I set up a new blog today over at eustaceclarence.com to provide easy updates on my first kid, and it got me thinking: thankfully, the personal blogging craze has largely died.

To wit: of the 5 links in my blogroll as of the time of this writing, the last updates were written:

1. October 31, 2007
2. March 29, 2010 (Previous before that was Jan 2, 2009)
3. September 27, 2009
4. July 22, 2009
5. …and one blog is no longer available on the internet

All of these blogs were written by guys involved with technology at a higher-than-average level: they could all probably tell you what AJAX is, and why IE6 is the bane of all that is internet. Yet, like 99.9% of people who started blogging in the last 5 years, none of them blog anymore.

Why? Because no one has time to write (much less write well), and for those that do…nobody cares. The only posts on this blog than anyone reads are the ones written on how to fix annoying computer problems, not the ones about my thoughts on the latest political whatnot. The only personal blog I read anymore is my sister-in-law’s, because she puts up great pictures of her kids all the time. (Ideally, Eustace will get similar treatment from me).

What it really boils down to though is that no one has enough time for all of that. Myspace died when everyone realized that the cacaphony of colors, spam, ads, and random musings available there was an utter waste of time. Twitter’s in vogue, but I’m pretty sure most people use it for a month or two before they realize that, too, is a completely ridiculous way to waste every spare minute of peace and quiet you might stumble upon during your day. I’m moving on.

I think Facebook is the big thing with the best chance, but I’m hearing a lot of people who are sick of it and despise the time they waste on it (me included)–it’s an addiction though, like a crackberry, and will likely last a few years before the next big thing comes along. It’s darn handy for planning class reunions or the like, but for doing anything else worthwhile? Not so much.

Sooner or later we’ll all melt down from the stress and insanity that comes from being plugged into too many people, too many streams of info, and too many responsibilities 24/7. As for me, I’m just hoping that a move back to the Dakotas/Minnesota might bring a few more years of sanity…

For an actually well-thought perspective on this over-saturation phenomena, you could read the paper I wrote on it for a class I took (Like Butter Spread Over Too Much Bread: Multiphrenia in America 10 pages, .pdf)…or you could just ADHD your way back to your Twitter feed and forget I mentioned it (though, kudos for lasting this long if you made it to the end of my post!)

It’s a bit disturbing to me that NBC’s solution to Heroes’ rapidly falling ratings was to introduce a lesbian love story. Why?

First off, it’s an indicator that we’ve reached such a level of political correctness that “tolerance” has become one of our society’s greatest virtue. By this I do not mean that tolerance (in itself) is a bad thing, but I do mean that what we now term tolerance goes far beyond that. Tolerance means “I will not prohibit you from doing something,” and typically understands the action/belief in question to be one that contradicts what the tolerating person believes. Tolerance does not equate to agreement or support, nor does it entail unilateral pluralistic license.

I will tolerate it if the neighbors’ music is a little too loud up until a certain time of night. If asked, I would prefer that they keep the noise to a reasonable level, and I will even state that it is disrespectful, selfish, and unkind for them to violate my need for restful sleep. Nevertheless, I might tolerate it up to certain levels in order to maintain a more amicable relationship with my neighbors. However, there is a point at which tolerance is no longer a virtue: if I cannot sleep at 3AM because of the noise next door, or have chronic headaches from their chronic partying, I will demand that they stop and involve the police if necessary. You wouldn’t call me intolerant for that, you’d say I was standing up for my rights, my beliefs that I need sleep to function properly at school, work, etc.

So, I will tolerate homosexual couples and beliefs to a certain degree. Homosexual activity (as opposed to temptation) is a sin per God’s judgement as revealed in Scripture, but I also recognize that humans have free will and there is only one Lawgiver and Judge, and that said Lawgiver is not me. However, when Heroes (or anyone else, for that matter) attempts to equate homosexual relationships with heterosexual ones, they are preaching a morality against Scripture that unfortunately has deceived many. Wrapping it in the attractive context of trust and love makes the moral precepts being pitched that much more dangerous. Satan masquerades as an angel of light. For the sake of current and future believers, I must resist this wholeheartedly.

Lest you miss it, I am also highly disgusted by how Hollywood does this with heterosexual relationships as well: takes extramarital sexual relationships, couches them in “devoted love,” and portrays them as a good, desirable thing. This too is opposed to Scripture and deserves our censure. Why the “double standard?” It’s partially due to the compounding nature of homosexual activity (not only is it illicit in it’s nature, but it is also further sinful in its typical extra-marital context), and partially due to the fact that the extramarital relationships battle has been largely lost in our culture and avoiding all references to such activity would likely shut us out from the media entirely. The homosexual topic still has enough of a taboo and minority status attached to it that prevention of its popularization may still be feasible.

So, here we are. Heroes was starting to be lame, but I was still hooked. I just won’t support a homosexual agenda in my viewing habits.

You might have read the reviews, you’ve probably seen the commercials. They’re all true: New Super Mario Bros Wii is one of the best Wii games ever made, and absolutely superb for multiplayer. Here’s why:

The graphics are pretty, the controls work like they’re intended to–it’s a very polished game. The game goes out of its way to make sure newbs aren’t totally lost or frustrated, and it’s challenging and deep enough to satisfy any gamer who ever enjoyed a Super Mario Bros game on any system. Other than being the most fun Mario title to date (and the truest evolution of Super Mario Bros for the 21st century), this true-to-its-roots 2D scroller has a few features to keep the non-hardcore-gamer from pulling their hair out.

• multi-player capability is guaranteed hilarity. most fun i’ve had in a LONG time playing a video game, even with people who are very bad at the game. why? if you’re about to die, or can’t get past a particularly difficult jumping sequence, you can put yourself in a “bubble” and safely float forward to join your more skilled friends. no more crying that you can’t make it past that part–as long as there’s at least one person alive and not in a bubble, you’re ok. if everyone “bubbles” or dies at the same time, you’ve got to start over. this gets to be quite funny when you all start bubbling and the last guy panics and bubbles, or jumps off a cliff!
• throwing people and jumping off their heads can lead to some very, very fun and competitive gameplay, or if properly done, teamwork doing these same things can make some difficult unlocks or sequences much easier.
• if you die too many times on multiplayer, you can watch a video to show you how to do the level.
• as you earn large coins, you can spend them to watch videos that show you how to find secret goals and powerups. then you don’t feel like you cheated when you search the internet for the same info, because you earned it!
• as you play through the game, you don’t have to always use the same number of players. that is, if you beat 4 worlds alone and save the game, the next time you turn on the game you can pick up where you left off with 1, 2, 3, or even 4 people! if you’ve cooperatively beat most of the game with a friend, you can come back and earn all the extra stuff you missed alone later.
• Penguin suit and propeller hats rock

this game is a total win. you simply MUST buy it.

Back at the end of 2005 I was looking for cheap shared webhosting. If you’ve ever been in the market for such a commodity, you’ll know it’s a complete crap shoot: there’s about 40,000 options that all look the same, cost the same, and yet offer widely varying levels of service and support.

All of them have complainers out there moaning about some issue or another, because frankly, people only talk about stuff when bad things happen.

…or, when good things happen!

Long story short, I chose webhostingbuzz for my shared web hosting, because it was loaded with features and extremely reasonably priced. Good choice.

1. I got great service at a great price. Been with them since about December of 2005, if that says anything. Perhaps more telling, I also set up a couple of websites I built for a client on WHB (The Bookends & The Great Exchange)
2. I just won an iPod touch from them! Yes, my friends, they held a sweepstakes and I won an iPod Touch. As if I wasn’t happy enough already with their service, I am now the happiest WHB customer out there

All that to say, if you’re looking for shared hosting, virtual private servers, or even a dedicated server, you definitely want to check out WebHostingBuzz.

(Well, sort of).

I’ve been coding a new template for a new venture I’ll be embarking on over this summer break, and I wanted it to look all nice with alpha’d png images. IE6 hates those things.

Despite the fact that it probably won’t matter (most of my traffic these days is Firefox, and the direction I’ll be headed is for more tech-savvy and mac users), I hate leaving little things untended.

So…. I looked, and looked, and looked for a script that might work for my pngs in IE6. Supersleight wasn’t flexible enough, (the jQuery plugin would have done the trick, but for it for some reason it did not work at all for me) and so I kept looking…

Some dude made it work. Nicely. Check it out if you’re frustrated with other solutions.

IE6 PNG fix

It claims to work even for repeating backgrounds, but I haven’t tested that. I did verify that it doesn’t work well for backgrounds on tr and td elements.

Enjoy!

If you’re comfortable with trying to use Terminal (or curious to start), you can get your twitter updates via growl on OS X. If you don’t know what growl is, you’re really missing out. Get it here — it updates you unobtrusively with program status messages that might typically show up in a popup box or embedded into a program window, or not at all.

Once you’ve got growl, you’ll need to make sure you have Ruby 1.8.3 or higher.

You’ll also need MacPorts to make this work right: Install MacPorts

• If you have 10.5 Leopard, you’re set
• If you have 10.4 Tiger, you’ll probably need to update:
  1. Open a Terminal window and type in the following command, hitting return at the end:
     sudo port install ruby

Now, we’ll install some stuff that we need for our script to run. Using terminal, enter these commands (Hit return after each one)

sudo port install rb-rubygems
sudo gem install xml-simple
sudo gem install ruby-growl


(If the “gem” commands don’t work, you may need to restart terminal before running them)

Provided this all went well, you should be ready to install the script. Download the Squawk Scriptand move it into your home directory (looks like a house in finder if you’re totally lost here). This file is thanks to damien, but I had to make a tweak for it to all work right. You have to edit the file with your login info:

sudo pico ~/squawk.rb

It should be obvious where to put your email address and password.

Finally, run your script!

ruby squawk.rb

If you want to run it in the background on startup, check back later. I’ll be posting on this shortly.