Birthdays, Black Fridays, and the Cracker Motif

To get this out of the way first, I'd like to admit that today is my quarter-century day of celebration. While more than ten years ago, I had hoped that perhaps one of these birthdays would set forth a milestone within an unearthed prophecy, and unlock the infinite power and wisdom of the cosmos to my fingertips. Maybe next year. The Universe probably doesn't function in yearly cycles anyway.

I imagine everyone survived the dreaded Black Friday - I noticed the sirens stopped eventually. I hear the big items of the last holiday are nearly just as big this time around. Of course, I am speaking of the Wii and the PS3. Not so much the PS3 of course, but the price drop does make it somewhat more attractive. I still hear tales of woe concerning the hardships people are going through finding a Wii. Upstate NY seems to be holding out just fine, but I assume that I played a hand in that, due to hundreds of phone calls and live visits nearly a year ago. If you stayed away from the physical stores and shopping centers, you would undoubtedly have much better luck, you see, rumor has it that yesterday, Wiis were going for $80 on Amazon.

Separate from the fantastic world of economics and marketing, although perhaps nemesis to it, I'd like to speak briefly about open source. This is a topic I plan to cover somewhat frequently, as it interests me greatly. Open source to most people means free software. It goes beyond that, and the actual definition labels it a culture. I won't touch on that too much, but the rundown is the concept of constantly being able to advance the world by promoting access to designs and goods.

Open Office is an indeed simple example. For those of you who haven't used Open Office, I suggest you try it. Open Office is essentially a free, open-source set of applications that mimic the functionality of Microsoft Office. You can download it for free and do all of your word processing create databases and much more. It is not as pretty as Microsoft Office. It does not contain a talking paperclip. A few options may be in different places among the menus. For these reasons, I have heard people completely bash Open Office. I hear similar stories for other alternative software. Perhaps it is just the people I overhear that is the problem. There have been times where I have surrounded myself in some pretty unknowledgeable groups and/or individuals who complain about free things. I'm not here to claim that Microsoft is shoving standards down our throats, and in fact, I am a big fan of where Microsoft is slowly trying to go, and it is clear that the standard user has no clue about it. None the less, without open source, innovation is decided for the user. If anyone is able to alter and redistribute applications, it applies a whole new concept of software evolution. Or, I suppose, you can complain about where the Paragraph formatting menu is and get nowhere. For more information about open source, check out Wikipedia.

The Respite

As far as rocking the backstreets of Oneonta this weekend, I took a short hiatus. I missed out last Saturday as well, unless you caught me at a fantastic little house party with a full ensemble of sound-amplification boxes complete with mood lighting. It makes me miss my performance days. The fact is, I did not actually take the weekend off, but a big-kid job came up, and the bounty was high enough to grease my proverbial palms. The recourse of course was that it killed my Friday night and took off with my Saturday. I had plans to do something spectacular this weekend, I swear! Either way, I don't really mind; the rewards needed to convince me to sacrifice my weekend are indeed high, and were met. Besides, everyone in the whole town seems to have gone someplace else for the Holiday.

I have, in the time since my previous entry, done some research on photo hosting. I've been using Flickr for quite some time now, and I stand by it. I have a few qualms that are happily resolved in the paid version. I suppose that is what qualm-sources are designed for. The biggest two issues were one; when reaching two hundred images, older images disappear from your gallery. You can still link to them, as in they still exist, but simply won't be shown on your gallery. More importantly, you can only have three album categories until upgrading to the premium version. Still, Flickr has a lot of neat features. For my older work, I will be uploading to Google's Picasa. Google offers a gigabyte of storage, and integration with the Picasa software. I've always shied away from Picasa, as I've never really wanted all of the images on my PC to be cataloged into one massive repository. You can discuss directory preferences within the software, but even so, for some reason it is lacking the control I want. Long story short, you can take a look at what I've got so far in my Picasa album here.

Friday was Shigeru Miyamoto's birthday. I've been celebrating by playing his latest masterpiece; Super Mario Galaxy. Miyamoto is one of the most beloved names in gaming history. He is the creative power behind Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Pikmin, and countless other Nintendo franchises. His ardent contributions towards the game industry are always highly anticipated. It's not hard to look at a game and recognize Shigeru Miyamoto's touch if he played a part in the development. With that said, Super Mario Galaxy is a complete meridian to his work. If twenty years ago, Miyamoto dreamed of a future for Mario, this very well was it. The game offers so much in near-perfect dose sizes that it is hard to believe that platform games are a dying breed. The Wii's biggest strength and weakness seems to be it's graphic processing capabilities compared to the other current generation systems. Super Mario Galaxy shows that even without the advanced rendering capabilities that the other systems have, a game can still look just as good. The soundtrack this time around mostly consists of completely orchestrated tracks with themes ranging from widely-epic to soothing, melodic undertones. There's quite a bit of the old material too, carefully remixed to take you back to 1992. Best of all, while the idea of plopping Mario in a space environment seems "gimmicky;" the game executes it so well that it feels completely natural. It's no wonder why Galaxy has been getting 10/10 reviews. There have been a lot of big titles to come out the past week or two, but for now, Galaxy has me completely hooked.

Sensational Vibes

I'd like to talk about a very handy tool I've been using the past couple months. While I, a hearty myrmidon of technology and gadgetry, may be much more aflame towards the ever changing virtual organism that is the Internet than others, I feel that I do have something in common with just about everyone who visits this blog.

I, like you, use the Internet. Whether you know vaguely how to bookmark a site, or you can script in PHP, I think the following tool will be a great joy to you. It's called Netvibes.

Netvibes is nothing more than a homepage, and nothing less than a smooth, seamless hub that will put nearly all of your favorite Internet tools at your fingertips. Those of you who have used Google's iGoogle page know exactly what I am talking about. It works very much like iGoogle, except it's much prettier, and much more adaptable. Both aesthetics and functionality play vital roles for the modern-day Internet. Web 2.0 may be a buzz word to most, but it's certainly showing that with a little effort and creativity, applications such as Netvibes can be crafted for the benefit of users of all kinds.

Let's go a little deeper into what Netvibes actually is. You create a free account using your email. This way, it saved your profile so that you can access it from any PC. Once you are signed up, you have a plethora of options and widgets to choose from. You can choose to display things such as email, bookmarks, News feeds, video feeds, search results from Google Images and Flickr, calendars, task lists, note pads, and the list continues. There is a massive, ever growing library of Widgets, and you aren't limited to using specific ones. You'll find them all over the Internet. You can even tuck games into Netvibes. Of course, they don't expect you to throw everything all on one page, so they support tabs. Tabs with customizable colors, icons, and settings. In fact, you can customize so many aspects of the Netvibes homepage very easily, right down to importing your own images for the background and icons.

What this can do for the average user, is put all of your commonly visited news sites and websites all in one place. You can look at headlines and expand full articles without even leaving the page. In fact, you can create Widgets that act as tiny web browsers, bookmarked to sites of your choosing with full navigational ability.

I highly suggest giving it a shot. It's free and simple to use. Remember, once you get it going, set it as your homepage. To get you started, I'll even offer you a Tome of the Untold Figment Widget. Go ahead and install this to read this blog right from Netvibes.