Axodys

The “11th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition”:http://ifcomp.org/ is underway and I’ve actually managed to play and judge one third of the total entries in roughly a week’s time. So far I’ve been really impressed with the overall quality of the entries. The contest has come a long way in the past decade both in number of entrants and the obvious care and testing that has gone into the entries. My goal is to finish judging the remaining games by November so I can get on to “Nanowrimo”:http://nanowrimo.org if I’m feeling motivated. I’m still not sure if I’ll actually follow through with the latter, but I figure it’s best to keep the option open.

The Seahawks’ come from behind “victory over the Cowboys”:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/football/nfl/10/23/cowboys.seahawks.ap/index.html was simply unbelievable. I was just happy they were going to make it into overtime after a gritty defensive struggle and then Drew Bledsoe went back to his “Cougar”:http://wsu.edu roots and threw an interception that was returned to field goal range and Josh Brown made it with no time remaining! What a beautiful moment for Seahawk players, coaches and fans everywhere.

The Dallas defense was tough today, but I was more impressed by the play of the Sea-Fence (props to the crazy fan that thought of that sign– he’s gotten TV time in the last two games I’ve watched). I was sure the Seahawks were dead after that stupid punt return fumble (”Roger Craig made the comment”:http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/5018324 that, that’s the kind of play that players lose jobs over and I could not agree more!) on the 10 yard line late in the game, but the defense got it done and forced a field goal and the Dallas kicker missed.

Awesome ending to a fairly painful game!

I’m in the process of testing out a new social web browser called Flock.  It’s based on Firefox, but integrates with various social web services like flickr and del.icio.us.  Flock also has a built in RSS feed reader and weblog posting support (which is how I’m writing this post). 

I haven’t figured everything out yet, but it seems to work pretty well for an early beta release.   The flickr integration is really cool.  It was a piece of cake to add the picture of Lexi and Gitte to the left.  I’ve never been much for using wysiwyg weblog editors up to this point, but this one definitely shows some promise. 

The main downside at this point is the lack of direct category and tag support. Hopefully that’s something that the Atom API will make possible once it’s integrated into Wordpress.

Found in today’s news of the criminally weird and stupid, here’s the last kind of fan Larry Bird wants:

“Man requests longer prison term to honor Larry Bird”:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/basketball/nba/10/20/prison.bird.ap/index.html?cnn=yes

bq. The lawyers reached a plea agreement Tuesday for a 30-year term for a man accused of shooting with an intent to kill and robbery. But Eric James Torpy wanted his prison term to match Bird’s jersey number 33.

The mind boggles.

Apple had another product roll out event today, but it was more incremental than earth shattering. The 15″ and 17″ “Powerbooks”:http://apple.com/powerbook get improved screens with higher pixel density while the “PowerMac G5″:http://www.apple.com/powermac/ lineup moves to dual core processors across the board with a quad core set up (dual dual) at the high end.

On the software front Apple also announced “Aperture”:http://www.apple.com/aperture/ a product that can probably be best described as “iPhoto”:http://apple.com/iphoto for Professionals.

The “Ken Hamlin assault situation”:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/football/nfl/10/18/bc.fbn.seahawks.hamlin.ap/index.html sure strikes me as the kind of scenario that’s going to appear on an upcoming episode of “Law and Order”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=axodys-20%26link_code=xm2%26camp=2025%26creative=165953%26path=http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html%253fASIN=B0002CX21K%2526tag=axodys-20%2526lcode=xm2%2526cID=2025%2526ccmID=165953%2526location=/o/ASIN/B0002CX21K%25253FSubscriptionId=0EMV44A9A5YT1RVDGZ82

bq. Pro football star gets in a fracas at a nightclub following a big win and ends up in the hospital with serious head injuries. Then just hours later one of his alleged assailants is found shot to death.

Of course if it actually shows up as an episode on “Law and Order”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=axodys-20%26link_code=xm2%26camp=2025%26creative=165953%26path=http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html%253fASIN=B0002CX21K%2526tag=axodys-20%2526lcode=xm2%2526cID=2025%2526ccmID=165953%2526location=/o/ASIN/B0002CX21K%25253FSubscriptionId=0EMV44A9A5YT1RVDGZ82 it will all take place in New York and there will actually be some kind of connection between the two events with an even bigger twist in the courtroom, even if nothing remotely like that pans out in real life.

At any rate I wish Ken well and hope the recovery process goes smoothly. I’m no doctor, but a fractured skull and blood clot near the brain doesn’t sound like kind of thing that you bounce back quickly from. I imagine his backup will have to fill in for the rest of the season.

After Apple announced their new “iPod”:http://apple.com/ipod with built in video support last week I was motivated to start experimenting with encoding video using the relatively new h.264 codec again. Well, after a week or so of playing around with a couple dvd and video files there’s no question in my mind that h.264 is the way to go, but you had better have a fast processor and a lot of time on your hands. The quality is superb and definitely my first choice, but at 320×240/iPod quality my older 12″ 867MHz Powerbook could usually only encode at 10 fps encoding per pass and that means 5 or 6 hours per video at least if it’s anywhere near movie length. A higher resolution file approaching full dvd resolution took over 10 hours on a 1.42 GHz iBook that I borrowed from work.

I haven’t had a chance to play with the process from the PC side yet, mainly because the software isn’t quite as easy to use as Handbrake on the Mac is, but I’ll probably give it a shot in the next week or two.

There’s nothing quite like a flat tire to start your work week off right. In this case it wasn’t one of my Element’s nice manageable tires though, it was one of the behemoths on Mary’s Expedition. I noticed the rear driver’s side tire looked pretty low while I was moving Eawyn’s car seat and initially figured it just needed some air added at a nearby gas station. Then I checked it with my handy digital pressure gauge and discovered that it’s pressure was 10 psi– or just over a quarter of what it should have been! Definitely time to put on the spare.

One of the few upsides to a fullsize SUV (besides their superior hauling capacity) is that they usually have a full size spare. This was the case with Mary’s Expedition and after confirming that the spare’s tire pressure was high enough for a short drive to the local “Les Schwab”:http://lesschwab.com I began the oh so fun task of changing two large and heavy tires. The whole process would have been a perfect success except I managed to tweak a muscle in my upper back while loosening a lug nut. It’s not incapacitating by any means, but it’s sore and irritating enough that I just know it’s going to bug me the rest of the week.

The good news is that Mary’s dad was able to take care of fixing things the rest of the way after I went into work. The problem turned out to just be an easily repaired leaky valve and was a free warranty repair. It was a pain to deal with, but in the end I’m glad I caught it in our garage so Mary didn’t end up stranded somewhere with a completely flat tire that she probably couldn’t have changed easily on her own. Now that I think about it though, I should probably walk her through the process of changing one of her tires just in case she’s ever in a situation where she has to do it herself.

I first came across “TiddlyWiki”:http://tiddlywiki.com, an experimental MicroContent WikiWikiWeb built by “Jeremy Ruston”:http://tiddlywiki.com/#JeremyRuston about a year ago, but I hadn’t really paid attention to it until I came across a “reference to a GTD variation”:http://www.mikemcbrideonline.com/2005_10_09_archives.html#112934024604451417 yesterday. What sets TiddlyWiki apart from your standard Wiki is that it’s written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser without needing any server side logic. This is cool on so many levels I don’t really know where to begin other than to say go check it out. There’s been a lot of progress since I first looked at it last year and “impressive community of adaptations”:http://tiddlywiki.com/#TiddlyWikiAdaptations has sprung up. I’m definitely going to be playing with this more

As if Shaun Alexander’s season to date wasn’t already demonstrating his value to the Seahawks, he now has four rushing touchdowns on the night! I really, really hope Seahawk management can get his contract worked out in the very near future. If he walks after this season they’re going to be in a world of hurt.

Speaking of world of hurt, I just feel bad for David Carr and the Texans in general. They just showed Houston’s upcoming schedule and there’s not much hope for a win other than the Brown’s in the next 6 or 7 games. Brutal.