I'm Ron. Ron Weeaasley.

I was the esteemed Ronald Weasley for Halloween this year.

My friends all thought that was a bit drastic that I went ahead and made the carpet match the drapes, but I got the last laugh after all.

Metaphysics, Philosophy, and Green-Skinned Space Babes

A well-read friend of mine sent me a disturbing e-mail the other day. After another friend recommended Ender's Game to her, she discounted the book after reading the amazon review:

I just started to read the Amazon synopsis of Ender's Game and had to stop reading after this sentence: Aliens have attacked Earth twice and almost destroyed the human species.

I don't think I can comment on this.

I consider this friend to be one of the most reliable litmus tests in terms of book recommendations; to see her reject a book out of hand (cart?) because of the mention of "Aliens" showed a closed mindedness that was disappointing, but not at all unusual, given the broad perception of the sci-fi genre as a whole. Between Star Trek Conventions and Hollywood remakes of Philip K. Dick novels, science fiction books and movies are generally seen as a niche, cult-appeal, sensationalist works meant mostly for the off-hours Dungeons & Dragons crowd looking for a break from the orc-hunting.

The Fifty Dollar Price Point

Apple shares fell 10.5 % yesterday in after-hours trading, and it fell another $2.34 today.

too much credit for masterminding the ROKR as an intentional flop on the scale of New Slurm.

Mac Mini Grab Bag

Not selling enough 2GB Nanos

One More Thing...

Refresh... Eat... Refresh... Eat...

The saddest thing is that I'm not only watching the apple announcements like a total psycho, I'm also streaming the important stuff to my friend Lin's phone, who is waiting for a plane right now and doesn't have internet access. Sometimes connectivity is a bad thing.

Google and the iGhetto

I read up on Google's latest mind-boggling project, Google Secure Access, a free, secure wireless initiative, and prepared to get geekily excited about it until I found the increasingly common "(Windows XP and Windows 2000 only)" disclaimer. I thought back to the recent offerings from everyone's favorite Mountainview mothership, and couldn’t help but think, “Why does Google hate me?” As a home Linux and Mac OS X user, I have gotten by pretty well lately, playing some cutting-edge games (ok, game), finding most new hardware to be OSX/Linux compatible, and using the commodity standard Microsoft Office platform; things were looking pretty good for a lowly Linux/BSD/OSX user such as myself. The systems were finally making inroads to the non-tech crowds, too: my technophobic brother was asking me serious questions about the Mac mini, and I hear you can get a free Linux box with the purchase of a qualifying rifle at Wal-Mart[1]. Just as it looked as if the Redmond beast might have to deal with some serious competition, opposition came from the unlikeliest of places: the company that Microsoft identifies as its biggest threat.

Though the first line on Google's company overview page smugly declares that the company’s mission is to make information "universally accessible and useful", a glance at Google Labs is enough to turn a *nix user green with compatibility envy. Google Desktop, Google Deskbar, Google Web Accelerator, Google Video Viewer, Google Talk, and now Google Secure Access are six projects recently released into beta or production through their lab, and all are currently only compatible with Windows systems. Though Google Talk uses open standards for the bland text chatting protocol, the real meat of the service is its VoIP client, which currently only lets you talk to other boring Windows users. Even Gmail, the nothing-short-of-revolutionary webmail client, went into public beta without Safari compatibility (though they are now Safari compatible, advanced features such as Rich Text formatting still only work in IE and firefox).

Trebek is out there

I've been sick the last couple days, which means I've had little else to do but watch Netflix DVDs. I just watched most of X-Files Season 4, and the screenshot on the right here is from "Jose Chung's From Outer Space". Re-watching that episode now, almost a decade after I first saw that, I can safely and without any hesitation say that it's the coolest episode of any tv show ever. It has pretty much everything you might want in an episode, including Rashômon style unreliable poly-narration, big-headed gray aliens, government men in black, and a cameo by the venerable Alex Trebek (pictured in the aforementioned screenshot).

On an unrelated note, I like Nyquil a lot. I mean, really a lot. If I still used "hella" as an adverb, it would be used here to describe my feelings for Nyquil.

The Obligatory Friendster PSA

The Pos told me that posting a friendster screenshot on flickr is very post-modern. I told him that he's adopted.

If you've been living under a rock like my friend E-*, then you don't know about the "Viewed My Profile" feature on Friendster, also known as the most unwanted feature in the world. This is demonstrably true as the first thing that anyone will you do when you tell them about the most unwanted feature in the world, the first thing they ask you is how to turn it off. Go to "My Settings", and set "View Profiles Anonymously" to "Yes"

You're pretty lame if you haven't heard about this yet, because even Business Week has picked up on it. I mean, I know that Friendster isn't cool anymore, but do they have to rub our faces in it?