Hump day hijincks.

December 10, 2003

I actually wanted to post an update yesterday, but my day just got away from me and I never got a chance to sit down and write. That’s petty interesting considering I spent most of the day in front of my computer anyway, still getting things up and running the way I like them. Now that my desktop is mostly complete again, I can slack off once more.

Yesterday was also spent fiddling with something called RSS. I’ve seen RSS news readers before, even had the ability to integrate them into my IM client and web browser, but I’ve never been interested. My IM client, however, has a big bug in the latest version that it somewhat annoying, so I’ve been constantly checking their website to see if a new version has been released. However, it’s more than a one-step process, as I have to go there and log into my account to see if the new version is released, but I remember someone mentioning in their forums as I was researching the bug that they had been notified of a new release in the past from the RSS feed.

I experiemented with RSS in the past, but I wasn’t too impressed. MOstly I think it was just the implementation I was using. RSS news feeds give the ability to display headlines or titles from a website in text-only form. In my IM client, RSS feeds take up a lot of room and they weren’t updated with any sense of regularity. Yesterday, however, I installed an RSS reader in my browser, where it resides in a sidebar. I put in about a dozen or more RSS feeds ranging from BBC World News to various tech news outlets to software releases. A lot of the time when I’m sitting in front of my computer, I’m reading news, checking for updated software, that sort of thing, but RSS makes it tremendously easier. Instead of going to every site and seeing if there’s anything new, I just click on the name of the feed and the headlines are displayed. If I want to read the story, I click on the headline and it opens up in my browser. Very nice. If I were using a modem, it would save me a lot of time visiting my regular sites and not waiting for headlines to load with the slow connection.

And that’s also when I discovered exactly what the “Syndicate this site” link on my page means. I’ve always seen it there towards the bottom of the righthand menu, but I’d never taken the opportunity to investigate exactly what it meant. Well it’s an RSS feed, so if you add the link an an RSS reader, it displays my entry titles and takes you directly to them. I didn’t add my own site as an RSS feed, however, because I’m fairly certain I know when I update my own site. And it’s not like I spend a lot of time reading my own work, either. Only if I have to fix a tpyo…er, typo.

You’ll also notice that my site’s title changed. That was in reponse to doing a Google search and finding out that I’m no longer the #1 link that comes up when you do a search for “Andrew Self”. What a travesty! While a couple of pages from my website DO come up on the first search results, my main page isn’t even listed until the SECOND page of results. Time to change that. So I shifted my title from “AGSHender.Net :: I want you to trip like I do” to “Andrew Self’s Home :: I want you to trip like I do”. I could have taken out the “I want you to trip like I do” part and gone back to “Andrew Self’s home on the Internet” like I had awhile back, but I decided that I’d rather keep the hip-ish title that has meaning for me. In a couple of weeks when Google’s bots come crawling back and catalog my site for their search engine, perhaps I’ll move up in the rankings again, back to #1, displacing Professor Andrew Self in England.

While I was Google searching, I also came across a lot of old posts I’d made to newsgroups many years back through Google’s Directory search. I didn’t even know those were still archived anywhere. Most of them were made to move newsgroups discussing various films, but honestly, I don’t think that was me. Whoever that person was is MUCH more geeky than I remember myself being. I also found a couple of instances of official posts I’d made to Microsoft newsgroups when I still worked at Stream, though I had completely forgotten that I’d done that in an official capacity. It was pretty strange, that’s for sure. I have emails saved from that far back, but I’ve poked through them from time to time and I’m familiar with the contents. Another peek into myself, I suppose. I had all my old signatures in the posts, though I haven’t used a signature other than my name and email address in probably four or five years now. Yes, I was truly a geek. I think the old reference to me on the Internet, however, was in a newsgroup post from about 1996 or 1997 with someone asking for information on anti-Barney (the big purple dinosaur!) media. I don’t know why they were asking for it, maybe they were a collector, but my name showed up as the author of an icon that I uploaded to AOL in about 1993 or 1994. I don’t really remember when. That was back when AOL was still new and didn’t even offer WWW access. I think I joined right after they began letting people email to the Internet, and I made a few icons that I uploaded to their tiny file archives–one of which was an icon of Barney with a circle around him and a big red slash through the middle. I don’t know if it can be downloaded anywhere, but that’s probably the earliest appearance of anything Andrew Selfi-ish in the digital realm that I can think of.

Last night I went over to Lloyd Center and caught a showing of Lost in Translation, Bill Murray’s new movie. I had heard that it was excellent, but I wasn’t really certain what to expect out of the plot. It was a little slow, kind of sad, but very good nonetheless. It was written and directed by Sofia Coppola, yes, Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter, and it very much reminded me of the last move of hers I saw, The Virgin Suicides, which was a little slow, very sad, and very good. Note that I can’t use identical adjectives, there, but it’s close enough. Bill Murray did an excellent job, and when I got home and looked it up in the Internet Movie Database I was pleased to see that it’s already in the IMDB Top 250 films list. Good show, Sofia.

Yesterday the Christmas tree went up after I helped haul all the stuff inside, and I was horrified to find that not only did my Mom want to put up the tree yesterday afternoon, but to put the lights on and decorate it, as well! Heresy! You can’t put lights on a Christmas tree in the afternoon when the sun is out! You do it at night, when it’s dark out (more than a cloud cover in the afternoon, that is) and the lights make it pretty. I mean, that’s like trick or treating when it’s daylight out. It’s unheard of! So I sequestered myself and and urged her to reconsider putting the lights up to no avial. At least I got her to not decorate the tree and save it for a time when my sister can come over and do it with us.

And on one final note, I’d like to give out a special birthday wish. For most people, the tenth birthday is a time to celebrate getting to double digits. Never again will your age be single digits, though one day you might have TRIPLE digits. A tenth birthday is when a child really begins to show who they are and continues the process of “growing up”. One step closer to being a teenager, one step closer to being their own, independent person.

But today is the tenth birthday of the video game Doom. Ten years ago today the very first version was released for gamers to download from BBSes around the world. In a world where games are lucky to have a shelf life of two years before they’re replaced by something shinier and better, Doom is still held as the gold standard for violent video games that corrupt the minds of youth and teach them to kill, even though apparently those who criticize it have never played nor do they even understand the game. Give it up; no one plays it anymore. It’s not sold in stores, nor has it been for probably five years, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find people who still own it. That’s a pretty neat trick, affected people who’ve never owned or even never played it.

What I find most interesting is that the same people who speak out against violent video games were the ones listening rock and roll and watching Elvis dance when people spoke out against them–and we ALL know how THOSE corrupted America’s youth!

So on the tenth anniversary of Doom being released, here’s my message to everyone who says that children’s minds are blank slates just waiting for an imprint from the media: phbbbbbt! That’s the best recreation of the sound of a rasberry as I can write. If you don’t want your children playing games that you feel are inappropriate for them, DON’T BUY THEM FOR YOUR KIDS. What we really need is some way for games to be rated–like an indicator for parents to tell whether it’s appropriate for their kids. What would make it even better is if the rating is easy to understand and clearly explained for each group, even with warnings about specific content. Now, if we could get all that AND put it on the front of the box of every game sold, we’d be in business.

Oh wait, it’s already like that. Happy birthday, Doom. I have fond memories of you, and may you go down in history unsullied by ignorant people who don’t show a little parental repsonsibility.

I said it would be hard to find people who still own it, not impossible.