larsinio’s logic

Hello brand new visitor, hope you become a resident!

I’m someone who hates popular things. If something is popular I’m automatically suspicious of it, if not downright apprehensive and vitriolic towards it. I guess these feelings stem from two decades of being let down with something once it becomes moderately “popular” or “mainstream”. Examples include Moby, Blink 182, Green Day, LOLCats, internet piracy, and Barack Obama. Video games are the latest thing to be come uber-commercialized and uber-streamlined to the waggle-motioned masses craving core games that are actually casual games and casual games that are actually core games.

Out of this casual-games-that-are-actually-core games comes the genre of Tower Defense games, a type of real time strategy game which all about destroying horde’s (4DAHORDE!!) of enemies from various defensive structures. I’ve been aware of this subgenre for a while, since one of my college roomates almost derailed his medical career because of a StarCraft mod that played like a tower defense game. So what is exactly? Well i view a Tower Defense game has having the at least he following elements:

1. A flood of enemies, usually coming in a certain pre-determined fixed path, that come in waves.
2. Various defensive structures that shoot things at baddies, usually are upgradeable, and usually cannot be destroyed
3. Explosions/death/etc
4. One fixed resource – i.e. cash

Now you’ll notice that theres not many elements there, bu its ok I promise, because it’s fun. Most of the elements of real-time-strategy games that make the experience a *chore* have been removed: units, pathfinding, tank rushes, over-aggressive AI. I find that as long as there is some depth to the gameplay (i.e upgradeable structures), that the gameplay formula works every time. I could see myself burning out on this style of game, but i think its casual enough that its novelty won’t fade. Take for example, bejeweled type games. Theres a bazillion of them out and its not as original as it once was, and I may not feel like starting a game, but once you are in a session, its very easy for time to quickly pass you by.

My favorite tower defense games that I’m currently hooked on

1. Plants vs Zombies – The game that started my recent addiction to TD games. Game is supercute, has lots of different “weapons”, lots of different enemy types, and a whole bunch of additional gameplay modes to try once the main game has been completed. Incredibly polished, addicting, and genuinely worth your money. This is a game where your defensive structures take damage

2. Defense Grid: The Awakening – A winding-path tower defense that features impressive sci-fi themed 3d graphics available on PC and 360. Most important feature is that the game speed can be sped up to 4x at any time, reducing the blow of surviving a mission except to

3. GeoDefense - The first tower defense game I played on the iPhone. Another winding-path game that features a graphical theme similar to Geometry Wars, and h a wide variety of weapon/structure types.

4. Star Defense - An iPhone game that came out like last week and features a winding path set on a 3d sphere. Has a really cool visual look, definately takes advantage of the phone’s touchscreen and is very well polished. NGMoco made this, as well as their earlier hit Topple.

5. FieldRunners - Yet another iPHone game, except this one lets you carve out the path by strategical placement of your defenses. A lot more flexibility in strategy since its an “open field” game, but also additional frustration .

Games i have yet to try

1. Gemcraft - An addicting flash-based game, or so I hear.
2. Crystal Defenders – another iphone game, this one made by Final Fantasy-maker Square Enix. Apparently not as good as FieldRunners
3. 7 cities - another iPhonegame, except with a map editor.

/me patiently waits for a Warhammer 40k/Space Hulk Tower defense game

America may not be pwning other countries in terms of a lot of factors , but Americans and Californians can still have pride in the fact the best/highest grossing/most watched TV and film industry in the world. Except maybe that whole “best” part. It seems to me that there is a complete lack of originality, at least in mainstream films for the last few years.   Sure there are some great gems out there, Gran Torino , Wall-E, and Slumdog Millionaire, but it just seems that there is a veritable flood of stupid-comedies, action, and worst of all, remakes.

Yes this post is a a Star Trek rant, but hear me out, I’ll try to get that out of the away as quickly as possible.  I have to get one in at some point. The movie was horrible. Much of what has to do with it is , that when you decide to make a movie have a 150 million dollar budget (as opposed to Wrath of Khan’s 17 million dollar budget), the studio must ensure to recoup that money back and thus play to a wider audience

Problems with Star Trek (Warning: Spoilers)

1. Plot holes? No they’re plot chasms.  Not only does nothing regarding plot make sense, the characters don’t even attempt to give an  explanation. Red Matter wtf?  Supernova destroying a “galaxy” wtf? Black holes used for time travel wtf? Old Spock seems to revel in the fact that a million time paradoxes were created by that,  Spock didn’t even know what it was basically. Why can they transport people at transwarp, yet can’t communicate to Starfleet and travel to Earth at the same time? Where are all the other ships in this galaxy? Earth and Vulcan are the two cornerstones of the federation, yet the only ship in existence at that point is the Enterprise? Trek has always been one to screw with time way too often, but this is just a low  blow.

2.  One Giant F-you to fans from JJ Abrams and Leonard Nimoy. Hey you know that precious timeline and canon you love? We’re gonna put everything through the meatgrinder and singlehandedly invalidate all the history, characters, and objects that you find . And add to that, the apperance by the cast members (and Nimoy) on Saturday’s SNL which just continued to dig at the fans who have enabled the franchise to survive for 35 years after the original 60’s series.  It’s an obvious whoring out of the franchise, and the “creative” forces seem to revel in the fact that they made the die-hard fans angry. It’s also super obvious that teh main actors have essentially no interest in the franchise, other than getting paid. The permanent destruction  of Vulcan is the most emblematic of this.

3. Product placement.  Kirk listens to the Beastie Boys and uses a Nokia Cellphone. Uhuru drinks Bud. Just unnecessary whoring.

4. Bad Physics

5. Chekov and Scotty switched roes. Chekov solves all the technical problems (and is still funny),  and Scotty is just comic relief. The only “work” Scotty does is punch numbers into equations that Old Spock gave him in the process of creating even more paradoxes.

6. It’s a Star Trek film? If it wasn’t for the central characters, who are primarily used as a vehicle for comedy, you could barely tell it was a Star Trek film. It reminded me more of The Chronicles of Riddick and Lost in Space (remake) as a standalone scifi-esque action story. Sure there were romulans, but there was nothing romulan about it – they were just scary, typical bad guys who have essentially void of character development.  Star Trek is about complicated plans, philosophical discussion , the empowerment and betterment of man, diplomacy, and combat as a last resort. This  film has none of that.

7. If it wasn’t for the fan-service of minor character references, there would be rioting on the streets.I feel lik

Upcoming remakes destructions  of existing films and properties.

1. RoboCop (2010) – The classic Paul Verehoven action/coporate and political satire tour-de-force  known for a high body count and  having twenty seconds to comply, is being remade by Requiem for Dream/Pi director Darren Aranofsky. I really like Darren’s work, even that time traveling movie with Hugh Jackman, but does this movie realyl need to be remade? Does Robocop really need to be dark and emo like Batman is now?

2. 2001  – Why why why why why? Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece is widely regarded as one, if not the best sci-fi films of all time. The cinematography and soundtrack alone make this a valuable experience to behold. But for some reason, it needs teo remade. The reasoning is beyond me, as even teh special effects still holdup today. As they were not cheesy in 1968 and don’t really seem cheesy. What could they possible improve? Update the Pan-Am references with Delta Airlines? Give everyone a cellphone/pda?  Steven Soderbergh has remade enough movies already: the Ocean’s series, and Solaris (which is way way worse than the original 1971 Soviet film). Is he gonna cast George Clooney as Heywood Floyd?

3. The Jetsons Live Action film (2010) – The Flintstones movie, ’nuff said. Why must every precious nostalgic memory be utterly destroyed

4. Barbarella (2009) – Sure the original movie is quite cheesy, but Jane Fonda  (pre-Vietnam) is way hot, and the campiness of the movie makes it a classic.  Robert Rodriguez, of Once Upon a Time in Mexico fame, will be taking the helm

5.  The Birds (2011) – Really? This movie has already been re-made once already. But given how bad horror/slasher films are these days, perhaps it would be wise to ripoff Hitchcock.

6. Escape from New York – I don’t think you can do this film, without Snake Pliskin. And the 80’s charm/synth soundtrack adds alot to what makes this film so great.

7. This website, which lists a  far longer list of remakes than I thought there were.

check out this list at wikipedia.

The question remains, is it worth having to deal with a bad movie if it means your franchise comes back?

In a word no, because there is no guarantee of a flight back to quality with sequels after the initial franchise “rebirth”. Are we happier now that Indiana Jones has been sullied with crystal skulls? I would have preferred that movie never to be made, sure it closes the question about Indy’s relationships, but no one was asking for that question to be answered. Indy didn’t need to get married because each one of his serial adventures had a different woman involved.  Fans wanted a great adventure based on some good mythology with godo action scenes. Instead we got less Indy, more Shia Lebouf, less  mythology, more History channel pseudopscience/conspiracy theory Crystal Skull BS, less.

Similariliy, Star Wars did not need the prequel trilogy. The whole point of Star Wars was that it was jumping in the middle of a larger story, to hark back to the time of serial adventures.  Ever since The Phantom Menace, Star Wars has continued to suck, to the point where I just dont care anymore at all. The franchise anchise is basically dead. I barely cared about Revenge of the Sith, let alone Clone Wars, and all assorted video games and such.

Movies are products of the times that they created in, essentially a bunch of random variables coalesced to produce a once in a lifetime performance.  Sequels can expand the story, and sometimes even make a better movie, but that doesn’t seem to hold as true as it used to.

I would not be as bitter or embroiled with the recent hash of remakes if quality big budget action/adventure/etc films were being made without having to urinate all over existing franchies and intellectual properties. Get some new ideas, kthx. And if youre gonna steal an idea from Phillip K. Dick, dont cast Nicolas Cage.

I haven’t shown as much love to this blog as much as I would like to, mostly because I became obsessed recently with reigniting the smoldering flame that is my graphic design skills, particularly in the realms of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.  I decided that the best way I could force myself to explore my creative side was by a bunch of small projects for a clear-defined purpose: making t-shirts.

So if you take a look at my Zazzle store, appropriately named “Larsinio Ltd.”  which is egregiously embedded as a flash sidebar app on the , you can see the current fruits of my labor.  Some of them are more experiments in certain photoshop/illustrator techniques  than anything, others are subtle satires and parodys of pop-fashion that will just look weird to the uninformed “viewer”.

I have looked at popular designs of t-shirts to try to figure out what elements and techniques are used to create the haute couture look. I found that most fashionable t-shirts have one or more of the following graphical elements:

1. Weird retro person/image/place that would not need a t-shirt. Why would I want to visit the Kalamazoo town hall of 1955?
2. Use of vintage/washed out filters
3. Stupid quirky slogans with ironical Sayings (Like a cartoon flower expressing displeasure at hayfever season)
4. Retro inspired fonts, like  Cooper Black (the Vote for Pedro font), Letter gothic, or that pimp my ride font.
5. Reduced color pallete, heavy on earth tones
6. Optional use of dithering, half-tone patterns, etc.
7. Use of photographs simplified down to vector objects with a lot of detail removed  for a more “hand drawn” look.

All the shirts I post for sale I intend to eventually buy, with a long-term goal being to only wear clothing that I have created for myself. Do you see it? It’s me trying to  reject yet another part of mainstream culture. Comparing to a vegetarian scale of craziness, I might be approaching vegan.

The thing that seems to be most impressive with my shirts to my real-life friends is the way I made a few Making t-shirts look washed, faded. The Lehman Bros and the AIG shirts I manually applied brushes to achieve that look. For the “MIRV Griffin” shirt, I used a commercial photshop plugin which seems to be right on teh money in terms of giving things that washed-out, faded look.

I’m currently working on a few more shirts that I think, may be the bee’s shins, as opposed to the bee’s knees. But I feel im gradually getting the knack of it.  So check it out and maybe buy a t-shirt! By the way, I set the prices to the minimum possible, Zazzle doesn’t exactly give you wholesale prices for on-demand t-shirt printing.

On another front, I recently deployed Jinzora to be able to listen to . Jinzora can be run from a home server, but in this case I chose to use hosting because it was a) only intended for personal use and b) I didn’t want to put the extra load on my home pc’s c) only intended to put a few albums on there.  It’s a pretty cool app, lets me stream audio and video, make custom playlists, and pretty customizable. However, its not bug free, and not as slick looking as Orb or Ampache. I’ll probably try out Ampache.

I decided to write down all the things that I would love to happen in the next 4 years.  A bunch of these ideas came from playing Budget Hero, an excellent game/simulator of the US budget. It lets you choose from a wide range of policy options and you get to see the insolvency date.

In order to make this more digestable, I’m trying to sort this by category and impact. Check out the Obamameter if you want  to see how he is being ranked against his campaign promises.

Defense

1. Cut defense spending by 15-20%. Since defense spending has risen 70% since 0201,

2. Leave Afghanistan by 2012, work with regional diplomatic partners to transition security details. Let’s get Muslims involved in the decision making of Muslim countries.

3. Raise soldier pay 15%, its been a long time since they got a decent raise. For how equipped our soldiers are, they make a pittance in return. This goal is compatible with Defense goal #1.

4. Stop subcontracting logistics, supply, defense  out to corporations like KBR and Blackwater. The only people that benefit from these setups are the lobbyists and private corporations. Since all these contracts are given out on a no-bid basis, they wind up costing way more than if armed forces had done the work themselves. And KBR has proven track record of short changing the troops

5. Block any US-based defense contractor from moving its headquarters out of the United States.

6. Reduce funding on missile defense shield. Focus on a system that works to defend against a single rogue missile launch, not a 50+ MIRV barrage.

Ethics and Reform

1. Allow lobbyists to interact with members of congress only if there are equal opposing voice constituted of citizens rights groups/grass routes.

2. Ban all personal gifts, all political contributions, of any non-individual group.

3. Full disclosure: whenever a congressman speaks, he must disclose any corporate ties/donations, relationships he has . If this is impossible/impractical, then congressman should wear corporate logos of the companies they work for

4. Any trade agreement to be ratified, must be held for voting via public referendum.

5. Stop giving preferential treatment to regimes who commit atrocities and actively work against and subvert the US:  China and Saudi Arabia.

6. Require any person running for public office to pass a US history & law exam. Most politicians dont seemt o know anything about what is/is not allowed, and what did/did not happen in the past. Scores most be made publicly available.

Taxes & Spending

1. Close loopholes allowing tax credits to corporations for exporting jobs overseas

2. Close loopholes allowing US corporations to run shelters in off-shore refuges like the Canary Islands, or more recently, Antigua.

3. Create tax incentives for forward-looking industries: green technologies, hi-tech, fusion, electronic medical records processing

4. Fully legalize marijuana and apply all rules that alcohol has to it (drinking in public, places of availability, 21 legal age, no DUI, etc). This especially applies in the case of taxies levied. The US would instantly have another billion ortwo  in taxable revenue per year. Also apply medicinal status to marijuana  This makes sense, since Marijuana is the #1 cash crop in the United States, above corn. This would also undermine the  dangerous and murderous Mexcian Drug Cartels, who do 80% of their business in weed.

5. Legalize and tax internet gambling, if run from places that allow it (Native American reservations, nevada, etc).

6. Legalize prostitution. It is essentially legal for the rich, since escort  services and VIP sections in clubs are all-but-named prostitution. Legalization will provide a multi-billion increase in tax revenues per year and will allow regulation that will cut down on crime, assualt/battery of women, drug use, disease, and make the pimp a thing of the past.

Social Issues

1. Executive order allowing Gay Marriage, on the grounds that discrimination against specific minorities is unconstituional.

2. Only give federal money to religious charities if its on the condition that there is no religious requirement to participate,and no prosyletizing involved.

3. Drop drinking legal age to 18, so college binge drinking can finally be regulated properly.

4. Restore funding to PBS, NPR, and the like.  Reinstate educational and public access requirements for networks across all channels. Since everyone has around 70 channels these days, its way too easy for people to not get any educational programming whatsoever.

Education

1. College and high school ethics reform: there is way too much cheating in high school and college levels. The administrators of both have an incentive in allowing kids to cheat: their grades look high, making the schools look better than they actually are. Allowing blatant cheating on the secondary and collegiate levels, just weakens our workforce and strengthens are economic enemies err partners. Grades must actually mean something if

2. Stop adding so much technology to schools and learning process. It’s important to know how to use a computer, program, desktop publish, type, etc. But you do not need a SMART board inside each classroom. Each student doesn’t need a laptop, at least if there are decent computer labs. Focus on the fundamentals, reading writing, arithmetic. Shit arithmetic is in critical condition, most kids cant even long division anymore.

3. Increase school year to 220 days a year, to try to bring American school systems in line with other countries.

4. Put ceilings on how high tuition can go each year, say 3-4%. College is getting out of control.

5. Allow parents to deduct money from their pay checks tax free to pay for college.

6. Increase federal spending on merit-based scholarships and grants, such as the Pell Grant.

7. Force c-span to broadcast in HD, broadcast content over-the-air. Even American without cable should ahve a right to see their congressmen and senators in action.

8. Have nationalized, highly publicized contests for things such as “top animal researcher of the year”. Award cash prizes and free publicity on the airwaves. Get young people thinking that learning is cool, instead of the opposite.

Energy

1. End the corn-based ethanol madness. It makes no sense, it has a negative EROEI (energy returned on energy invested), and the only way its affordable to producers and users is through heavy government subsidy. It also mines all our precious water. Switchgrass, Sugarcane, and hemp are much better solutions that have either or 0+ energy returned.

2. Supercharge investment in solar energy production and research. This is our energy future, fusion power nonwithstanding.

3. Keep ANWR and far-offshore  closed, until we really need it, like after the upcoming resource war of the 2030’s.

Environment

1. Cap and trade. Nuff said

2. Full government acknowledgment that recent rapid Global warming is man-made phenomena. End the debate already!

3. Aim to reduce emissions  to 2000 levels by 2025, in a multilateral binding agreement. Think Kyoto protocol 2.0 . This must include China.

4. Force timber/logging industry to stop harvesting trees for paper. Uses quick-growing grasses like hemp instead.

Healthcare

1. Institute  mandatory prices for medical procedures, a-la the medical system of Japan.  Competitiveness will still exist, but will be in terms quantity, not price. Many practices will fold because their cost structure is too big, but this will promote effective business practices.

2. Force health insurance and hospital companies to be non-profit.

3. Increase FDA funding, to allow better screening of drug side effects.

4. Establish measures to stop the drugco-doctor-insurance cronyism. Doctors should not read promotiional materials as if they’re fact. They should not decorate their offices and write with DrugCo freebies. They shouldn’t be allowed to go on free trips vacations, and conferences on DrugCo’s behalf.

This was way, way under the radar of all my readings, but apparently Google has teamed up with the Big Three music labels (Sony, BMG, Warner) to provide free music to Chinese internet users with the hope of recouping money via advertising revenue. China’s #1 search engine, Baidu already does this.

So why is this happening? Apparently people in China are so used to their free downloads of music, that they would never think of purchasing it! SO the labels apparently have no other course than to give it away! Won’t somebody please think of 50 cent’s children!

I have said often that, if the music labels would recover much more money by just trying to convert 1% of the Chinese music market into paying, legit customers they’d make so much more dinero than they would ever would going after Music Grabbin’ Granny, Leechin Lil’ Lisa, or Downloadin Dave… the Dog.

So you can check the site out here, you can look/search but can’t download. A few interesting observations:

• Guns n Roses  horrible new album “Chinese Democracy’ is not available
• Rage Against the Machine’s “Evil Empire” is available
• System of a Down’s “Steal this Album” is available
• Grateful Dead’s “China Cat Sunflower” is not available
  

Of course there could be a legal market in China and rampant marketplace piracy and bootlegs could be reduced. At the least a Canadian-style approach of taxing blank discs could be used to recoup lost revenue. But of course China, our most favoured trading partner, still doesn’t care about any sort of Intellectual property laws or patents. And for some reason, teh US doesn’t make an issue. Probably somethign to do with China buying all of our debt used to finance political wars and subsidize failed energy policies.

Of course this is also happening at the same time that Sweden launched the iPred system, enablign their equivelent of teh RIAA/MPAA to directly send fines to  people without need of any silly old legal system

In case you’re saying “Wow I dont want to be screwed over to help a soverign country!” Well guess what, what do you think the flushing out of all our domestic industries has helped us? Gee, I wonder.

As everyone is probably well aware, even you non-IT-total-newbz out there, that on April 1st a internet worm with the aesthetically pleasing name of Conficker will activate (ficker means the f-word in zhe German language).  As I type this, the worm is makin its way through the  intarwebs in Europe and Asia and starting to impact DNS speeds, but not to a worrisome level.

Most scanners have covered this worm for a while, and Microsoft pushed out a fix a few weeks ago. Most people should be fine. However, the media loves its imminent disaster non-stories, so this all over the place.

What people really should be worried about, is Ghostnet. a bot-net found to have infected a whole bunch of government computers, and even some defense systems. From wiki:

Compromised systems were discovered in the embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan and the office of the Prime Minister of Laos. The foreign ministries of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan were also targeted. No evidence was found that U.S. or U.K. government offices were infiltrated, although a NATO computer was monitored for half a day and the computers of the Indian embassy in Washington, D.C., were infiltrated.

Scary stuff right?  Rearchers from Canuckistan found this one in realation to complaints from Tibetan-freedom groups about emails getting stolen.. In addition to the systems listed above, the Dailai Lama’s offices around the world all got infiltrated.

Who’s to blame? By current guestimation and inductive reasoning techniques, our good friends and most-favored trading partners, China of course! China denies it of course, sayings its illegal to do cyber attacks in their country. But, this is far from the first time they have been detected in infiltrations. Just a few months ago, Defense officials reported they saw traces of Chinese infilitration in  some pentagon computers. But this won’t be a big story in the media; ordinary folks are impacted so much and the Media likes to keep on its toes regarding causing a ruckus with the aformentioned Chinese government and potentially straining the relationship of american companies who depend upon chinese production  (read: most of them)- the same companies who advertise heavily with said media organizations.

So the world wont end tomorrow, either from Chinese black-ops hackers or the Conficker. But if your “free Tibet” emails might get read overseas.

Something interesting I just found on Mental Floss:

Economists have said the size of the hole in the doughnut directly mirrors the state of the economy. The bigger the hole, the worse the economy is. Makes sense, really – means bakers can use less dough per doughnut and charge the same price.

Makes sense kinda, as doughnuts, and liquid fusion (coffee), are always sold at dirt cheap prices, unless of course you go to Starbucks.

Thinking further, here’s why it makes sense.  For example, McDonalds was very hesitant to raise its dollar-meal prices because those products are what brings people to those establishments.  McDonald’s has value-driven customers. Dollar meals have a higher demand elasticity, because they are highly in demand items that have plenty of substitutes.  So  to avoid losing the extra business, Ronald would rather raise prices on higher-priced food items before raising it on the dollar meal value items which are  the drivers. People won’t complain if a big Mac is 10 cents extra, but will complain if their dollar cheeseburger costs $1.10

Conversely, I do not think doughnuts are what drives people to a DD – its more ideally the excellent coffee. DD has caffeine-driven customers. Coffee is higher priced already, so people are additionally sensitive to price increases on these items.

Doughnuts ar often bought in bulk, like the affordably-priced dozen configuration. So any price change on an individually priced item would be less noticeable on a bulk-value purchase. Additionally, since doughnuts are not drivers of people going to DD, and also are bought in bulk, it makes sense to cut the size of the doughnut.

People would be less sensitive and less observant to changes in doughnuts, particularly changes that made them eat healthier and do not cause a price increase. In addition, doughnuts are not available that widely, but every single store during breakfast time sells coffee. So there are plenty of substitutes of coffee, but less for doughnuts.

So it makes sense because its good marketing and good economics….So mind your holes.

Other food related economic measures:

• Big Mac Index – Purchasing power in different countries as measured by the price of a Big Mac
• Tall Latte Index – A competitor to the Big Mac Index.

*looks down*

We’ll that didn’t turn out has planned did it? Let’s hope this time, a recommencement speech is properly in order. A year later, some additional motivation later, some relative increased happiness in my life, I am returning to running a blog. This time, I really mean to. Really. Seriously, it’s like totally gonna happen.

Haters just want to hate. at least thats what the music with the fast beats tells me.

In the days to come, I will be reinserting all the old blog posts but organizing them properly. Changes will come quickly, fast, and without warning.

–larsinio

Bought a domain today. Obviously. Dreamhost is a pretty spectacular host. Lots of space (500gb), lots of bandwidth (5tb a month), shell access, and support for just about everything: wordpress (obviously), mysql, php, cgi, Secure transactions, and a lot of room for creativity. aside from just trying to learn, I’m also just trying to capture some musings in the vain hope of reflecting at a later time. Things are good

So i’m trying to force myself to learn all sorts of new web 2.0 services, and see how running a website has changed since last time around. I’ll tell you one thing though, i feel theres TOO much integration. Everyones blog integrates into 15 odd web services: Digg, del.lic.ious, technorati, facebook, last.fm , all sorts of everything google, rss feeds, atom feeds, mobile web transcoders, and a lot of stuff I am certainly forgetting.

I’ll come up with my own template hopefully this weekend.