Satori

Well, looks like my Xbox360 has finally decided to give up. I got it quite soon after launch, so it's not too surprising that it is crashing out I suppose. It crashes randomly, and fairly quickly, occasionally throwing up a three-LED red ring. I'm tempted to open it up and see if I can replace the heat sink putty (which some people claim is the problem) but at this point I don't want to void the warranty. So I'll just send it in. Argh.

I've been hanging out in NYC the past few days as the first leg of a multi-hop trip. It's been awhile since I've been here, and I forgot how cold it can get - 17 degrees right now! I love wandering around the city, but with this weather I'm mostly spending my time in hotels and offices. :-) While San Francisco can get cold, it definitely spoils a person. I can't remember it ever getting below freezing there!

Posted by madsax at 06:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Scott Foe sent me a link to this cool site, called For The Love of Gaming. It's a trivia game for videogamers, with cool graphics and a theme song. I had a fun time playing it, although I kind of sucked. :-) Give it a try!

Posted by madsax at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few weeks ago I turned off site comment authentication to see what would happen - I think I've received about 1500 spam comments in that short span of time. So I've turned it back on! Ideally I want to put a Captcha or math problem authentication there instead, but haven't had time to add it onto the site. So it's back to auth. Sorry about that!

Posted by madsax at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Daniel Terdiman from CNET.com wrote a piece today about the large number of social networks and the stream of invitations one gets in email. I talked to him about it a bit and he quoted me a few times in his piece.

I am a serious user of LinkedIn and Facebook, and I definitely find the services valuable. But I have policies for myself on who I will link with, and I find that as my network grows, I want to share less and less personal information. LinkedIn is easy, it's all business, but Facebook is all play, and I could spend all my time telling people what I'm reading, writing, eating, drinking, and playing. Is there a "What I'm looking at on Facebook" app? Maybe there should be. ;)

I've found both services most valuable for keeping me in touch with people in the games industry, and for re-finding people I've met previously, or contacting people who I don't have an email address for. The barrier for sending a message on facebook seems lower than a traditional email, as well, so it does encourage a friendly banter.

One of the things that does worry me about social networking services is the way that some treat the information you post as their own property. If I spend my own time creating value for myself by creating a network, shouldn't I own the network information? I'm happy to let the service also have access to the information I created in trade for providing me the service for free, but as for them owning it? That's a bunch of hooey. Check out Robert Scoble's post about getting kicked off of facebook for trying to harvest the information he'd posted up. Wouldn't it be nice to have some data portability standards for social network sites so we don't have to worry about things like this?

Posted by madsax at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jason Della Rocca sent out word today that the voting for the IGDA board of directors has begun. I'm running for the board, and I'd be honored to have your vote!

The fundamental perspective I would bring to the IGDA is that "everyone should be able to make games". This past year saw the first IGDA conference here in San Francisco, and I would like to see it be the first of many - there are many topics and regions that are not served well by the existing conferences, and I'd like to see the IGDA filling those gaps. Other non-profit organizations fund themselves almost entirely through their industry conferences, and I hope that a strong conference program will enable the IGDA to be more active, supporting the agenda of the game development community even more.

Networking is a fundamental tenet of the IGDA, and I want to help ease the lives of local chapters, making them easier to start up, and easier to maintain, providing additional resources so that they are able to reach out to their communities. The IGDA is also missing vast segments of the world where game development is occurring, but the few development studios are not in touch with each other - the IGDA can serve to bring developers together, and even encourage development efforts that are global in scope.

I've always been passionate about making game development easier, and enabling more voices to be heard. IGDA, as the largest international game developer organization, has been working for years to make the industry easier to understand, easier to work in, and easier to break into. I'd be honored to add my voice those guiding the organization, and hope you'll vote for me in the election. Thank you!

Posted by madsax at 02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Number of calls from the Obama campaign: 5
Number of calls from the Clinton campaign: 0
Number of calls from other campaigns: 0

Hmm.

Posted by madsax at 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Awhile back I posted about my frustration with Starbucks Coffee Cups. Amusingly it has become one of the most frequently visited posts on my site.

Today Steven Rojas posted a link on my site to the ultimate answer to the coffee spillage problem, the Little Green Plug. I'm laughing about it, but yeah it is basically a little green plug that plugs up the hole in the coffee cup. Problem solved! That's funny as hell.

While digging around their site I also found this excellent video about a guy who tried to hit all 171 Starbucks in New York City in one day. Wow! There seem to be only 31 in San Francisco so far - much easier. Anyway, hope you enjoy the video. :)

Posted by madsax at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)