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There is a unique quality to the coming year not unlike that of a natural disaster, a unifying sense of shared situation despite social standing or personal opinion. In the midst of a power outage or sudden snowfall community ties bloom, people unite, and, mostly, the best in us shines. "We're all in this together!" is echoed on a city bus full of sodden commuters or the brave that trudge hip deep, flashlight in hand. New Years is a similar force of nature in its power of group reflection and collective ambition for the year ahead.
For a few days, at least.
As such I have looked back on my 2008 ventures in tech hoping not only to ensure continued improvement but to reflect on several adoptions that will propel me boldly through 2009. Some were long overdue, others a chance encounter whose advantages are now taken for granted, but all have greatly changed how I functioned daily through the last year.
posted by Chris on December 29, 2008 4:59 PM in Podcast
This week's episode we spend some time cleaning out the mailbag and talking about what games we played over the break. It was a lot of games and this bears discussion. *Is* Left 4 Dead the best game evar? *Is* the new Prince of Persia too easy? *Is* Fable 2 just an early beta and the real game's going to be released Christmas 2009? It's like you're sitting here with me, Ross, Qais and Jinny with a cup of hot cocoa, warming your toes by the fire. Maybe your cup of cocoa has been spiked with Bailey's or peppermint Schnapps's and you're getting shitfaced. Shitfaced with The Weekly Geek. Happy New Year.
I broke down in tears crying the morning of December 25th, 1989. It was a stressful year. My parents had just got divorced and I had to move school districts. I went from being fairly popular (as popular as an 8 year old can be) to constantly tormented for being the new kid. Even without the ability to comprehend our financial situation, I knew we weren't well off. My Dad was working a lot of overtime trimming trees and doing random handyman work and my Mom was working long hours at the hospital.
I was already into video games. I would be over at my friend's house almost on a daily basis fighting my way through the Mushroom Kingdom to save the princess, or fighting through Hyrule to save the princess, and other variations on that theme. The Nintendo Entertainment System was an object of almost mythical proportions. The worlds in these games seemed more real than reality to me. I took to them completely. This Christmas though. This one started it all.
I broke down crying once I opened the gift my Dad and Mom gave to me. It was just one that year, a large rectangular box a little over two feet across. I still remember the weight of it, how it felt in my hands. I tore off the first leaf of brightly colored paper and saw the iconic black star field and red racetrack logo. My parents had bought me an NES. I'm not entirely sure why I wept, but I was happy.
Since then, Christmas has been all about the games. We complain about games being expensive now, but back in the late 80's and early 90's they were just about the same price. Sixty dollars or so could get you a copy of Boy and His Blob, or Legend of Zelda, or Super Mario Bros. 2. I'd get maybe one game for Christmas from my parents and that game was savored. The year I got Super Mario Bros. 3 was especially memorable. I got it on Christmas day and didn't stop playing it until I beat it on New Year's Day.
Eventually when the SNES came out, my Dad bought it for my sister and I for Christmas. Of course, he put that it was from Santa on the tag, and that it was for me, my sister AND my Dad, slyly linking the SNES to his apartment. That meant we had to keep it there and only play it every other weekend, which made me even more obsessed. Later I'd learn that he did that so we would have something to do at his place, as if I wouldn't carry it along with me wherever I went like I did the NES anyway. That Christmas was Mario Paint, Pilotwings, and Super Mario World. All of these memories are stuck in my mind as really happy times despite whatever hardships or stress came from being a child of divorce and being one of the poor kids in a decent middle-class neighborhood.
After all the gifts were unwrapped and the adults retreated to the kitchen to cook Christmas dinner and talk about adult things, my little sister and I would always turn to our consoles. Now that I think about it, the term "console" is pretty appropriate. It is kind of sad to think that my whole obsession with video games comes from wanting to escape and feel comforted, but as I sit here on Christmas day watching Jinny chop wood and fighting highwaymen in Fable II I can't think of anything more comforting to do. Or more in the spirit of Christmas.
I may be an atheist and we may not have a tree or a nativity scene in our apartment, but this is still a pretty special day and every time I sit down to play a game on Christmas morning I remember being 8 years old, brought to my knees with joy over the gift of an NES. Hope your Christmas (or generic winter holiday celebration) is full of comfort as well. And most of all - great video games.
I can recall my first exposure to a PC, which was early on due to my father's early buy in to the market. It was this indoctrination of regimented syntax and structure (DOS) that provided the groundwork for what has evolved towards an intuitive understanding of the majority of systems I've worked with. Now, many years later, it is only fair that I take up the yoke of reciprocation and return the favor by mentoring the same man that made my infatuation with tech possible.
It hasn't been easy.
Specific processes rooted in detail are one thing, more subjective ones another. Our latest accomplishment is a functional grasp of Gmail Filters, a mix of the two. With the time spent pouring over hundreds of previously unarchived correspondence it didn't take long for the issue of "junk mail" to come up. My father was perplexed, couldn't we just make a filter? He knew that Gmail's built in spam filter was chugging away but a lot of "junk" was still getting through. At the risk of stereotyping the majority of his correspondents as inept adult users I started to outline the criteria I use in my own account, quickly discovering that while both our desired end states matched we were dealing with vastly differing subject groups.
It was at this point we ventured in to the realm of the undefinable, that subconscious rhythm an email can have which immediately sets off sirens. Sure, he knew to look for the tell tale signs of chained FW: in the subject line or rotating GIFs but ultimately it came down to my reliance on "you just know" which was as far from the answer he wanted to hear as the one I wanted to give.
That indefinable rhythm has been bothering me ever since, mostly due to the inability to escape it.
It's the snowpocalypse in Seattle, and it seems like the rest of the world is taking a break this week as well. There's absolutely nothing going on, which is completely awesome. We're gonna spend some time bundled up with some fun games and get back to you in the new year. Enjoy the holidays n stuff!
posted by SecksCab on December 19, 2008 11:14 PM in Books
Among my obsessions is a certain penchant for things biographical, i.e. books, and this year I treated myself to a Christmas present: a biography on Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan revolutionary who chopped off the head of the sitting monarch, declared himself the dictatorial "Lord Protector" and assured, by his death, that North America, especially the colonies that would later become the United States, would pretty much be the chosen end-location for all the world's violently deluded Millenialist religious dogmatists who basically give us exactly the reputation we deserve these days as the global asshats and cockends that we allow to manipulate themselves into office.
Sadly, the days of this particular generation's Oliver Cromwells are waning down, and if you can stand to believe it, we have less than a month left of Republican rule over our spatial area. I understand that non-Americans read this site, but this one is primarily directed at the Yanks.
As a youngster I voiced my displeasure at a particularly painful headache to my parents. "Why is this happening!?" I yelled, "It hurts!" to which they replied "Well, the little man in your head that goes through all the file cabinets is very busy getting you information, sometimes he starts slamming them shut and that's why you get a headache."
This asshole sounded a lot like the guy in the mailbox, both of whom were relatives of that creepster in the fridge on light duty.
Now, as a jaded twenty-something, I know better than to ask those two anything, yet the image of countless rows stretching past imaginable distance is one that has remained. Day to day dealings involve massive amounts of information and while the little man is now replaced with a frenzied gibbon (he's upgraded to the Minority Report interface, truly a sight to behold) it's a concept I constantly revisit.
Endless information and all of it necessary. Tiny repositories both temporary and permanent that I need to have in hand's reach when the needs arise. Think tank, shopping lists, and more recently a database of details surrounding a job search. A call can come at any time and while the more mundane route of a pen and paper could certainly suffice for a quick lookup I've found an easier medium by which to navigate these information heavy archives. A singular solution like the ever present Moleskin but with meta rich tagging and scalable, universal access.
I've fully embraced the "external brain" that is Evernote.
Initially discovered as an iPhone app, Evernote first impressed with the ability to sync meta-tagged data be it text, voice, or photo. As I delved deeper in to the cross-platform solution a system unfolded that could combine limitless forms of input from wrinkled post it notes to wall mounted white boards. My "to read" list always at my side, job search particulars neat and tidy, and catastrophically unorganized "Ideas" folder archived and searchable.
At its core the Evernote account is remotely hosted, access offered by means of web interface or local app on your computer or smartphone. Notes of any form are synced throughout in a rich cloud of meta data from geographic location to OCR'd snapshots. Browser plugins allow entire web pages to be stored for later reference, local apps allow webcam video capture, and an account specific e-mail address can be utilized from outside the confines of your own machine. Evernote offers a modern backbone to the note taking process, a customizable road map to your information with directions specific as you want.
You can head over here to the official site for even more uses of this service, which exists in both free and premium ($5) formats, or hit the jump for a more in depth look at a few solutions I've been extremely satisfied with.
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There is a unique quality to the coming year not unlike that of a natural disaster, a unifying sense of shared situation despite social standing or personal opinion. In the midst of a power outage or sudden snowfall community ties bloom, people unite, and, mostly, the best in us shines. "We're all in this together!" is echoed on a city bus full of sodden commuters or the brave that trudge hip deep, flashlight in hand. New Years is a similar force of nature in its power of group reflection and collective ambition for the year ahead.
