Time to change the song title...

From "Crash" to "Crap" via [accordion guy]

Hubba Hubba!

Check out the stats on this babe! Thanks Todd

Why I'm a big fan of emulators

The other weekend I decided to blow off some steam with an hour of Crazy Taxi on my Sega Dreamcast. Now, as many of you are well aware, the Dreamcast is an outdated console that never really took off. Still, there are some incredibly cool games on it that I enjoy immensely (Powerstone 1/2, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, Crazy Taxi 1/2, Ikaruga and the fantastic Jet Grind Radio). Needless to say, back in the day I spent several hundred bucks on the console and games and was very happy with it. I'm not a game "junkie" but I do like to blow off steam every once in awhile with them.

So I was understandably pissed last week when I discovered that my Dreamcast had stopped working. It just won't read the game CDs anymore. Now the games are all fine, I just have no means to play them. And Sega, in their infinite wisdom decided to make the game discs a proprietary format (GD-ROM) that can't be read by non-Dreamcast drives. I could go out and buy another Dreamcast off of ebay or at Gamespot, but the hardware is four years old and I would be back at square one within about 6 months. So here I sit with ISOs of the games that I own that I downloaded off of the Internet (through an "illegal" P2P network) trying to get them to work with Chankast.

The same thing happened to me with my NES, and SNES systems as well. I can understand the companies not wanting to forgo revenue on intellectual property, but I'm of the opinion that they should give me an option to play these games for life. Especially, when that option is a very feasible reality. If Sega released an emulator for the PC I would buy it in a heartbeat. The only game company that has come even remotely close to doing this is Nintendo, which released a lot of their classic NES games for the Game Boy Advance, but I balk a little at paying full price again for a game that I already own on top of having to upgrade to a new system where the same thing will happen in a few years. I think we've established that the PC is a viable emulation platform, why fight it?

If these companies would work with their customers I'm sure a feasible solution could be achieved. But they seem to refuse to realize that some of the best games have already been developed and have a loyal following that they could capitalize on. Until they do I'll put my support behind ZSNES and Chankast.

Update: I've been doing more thinking on this and I think that part of the reason that I'm so ticked off by the gaming industry is because the hardest part of launching any new business venture is determining what the need is. Where is the value for the customer? In this case the value is handed to them on a silver platter and they still can't pony up. Amazing.

Email as the Swiss Army CYA Tool

I have to agree with Philip Reichert's comments (brought to you via drunkandretired):

I experience of email is that people use it as a documentation tool. EG: If you have doubts about a project then you send an email.

I would go a little further and say that I've seen email shift to a "Cover Your Ass" tool over the last few years. Especially in financial and legal circles I'm seeing it used as a quick and easy method to be able to say, "I didn't drop the ball on this one...someone else did."

I think this occurred almost simultaneously with court decisions that personal email was corporate property if received on corporate time using corporate resources and the idea that emails could be subpoenaed for litigation. For better or for worse, most of my work emails (both sent and received) are of the type, "on [insert date here] I sent an email to [insert guilty party here] which detailed [insert relevant information here], and they [insert action here]."

It seems like such an awful way to run a society.

Only in Texas

guns-and-dentistry-thumb
Originally uploaded by egoodwin.

Not sure if I posted this on the old Radio site (I think I tried and it never went through properly), but this one belongs in the, "Yup, you're definitely in Texas department":

What happened to all the Mozilla extensions?

I seem to recall that Mozilla 0.8 had a number of Blogger extensions that were compatible with it. Now it seems like every Blogger extension has either ceased development entirely or is not compatible with 0.9.3. What happened? Did all the developers move on to other platforms?

What are all you blogger users out there using to create/edit posts in Mozilla? I like BlogThis okay, but it messes up the URL of links that I try to blog about, so it's next to useless. I'm gathering it has something to do with changes/deprecations in the Blogger API, but I'm not sure.

How did I miss this?

Ugggghh! Don't you hate it when you just assume a feature is built into an application (simply because ALL of its competitors have it) and then you find out it doesn't when you need it most? I'm referring to the fact that GMail doesn't support mailing lists!

RoadsToFailure

Just checking out the BlogThis! extension in Firefox. Go check out Cote's Roads To Failure notes on his wiki. It's chock full of good advice for would-be techies and those who would manage them.

Update: It appears that the link reference in the extension is wrong...I may have to go and fix the code. Once again, this may have to wait until later.

I've got a busy week...

There's alot going on in Edtopia (Houston) and so it might be awhile before I can import my sidelinks and old entries from the old site to here. Please be patient as I break things. I'm about to try and import all my friends links right now. If it takes more than 5 minutes then I'm gonna bail on it until the weekend.

Update: That was pretty easy...I'll pretty up the formatting later. If any of you out in reader land notice any mistakes feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly.

I've had it with Radio

This is my second post here, but it's really my first "official" post with this as my new website. I've had it with Radio's erratic posting, picture uploading problems, crappy support, lack of Help files, and general lack of innovation. Even with their new innovation czar, it became apparent to me that they were going to work on things that I really don't care about. A better news aggregator? I've already moved all my feeds into Bloglines, and I think they're going to spend most of their time playing catch up before I see anything worthwhile that I don't already have. Better CSS and templates? I like eye-candy as much as the next guy, but give me a break! My problems with Radio have to do with dependability, robustness, and generally not being able to understand what the hell it's doing. Oh yeah, and the fact that Mozilla support is just about zero. Everytime I fire up Radio it asks me for my default browser location. I don't have context menu support for blogging and in general it is just a pain in the ass to use under Firefox.

Despite the advantages of the "desktop" mini-server that was Radio, I found it impossible to become a power user, because it was built around proprietary technology, in a language I didn't know, and relied on metaphors that I didn't think were spelled out well enough for novices to accomplish anything.

Anyway, enough ranting. Time to start downloading the Firefox Blogger extensions and get blogging again. Expect me to be more active in the weeks to come.