anything can happen

apologies in advance for another rambling, overdue post. work is a time-sink of epic proportions and i often find myself to lazy to come home and post more than a few words to a virtual punchlist of topics i want to discuss.

in reverse order, i ended up rebuilding my windows install today on my desktop because it had started acting all goofy (probably due to a timing issue introduced by the addition of new memory with mismatched timing) and was over a year old. its a ritual i've come to enjoy because it gives me a chance to check out new versions of software and such -- as such, i've discovered the embedded-google-sidebar chat-thing and foxytunes. both are totally awesome and highly enriching. being able to click a little button that launches a page containing lyrics, youtube videos, wikipedia info, etc is fantastic. frustrating at after going from 2GB to 4GB of physical memory, the 32bit garbage XP only can handle 3GB. however, w/o a DX10 video card, vista seems like an unnecessary exercise in frustration.

i've had the chance to use a tricked out dual quad-core Mac Pro at work recently and it was without doubt the fastest PC i've ever gotten to use. too bad its just a $4000 dongle for OS X.

heading back in time, ozmo got the best dvd release of any tv show i've ever seen. even crazier, the all-encompassing release cost $12USD and came direct from the producers. makes me upset that I repeatedly have to go to japan and pay hundreds of dollars to get tarantino films done correctly.

along the lines of spending money, i got to waste two hours of saturday morning getting my emissions tested, which was prefaced by a $1300 repair bill at the Saab place (again). i hate cars -- i can conlusively say that having not taken my car out here would have saved me like $5000 at this point. its almost as depressing as this foul dreamcast bait-and-switch.

penny arcade recently did an amusing podcast on the subject of EA's abominable shooter army of two. it was hilarious and awesome, focusing on a topic which they are fantastically passionate about, agency in gaming. will wright's incredible gdc talk was also tangentially related vis-à-vis generative behavior in worlds. what made the podcast fascinating was the large amount of it dedicated to hating on the phraseology of dude, man, and bro (and of course, the variant bra). as a dude who goes around referring to his bros as man and bra (whilst fist-pounding), it was disheartening, yet hilarious. whilst unimpeachably the most genuine, humble figures in the gaming community, one wonders if in certain social matters (such as the oft-requisite fist-pound) PA's authorship is not a bit too pretentious.

speaking of pretentiousness, i hate capitalization inconsistency. camelcase, etc drives me nuts in email. this blog entry, for example, is completely lowercase, aside from acronyms and a few proper names, but its a lot better than People Who Write Like This Because They Don't Know ANY rules about capitalization. the only thing worse is mixed capitalization in server/host names...e.g. referring to a server as WEBdatabase or even worse WebDb or something horrible like that. the camelcase involved in the WikiFormatting syntax that Trac uses is horrible, compared to the (IMHO) simple MediaWiki syntax i've come to know and love. it's my primary objection to trac as a software development tool.

finally, my last interesting topic is a question: who is the trent reznor of your industry? i would argue that i work for 2 in my industry, but its gotten me thinking. trent is held up as my example of someone who gets "it" from end-to-end (consumer - producer). he had an account on oink, understands the importance of remixing and reinterpreting with quality production material, and also quality/fidelity issues. the notion of a major artist giving me multitrack wav with a license that allows me to redistribute my own music using it is unprecedented. also, the idea of multiformat, high-quality digital/physical release is also new. his recent condemnation of radiohead as gimmicky is spot-on...i barely listened to rainbows until i got my cds and vinyl. its an interesting topic to debate ... will wright could be another example, but he works for the monolithic monster EA and doesn't seem to care about distribution, etc.