Spirit House

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One of my various ways of keeping a roof over my head is editing TechDispenser.com, a technology blog aggregator. If you’re into tech, it’s a great place to keep up with the blogosphere’s reaction to technology-related news.

But some of the blogs that are a part of the TechDispenser network include off-topic posts. I reject those posts; it’s what makes TD special. The reader doesn’t have to sift through posts about a blogger having a runny nose or that someone stole his lunch out of the company fridge today.

But sometimes, there are real gems that have to get rejected for being off-topic. And I just feel compelled to pass along these posts in whatever way I can. Which finally brings me ’round to the point of this post. Andy Updegrove of the consortiuminfo.org Standard’s Blog is on vacation, hiking around New Mexico and Utah, and he’s blogging about his adventures.

And damn, the man can write.

Please check out his post, Preserving Our Past to Help Us See Our Future: A Reunion with Spirit House and if you enjoy it as much as I did, pass word of it along to your friends.

So what is Spirit House? In Mr. Updegrove’s own words:

Why all the interest in this one site? As cliff dwellings go, Spirit House is hardly the largest, nor the grandest, nor the most dramatically situated. With 49 rooms spread along a quarter mile of ledge in a pleasingly sinuous, but otherwise unremarkable canyon, it is for the most part typical of the hundreds of other ruins scattered throughout the Four Corners area. And yet it remains perhaps the best loved, if not the best kept secret, among Anasazi ruins.

Next step: wormholes

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‘We have broken speed of light’

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light – an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.

According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second.

The next cold fusion? Or a genuine breakthrough?

The Guild

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When I saw the first episode of The Guild I was tickled but wary… it was very, very funny and I’m scared to say I could relate to it almost too well. But was it a flash in the pan? Well Episode 2 is out, and it’s just as funny.

You can go to YouTube to watch them but I’m going to tempt you here and now…

Episode 1

Episode 2

The WebbAlert

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A couple of weeks ago, G4’s Morgan Webb started up a daily video show about what’s going on in the world of tech. I watched the first one and although I enjoyed it, I promptly forgot about it. At the time (it was day 1 after all) there wasn’t a feed or anything. You had to hit the website to watch.

Well today I remembered it again, and now she has a feed set up so I promptly subscribed via iTunes and slurped down the 7 episodes I hadn’t seen. I just finished watching them all, and yup, the show is still pretty good. Morgan is genuinely likable (well, to me anyway, but I feel like I’ve watched her grow up from her first nervous days of appearing on The Screensavers) and the content is interesting and succinct. She then offers links for further info.

If you’re interested in tech, it’s well worth watching.

Windows Live Skydrive enters beta

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The title pretty much says it all. Microsoft’s Skydrive service has entered beta. It’s free and you get 500 megs of space for uploading files. You can set folders to private, public, or shared (as best I can figure, public folders anyone can read, but not change, and shared folders can be read and changed by a selection of friends).

I’m not often one to beat the Microsoft drum, but it seems like a handy way to keep a small number of files backed up remotely, or to collaborate/share with friends. To be sure there are other similar services* out there, but for me this is an alternative to gmailing files to myself. I already had a “Live” account, so it was just a matter of clicking a button to sign up. 🙂

* Here are a few that offer free plans:
http://www.box.net
http://www.snapdrive.net/
http://www.xdrive.com/
http://www.mediamax.com/
http://www.omnidrive.com/
Caveat Emptor: I have no experience with any of these. I wouldn’t store anything very private in any of these without doing some research first!

.hack// Another Birth Vol. 4

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.hack// Another Birth Vol. 4And so the story ends with .hack// Another Birth Vol. 4 . I suppose it is telling that I’m not relieved to be done with this series. After 4 books most tales start to get tired, at least to an extent. Of course these are all very short books. But I wish there were more available.

The ending was a lot quieter than I expected it to be. I don’t mean that as a criticism; I think I preferred it that way, since it better tied into the fact that the battles we’d been watching were being fought by characters in the game, and not the ‘real’ characters. Once the dust settled, they log out and have the rest of their lives to deal with, y’know?

This series was, for me, a joy to read. I’m not sure it would be for everyone, though. I think first of all you need to be an MMO gamer to really get how a game can become so important to you. Granted here they had the ‘hook’ of trying to bring people in the real world out of comas, but MMO players don’t really need any kind of real-world hook for the happenings in-game to become very important to them. In fact our struggle is just the opposite: how to keep in-game events in perspective.

I’m hoping the .Hack Project folks are hard at work on another series of books.

Books vs Games:
I’ve played the first PS2 game and while reading this series dug out the second one, and honestly I enjoy reading about The World more than I do playing the games. I own the 3rd game but not the fourth, which apparently is now something of a collector’s item, so I’m very glad to have been able to get the whole story without having to spend $100 or so on the 4th game. And just to be clear (something I should’ve mentioned much earlier): these books cover the same events/story/characters as the PS2 games.

Good Night, and Good Luck

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I don’t often mention movies in this blog because I’m just not very good at critiquing them. For me, movies are most often an escape. Usually, I’ll watch a movie, like it or not like it, then move on without giving much thought to either the movie or why I felt the way I did about it. There are about a million bloggers better at covering movies than I am, so why bother?

But last night I watched Good Night, and Good Luck, a docudrama directed by George Clooney and starring David Strathairn, George Clooney, and Joseph McCarthy. Strathaim and Clooney played Edward R Murrow and Fred Friendly, respectively, and McCarthy plays himself. The whole film is in black and white; I watched it on blu-ray and it was amazing to watch. It’s weird for me to be saying that about a black and white movie, but seriously it was stunning.

Now most of the people reading blogs weren’t around during the ‘Red Scare’ and I’m no exception, but we’ve heard about the ‘McCarthy Witch Hunts’ and the black lists. We’ve seen the Twilight Zone episodes that were inspired by the paranoia of the day, and we’ve heard how everyone was afraid to speak out for fear of being accused of being a Communist.

We’ve heard about it, but seeing it was a whole ‘nother ballgame. Clooney didn’t cast anyone in the role of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Rather, he used actual footage from the hearings and from McCarthy’s television appearances. Joe McCarthy was brilliant in his role. 🙂 According to the Good Night, and Good Luck page at IMDB, Clooney said that test audiences complained “that the McCarthy character was overacting a bit, not realizing that it was the actual McCarthy through archive footage”. Now I wouldn’t believe everything you read on IMDB, but it’s a believable bit of trivia.

It’s easy to look back in this era and think “That could never happen today.” but of course it could and does, on both grand and micro scales. Well, I’ll hold back on the proselytizing.

But this was a damned fine film, and I urge you to give it a try.

Rare Book Room

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There are times when StumbleUpon really earns its keep.

Rare Book Room is a site that features page-by-page photographs of (surprise!) rare books. From their front page:

Over the last ten years, a company called “Octavo” embarked on digitally photographing some of the world ’s great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).

The photos are high enough quality that you can easily read the books. Or just enjoy the artwork inside, in some cases.

Image from Chaucer's 'The Works Now Newly Printed' from 1896
Screenshot from Chaucer’s “The Works Now Newly Imprinted – 1896”