Pic­tures!

This is my entry in the Col­or­Wars reverse-caption con­test:

It was warm and sunny this after­noon.  Every­one was enjoy­ing it.

It’s amaz­ing what a lit­tle work and less than $20 worth of sup­plies from the hard­ware store can do to get you more orga­nized.  This is my “net­work closet” (you can’t really see the LAN patch panel, off frame to the right) that also holds all my tools.  Pre­vi­ously, all of these hang­ing things were rat­tling around in the bot­tom of a tool­box.  If I wanted a par­tic­u­lar tool, I would have to dig for it in the box and hope I didn’t catch myself on a saw blade.

Brightkite

I am now on Brightkite.  I have offi­cially stopped using Dodge­ball.  I’ve turned off my Dodge­ball noti­fi­ca­tions and will no longer post there.  Brightkite is sim­i­lar to Dodge­ball, but dif­fer­ent.  A few things that might be of inter­est to Dodgeball-to-Brightkite refugees:

* The “@placename” style checkin only works if you’ve already set up your own per­sonal place names.  Oth­er­wise you have to do “?busi­ness” to get a list­ing, then select 1, 2, 3, etc. to choose the spe­cific one.  It’s an extra step, but it does ensure that you’re check­ing in to the cor­rect place.  But you really do want to set up “@placenames” for the places you visit most fre­quently.
* By default, you only get noti­fi­ca­tions from peo­ple very close to you (within about a block), whether or not they’re friends.  If you want more of the Dodge­ball feel of what your friends are doing around the city, you need to go to “Account Set­tings: Noti­fi­ca­tions” and change the radius to “Area (4000 meters)” and the who to “Friends”.
* I’m tem­porar­ily shar­ing my check­ins to my Twit­ter stream, but may not con­tinue to do this long-term.

I have one extra Brightkite invite if you’d like one.  I expect to be get­ting three more soon.  (They keep giv­ing me three invites every so often.)

The Pas­sively Mul­ti­player Online Game (PMOG)

The Pas­sively Mul­ti­player Online Game or PMOG is a very inter­est­ing diver­sion and I espe­cially like the steam­punk theme it uses.  The game itself is played through a tool­bar in your web browser as you surf the web.  As you visit unique sites (or, at least, unique top level domains), you get dat­a­points (the form of cash used in the game.) You can then spend that cash on items and equip­ment.  In its sim­plest form, you can deposit items on pages for other peo­ple to pick up or set off.  For instance, you can leave a bunch of mines on digg.com and the next per­son who comes along (that is play­ing the game) trips those mines and had bet­ter have some armor.  You can leave a crate of cash and armor.  You can also take mis­sions and even cre­ate them.  In this con­text, a mis­sion is a path across sev­eral web pages with a lit­tle bit of nar­ra­tive text to pull them together.  For instance, I made a Sudoku mis­sion last week that took you around to places with rules, strat­egy, and higher qual­ity daily puz­zles.  You can think of it as a sort of “user gen­er­ated con­tent” vari­ant of the good ol’ webring (remem­ber those?), but dynamic and voted upon, so you’ll know which ones are good and which are lame.  The mis­sions (and por­tals, which are like one-website mis­sions) can be sought out and taken–but even nicer is the way you can stum­ble across a mis­sion.  If you visit a web page that is a com­po­nent of a larger mis­sion, your tool­bar will notify you of the mis­sion.  I’ve found the mines and armor to be great for shal­low sur­face enter­tain­ment, but the serendip­i­tous link­ages you get from stum­bling across mis­sions is a much more sat­is­fy­ing level of fun.  For instance, if I were some player that went to the New York Times daily sudoku puz­zle, I’d be informed of a related mis­sion.  If I took that mis­sion, I might learn that USA Today also has a decent daily puz­zle page, or I might learn about a cool online step-solver (that shows you HOW to arrive at a dif­fi­cult answer with­out bla­tantly jump­ing you to the final the answer.)

Over­all, it’s a fun lit­tle diver­sion.  Right now, I’m not actively try­ing to level-up and earn points and badges.  As the game’s name implies, I’m pas­sively play­ing, and hav­ing fun doing so.

If you’re inter­ested, I have sev­eral invites.

Veg­an­ism?

I know that a num­ber of peo­ple read­ing this are veg­e­tar­i­ans.  I believe a few are also vegan.  My ques­tion to you is: why?  Why did you go the extra mile from being veg­e­tar­ian to vegan?  As I under­stand it, for most peo­ple, it’s a moral choice–for instance, cows in “fac­tory farms” hooked up to milk­ing machines is arguably not the most humane way to treat them.  If this is your rea­son, though, would you eat milk and cheese from a local farm that you know treats their ani­mals well?  Are eggs right out, because they’re going to become baby chick­ens, or would it be dif­fer­ent if they were free-range or if they were from hens you kept yourself?

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Tagged as: brightkite, cats, closet, colorwars, deardiary, evileye, pmog, tools, vegan, vegetarian, windowsill