ironSoap

I’ve been hard on the Sharks. I still think the answer to their frustrating playoff performances lies mostly behind the bench, but I feel I need to soften my typical post-postseason angst in the wake of last night’s herculean effort. For as much as I wish they’d managed to squeak one past Turco—a man who deserves a massive amount of respect—you can’t say they didn’t try. And try. And try. But when a guy is prepared to make 61 saves in a game…

There is one thing though. I think the Sharks actually won. That reviewed goal that was eventually called off? Someone please answer me this: Why didn’t they let the tape run? Wouldn’t the location of the puck after Turco peeled himself out of his own net have been a clear indication of whether or not it crossed the line? Perhaps the rules stipulate that you have to actually see the puck cross the line and go into the net but if that’s the case I have to ask, “why?” Why can’t someone apply simple logic and say that if the puck disappears from view beneath a goalie whose body ends up in the net and when they move after the play the puck is found beyond the line, that stands to reason that a goal was scored? Otherwise what’s to prevent goalies from backing into their own nets on in-front scrambles to obscure the overhead camera while the defense collapses in front to obfuscate any alternate angle shots?

It even leads me to another question that has bugged me forever: Why haven’t we applied better technology to sports? There has to be a way to accurately determine relative position between a puck and a goal line or a ball over the plate or the pigskin on the first down marker? If accuracy is really a priority, why are we still relying on humans to make these critical determinations?

Anyway, it’s all academic at this point but while my disappointment is still there at least I can’t say I didn’t get to see some phenomenal hockey. I mean seriously, seeing those guys gut it out after 120 minutes of hockey (with the Sharks down a man from their initial line-up, too) was amazing, and something I won’t soon forget.

I just feel bad for my dad and brother out in the Central time zone. The game wasn’t over until 1:45 am their time.

Minor Meta Memorandum

I’m still unclear how it happened but the WordPress upgrade from a couple of weeks ago resulted in the loss of all user account information in the database. I even tried restoring the old database to pull the information from and it, too, is missing the data. There is no logical explanation for this and it frustrates me greatly to have to say this but if you had an account with which to post comments here, it is gone and must be re-created.

I apologize profusely.

So, WordPress apparently has a nasty vulnerability that is being exploited all over the place. To avoid hassles I don’t want to deal with I performed a long overdue upgrade on ironSoap’s WP installation. For the most part it went smoothly (thanks DreamHost!) but a couple of things didn’t make the transition without incident. One is the poll plugin, which I can re-install but don’t have any more time to attend to today and isn’t a big deal. Another is the comment-spam prevention plugin that disables comments on older posts. That doesn’t affect anyone but me so no harm there either.

Unfortunately the biggest oops of the whole procedure is that, to the best of my ability to discern, all user accounts were deleted. If by some miracle you can still log in, awesome. But I suspect that all four of you may have to re-initiate your login accounts if you want to post new comments. I apologize for that and when I get the time to repair the plugins I’ll first make every effort to restore user accounts from my backups but my cursory examination suggests that may not be possible without re-setting all the passwords, something I’m very hesitant to do.

Sorry for the trouble.

I don’t know if there is a gland that secretes some sort of hormone that facilitates writing. My grades in high school Anatomy were barely passing, partially because a huge chunk of our score was based on—I’m not making this up—coloring. It was presented under the guise of education and we were instructed to use colored pencils instead of crayons as a nod to our maturity, but you can slice it however you like, it was still coloring.

Anyway, I don’t ever remember coloring in a “writer’s gland,” but then I didn’t really color in a lot of those stupid sheets. I could have missed a few.

Assuming there is a gland, mine is running fairly dry these days. Whatever that hormone is, literasium or something, I’m kinda tapped out at the moment. Here’s why: I responded to a Craigslist posting that was asking for video game writers. Anyone who has read ironSoap can attest that I write, at length, about a lot of things but very high on that list of subjects is video games. I’ve recently dedicated an entire site to that pursuit in an effort to spare you all the dissections of my game sessions.

By the way, you are welcome.

So I saw the listing and thought, “Yeah, okay.” They gave me a chance to do a two-week trial run based on, I’m only speculating here, the fact that I was the only response they received. I went ahead and worked on the site through the next couple of weeks and it seemed to go pretty well. As promised, they invited me to come on board full time and become a regular contributor.

I don’t have all the details just yet, but the long and short of it is that I contribute 15 articles per week (mostly video game-related news, but I’ve also posted a couple features). They have said they do pay, just not much; the loose wording of the original email was “about enough to cover a broadband internet connection” which I guess means anywhere from $25 to $50 a month.

This really isn’t about making stacks of cash, though. Instead it is a matter of presenting my writing in a more public forum and following the ancient adage of “write what you know.” It turns out I know video games pretty well. I can wait while you recover from the shock. I can’t say at this point what, if anything, will come of this. I do know that having a schedule of how much I need to write each day has been an adjustment. It’s not difficult necessarily; I have written far more than I’m required to often enough for my own various projects. But those are writings born from desire to express, not mandated by responsibility. I’m curious if this transition of writing from pastime to necessity will affect my view of it. So far it hasn’t become a chore, only tapped my reserves a bit, which is why my personal writing locations have fallen relatively silent.

I am picking back up some of the pace, but I have to be cautious and preserve my literasium supplies.

tail -n 4 /brain/var/log/messages

• Nik and I were discussing our summer movie experiences the other day. We saw some pretty good ones including Stardust which has a very strong Princess Bride vibe (read that as a major compliment) and Ratatouille which Nik said was her favorite Pixar movie to date. We also just caught Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix in IMAX 3D. I hadn’t seen an IMAX or a 3D movie since some weird thing they were showing at the local amusement park (Great America, for those keeping track) back when I was probably 12, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was very good and did an admirable job with what must have been a beast of a scriptwriting task. The 3D stuff was pretty impressive for the most part, but I actually thought the sound system in the IMAX theater was the star of the show.
• My co-worker kicked the power cord for my workstation the other day. It occurred to me as my laptop stayed on and was the only thing that wasn’t at risk of losing any unsaved work that there is no reason PC manufacturers can’t include a small 10-minute battery in every power supply. I know there are products that do this but for the most part they are aimed at server administrators, not consumers. I ask, why?
• It’s wickedly hot here in California, which is normally not so bad since most places I frequent are air-conditioned, as my pale, nearly translucent skin will attest. The exception, naturally, is the room in I work within which contains too little space and far too many heat-generating electronic components. Many of my co-workers wear shorts to work to combat the problem, but as ragtag as I typically appear, I can’t bring myself to eschew actual pants when I arrive somewhere expecting compensation.
• Perhaps I’ve discussed my Zuma addition previously, I can’t recall. The days when that game consumed my soul are dark and grim and my mind does not revisit them readily. As a defense mechanism this localized amnesia is then somewhat flawed because it allowed me to download the version on Xbox Live Arcade which is half price this weekend only via a special promotion. My thoughts weren’t even filled with pathetic delusional justifications like, “What could one time hurt?” or “I can quit anytime I like.” I simply did it, fool that I am, casting the shreds of my dignity back into that nameless void. The sale went into effect at midnight last night and the dark circles under my eyes today are a shameful testament to just how strong my will can be against this foe.

Following the Sharks’ annual ouster from the playoffs I usually get kind of quiet around here. I’m sure part of it has to do with all the Sharks talk that precedes their inevitable failure leaving little more to say once they finally succumb to their own mediocrity. Plus, I tend to make it a point to do other stuff besides think about sports once I’ve been let down once again and coming back to the site is a harsh reminder of the hope and promise I held a few short weeks ago.

But life goes on and I haven’t been entirely silent since I’ve been filling up my video game journal these last few weeks. I suppose it makes no sense to have a separate place to talk about video games and not sports since I’d guess there are just as many people who couldn’t care less about the Sharks as there are people who couldn’t care less about XBox or whatever. Let’s face it, most of what I’m interested in writing about is of no interest to anyone, anywhere, ever. Perhaps I should just accept that and recognize the futility of trying to cater to a readership which, frankly, doesn’t exist.

At least in this case I’ve already started keeping ‘em separated so there’s no sense stopping now. I’m just saying.

While I wouldn’t call my general lack of postiness a problem exactly, it does bely a general apathy toward the kind of daily updates that are in theory the point of ironsoap.org. Even then, apathy isn’t exactly the right word. I don’t want to get all meta the way I used to with existential angst over the deeper meaning of the blog or whatever. All I’m saying is that I have things I want to relate and stories I might be interested in telling but there is a curious clash between three distinct desires: One is the desire to chronicle myself as has been the historical focus of this site. Two is the intention of writing in some sort of functional capacity, be it creating a novel or writing for other outlets (paid or unpaid). Three is the basic inclination to save thoughts and ideas for use in actual conversation with other humans.

Here’s what I mean: If I write down the little thoughts and theories that occur to me regularly and post them here, I find that I feel discussing them in person with people is somewhat redundant. Are they simply being polite and letting me carry on when they’ve already read the Cliff’s Notes version online? Meanwhile, if I spend the time I have writing these blog entries is that actively preventing me from using my “writing time” for projects that might better benefit me or, ultimately, be more satisfying from a creative standpoint? In either case, my desire to have a repository where I can keep some of the random ideas I come up with is steadfast and maybe useful to others? It’s difficult to separate oneself from it enough to come up with any useful conclusions.

The exacerbating factor is that I’m not really digging on my “day” job with the kind of enthusiasm I’d hoped for. Whenever this is the case I tend to romanticize the act of creating (especially writing) to an unhealthy degree and feel that if I just had that one break I could be ridiculously happy tapping away my thoughts and ideas for a living. Logically I know this is a zillion to one chance and rife with pitfalls and hardships along the way which, compared to my generally comfortable existence, isn’t nearly as attractive as it seems. Not to mention the fact that while I enjoy it immensely, I’m aware of my considerable shortcomings regarding the skill of writing. And no, I’m not fishing for compliments so don’t bother.

In fact—and I’m going to be more honest about my intentions here than I usually am—I confess that part of my melancholy regarding the site is that it isn’t likely to merit compliments were I to fish for them anyway. Nor does it merit debate when I wax controversial. Nor does it seem to merit much at all. I guess I was told often enough as a youngster that I was a talented writer that I started to feel that if I just put writing out there, whatever it was, people would recognize said talent and come flocking for more. I had daydreams of phantom phone calls from publishing houses and news journals asking—no, begging for my services. That my “audience” consists entirely of a handful of old friends and my family and has remained so for five years of pretty consistent updating has been an unmistakable indication that my “talent” either does not exist or exists at a level indiscernible from the millions of others who probably had the exact same fantasy.

On any given day I’m fine with this: Complaints from someone as blessed as I must sound like the pestering whine of a mosquito in the ear. Please, swat me away. However the examination of this phenomena (or lack of any phenomena I suppose) reveals that the issue lies in the fundamental assumptions: Namely, I’m not a remarkable writer and I probably don’t really have anything all that interesting to say.

Which leads back to the earlier issue which is that maybe the problem is the blog gets in my way. Maybe I need to work harder on more formal writings, maybe I need to sever the ties with the loose-format, disposable post dashed off in a few minutes of downtime. Perhaps I just need to stop using writing time to get introspective about sports teams or video games. Or, maybe it’s just a silly pipe dream anyway and what I should be doing is paying more attention to my work instead of feeding wild flights of fancy about jobs I’m woefully unqualified for.

Anyway, it’s unlikely to matter as I’ll forget all about my current sour mood in time and go back to cheerful obscurity as I intensely debate the merits of the new Transformers movie or something to my audience of three. Whatever the case, thanks for sticking with me. I don’t say it enough, but I’m honored you care enough to let me bother you now and then. Sorry I can’t make it more worth your while.

Briefly I have a few things to touch upon.

Tee to the Vee

I’ve caught a few of the new shows for this season and so far the best is (by far) Heroes. I admit that Ali Larter’s Niki Sanders character is either really lame or she’s just a terrible actress (maybe both); Adrian Pasdar plays the same exact character he always does (good guy/bad guy… who can tell?) and the cliff hanger commercial breaks were rarely ever thrilling. But still, this is a show that has something a lot of shows never have: Promise. Consider another show I caught the premiere for: Smith. A show about the other side of the law. I’m thinking Goodfellas. I’m thinking Heat. I’m thinking high-tech Sopranos. But instead it’s more like Desperate Housethieves than anything cool. Too many personal stories. Why does he have to have a respectable alter-ego? I don’t understand why someone would go through the hassle of trying to maintain a dual identity (complete with respecable sales job) if they were either that good at being a burglar or if doing their theiving would compromise their family. I mean, either you can support yourself without breaking the law or you can’t, right? It doesn’t make sense that someone would even try to do both.

At least on the Sopranos they made that part of the story.

I also caught the Shark series premiere which I enjoyed quite a bit despite it being only a shade more intriguing than would be if Sam Watterson were given the whole show (Law & Order), primarily because James Woods is fun to watch pretty much no matter what he’s doing. Although, I got the impression from the premiere that Woods was going out of his way to be all Emmy worthy. Like he was trying too hard or something. Still interesting but it did break the spell a few times.

I also caught the premiere of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip which was basically not very funny and not very dramatic and therefore not very good. It seems very much like a show that the writers really wanted to do, but it turns out that watching the creative process behind the shows we watch each week? Not very interesting after all.

The only thing I’m still waiting for is The Nine and I missed the first episode of Kidnapped (but it looks like they’re re-airing it on Saturday). Other than that the few shows I’m holding onto from last year is all I’m anticipating so I have a feeling that since they usually cancel the shows I like, I’ll probably have nothing to watch in a few months.

Sporting Bads

• The 49ers are a better team than last year, but they still managed to showcase their patented “Sieve Defense” on Sunday versus the Eagles. Here’s something I was wondering for some of you older-school Niners fans: I recall Joe Montana only as being the dominant, clutch-thriving QB that earned him a bunch of championships in the eighties. But it occurs to me that he must have had some sort of career prior to that time. Was he always good? Did he dominate in college? Was he a solid NFL QB right out of the draft? What I’m (probably obviously) driving at is, can we even hope that Alex Smith was the right guy to draft or is his so-so performance thus far indicative of a long term trend of not living up to his hype?
• I guess the Giants are officially out of the playoff race this year. Big surprise when your starting rotation starts serving up whiffle balls on the most pivotal road trip of the whole year. So now people are starting to talk about next year. I guess nearly the whole team is up for contract renegotiation. I don’t know if you remember but back a couple years ago when the Giants choked in the World Series an East Coast radio personality and lifelong Giants fan had a screaming rant after they bowed to the Angels about how difficult it was to be a Giants fan.

  I’ve talked about this before because while the Indians and the Cubs have longer streaks without championships, it has to be easier for fans of those clubs because they have had a lot more crummy teams that can’t win the World Series (like, big surprise). The Giants reserve a special brand of torture for their fans by actually fielding good teams… who can’t win the World Series. Anyway, the guy from the East Coast (Chris Russo) got on the horn this morning with one of the local SF sports talk stations and had some pretty spot-on opinions.

  Basically he thinks that the management of the Giants has made a bunch of bonehead moves in the last few years and I agree. I mean, let’s compare the two Bay Area teams. On one hand we have the revolving door of the Oakland A’s where each year is a new crop of random youngsters and league no-names. But they’re built to be a team and somehow they keep having legitimate chances at winning stuff. Oh, and they do it with no money but having a rich farm system and focusing on things like winning games versus breaking pointless records and having recognizeable names. The Giants have a decent payroll which they squander on has-beens. San Francisco has become like the pre-retirement community for the Major Leagues. I don’t want to go to the park and watch a bunch of washed up geriatrics struggle to make basic plays, I’d rather watch a bunch of kids who have something to prove run their butts off and make stupid mistakes. For every A’s game I watch where I see some rookie get caught in a stupid rundown or something because he tried to stretch a long double into a weak triple I see two games where Bonds can’t score from second on a stinking double or Morris forgets his bifocals and walks six batters in a row. Forget these old codgers. Let’s set up a farm system, let’s get a real game plan that is more in depth than “let’s get people on base and then bring Bonds to the plate!”

  Come on. Bonds has been on the team for over ten years (since 1993) and (as Russo points out) they haven’t won with him. This year he’ll play maybe 132 games and he’ll have the lowest HR total in a season since he was a Pittsburgh Pirate which includes 1999 where he barely got in 100 games. I don’t care about the steroids thing. I don’t care about Babe Ruth’s home run record. You know what I care about? The Giants doing something that makes me glad I’m a Giants fan.

• I was glad the Saints won last night, even if the second half of the game was pretty much snooze-fest. I wanted New Orleans to win for the same reason I’m guessing most non-Atlanteans did, although ESPN’s incessant badgering on the Katrina angle got really old after about oh, the first quarter, But I had ulterior motives as well: My opponent in fantasy football had both Michael Vick and Warrick Dunn going last night and needed them to help him make up about 30 points. Not insurmountable for a running back and a QB, but both of them sucked last night which was just fine with me. Thanks, Saints!

And the Rest of It

• I know we just came up big time on a new-to-us 36″ TV, but the lure of HD is strong and my will save vs. techno-geekery is like -8. Thus it was with rapt attention that I followed the announcement and ensuing hullabaloo regarding the release of the TiVo Series 3 HD DVR. Of course to take advantage of such a device I would need:
  1. A HD-capable TV.
  2. HD content, probably in the form of cable television we cannot receive or an XBox 360 I can’t afford.
  3. Some place to put it and/or our existing equipment.
  4. $800 for the TiVo3.

  I have been looking at HD TVs for some time now. Remember that the Trinitron acquisition was more of a kind blessing from HB and Gin than something we sought. I keep seeing a very nice one at places like Best Buy for what I consider to be pretty reasonable (roughly $1,700 for a 42″ Sony Plasma) but then I recall that we don’t have any way of really getting HD content and we can’t afford it and we don’t need it. But like I said, I can’t resist. Stuff like this usually helps some and reminds me why, though I may be a covetous geek-tard, my patience for technological foulery is far, far too thin to be a true early adopter.

• We’ve played a couple of sessions of a pretty fun large-party game called Werewolves of Miner’s Hollow. It’s kind of like the old elementary school rainy-day recess game “Heads Up Seven Up” where players close their eyes and someone is randomly chosen and they have to guess who picked them. This slightly more sophisticated version uses a series of phases that last through the “night” (the time when players have their eyes closed) during which various different people get to open their eyes and perform tasks. Primarily, the werewolves (determined by randomly distributed cards) look around and choose a townsperson to kill or remove from the game. The remaining players try to figure out which of those left in the morning (when all players open their eyes) is the werewolf in their midst through debate and discussion. Eventually they all must choose someone to “lynch” or remove from the game through democratic voting. Sometimes they pick correctly, other times they kill an innocent. There are a lot of other special townspeople like the Mystic who can examine one player’s card during the night and the hunter who can take someone down with him if he’s killed during the night. It’s a good game for parties because it doesn’t require a lot of set up and it encourages people to interact. We played it for Whimsy’s “surprise” 30th birthday party last weekend and I think everyone really enjoyed it. It’s also fun because the individual rounds don’t last that long (maybe fifteen minutes) so players don’t get stuck doing the same thing and you can play through several dozen rounds in an evening. There is a very comparable game that uses similar mechanics but with a few variations that Nik and I purchased called Lupus in Tabula. The main difference between the games (from reading the Lupus instructions) is that in Lupus you don’t reveal the dead players’ identities until after the game is completely over which would probably work well to increase the general tension and paranoia since you don’t necessarily know (if you’re a regular townsperson) how many allies you have left at any given point in the game.
• There is a new poll up. In case you were interested.

Today is weird. I’m not sure why but everything feels surreal, like I’m having a very vivid dream about a regular day only everything is just a little bit off. For example, I ordered a meal from Arby’s this morning—a meal I’ve ordered dozens of times from this exact same restaurant—and the price was about a dollar higher than usual. When I actually collected the food I noted that they had given me the extra large drink and a huge box of fries, without me ordering any differently than I usually do.

Also, I was sitting at a stoplight this morning on the way to work with a dozen or so other cars on a fairly busy cross street. I was about three cars back from the line. It changed from red to green to yellow to red again in the time it took me to get about eight feet. The car in front of me didn’t even make it through. The second car in line practically had to run a red light. I looked around after the strangeness at the other drivers and we were all exchanging glances like, “Uh, what?”

Finally, I was sitting at my desk when I realized I had to go to the bathroom really bad. Really bad. So I got up, walked (quickly) to the bathroom and stepped up to the urinal. Suddenly, I didn’t have to go at all. Not even a little bit. I kind of stood there, confused, for several moments before eventually shrugging and sauntering back to my desk. The feeling never really returned, not even after drinking that huge soda I didn’t order.

Since today is sort of random, I figured some random links were in order.

• Top Ten Grossest Candies. I’m not sure what’s weirder, the gross candy or the fact that there is a website called CandyAddict.com.
• My RSS primer didn’t exactly inspire a deluge of grateful email for opening people’s eyes to the wonder of Syndication. Still, I think it’s cool so I thought I’d pass along this link that Ryan sent me for converting any RSS feed into an email newsletter. I guess it’s kinda like the FeedBlitz feature I have only it just requires an RSS feed and not some involvement on the site maintainer’s part.
• I know a lot of people bash on high profile blogs and I don’t mean to be one of those bitter little webwriters who are so envious of others’ success that I can only sleep at night after thoroughly convincing myself that I’m only obscure because I’m elite and the mainstream is lowest-common-denominator drivel worthy of nothing but scorn. Still, as much as I usually like and respect big gaming blogs like Kotaku, posts like this really annoy me. Sure the guy has a right to his opinion and he should certainly be able to post it but c’mon. Griping that New Super Mario Bros. is lame because it doesn’t surpass what some people consider to be the best side-scrolling platformer of all time? Incommensurate expectations much?
• Just in case you were wondering and couldn’t figure it out from the links, the Current Coolness is Seattle-style Hot Dogs which are hot dogs with a generous helping of cream cheese and maybe some grilled onions. It sounds strange at first but trust me, it’s 100% fantastic. They make them at little street vendors all over the place in Seattle but they work just as well made at home. I recommend the Grillmaster Ballpark Franks and a substantial bun, toasted if possible. Grilling the dogs is always better as well. And don’t let the picture I have fool you, mustard is definitely not needed or desired in this case (it was just the only picture of a Seattle-style I could rustle up). Take that to heart too, dear reader, since you are in the presence of a mighty mustard fan here. As for the cream cheese, usually a fairly generous spread on one half of the bun is sufficient although you might want to either heat it up some or use the “soft” or whipped variety if you aren’t going to go with the toasted buns since it has a tendency to tear up regular buns in it’s usual cold, dense state. Plus it tastes a little better when it’s warm in this case.
• Best summer TV show: Psych. It’s clever. Clever is good.

If it seems like my updates are coming in rapid-fire bursts instead of nice, evenly spaced distribution that has something to do with the fact that my schedule is kind of wacky at the moment and as such I get about 80% done with most of my posts a day or two before I finally get around to finishing them so I end up spending short amounts of time on several entries at once since I’m catching up before I get new stuff written/started. Maybe I’ll figure out a decent schedule one of these days.

Disclaimer taken care of, time for some bullet points:

• I came up in the silent auction that Lister held for some salvaged game stuff a co-worker was going to toss out: I bid $40 on a box of assorted Chaos Marines 40K figures and I picked them up this weekend to happily discover that had I purchased these models outright I’d be looking at over $250. Nothing like saving over two bills to make a Hamilton man happy.
• I also scored a complete and basically mint condition Battlefleet Gothic box set which looks like it will be a lot of fun (and mercifully easy to paint the models since they’re just ships—I have enough difficult painting projects in the queue already, thanks!) plus Lister has an alternate set of rules that we could use to play some crazy battles like Starfleet ships versus 40K Chaos ships versus Imperial Navy ships. Just ’cause it’s fun to be a geek like that.
• Speaking of Lister, we got a chance to meet his and Whimsy’s new daughter, Delia. She’s an adorable and very sweet little girl and her parents look like they couldn’t be happier, which makes me happy in turn. It’s satisfying to see good things happen to good people.
• Apropos of nothing, there is a new poll up.

As it happens I’ve been keeping a separate weblog specifically about my video gaming over on GameSpot since I’m already using the site and I figure most people around these parts barely tolerate me babbling about video games in a disconnected observer kind of way and really would flee in droves if I started yammering about how last night’s gaming session went.

However, if you’re one of the precious few individuals who actually would be interested in something like that or perhaps you’re just masochistic enough to read pretty much anything I happen to belch into a text editor, I’ve included a link to the blog and a link to the RSS feed over in the Meta section yonder left column.

Now let us speak no more of these alternate writing outlets.

• If you haven’t seen the video of Darth Vader being a jerk, you should. As a co-worker pointed out, it’s random but hilarious.
• I’d like to post a snippet of an email I received from Bosslady:
  

  On the Nintendo DS Lite…I actually bought one. I saw it on TV and thought it was cool. It was the commercial with the Brain Age game. I guess they should hire that marketing firm again, since I have never wanted a video game in my life.

  Does this suggest that Nintendo’s plan to expand gaming to non-gamers might be working? As a note, the link to the commercial video is a guess; she didn’t specify anything more descriptive about the ad and that was the best I could find.

• I started working a sort of strange shift at work: They needed someone to help with the early morning coverage while one of our team members is out on personal leave. But I’ve been commuting to work with Nik since she started expanding her hours at her job. So as a compromise I log in from home at 5:00 am and watch the phones, take new tickets and follow up on things until 7:00 when Nik is ready to leave. Then I pack it up and head in to the office like normal only I get off of work sometime around 3:00 pm instead of 5:00. Unfortunately with the two hours of work-time spent doing other things (commuting and lunching) that makes for pretty lengthy days although they’re talking about doing four ten-hour days instead of five eight hour days anyway so maybe I’m just ahead of the game. The weird part is when I’m off at 3:00 Nik still works until 5:00 so I have to figure out a way to fill the time. I’m sure I’ll come up with something.
• If you’re using Netvibes (and you really should be), check out Netvibes Ecosystem. The Sudoku module is really cool.
• If you’ve voted in the poll, you probably noticed that the results looks pretty screwy. Apparently the polling software doesn’t care too much for links in the answers (which is really dumb, by the way). Sorry about that. I could pull the links but it would ruin the effect. Such that it is.
• So the Giants finally snapped their nine-game skid. It’s funny because when baseball season starts I’m in full hockey mode (usually). In a few weeks I’ll be all hyped on football and in a couple of months it will be back to hockey as well. So late July and early August are pretty much the only times I actively follow baseball (I pick it up again in the fall if the Giants or the A’s are in the playoffs). A couple weeks ago I started catching a few Giants games and they beat up on the Padres enough to earn their way to first place in the National League West. Two weeks later they’re in dead last, 3.5 games out. Funny what losing nine games in a row will do to you. I’d suggest that they started losing just because I started watching, but I know that isn’t true. The Giants lose regardless. They lose the way the Red Sox used to lose. Forget the Cubs, the Giants are the new Red Sox. Perpetual losers, revelling in their ability to choke at the last minute, to fall apart right when they need to step it up. Why not? They’re my team, after all.
• A lot of modern pop music is pretty crass, in the way that it is lowest-denominator, self-referential drivel with little redeeming value. But I like pop music in the sense that I like artists who can craft an accessible song provided they can do it in an original way or present within it original ideas. Maybe “original” isn’t even the word since nothing’s original; I can settle for unconventional. If you’re like me, you might want to check out Jem’s Finally Woken album. It’s good, unconventional pop music and the whole album is solid. I knew it was something worth trying when perpetual death metal advocate HB recommended it to me.

There is a new poll up inspired by the recent Focus on Fear entry (which has a lively—in relative ironSoap terms—discussion going on) and also inspired by the fact that I am a dork.

Other than that the only things of note are that Apple finally did the Bluetooth thing with their Mighty Mouse and you should check out this freaky precognitive letter to the editor from an ancient issue of Nintendo Power which foretells the coming of Super Mario Galaxy.

Oh, and in breaking news, Whimsy is apparently en route to the hospital, hopefully to dispel their new daughter from her innards and wean her from her parasitic ways into something that isn’t so easily comparable to a creature from Alien.

I may have spent too much time thinking about scary movies lately. Just a hunch.

The thrust of the two polls I’ve been running over the last few weeks has been to try and subtly feel out whether a simplified intro to the sometimes unintuitive realm of RSS would be useful. It’s hard to say for sure from the polls, but I gathered that there were enough people who either didn’t know about it or didn’t care to try and learn that it might at least be of some value to a couple of people. So here goes.

Part I: What is RSS?

RSS stands for “Really Simply Syndication.” Yes, it’s kind of a stupid acronym. Then again, most acronyms in the computer industry are pretty stupid. But ignoring what the letters stand for, what RSS really covers is a series of related technologies that allow the content of a site to be broadcast in a way that can be easily read and reformatted by other entities.

The technical mumbo jumbo isn’t really important, what is important is that RSS allows any site that has a Feed—which is a little broadcastable file that contains the content of a site—to interact with a Feed Reader. A Feed Reader can be one of many different things: A small snippet of code attached to something else like another website (see my Netflix and Last.fm lists in the right hand column of ironSoap.org for examples) or an email program or it can be a standalone application that does nothing else but read Feeds.

You will note that most people use RSS the way they use the phrase Kleenex: What they mean is any of several technologies, products and services that work to create, detect, read and deliver Feeds. RSS itself is just one type of Feed, specifically a specification for a Feed format. There are a couple of different versions of the RSS specification as well so you might see something like RSS 2.0 or RSS 1. Another common specification for Feeds is Atom. Generally speaking they are interchangeable and most Feed Readers treat them equally; their only differences lie in the nitty-griity technical details that you don’t need to bother with.

Part II: Why Should I Care About RSS?

RSS is cool, and I can prove it. How many web sites do you visit? 5? 20? 500? 2,000? Let’s say you’re a fairly typical casual web surfer and you check out 25 sites on a semi-regular basis. Some you check maybe once a week or less because they don’t update that much. Others update really sporadically but sometimes there will be a lot of new stuff in a short span of time (like, say, ironSoap.org). A few update all the time (daily) but at different times during the day and one or two update many times per day, every day.

How long does it take you to check 25 sites like that? If you went through all 25 and read the latest stuff, it could take you hours. What if there was a way to check only the sites that had new content? Maybe you could cut the time in half since only maybe 10 of the sites update regularly anyway. What if you could preview the new updates before you ever even went to the site? If several of the sites weren’t devoted to a particular topic and you didn’t always like what they posted, maybe you could save yourself another hour of wasted time.

This is why you should care about RSS: Because surfing the Web is fun but it is also a huge time sink. Anything that lets you surf without wasting time is a very Good Thing. RSS lets you know when the sites you like have something new to read. It lets you preview the new content and decide if you want to go ahead and visit the site. Some RSS Feeds and/or Feed Readers let you view the entire content without having to actually load the site. Mostly RSS gives you the chance to avoid wasting time checking on or loading sites that don’t have anything to say that you haven’t already heard.

Part III: How Do I Get Started?

The first thing you’ll need is a few Feeds. If you use a modern browser like Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer 7 (which is still in Beta mode, by the way), there is typically a notification method whenever you visit a site that offers a Feed. In Firefox it looks something like this: An orange square with a “broadcasting” dot. The Safari icon is simply a blue rectangle with the letters RSS. IE7 is reported to use the Firefox icon, but I can’t be sure because IE7 Beta requires XP Service Pack 2 and I only have SP1. (It looks from this Microsoft article that the IE7 icon is a minor variation on the Firefox broadcasting dot icon.)

If you’re still using IE6, you may need to do a little looking. There are plugins available for IE (such as Pluck) which allow it to mimic the features of Firefox and Safari, but it doesn’t hurt to be able to locate RSS feeds on your own.

The easiest way to do this is to look for an RSS icon on a site. Most sites use either an icon that looks like the Firefox RSS icon or an orange XML button. Before you start getting confused, you can safely assume that in this case XML is completely synonymous with RSS; in fact RSS is a specific type of XML if you want to be technical. Usually clicking these icons will either bring you to a page that lists the various different Feeds the site offers or they will open the feed itself.

Looking at a Feed in a Web Browser that doesn’t actively support Feeds (like IE6) will result in something that looks like some sort of bizarre code. That’s okay, you don’t need to worry about what’s in the Feed, you just need to know how to get there. If you do see something like the code, you’ve located the Feed so now you just want the Feed’s address. The address is the same as a site address (http://www.somesite.com/somefile…); this is what you’ll want to provide to your Feed Reader so it knows where to go look for the updates to the Feeds.

Other sites use a variety of different methods of describing their Feeds: They may have a variety of different icons, logos, textual links or in some cases, no indication at all that they offer Feeds. We’ll deal with those particularly insidious sites in a moment, but in the meantime the best thing to do is search over a site (especially in the fine print areas since Feeds are typically considered to be extraneous once you’re actually on the site) and see if you can find something that looks like it has something to do with RSS, Atom, XML, Syndication or Feeds. If you can locate the Feed and copy it’s address, you’re halfway there. If you can’t find it, your best bet is probably to email the site’s Webmaster and ask if they have a Feed and if not, what their problem is! Sites without Feeds are pretty rare these days, especially if the site has any kind of updating content. Also keep in mind that some sites have Feeds that are only for specific parts of the site and you may need to navigate to those sections before you can find any Feed links.

Part IV: So, Uh, What Do I Do With This Silly Feed Address?

So you have a Feed. You’re halfway there! Of course, having a Feed address is pretty useless unless you can provide it to a Feed Reader and have that do the heavy lifting for you. That’s what this is all about anyway, having software check your favorite sites for you.

Feed Readers these days are a dime a dozen. We’ll take a look at just three, but the basics will be regardless of which program you decide to go with. The three we’ll check out are Thunderbird (it is to Outlook Express what Firefox is to Internet Explorer and made by the same people), Firefox and RSS Bandit. This should show the three most common types of Feed Readers: Email client-style, browser-style and standalone.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird looks a lot like the familiar Outlook Express. For our purposes we’ll want to Create A New Account in Thunderbird. When the Account Wizard comes up, select “RSS News & Blogs” and click Next. Name the account and click Next again, then click Finish. Now there should be a new item in your left hand pane that looks somewhat like a new Mailbox. If you right-click on the new account name and choose Manage Subscriptions… from the menu, a RSS Subscriptions box will appear. From here, click Add and when it asks for the Feed URL, paste in the Feed address you found from your favorite site (see Part III). Once you click OK, Thunderbird will verify the Feed and load the most recent content. If you close the RSS Subscriptions box and go back to your new RSS News & Blogs account, you should see a new item under there for the site you just added. It should have a number after the name in parentheses.

You should get used to seeing this parenthetical number when dealing with Feeds: They represent the number of new articles/entries for the site since the last time you checked on the Feed. In this case the Feed is new so you’ll see a fairly high number. If you open that site’s entry you should see the site updates listed like new emails. As you click through them, the headlines (subjects) will un-bold just like a read email and the content of the update will appear in the lower pane. Once you read or click on all the articles you should see the parenthetical number disappear. Next time the site updates and you check your Thunderbird, you will see a new (1) after the site name, indicating that there is new content for you to read. Sweet!

RSS Bandit

RSS Bandit is kind of like an email program, too, except that it is strictly dedicated to Feeds. RSS Bandit comes with some feeds pre-installed. You can click through and see RSS Bandit check the status of these feeds and return the most recent updates to those sites. To add your own feed (that you located and carefully copied the address for in Part III), click the New… button in the upper left. The Add Subscription Wizard will appear and you can click Next. The Wizard then asks you for a URL (address) for a feed. But that’s way too easy… you could just paste the address you have.

Instead let’s try Auto Discovery. Check the Autodiscover and Verifty Feed box (if it isn’t already) and instead of pasting in the Feed you found (you can do that later), type in http://puckupdate.com/. PuckUpdate is a pretty cool hockey blog which up until recently didn’t have a clear way to locate the site Feed. Now hit Next. RSS Bandit does what a lot of the newer and more feature-rich Feed Readers does which is search an entire site for Feeds for you. After a progress bar indicating that the search is underway RSS Bandit will locate PuckUpdate’s Feed and ask you if you want to change the title or re-categorize the Feed. Click Next when you’re done and you’ll be presented with a login option.

Some advanced Feeds for sites with subscription content have enabled login routines to access their Feeds. This allows them to offer Feeds of their premium content without having to let non-subscribers read their for-pay stuff. In this case the PuckUpdate Feed (like most) is free, so you can click Next. RSS Bandit has several advanced features specific to the fact that it is dedicated to delivering Feed content. You can safely ignore most of the next screen but you may want to note the “Update frequency” option.

Feed Readers work by periodically checking on the status of the Feed(s) they are subscribed to. They can compare the copy they have most recently accessed to the version currently resting on the server and that’s how they determine if the site has been updated or not. You could set the update frequency to something very small like one minute. But that’s sort of like loading a web page and hitting the Refresh button on your browser once per minute. If enough people did this the site would probably crash! Most Feed Readers default to about once per hour, which is fairly reasonable. But you can customize this based on the site itself. For example, Slashdot.org updates probably three times per hour. If you wanted to know fairly soon after an update hit that site, you might change the update frequency to 15 minutes. On the other hand, a site that updates weekly (but irregularly) might be set to check in once every 24 hours. And of course you can always change the update frequency after the fact.

The next screen talks about formatters: One of the key features of newer Feeds is that they contain much or all of the content of the site updates. This means that technically, you never have to visit the site in question in person; you just get the information/content and read it in your Feed Reader. Because of this you could also re-format that content however you want. In this case we won’t bother, so just click Next and then click Finish.

Now if you check under the Blogs folder in the Feeds pane on the main RSS Bandit window, you’ll see PuckUpdate listed there with all the latest hockey news. Aren’t you lucky?

FireFox

So now you know how to successfully add a regular Feed to a Reader, you can do autodiscovery… what else is there?

Well if you use a browser like Firefox you can get “smart” bookmarks that will give you quick and easy links to new content on your favorite bookmarked sites. Of course, it accomplishes this through Feeds. In Firefox it couldn’t be easier: When you browse to a site that offers a Feed, the icon will appear in the right side of the Address Bar. If you click that icon, you’ll get an Add Live Bookmark dialog box. The Feed address is already filled in for you, all you need to do is give it a name and choose a location. If you choose Bookmarks Toolbar Folder the bookmark along with the Feed icon will appear below the Address Bar; clicking the title will show a dropdown list of recent article headlines and clicking one will bring you to the content in question.

If you need to know what the Feed address is for that particular Live Bookmark, right-click the bookmark and choose Properties… and the address is found under Feed Location. You can copy this and paste it into RSS Bandit, Thunderbird or any other Feed Reader that happens to strike your fancy.

Part V: Now What?

At this point you should be able to locate and use basic Feeds. Of course there is a lot more you can do from there, including adding Feeds to your own site or using Feeds on sites you may have set as your home page (like Netvibes or My Yahoo!). There are also sites like Feedburner that act as a buffer between Feeds and the sites they represent in order to provide site owners with detailed statistics about who is using their Feeds and how. Most of this is comparatively advanced but once you get comfortable with the idea of Feeds in general, you may never use the Web the same way again.

Happy Feeding!

Questions, comments or requests for clarification are welcome. Please leave a comment or email the author.

Two short links, one short announcement:

• Next Gen has an interesting article about Nintendo’s role in the video game market. I don’t necessarily agree with their positions, but it’s good food for thought anyway.
• Opera-based browser for the DS, anyone? Interesting as a novelty, but I’m not sure how much use I’d really get out of it… especially not when they’re charging as much for it as they would a regular game.
• You may now access any/all Game topic entries from http://games.ironsoap.org/. By popular request. Yeah.

Watched the Lost season finale last night. Compared with the ending of Alias we’re talking about the difference between six weeks’ all-expense paid vacation in a tropical paradise with a supermodel of your choice versus getting kicked in the crotch and shot in the kneecap. Or, put another way, there is no comparison.

Caution: Spoilers may follow.

The return of Desmond was no great surprise, but the faith/doubt rollercoaster that Locke had been on all season was neatly tied by bringing back the catalyst (so to speak) and having them work it out. I agree with some of the rumblings on the webs that Desmond might have mentioned to Locke that he had almost let the Bad Thing happen by not pressing the button a couple of months earlier and could pretty much verify that it was not a hoax and you didn’t want that to happen. I could see him being upset after having perhaps seen the Pearl orientation video, but just hearing about it doesn’t seem like it would have made him just kind of go along with whatever Locke wanted.

The open-ended fate of Locke and Eko was mildly alarming, although I’m willing to bet that the writers/producers felt they had met their Shocking Character DeathTM quota for the season and Locke and Eko seem too integral/symbolic to the direction of the show to be cast aside without much fanfare. As much as I liked the Desmond character and was glad to see him back, I’m hoping they don’t try to say he survived the explosion/magnetic discharge/key turning and bring him back. I sort of liked the concept of the hatch and the button, but I’m certainly not sorry they didn’t drag it on forever… a glimmer of hope there that they know better than to draw from the same well too often.

My biggest eyebrow-raising moment was when the rest of the Others seemed to kind of defer to Henry Gale as a leader of sorts, this has made for rampant speculation that Gale actually is the “Him” he whimpered about during his incarceration in the hatch. I’m not a fan of this theory as it seems to suggest that he would have orchestrated his own capture (that or he is especially careless, which does not bode well for someone we have been thus far lead to believe is rather feaed). If he is “Him,” that seems like a very risky move to make, considering how hostile and frightened of his group the Losties were at that point. Heck, even Rousseau—who ostensibly did the original capturing—would have had a pretty compelling reason to just flat out kill him (They did, after all, kidnap her daughter). That he managed to make it out alive can only be attributed to fortune (no one could have successfully orchestrated that series of near-deaths) which means that either Gale isn’t “Him,” or that he is in which case I would say that’s pretty disappointing since “He” is sort of a lucky dweeb and not some legendary Kaiser Soze-style uber-villain.

Some people grumbled that Claire’s kissing Charlie was out of character for her, but I think they set the stage for that already with the hand grab during the funeral in a previous episode. Still, I’d agree that her wishy-washy attitude toward him wasn’t handled quite as well as it maybe should have been (for all she knew he really did try to drown Aaron less than two weeks ago), unless they plan to set the stage for a plotline where Claire is a very poor judge of character/doesn’t learn from past mistakes very well. I hope with most of the key characters otherwise occupied in various high drama situations that we actually get some real storylines with Claire and/or Charlie next season.

I’m essentially opinionless about the cliffhanger ending since it involved plot elements that are nearly 100% new at this point in the show. Nice touch, though.

A Brief Meta Comment

If you stopped by the site sometime after about 11:00 pm PDT until around 9:00 am PDT you may have seen the site lookin’ all busted. I think I’ve fixed the Netflix feeds so they won’t break the site when they don’t work now but if you see the site acting goofy like that I wouldn’t mind a quick email letting me know. I suppose that goes for general site weirdness evident since the server switch.

Giggiddy Game Weekend

Tomorrow we head out for Kublacon. I had grand intentions of getting a bunch of my painting projects done but instead I fell into a spiral of video game resurgence, Netflix queue burning, lazy TV watching and irregular work hours. As such, my wonderful armies will not see the honor of battle this con. It’s really not a huge deal since there will be a slew of other stuff to do and more than enough games to play. I am still going to run a short Shadowrun 4th Edition adventure tomorrow night so at least I don’t feel like I did nothing to prepare for this anticipated event, but I had grand schemes of Warmaster battles that will have to wait for some arbitrary weekend in the future.

The only bad thing about the con is that in order to get a decent room and have a chance to get settled in and play a few pick up games before the festivities kick into full gear I need to get off work earlier than usual which naturally means getting to work earlier than usual. I’m still not exactly sure how that’s even going to work but considering that Friday nights at a con are historically rather sleep deprived, that strongly suggests that tomorrow may be in the running for Longest Day Ever.

Enjoy your lengthy weekend, Internet.

I use the phrase “in terms of…” way too much. I think when you get right down to it I have a handful of phrases that I just destroy with overuse.

See? Right there I originally typed that as “…that I just destroy in terms of usage.”

What’s wrong with me?

I think I’ve gotten most of the bugs ironed out here. An unexpected bonus: I saved the archives! Anyway, it’s not the prettiest site on the net (like it ever was), but it’ll get the job done. Hopefully I’ll get some improvements made over the weekend and we’ll be all shiny and new come Monday.

If you see anything truly wonky happening, drop me a line, but use my alternate email address because I think paul@ironsoap.org is still non-functional.