first problem was the pax forum nickname fiasco. I couldn't decide what I wanted my nickname, or "handle", to be, so I kept creating new accounts with new names (I don't even want to think about how much time I wasted doing this). And what did it get me? One of the admins banned me. Sigh. So, note to self...everyone in nerd-world knows that you never, ever, ever create a second account on a forum. Good to know. Even though you can change your name on Xbox live, or in WoW, or any number of other places, you can't change your name on forums under pain of death. Okay, got it. After a groveling note they unbanned me, but the damage was done I think. And I still hate my name. "Ganno". Seriously bri? God that is sad. And then today, I did the unthinkable. After finally getting into the PAX IRC chat room (second note to self - anyone who is anyone in nerd-world IRC's), but not seeing any messages, I *very stupidly* (I knew this was so stupid at the time), typed "Can anyone see this?" -- replied to eventually with a smarmy "I wish I hadn't." Sigh. Since it took a while for that to come up, I thought it wasn't working, so I disconnected. And then I went to reply in kind, but I had already dc'd. So to everyone in the room, it looked like I had left to run home to my mommy.
So, whatever, that's the end of my foray into nerd-world. I am still looking forward to PAX East (a big gaming convention at the end of March), but I really just consider it as a observe and report mission before anything else.
In Brian-world, I need to get serious about what is happening for me jobwise this year. That's the topic of another post though.
Right now, I'm going to play my second DoW II mission of the day. Ugh, I need this game to end already. It's a lot of fun...but it's gone on a little long. The last mission...the one where the boss was the Avatar of Khaine, was pretty tedious. Go into arena, wail on boss for a few seconds, and then run away before he blows up the ground we're standing on...again. And again and again and again. Here's hoping that this next one isn't so bad.
--Transmission ends
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Hi there
Hi. I'm Brian. You may see me online as Boofus Outlaw. Or gannobd9. Or Ganno. Or Kahless. Or...Gannosaur (wtf?...so lame, I know). I'm working on that.
Anyways, this is my blog. I've been meaning to start this for a *long* time and here I am. This blog is going to be about a number of things. First and foremost, it will be about my thoughts and musings on my #1 hobby, gaming (the video gaming nerd kind, not the gambling kind...although that's fun too I guess). It will also be about all sorts of other things I find interesting too though. Things like theoretical physics...or ancient history...or ADHD...or LOST. It is quite the gamut.
A project that I am currently working on is related to my quite acute attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). I am trying to define "The System". This will be the master System that makes use of all of the cool stuff in our world today and that conquers forgetfulness and chaos once and for all. Even though I've had it for over a year, I'm finally starting to play around with MobileMe (the Apple "cloud" platform)...which syncs up calendars, emails, etc. on the fly between a mac, an iPhone, and a MobileMe website.
What has stymied me in the past is that when I look into these really cool new things, I invariably find some basic, basic thing it doesn't do. It's so odd. I just experienced this again with MobileMe. I can go on the MobileMe website, schedule an appointment, and boom, there it is in my iPhone a second later. Awesome! But you know what I can't do? I can't set that appointment to have an alarm, like I can on the iPhone. And while the website has a To Do list, the iPhone doesn't. Huh? This is what makes me crazy. We have the technology. We figured out warp drive. All we have to do now is warp to a new solar system and join the galactic community. But no...we just build the Enterprise and then park it in orbit around Earth. ARRGGH! So, anyways, this is one thing I plan to blog about. I'm going to figure out The System - the thing that ties together all my platforms, and does all of the things that *should* be possible with today's technology, and then tell you how to do it. With all the stuff that's out there (Google, MobileMe, Facebook, Twitter, all the stuff I don't even know about yet), that's a tall order. But I'm going to figure it out, and then I'm going to tell you, because I bet it would help you too!
Glad you're here. I'll be back soon!
-Brian
Anyways, this is my blog. I've been meaning to start this for a *long* time and here I am. This blog is going to be about a number of things. First and foremost, it will be about my thoughts and musings on my #1 hobby, gaming (the video gaming nerd kind, not the gambling kind...although that's fun too I guess). It will also be about all sorts of other things I find interesting too though. Things like theoretical physics...or ancient history...or ADHD...or LOST. It is quite the gamut.
A project that I am currently working on is related to my quite acute attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). I am trying to define "The System". This will be the master System that makes use of all of the cool stuff in our world today and that conquers forgetfulness and chaos once and for all. Even though I've had it for over a year, I'm finally starting to play around with MobileMe (the Apple "cloud" platform)...which syncs up calendars, emails, etc. on the fly between a mac, an iPhone, and a MobileMe website.
What has stymied me in the past is that when I look into these really cool new things, I invariably find some basic, basic thing it doesn't do. It's so odd. I just experienced this again with MobileMe. I can go on the MobileMe website, schedule an appointment, and boom, there it is in my iPhone a second later. Awesome! But you know what I can't do? I can't set that appointment to have an alarm, like I can on the iPhone. And while the website has a To Do list, the iPhone doesn't. Huh? This is what makes me crazy. We have the technology. We figured out warp drive. All we have to do now is warp to a new solar system and join the galactic community. But no...we just build the Enterprise and then park it in orbit around Earth. ARRGGH! So, anyways, this is one thing I plan to blog about. I'm going to figure out The System - the thing that ties together all my platforms, and does all of the things that *should* be possible with today's technology, and then tell you how to do it. With all the stuff that's out there (Google, MobileMe, Facebook, Twitter, all the stuff I don't even know about yet), that's a tall order. But I'm going to figure it out, and then I'm going to tell you, because I bet it would help you too!
Glad you're here. I'll be back soon!
-Brian
Monday, March 1, 2010
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