Might As Well Face It, I’m Addicted to DS

I’ve become entirely addicted to my Nintendo DS-Lite lately, squandering at least an hour or so on most nights trying to slay zombie cleaning ladies in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, or otherwise trying to pry the little bugger out of Carole’s Mario-Manipulating fingers.  So far, I’ve accumulated quite a little stack of treasures.  Here are the games I’ve picked up so far:

• Castlevania - Portrait of Run: great, excellent, fantastic game.  Love the character swapping and the old-school platformer style.  Much fun.
• New Super Mario Brothers: Looks very fun, but I haven’t been able to play much due to my DS-hijacking wife.  On the plus side, that gives me some time to play Twilight Princess on the Wii.
• Brain Age: Apparently, my mental age is something like 67 years old.  Not good. 
• Super Mario 64: Looks great, haven’t played it yet.  Look forward to catching up with 3d Mario with some travel I have coming up soon.
• Elite Beat Agents: Played this one for a few minutes.  Pretty innovative and fun.  Want to try this one out some more as well.
• Final Fantasy III: Only played this for a little while so far, but I have high hopes for it.
• Super Mario Kart Racing: I loves me some go-karts.
• Yoshi’s Island II: Another one I bought for Carole.  She claims this one has too much “button pushing.”  I’ve yet to pass judgement on the Egg-Master.

Games I’ve ordered, but have yet to play:

• Super Princess Peach: Uh, this one’s for Carole too.  Yeah, that’s it.
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: sounds interesting.
• Trauma Center - Under the Knife: Because anyone who can operate with a d-pad the size of a midget chicken nugget deserves to be called doctor.
• Animal Kingdom – Wild World: Uh, this one’s for Brighton.  Yeah, that’s it.

All hail Nintendo, King of the Destruction of Productivity.

NaNo-NoMo?

I was ready to throw in the towel and admit defeat today … after all, it’s not likely that I’ll be able to write an average of 3,500 words over the next five days until the novel is complete.  Brighton had been pretty fussy the last several days, so I’m way behind with my word count. 

Also, next week is the last real week of classes, the graduate colloquium, the creativity showcase, and a few important meetings. 

I’m not quite ready to give up yet, though.  We’ll see how tomorrow goes…

Slashdot | Drugs Eradicate the Need For Sleep

Hmmmm … This seems like it might be … zzzzzzzzz 

Huh?  Wha?  Who’s there?   Zzzzzzzzzz

Link to Slashdot | Drugs Eradicate the Need For Sleep

NaNoWriMo: Half Way There, and Livin’ on a Prayer

Whooah, we’re half way there
Livin’ on a prayer
Take my hand and we’ll make it – I swear
Livin’ on a prayer

As much as I hate to quote him, Bon Jovi actually got it right on this one.  25,000 words are now on paper, but I’m four days behind.

Here is what I need to do to actually finish on time:

Where I should be: 31,673 words
Where I am: 25,000 words
Deficit: 6,673 words
Days Left: 10
Extra Words Needed Per Day: 667.3
Total Words Needed Per Day to Finish on Time: 2,334
Average words written per day on non-NaNoWriMo tasks: ~3,000
Total words I’ll need to invest over the next ten days: ~5,300

Whoooah, Livin’ on a Prayer!  The only thing that will possibly get me through this is my fierce competitive instinct.  Well, that and copious amounts of heroin support from friends and family.

NaNoWriMo Day 9/30: Worst. Day. Ever.

If only I could remember who got me into this 50,000 word novel mess.  If only I could pull that one little factoid from memory, the world would be a better place.  Because I could sent Mort after that person.  Indeed.

NaNoWriMo Day 8/30: Wrists Hurt. Brain Hurt.

Well, lucky I had an extra buffer of 200 words from yesterday, because I just barely managed to squeeze in my word count for today.  This is becoming markedly more difficult as the days go by.  Story is still fun, though.  Just wish I could get someone else to type it for me

Wired News: Delete Your Bad Web Rep

Want to get rid of that flame war between you and 1TuffMother on the ilovekittens.com discussion forum?  How about that a-little-too-friendly announcement you posted to MySpace at 4AM after a hard night of drinking?  Need to restore a shattered digital ethos?  ReputationDefender may be the product for you.

While the ReputationDefender methodology (a combination of software search agents and what Wired describes as “good old-fashioned human Detective skills”) sounds good in principle, there are a few inherent problems with this:

1. I doubt the technology is sophisticated enough to retrieve emails from client computers.  You know those notes you sent to the the marketing division calling your boss a waste of perfectly good carbon?  Not gonna get em’ back.
2. Since this was a product designed for kids, I’d like to see some examples of what the designers consider to be “potentially damaging postings to social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.”  All comments posted to these sites are potentially incriminating.  It’s a site designed for networking, and most users are bound to have at least one nitwit linked to their buddy list.  I wonder what makes a post “potentially damaging.”  Cursewords?  Pictures of juvey tats? Bad poetry? Unreadable Internet slang?  Take that away and you take away MySpace.  Wait, maybe that’s a good thing …. 
3. I’m a little skeptical that McDonalds or WalMart is going to go digging through MySpace looking for incriminating comments in order to keep a teen from getting their first job.  I think the Fresh Prince said it best in Parents Don’t Understand: “You’re only sixteen, you don’t have a rep yet.”  Careerbuilder says that 1 out of 10 hiring managers looks on a social networking site to check out potential employees.  Might this time be better spent on a little extra face to face time?  Don’t judge a person based solely on his MySpace heroes.  If Gallagher and 50-Cent are the primary role models in a young person’s life, then who’s to say that young person cannot be a productive member of society? 
4. The consequence of public communication is something I think is best learned early.  Understanding that anyone in the world with a computer can access your most recent blog posting is a lesson any up-and-coming Internet social journalist should pay attention to.  Maybe one day these folks will remember this and think carefully before “replying-all” to a LISTSERV with 3,000 members bragging about their latest romantic conquests.  ReputationDefender says, “It’s okay.  Be as asinine and immature as you want.  When you’re done, we’ll write a nasty legal letter and see if we can purge it all out.  No harm, no foul.”
5. Not surprisingly, the blame is shifted away from the true source of the problem (those users posting the offending material and, in some cases, their parents) to the service providers hosting the content.  What is really needed here is better parental monitoring of computer time (and there is good technology for this) and a heart-to-heart talk about how posting to the Net is different than talking with your two buddies at the lunchroom table. 

Link to Wired News: Delete Your Bad Web Rep