chuggnutt.com

Happy Halloween to all of you who celebrate it!

Whoops! In my Oregon Bloggers post yesterday, I incorrectly said that Jake at Utterly Boring was giving away free TypePad accounts. Jake commented to correct me; they're not free accounts, just discounts for new signups.

Still, it's a good deal. Go get a blog!

If you're a blogger in Central or Eastern Oregon, or you'd like to try it out, head on over to Utterly Boring and check out Jake's offer for a free TypePad account. We want to see more Oregon bloggers east of the Cascades!

It's funny how the world works. Hot on the heels of my blog article on Sony Bend Tuesday of last week, our local newspaper, the Bend Bulletin, publishes a story in Saturday's business section about Sony Bend and the latest version of their Syphon Filter game in development.

"Sony filters out separatist group from Bend designer's video game" is the article. I don't really need to comment on the story as the opening sentence covers it: "Sony Computer Entertainment America has pulled a fictitious Quebec terrorist group from the latest in a series of hit video games created by John Garvin...."

Basically, I just thought it was very interesting to see this article show up in the paper less than a week after I had initially blogged about the company.

This is the second part of the story about Sony Bend I previously posted. This follows up on Mike Berlyn, who was a founding member of the game company Eidetic (now Sony Bend), who left the company in 1997. Read on for the gory details.

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Herewith the first part of an online detective story, with interesting results. If you're interested in any of the following: Infocom, the Sony PlayStation, or video game companies in Bend, Oregon—then you'll probably enjoy this story. Read on.

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My poking around in the world of RSS has inevitably led me to OPML, another XML format created by Dave Winer, and is ostensibly designed to contain outline-structured information. What is outline-structured information? A fancy way of saying a structured list of hierarchical content, like browser favorites or web directories like Yahoo. It seems any list will do, actually.

I'm interested by what I see, but I'm still reserving judgment. It looks like OPML will be/is valuable in the same space as RSS (e.g. weblogs), but I can't find a concrete description of the specification (so far, at least) beyond version 1.0—yet I keep finding OPML files online referring to themselves as version 1.1, and each one has a slightly different set of attributes. Is there a 1.1 spec? Or is it only proposed, letting content creators add features willy-nilly? Hmmm.

We had the most beautiful sunrise this morning, so I went out and snapped a picture of it. Smaller version here (640 by 480), larger version here (1024 by 768, but I recommend this larger version).

It struck me yesterday as I watched my wife surf eBay and eBay-related sites (like DisturbingAuctions.com) that eBay et. al. functions as a vast weblog for some people the same way that "traditional" weblogs function for people like me. Or more precisely, eBay fills the same needs for some people that weblogs fill for others.

(What needs? Well, the first thing that pops to mind is social needs, the kind of social needs you find satisfied by participating in an online community of some sort.)

Probably this has been obvious to many people long before I realized it. But this metaphor of eBay-as-weblog (or perhaps more than a metaphor) has been staying with me, nagging around the back of my mind, so I figured I'd put words to some of the ideas and see what comes of it.

It might be more fair to say eBay can be considered a meta-blog, categorizing and listing the individual entries (auctions) of thousands of bloggers (sellers) (side-note: perhaps eBay is more like an aggregator?), providing means for users to comment (feedback, ratings). Popular auctions are peer-reviewed and the cream rises to the surface, much the same way as in the weblog world.

It would be trivial to graft typical weblog services, like RSS, onto eBay's services. I've toyed with this idea before, I think it would be a great example of the killer app RSS wants to be.

But it makes me wonder: why doesn't eBay have RSS feeds? They already offer a saved searches feature that emails you notifications when new items appear matches your search criteria; that should be a no-brainer for a feed. Or perhaps feeds to supplement the services that many third-party sites offer: collective views of items you're selling, with current hit counts and bid prices.

One problem I do foresee, though: eBay is highly time-dependent. Users want to know what's happening with auctions now, via a browser refresh or an up-to-the-minute email; RSS as it's implemented now is not enough of a "push" technology to make this happen. Sure, you could fake it by setting your aggregator to poll eBay every 5 minutes for a feed update, but what happens when 100,000+ users retrieve an XML file 12 times an hour? Bandwidth dies, of course. EBay would brown-out.

Anyway, that's enough for tonight. I'm still finding the eBay/weblog idea intriguing; I may try to merge both worlds and produce some sample RSS feeds based on eBay searches. If I do, I'll post them here.

I got so caught up in finishing Cryptonomicon this past week that I didn't really go online to post stuff. Damn good book. Longer than hell, but it was worth it.

What else? Oh yeah, bought a PlayStation (the original, not Two) from my brother, along with several games. It's pretty sweet, even though I've only played a few times. I know, I'm way behind the curve, but I'm always behind the gaming curve; before the PlayStation, the most advanced console I have (aside from the computers) is a Sega Genesis. Then a Nintendo, the original one. At the rate I'm going, I should be up to a PS2 or XBox in 2007 or so.

Could've been worse, I suppose, if it weren't so amusing.

According to this article on Bend.com, Jodie Lynn Ackerman was released from jail last Wednesday (the 8th) due to overcrowding. By Saturday night (three days later), she "was booked back into the jail on charges of second-degree theft, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, first-degree criminal mischief and a probation violation." Seems to me that if you suddenly got a "get out of jail free" card, shouldn't you not do something stupid, like, oh, I don't know, steal a car and some beer and evade the police?

(This also showed up on UtterlyBoring.com.)

I've been reviewing the web server logs for my site, and decided to self-indulge and post some interesting stats here online to bore you all. Read on if you're interested.

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I just uploaded the Palm Reader file for Macbeth to the ebooks page, and holy crap, I forgot how messed up that play is until I was converting it. Shakespeare must have been in a very, very dark mood when he was writing it. Enjoy.

For the second time this year I got a dollar bill stamped with the "official" Where's George stamp. The first was at the Portland Zoo back in July, the second yesterday here in town, from the Factory Outlets. For the uninitiated, Where's George is a bill tracker, where users can enter the serial numbers from various denominations of money and their location, and the system will track those bills, and show you a report of where that bill has previously been (if another user had already entered it).

It's a neat concept, one of the first of this type I think (along with other sites like BookCrossing), that came out a few years back. All or most of the original stamped bills were released on the East Coast, I believe, so it's interesting to see them finally circulating out west.

Of course, it's also easy to overlook the fact that this is a massive database tracking the existence and whereabouts of hundreds of millions of dollars across the country, which I'm sure gives paranoid conspiracy theorists nightmares... Myself, on the other hand, I'm a data junkie, and I would just love to get a peek at that database...

So the freak show in California is over and Arnold Schwarzenegger is the new governor.

Lovely.

Reminds me of an old California joke: California's like a bowl of cereal; once you get rid of the fruits and nuts, all you have left are the flakes.

The trailer for The Return of the King is online. December 17th; just over two months.

We (finally) went and saw "Pirates of the Caribbean" tonight. It was a lot of fun, I liked it. Johnny Depp was, frankly, amazing. Go see it, if it's still in theaters where you're at.

I've been reading a lot about how email is broken these days—articles here, here and here are examples—and interestingly, I came across the following passage in Cryptonomicon (published in 1999) that I thought was apropos:

"I hate e-mail," John says.

Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. "What do you mean?"

"The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don't observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it's really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it."