fighting-man speaks

The problem with WoW and any MMO is to get anywhere in the game you really have to devote a lot of time into it.  As a husband and father (even with just 1 child) and having a 3 hour round-trip commute every day, I am just not able to do it anymore.  I have always been a casual player throughout the years.  Before I was married and even a few years into marriage and when I lived 5 minutes from work, I could spend a few hours playing every night of the week.  I just can’t do that anymore.  I also get tired and sleepy on the weekend evenings.  Maybe I’m just getting old or just not obsessed.

Twitter has been around for a while and I have enjoyed it but now it is getting REALLY good. For it to be good you have to know how to use it. There are 4 things that really make it great for me.

1. News - It has become a breaking news source for me locally, nationally, and globally. News comes the quickest through Twitter much faster than cnn.com and other news sites. This can be good and bad. The swine flu incident got out of hand with all the rumors flying on Twitter.

2. Search - I was blown away when search.twitter.com was released. I could now search on any topic and see what people were saying about it. This also includes hash tags. People use hash tags for topics and other things. Like if you wanted to tell the world what you were doing on Saturday you would type “going to the park #saturday” then you search for #saturday and you see your tweet and everyone else that uses #saturday to see what they are doing and you don’t have to follow them or they follow you. You can find people now based on their interests through searching. It is amazing. My favorite now is #dnd for everything Dungeons and Dragons.

3. Tweetdeck - Excellent Adobe AIR app that allows you to create columns to group the people you follow and your searches. You can also filter the columns for certain things. This is great so you don’t have just one long list of everyone like in Twhirl or the Twitter web site.

4. Twitterific - Love this iPhone app. They just release the 2.0 version and it rocks! It has a search feature builtin too. Very very good! Easy way to stay connected to the Twittersphere on the road. I use this app the most other than Maps.

Twitter and Facebook is the new Web. Web 3.0? Blogs dead? Well, I’m still writing this on a blog.

As we all know, we are in the middle of a housing crisis. People spent way too much on homes they couldn’t afford. Did we seriously think that a 900 sq. ft. 2 bedroom shack built in 1935 in California would stay valued at $500,000 forever? Does your family of 4 really need a 4500 sq ft McMansion in the suburbs? Our parents and grandparents lived in little 1200 sq ft ranch style homes with a basement in small towns for decades. Ride through the downtown of any small town in America and you will see these small homes that people did just fine in for many many years. The housing bubble was just like the dotcom bubble of the late 90s/early 2000s. Wall Street brokers and firms continue to find the next hot thing. They just did it will oil last summer. That was a quick oil bubble. What’s next? Unfortunately, they are playing roulette with the middle class and it will continue to hurt.

The dotcom bubble got your every day person buying Internet stocks of worthless companies. Everyone was day trading like crazy. I remember there were stock market classes at my church. It was nuts. Then that crashed. Then every started buying and flipping homes. That started the whole housing bubble. Wall Street knew what they were doing and once again the middle class paid for it while the brokers got rich (read The Wolf of Wall Street book, you will be amazed at the lifestyle of a hedge fund manager). The housing thing lasted a long time and now we are in the crisis. There have been little bubbles here and there and will continue. There is a book called The Great Depression Ahead that says the market will rebound a little bit this year but will eventually fall to 3400 (DOW) and that oil will go back up but not as much last summer. It will continue to be a downturn/flatline for the next 5 years or more. The book says that a new bull market will occur closer to 2020. It seems like that is happening.

My problem is that everyone jumps on the bandwagon of investing and whatever the hot thing is. Now is the time to cut spending and save your money. Yes businesses will go under and there will be a shakeout. You won’t be able to buy that plasma tv or go to the Bahamas. Put your money in savings and hope to God you don’t lose your job. Sell whatever toys you have acquired and just stop spending. Don’t buy a new home or new car. It’s a big lifestyle change and a lot of people are being forced to do it. My grandparents grew up in the Depression era and were very thrifty. They lived comfortably for many many years. I see the mistakes I’ve made and so many other people around me. I hope to be more like my grandparents in the coming years. I know this all sounds harsh but it’s just what I am thinking about these days.

Fascinating article:

If the password cannot be guessed and is not found in a dictionary, the cracker has to try a brute-force attack. When brute-forcing, the time to crack the password depends on the amount of possible passwords that the cracker has to try. The amount of possible passwords increases with password length and with increasing diversity of characters being used (complexity).

Let’s take the scenario of a cracker trying 15 million passwords per second. This is currently the maximum speed being claimed by password cracker vendors. You need a pretty fast computer to achieve this. The following table shows the computed time to crack a password with 15 million tries per second. Notice the incredible increase in time to try all possible combinations when password length and complexity increase.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/08/08/101-classic-computer.html

When I was a teenager I discovered my parent’s record collection from the 70s.  I fell in love with classic rock, R&B, funk, soul, and more.  I also hooked up their old stereo system.  The receiver weighed about a 100 lbs.  It was a beast!  The speakers were larger than mini-fridges and had that beautiful woodgrain paneling.  I also had their turntable but it was pretty old so I bought a a new one from Radio Shack.  Throughout my teen years and college I enjoyed the sweet sounds of 70s.  There is nothing like listening to a vinyl record.  It’s very rich and warm sounding and has just a different sound to it.  Here is a link I found with photos of a guy’s vintage collection.  Looks a lot like what I used to have.  http://www.gallagher.com/ebay.htm

The iphone has changed my life. Seriously. It is like having a second computer. I was worried about typing on the touch screen because I am so used to tactile feedback. I am glad to say that it is really good. I am typing very fast with my index finger. It seems like it has adapted to my finger. Truly amazing device. There are some great apps that make life so much easier. The apps enable you to get what you need without having to go to the Web. Best phone ever.

When the economy sucks and all you see on the news is politics and movie stars, just give me tech.

Let me live in the world of SQL code and database design or javascript and Web 2.0.

Nothing else matters when you bury your nose in a book about n-tier web architecture or algorithms that you’ll never understand.

Pondering the complexities of virtual world design or network programming is a great way to spend the day or evening.

The details of the latest mergers and aquisitions or what company is getting bailed out next is nothing compared to some hairy Linux device errors or rebuilding your kernel.

Just give me tech.

I’ve always enjoyed the electronic duo Daft Punk.  I especially enjoy the track titled Voyager from their Discovery.  It’s just a smooth jam that you can code or do other types of computer work to.  All of their music is pretty much awesome.  Check em out.

http://www.last.fm/music/Daft+Punk/_/Voyager

I have enjoyed classical music since I was very young.  I bought a tape series called 100 Greatest Melodies.  I listened to them every night when I went to sleep.  At the same time, I was learning to read music in band class playing the trombone.  I learned all about the greatest composers.  Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Handel, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and many more.

Then I became interested in computers and discovered MIDI.  Downloading MIDI files was all I knew before I learned about WAV files and eventually MP3s.  I would download all the MIDI files I could find load them into a program that would show me the notes.  Then I would try to play the songs on the piano.  Classical music definitely makes you feel smarter even when you have no understanding of actually how complex it is.

Around this time I discovered cheesy electronic/synthesized versions of popular songs and classical pieces but I didn’t really understand it.  Late in high school and possibly college, I saw A Clockwork Orange which freaked me out but I loved the odd sounding versions of Beethoven’s 9th symphony.  I then saw TRON.  I noticed the music had that synthesized sound to it.  I then found out the composer was Wendy Carlos.  She is famous for composing Switched-On Bach back in the late 60s.  It is the most sold classical album of all time.  She used the original Moog synthesizer which was analog and not digital yet.  It was extremely difficult to work with.  If you love classical and a quirky electronic sound you have to check it out.  She actually did four different albums of the stuff.

The interesting thing about this “computer music” is that during the 70s and 80s when personal computers took off, Wendy’s music was used heavily in commercials for computers such as the Commodore 64 and also in promotional pieces for Disney’s EPCOT Center (possibly because of TRON which was a Disney film).  I think it’s funny how marketing people tie together classical music, because people who use computers are smart, and electronic classical, because it’s a computer.  It was just a 70s/80s thing I guess.  You don’t see this type of music being used at all anymore.