Here’s a quote for you. Richard Bartle speaking out against the “self-righteous politicians and newspaper columnists” who “beat on computer games”:

Call them [gamers] social inadequates if you like, but when they have more friends in World of Warcraft than you have in your entire sad little booze-oriented culture of a real life…

Richard Bartle: Gamers have won the battle against the censors | guardian.co.uk

It’s a fun rant, but really nothing you don’t already know if you’re a gamer.

I started reading this post and thought it was pretty cute and funny. Then I kept reading and thought it was pretty darned wise.

You might see a bit of yourself in it.

Personal Development, Canine-Style – Lifehack.org

Me, I’m going to go chew on my foot for a while.

A blog post worth reading, and yeah, I tried to use his advice in that silly post title:

how do you compete for attention in the much scarier and larger world of emails, blogs, company memos, webcopy, sales copy, etc.? The answer, my friend is spin.

Gone Fishin’: How to Hook Your Readers With Textual Crack

Technorati Tags: writing

I read a piece at Linux.com (Run Windows and Linux without virtualization) about andLinux.org today. It’s an Ubuntu system that is supposed to run alongside of Windows. I’m intrigued, but frankly don’t want to mess with my Windows Vista system (used primarily for gaming) any further than installing programs on it. andLinux *seems* to be non-intrusive, but I’d love to hear from someone with firsthand experience with it.

Technorati Tags: linux, andLinux

Mahalo Daily outdoes itself with this spoof.

She don’t take no jive on her hard drive. Waa-oo-waa-oo-waaaaa!

Lots of useful and interesting information about Felis catus:

Technorati Tags: funny, video

If you’re either a new PHP developer, or just new to using PHP Frameworks, the good people at KillerPHP have a great series of screen-cast tutorials to get you started.

Topics include: Setting up Zend Development (Part 1 & Part 2), Zend Controller and Zend View, and Setting Up an MVC Structure with the Zend Framework (Part 1 & Part 2).

I’ve so far watched those last two and they’re very well done. Clear, simple examples that are enough to get you thinking in MVC (Model-View-Controller) terms, at least.

I’ve never used Zend Framework. I have used Code Igniter and was delighted at how fast and easy it made PHP development, once I got my head wrapped around the concept. It looks to me like jumping to Zend would be pretty easy at least conceptually, but I don’t know if there’s any way to shortcut the learning curve of what each framework makes available.

Compare the Zend MVC vids to the Code Igniter video tutorials by Derek Jones and you’ll see what I mean.

Warning, incoming rant.

I was reading an article at an online magazine today and noticed a glaring and really embarrassing typo where one of the editors had just (inadvertently) dissed his own product. So being a nice guy, I figured I’d point that out to them. Turns out contacting the editors of this “magazine” isn’t easy.

Here’s how my thought process went:

1) I’ll leave my feedback as a comment

• I have to register or sign in to comment? Annoying
• Oh, they support openid, I’ll use that!
• Wait, they post my openid as my name if I use openid? That’s insane. Skip that.

2) I’ll email the author then. Click on his name.

• OK here’s a profile, what’s his email address? Not listed. Yes, I know it’ll get you spam but you’re setting yourselves up as journalists. Being contactable is part of that process.
• OK click on Contacts
• OK here’s a contact email address. I’ll click that.
• Oops, it isn’t a link. Highlight and copy it then
• Nope, they used an image so I can’t cut and paste the email address

So finally I type out the email address and send them an email, but not to tell them about the typo. Rather, to tell them how this process was so frustrating that I’m unsubscribing from their RSS feed and won’t give them my eyeballs again.

We’re talking about a site with advertising on it, so my page views = revenue for them. If you want to put on your journalist suit and collect an income from my visits, then you damned well better treat me, the reader, as a customer. Yes, I understand spam is a huge problem. But its part of the cost of doing business if you’re going to set yourself up as a business, which the ads tell me these people are (that opinion is bolstered by the name and format of the site).

OK, end of rant. I know I shouldn’t get so worked up about such things but, well, I do. And I can’t be the only one!

This lady is my new hero:

Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone | The New York Sun

My friends and I often spend time talking about what life was like when we were kids; how we’d run around unsupervised and how none of us died, y’know? We didn’t have “play dates,” we just shouted “I’m going over to Billy’s!” as we tore out the door. These days I just wonder when kids have a chance to be kids? Henry Jenkins has suggested that kids are so drawn to video games these days because those are the only places they can go to, y’know, get away from the parental units and be themselves, so to speak. That makes sense to me.

Now I should state that I have no kids, so to a certain extent, talk is cheap for me.

Anyway, Lenore Skenazy, the author of the article above, has started a blog called FreeRange Kids. How about that for a blog title!!? I love it.

Can anyone think of a practical use for this? I’m coming up blank, and it was apparently designed more as a social experiment than anything. Weird though.

Avatar Machine – Marc Owens’ wearable simulator of virtual worlds. – Boing Boing TV