Updates! Yes!

Contrary to popular belief, I am not dead, nor am I undead. I am quite alive, I do believe.

What have I been up to? Well, let's see, I ran from Ike, got published, moved, and got a new second job.

How could I of all people give up a job at Camelia Heaven? How, oh, how?

Oh, yeah, to get a job at Malus Electronica. To answer your next question: I don't know.

Other things that managed to catch my interest: LibraryThing.com. Google Books is SLOWLY approaching the coolness level of this product, but I think that Google Books has a different goal as LibraryThing.

LibraryThing is teh awesome.

I have a lot on the backburner right now, hence the 400 years of silence, and I hope to get some more projects started after the cards settle.

Ooh, was that a subtle hint?

Maybe.

Okay, talk to you later.

Hurricane Madness

For those of you who ignored Amber's post:

Ike hit Houston, and now most of Galveston is a water park. Amber and I were in a mandatory evac zone (for both places... what are we? The McCains all of a sudden?), so we high-tailed it up to good old Plano, TX, where my mother's brother lives with his wife, mother-in-law and four cats.

We brought our two cats and our friend's/neighbor's cats (since they were on vacation in Cali), contributing four more cats to the local cat population. Yay, eight cats.
The cats handled it well in the following order:

Tucker: "Oh yay! Another home!"
Pequod: "I'm uncomfortable but curious... but the toys are great!"
Jessica: "I'm scared. Tremble tremble."
Gabi: "ROWR SNORT HISS GROWL!"

We were expecting Ike to follow us here, but he didn't. Instead he visited my parents. It was funny, my parents were grilling my uncle: "are you prepared for a blackout, etc.?" And he's all like, "yeah." And then they're the ones with the blackout. Irony. Or maybe irony as defined by Alanis Morisette.

One thing to note, though: my uncle seems to have an awful lot of "adult entertainment." Kinda weird...

Anyway, we're all all right, and we're planning on heading back very, very soon. Neither place was wanged, and at least one has power, so we're cool.

AND THAT DANGED TREE IS STILL STANDING? WTF MAN!?

That is all.

What I'd Like To See

There are some things in this world I'd like to see...

We have all manner of video games out there, and some of them let you personalize your character. Second Life, for example, lets you make someone who looks like you (or nothing like you, if you so desire). Spore lets you create your own species from the cellular phase onwards. Other games with multiple players will even let you create a custom avatar.

But do these avatars tranfer?

What I'd like to see is what I call the OpenAvatar. You generate a 3D model using some open standard, and then plug it into your games, and now, instead of Solid Snake, it's You. For games supporting it, you just point it to your OpenAvatar storage site, and it takes care of converting the character to the in-game style. Additionally, a tool should be generated with plugins capable of translating your OpenAvatar to be playable in those games (maybe even a 2D renderer!).

Who's with me?

Additionally, since I gotta make this blog post count, could we please stop finding mutilated dead dogs and calling them cryptids? It's gross. Please?

Crossposted in The Eventide Knave and The Gangster of L'Oeuf.

Happy Birthday!

I just want to take this time right now and wish my sweet wife the happiest of birthdays. I wish I could just shower her with all the nice things, but I can only afford to drizzle them on her. :P

Nevertheless, every year we spend together is yet another wonderful chapter in the book of my life.

Amber means everything to me, so I'd do everything in my power to ensure that today is a wonderful day for her, especially. I try to make every day a wonderful day, but this, her birthday, means I have to make it an EVEN MORE SPECIAL day.

Amber, I love you, and I hope that you have had a very happy birthday.

All my love.

-Jacob

Crossposted in The Eventide Knave and The Gangster of L'Oeuf.

Feed Me

Disregarding the fact that today marks one score six years for me on this the planet Earth, I thought I'd share a little bit of my syndicated life with you.

In case you didn't realize, this recent issue of 2600 does in fact contain an article written by me. Of course, you all read my writings blog, so of course you know that (http://jacobswritings.blogspot.com/).

As far as reading goes, there's what I read in my reader. If you want to follow along with things I deem interesting, check it out (http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/00394582249215392869/state/com.google/broadcast).

If you want to see what I'm READING, reading, there's always this: http://books.google.com/books?q=label:%22reading%22&uid=1391704558296914713&output=rss, and to see when I've finished reading something, there's this: http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/o16083507027721366979.163798611332227612/od5/public/basic.

There are other feeds, if you're interested in following along. Check out my website and click the autofeed discovery icon for the others. When I discover that I actually have more feeds, I'll add them there.

Also: Amber and I saw V for Vendetta last night at Shawn/Jen's. It should be required watching for any public official.

Because it's half-past late, and I'm not feeling so hot, It's time for me to go to bed. Jared, Amber told me you called. I'll e-mail you guys tomorrow.

Crossposted in The Eventide Knave and The Gangster of L'Oeuf.

More Zombies, and Maybe a Robot

Recently, I finished reading The Walking Dead: Miles Behind Us, the second volume of the Walking Dead series. I must say this: the story telling was still the same amazing storytelling that got me hooked on The Walking Dead. The disappointment, though, lies in the changing of the artist. No longer are the drawings clear, such that you can tell who a character is from "miles" away, but now they're blob-faced and hard to distinguish, even up close. It was disappointing, but not enough to prevent me from reading on. One other problem I had were the massive introductions of characters, and at times I had difficulty figuring out who was who. Nevertheless, I managed to figure out who was who, based on context. The story picks up where the previous issue left off, and introduces some more characters. Along the way, some folk die to the bite of zombie death, and some drama ensues. I really liked it, all in all. And if you like the ever popular zombie tale, I recommend this book to you. You'll probably like it too.

Also, Amber and I saw Wall-E last night. I lifted my ban on the evil Cinemark empire and paid enough for a special edition DVD, but I was not disappointed in the movie. In case you have lived under a rock for the past...year... Wall-E is a movie about a trash-compacting robot living all alone on an abandoned, over-littered Earth. He does his daily activities of compacting the trash into neat little cubes and stacking them into piles larger than most skyscrapers. One day, though, he meets a new robot, named Eve, who shows him just how lonely he's been this entire time. Wall-E, the robot, gets a feeling for what it's like to be alive, until Eve is rushed away in a spaceship. Wall-E latches on, and they're soon on an intergalactic cruise ship whose patrons are ... well... it's funny 'cause it's true. Here he takes place in a power struggle akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey, only Wall-E fights for the User! The entire movie had that funny because it's true motif to it, ranging from a Wall-Mart-like company ruling all of mankind, to the detriments of laziness, to an over-reliance on machines, and every other thing that you bad humans do these days. Disney Pixar, with their past few movies, have really caught my interest. I really liked The Incredibles, enjoyed Rattatouille, and also liked greatly Wall-E (Cars was all right. I'd rather watch fake cars waste fake gas than the alternative). Amber liked it as well, as basically, she'll like anything animated with the word Disney somewhere in the title.

What's next? I picked up the latest issue of FSF (thinking about switching to the Best Of omnibuses after the December 2008 issue). It looks like a bearded James Dean is shooting Al Pachino, but he just seems to find it the funniest thing ever. I wonder what treasures await!

Also, picked up the latest issue of 2600. There's an interesting article on extracting stored passwords using JavaScript from the address bar. Or maybe I'm a little biased.

Crossposted in The Eventide Knave and The Gangster of L'Oeuf.

Zombies and Foxes and Creatures Galore!

Recently, I finished reading World War Z by Max Brooks.

Let me tell you this: though this book is filed under Horror, it could just as easily go in the history book section and sound just as plausible.

Brooks has the knack to write a deadpan humor book (The Zombie Survival Guide), and a horror book in which the supernatural elements are less scary than the real.

Written like a series of interviews, this book captures many different voices, and each interview actually sounds like a different person, with some overlap of plot details, so you can put together a picture of what happened. The people are from all over the world, including an interview with someone who was aboard the ISS during the entire Zombie Wars.

Did I mention it's about zombies? Well, it is. It's sort of a sequel to Survival Guide, and requires a reading of it to fully understand Brooks' zombie mythos (it's not too different than the classic [Romero] zombie mythos). Z even makes a reference to the guide in an interview here and there.

If you like zombies, or want a chilling good read, check out this book, but be sure to read the guide first!

In other news, Firefox 3 got released today. It's AWESOME (and has the AWESOME BAR). Download and enjoy. That is an order. You will save precious milliseconds with its improved speed.

http://getfirefox.com

Additionally, Spore Creature Creator came out today. Download and enjoy. That too is an order. You don't have to buy the full version, but you may.

It runs on my ancient computer with it's glorious gig of ram and dual core processor and 1024x768 resolution.

http://www.spore.com

You will thank me! That is a prophecy.

That is all.

Crossposted in The Eventide Knave and The Gangster of L'Oeuf.