Well, I have to say, I’m a bit sad. I have really enjoyed MS Flight. It seemed to be targeted at the casual Flight Simmer. I suppose that would be me. I like FSX as well, but it’s a bit clunky, and very full-featured. When I feel like some defined missions or lightweight adventures, MS Flight is great. The graphics and performance are nice on my system. I just read today that they’ve cancelled the program, which is too bad.

I’ve recently started contributing to a nifty new iPhone app called urbandig. It is the app that I wanted when I was in NYC earlier this year. It’s the app that I want when I visit Memphis and Denver later this year. Basically, they’ve gone out and found people who know the city, or parts of it, really well, and gotten them to created nice little curated morsels of experience. Portland’s urban dig experience has just been release, and in it you can enjoy my delicious noodle crawl, in which I explore some of Portland’s more exciting Ramen joints.

I recently received my new Flip camera. I ordered online and got the custom design. Sorta half-assed that, but that’s okay. The first thing I noticed about it after picking it up is that it is lighter than I’d expect. As in it feels somewhat plastic. I immediately plugged it into my computer to charge it and play with it. The charge happened pretty quickly, so the playing did as well.

I’m a book lover. By nature. I find flipping pages, browsing aisles, and even falling asleep on a book, to be comforting. But I’ve been eyeballing the Kindle (and the Nook and the eReader) since it came out. With the price dropping to under $150 (sans 3g), it was suddenly accessible. I started to think about it, but never quite pulled the trigger. Which was fortunate, as the lady got me one for my birthday.

N and I are heading down to Austin shortly to catch the SxSW interactive conference and spend some time with her sister who moved there from somewhere I didn’t want to visit about 6 months ago. So I think I can find my way around a conference. But what about the city? Any tips…beer, BBQ, texmex, or whatnot. Cheers. PS. Just saw the Tron Legacy preview and it looks pretty awesome.

I’m a fan of social media sites. Sites like twitter and facebook are loads of fun, and great for staying in touch with old friends, new friends, and potential friends. In a recent post I commented on what I felt were the differences between facebook and myspace. In the end, I believe that myspace is primarily a vanity site, whereas facebook focuses on relationships. A more subtle comparison happens between facebook and twitter.

I’m completely aware that Facebook is pretty handily kicking the figurative ass of Myspace. I am pretty excited about this, because I’ve never been a fan of Myspace as a social networking site. I’ve enjoyed visiting band sites, and I managed to connect with a few people there. On the other hand, I love Facebook. I talk about Facebook. I advocate its use, and might occasionally be obnoxious about it. But the conversations are interesting.

Twitter is getting some hype lately. The fun part of the hype is that it lacks any real explanation of what twitter is about, and generally any real understanding. So I’m going to help out by offering some examples of how twitter can positively impact your life, and not just by getting endless tweets sent to your phone or browser. Twitter for sports teams This one is for the soccer moms and team managers.

There are tons of ways to share photos (and videos) on the web. I currently use three main sites to share my photos, each for different reasons. Picasaweb – I’ve been using google’s photosharing the longest, largely because I didn’t want to deal with getting a yahoo id. Which isn’t that tough. I like the album nature of picasaweb, and put most of the photos that I take onto there, treating it like as a bit of a cross between a backup and a social network.

I finally broke down and got me a flickr account. Now I have photos at picasaweb, facebook, and flickr. So, now I have wonder…what goes where? I’m thinking that the picasaweb will continue to be my library-type space. Pretty much all my photos go there. Then facebook gets the goofy fun ones, the parties, whatever. And lastly, flickr will diplay my favorites. Some I think are good photos, some are representative of what I’m about, and some just end up there.

I’ve been thinking about social web stuff a lot today. The good folks at Nemo Designs were good enough to have a long chat with anners and me about their social interweb. But that’s just the setup, I’m not really going to go into that…it was interesting though.

What I wanted to hit on is the kids and their lack of email! Which is something that’s come up in conversation, and it came up sometime after the aforementioned meeting, but not during. So the argument that I hear goes something like this:

– Email is going away.

– Why?

– Because kids don’t use email.

– Huh?

– Yeah, they’ve studied kids and they use facebook and twitter and stuff and they don’t even have email accounts.

So, my response is…So what? I mean, did you have a mailing address as a kid? I don’t recall getting much mail. And most of it was highly temporal, non-transactional information. Birthday cards, Ranger Rick, um, I think that’s about it. I was way ahead of my time and couldn’t stand sending letters because the transit time was ridiculous and I didn’t want to pay for a stamp.

But this makes me miss being a nerd! Read more about Wednesday’s upcoming excitement here. Props nader for the links and the reminder.

Playing with google ads. I don’t have any illusion that they’re going to make be rich, or even more than a few pennies a year, but I’m not in this blog thing to retire early. I’m in it for the fame and notoriety. So you’re probably better off pretending they’re not there.

Okay, this is one of the coolest tools I’ve come across in awhile. Still trying to see how well it integrates into my workflow tendencies, but I’m really hoping that it does. Because it’s pretty awesome. TiddlyWiki is a wiki/blog that exists completely inside of a single file. It’s all DHTML and such, so it requires no server-side processing to work. What that means is you can just save the file to your computer, and open it in your browser, and it works.

Okay, I’m a bit late to the party, but this is pretty sweet. How many of that bad boys haven’t you plugged two bits into? They’re on tour, the bizarre thing is the order of cities. They are all over the map. Must’ve been the original Pacman algorithm.

Went to Ignite last week, it was pretty sweet. The premise is a bunch of presenters get up and talk about something presumably interesting for a little while. The catch is that they have exactly five minutes, 20 slides (power-pointish), 15 seconds each, and they roll automatically. That keeps things moving and keeps you on your toes. And from experience (not at Ignite), talking about something for five minutes can be tough.

You’re in the Pearl District meeting some folks, it’s going to be hours. But you need to park, and it’s the Pearl so you have to pay to park. Two hours max. So you figure out the green monster and get your two-hour slip, and stick it to your window where it will eventually be sucked inside the passenger door. You pull out your cell phone and make a call: “Remind me to pay parking in two hours,” and go off to your meeting.

I love Google. I use a number of google applications. Google’s search is and has always been fantastic. I have a gmail account and a picasaweb account. Blah, blah, google’s does a lot of great things and makes my life better. Thank you google! However, I’m feeling more and more that google just isn’t getting it like they used to. The internet has changed, it grows more dynamic, more personal. But while new sites keep popping up that enable users to do more, google looks the other way.

Storm is a next step in evolution of computer virus. Basically, it’s more organized than your typical trojan horse or virus, having three (?) different roles: breeder, brain, and drone (my terminology). The drones are the most common, and basically install on your computer and await instructions from the brain. The breeders try to spread, and the brain acts as a command and control center. The scary part is that lying dormant, this thing has access to pretty much everything (secure or no) you do on your computer or the internet with that computer.

light lately, but that’s because I’ve been writing little mini-fictions over at ficlets. Here’s me. The account system is pretty neat, let me know if you have trouble getting signed up if you’re into it and I can help you out.

Alright, beerdrinker got a shiny new red iPod Nano for xmas from my mom. It totally rocks. It synchs with my iCal and address book (surprise! yay me!), it plays music, it’s tiny, and it sounds good. Pretty much kicking my Zen Micro to the curb. The only thing it doesn’t have is a voice recorder…and that is a bummer. But what I’m really stoked about is the Nike+ addon. (Disclaimer: I am a Nike employee.

After running Gentoo Linux on my personal machine for several years, I’m leaving it. Done. Not looking back. I’m installing Ubuntu right now. I’ve battled Gentoo with every significant upgrade. I like to do things the right way, but I found myself reconfiguring my wireless LAN and video card way too often. Nothing fancy, but with every upgrade, samba broke, I could no longer print, and usually I had to figure out a cascade of failed dependencies.

this is pretty funny. worlds largest windows crash. thanks m@. btw, I run linux at home, and prefer solaris for the bigstuff, but HPUX works too.

Alright, enough about Windows. But not enough about beer. But that’s another tale for another time. Recently I received a copy of the latest edition of Running Linux (number 5 is alive). The author credits go to Matt Welsh, the author of the original, and Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, and it is published super-recent. Before I get started, full disclosure is that I do some work occasionally for O’reilly and they sent me this copy to check out (but not do any work on).

This is pretty sweet. thx to broomball player for this one.

Tons of people haven’t been asking me what software I run on my Windows boxen. This little ditty isn’t for them. Before jumping into recommendations, I should give you an idea of what I’m about when it comes to the software I run on my computer. As a Unix guy I have a strong appreciation for simple tools to solve simple problems, and are able to work alone or with other tools to solve (or create) complex problems.

okay. I am not a Windows user. I am a Unix admin by trade (solaris/HP-UX/Linux), but whenever I go home I try to help my family out with their machines. It seems that everybody is running XP now, and I helped out with a few things. Ryan got a new laptop. It’s a Dell running XP. Brand spankin new, and he wants to install all sorts of crap on it and, you know, connect it to the web and stuff.

The ubiquitous Hello World is getting a new twist with this frickin virus. Watch out for emails that are Subjected Hello, Hi, hi, or nothing. Those are what I’ve seen…at about every minute or two now. Oh, and I’m seeing bounces saying they’re from me, they’re not. Really. It’s quite annoying, so please don’t open those emails. I beg of you. I don’t need more garbage. Between the spam and the viral clogging I wonder if this stuff isn’t put out by the USPS in an effort to make email so annoying as to be ineffective.

This is insane. An e-card to spy on your lover. It’s appallling, rude, jealous, base. Here are some details. Don’t do it. Bad. Of course it was only a matter of time, but I hope they all go to jail. props Abrichar.

yay! I’ve finally gotten my computer back up and running near to my satisfaction. After a misdiagnosed dead cpu (replaced with an athlon 2200+) and a splurge of a new case, several hours of puzzlement swapping known-goods back and forth, I replaced the motherboard (was a Gigabyte) with an new one (ASUS A7N8X Deluxe). I think that I’ll be happy with this, especially once I get all the firewire, USB, multimedia, and RAID working (I run Linux so it’s not quite as plug-and-play).

Hey, I’ve noticed that a lot of folks are moving off of blogger/blogspot/whatever. I recently got a bulk domain reseller account. It’s a great service, if any of y’all are interested in hosting reliably and cheap (like <=$35/year…I’m just looking for help with the costs) drop me a line. You’ll have full access to admin your site, but I can help out if needed.

Accoriding to this article the White House is backing a plan to associate phone numbers with internet-related addresses using DNS. I read the RFC and it basically introduces a new record to DNS, the NAPTR record, as well as defining a new domain, E164.arpa, to which a phone number including area code and international code will be reversed, dotted between all digits, and prepended. This is an interesting idea, but I’m having difficulty identifying how it will be implemented.