The Strongest Man Alive

I don't post here anymore.  

Here's a link to my most recent blog entry on Metroblogging Pittsburgh.  It's about Justine Ezarik, rising Pittsburgh-based internet star. 

Show us what Mother's Day means.

Mother's Day

Nerd Alert: Penny-Arcade Podcast

Penny Arcade! is, for my money, the best webcomic there is, despite the vast numbers if imitators. PVP is good, too, but it's more traditional. Penny Arcade is absurd, ridiculous, filthy, vulgar and hilariously funny. It's about video games, so many of the comics might not make much sense to you if you don't play them.

They recently joined the three-year bandwagon called podcasting, which is basically a radio show that you can subscribe to, and which downloads instantly to your computer every time the podcast creator releases an episode. I've written about them here before.

I highly recommend the Penny Arcade podcast - while it is chock full of inside baseball sorts of conversations about the game industry and video games in general, it also features some glimpses into the personal lives of the Penny Arcade creators, Gabe and Tycho.

They didn't go to college. They worked in tech support and in retail for most of their young lives. They have been friends since high school, and are now in their early 30s. They have wives and both had kids recently. They started Penny Arcade about 8 years ago as a hobby, and after years of consistently producing a comic three times a week, gathered a huge following online. It's such a big following that Penny Arcade is now a full-blown company that employs other people, has a huge expo every year (that was at one time rumored to be taking over for E3), a million-dollar children's charity called Child's Play and actual books that you can buy in any bookstore.

They're also two of the most naturally funny people I've ever heard. The podcast bucks the trend by having kinda shitty recording quality (the volume is frequently too low and they don't seem to have the mics close enough to their mouths), no theme song and no production values. It's just Gabe and Tycho writing the comic for the day - no frills, no padding.

That doesn't begin to communicate how genuinely amusing and entertaining the podcast is. Subscribe to the iTunes feed here, or listen to the file here.

I have used Macs consistently for about 5 years, and exclusively for about 3. I say exclusive with some reservations - any time I've spent on a Windows machine in the last few years has been spent either at work (where I have no choice) or in order to play games (which are sadly underrepresented in the Mac universe). I do everything else on my iMac or my iBook before it.

Here are the reasons:

1) The macintosh operating system was created by artists. Windows was created by engineers. This results in a simpler, more intuitive workspace.

2) There was a time in my life when tinkering with the internal organs of a computer made me happy. Then, I started to care more about actually getting things done. It's a cleche, but Apples just work. For example, in order to uninstall a program from my Mac, I drag its icon from the Applications folder and drop it into the trash. I don't have the time or the inclination to watch my computer chunk and chunder through dialogue boxes and progress bars just to uninstall the shareware program whose demo time has expired.

3) It runs Windows really well. I can still play my games.

4) It has a little camera and a little microphone built-in.

5) There are some damn fine programs available for the Mac, giving functionality and integration to your system that I just haven't found in Windows. Here are my top six:

- Quicksilver. To quote the developer's description, this program is "a unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data." This does not even begin to describe the miraculous functionality you can get from it. It basically allows me to control every aspect of my computer just by typing keystrokes. To send an email to somebody, I press the hotkey, type the person's last name (or part of it, as it has a very intelligent auto-complete) and it gives me a little icon for that person's contact information in my Address Book, hit tab, type the letters "co" (for "compose), and hit enter. Up pops a blank email with that person's email as the primary receiver. By using similarly simple and obvious key combinations, I can add more recipients, write a subject, attach one or many files and even write the whole email just within Quicksilver and I never have to take my hands off the keyboard.

Also, I can search any website that has a search function without actually going to that website. And I can access my Firefox and Safari bookmarks even if those programs aren't currently open. It's really, really powerful.

I can say much, much more about Quicksilver, but you should just watch some videos.

- Textexpander. I blog a lot, and blogs usually have links in them. Instead of typing the acrobatic keystrokes necessary to make this frequently-used html code, I simply type "llink" into any text box anywhere on my Mac, and it takes the link I copied to the clipboard, lays out the code, and puts the cursor between the "a" tags, right where I need it. It can do this with any block of text you type. You assign any flag text you like, and anytime you type that text, it replaces it with the text you have previously written for that trigger.

Or, instead of trying to imagine what my hamfisted description describes, you can watch a video of it at work.

- Transmission + TVShows. This power combo still blows my mind. Transmission is just a simple, bare-bones, pretty-looking bittorrent client. I tell TVShows what shows I want to watch. As soon as those shows are available on various Bittorrent directories, it grabs the link and sticks it into Transmission, which immediately begins downloading them. If I'm not home to watch Heroes, for example, it'll be downloaded and ready to watch by the time I get home - usually within a half an hour of it airing. It's like Tivo without the Tivo.

- iLife. All new Macs come with this power suite of creative programs. It includes iPhoto, which organizes your pictures just like iTunes does, with powerful functionality and built-in editing capabilities. I use iMovie to edit the movies I make. Though I have no talent for it, I occasionally dabble in the little- but-powerful music/sound studio called Garage Band. And for making simple websites with lots of neat functionality, I use iWeb.

On a related note, the stuff built into OS X itself is pretty rad. No need to download a separate program - it has pdf capabilities all by itself, and anything you can print you can instead save as a pdf. Also, hold down a few keystrokes, and you can take a screenshot of all or a selected part of the screen. And changing the big, pretty icons (or small, pretty icons, if you prefer) is really easy, using copy/paste functions. And with some small, rare exceptions, you can drag an item from any application and stick it in any other application. If I want to add a photo to a website I'm working on, I grab it from iPhoto and drop it right onto the page.

Also, Macs now come with Front Row, which is a media center that I can control with the little remote control that came with my Mac. Lying in bed, or sitting within visual range of my computer, I can display every piece of media on it, from the photos to the music to the movies. Example: A couple of friends and I looked through the pictures I took at a recent outing as I controlled the display of all of those photographs on my beautiful 20" widescreen from the comfort of my bed.

- Teleport. I just discovered this one. It lets me put my iBook right next to my iMac and control it with my desktop computer's keyboard and mouse. All I do is drag the mouse pointer across a predetermined edge of screen (which I assign), and I'm instantly controlling the iBook. It's like having two displays, except one of the displays is a fully-functioning computer. Installing it is really easy, too - all you do is install it on both of the computers you want to control, click a couple of boxes in the preference pane, and it just works.

- Adium. It's simply the best chat client ever, and it's only available for the Mac. It seamlessly combines all of the major chat protocols into one unified interface - I use it for MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk and AIM. It's also completely customizable. Oh, and it's totally free, too.

It's also worth noting the programs I don't have to run, like memory-hogging antivirus suites and the aforementioned Acrobat Reader.

Every program listed above is free, except TextExpander (which I will happily purchase when the demo ends).

I don't know if this surprisingly long lecture is going to convince you to ditch your Windows machine for a Mac, but I hope it will. Macs are slightly more expensive (and the gap is shrinking), but they're worth it.

...or anywhere else.

A 17 year old girl was murdered for having a presumably romantic relationship with a young man from another religion. She is a Kurd, he was allegedly a Sunni.

This sort of thing happens here once in a while. For example, Matthew Shepard was killed for being gay.

The difference? Shepard was killed by two drunk rednecks who sought to "rob a gay guy."

The girl? She was killed by a mob of over a thousand people, including local police officers.

Our country isn't always great. I am appalled by recent attempts to legislate bigotry and homophobia. I'm disgusted by the anger directed at illegal immigrants, which is bigotry disguised as something else.

The ideals of western civilization stand as the greatest political achievement in history - the victory of reason, logic and liberty over dogma, religion, fear and unfettered emotions.

You won't get arrested for kissing a girl in public. You won't be tortured and then executed for having sex with the person you love.

It's not just "a different culture." It's disgusting. It should not be tolerated by anybody.

Sony held a partyrecently in which a decapitated goat served as the centerpiece:

Guests were enjoined to pull (and then eat) fake entrails out of the goat's carcass.  The party stuck closely to the theme of ancient Greece, as a way to promote their Greek-themed game, God of War 2.  There were topless chicks in togas, too.  I don't know if those were common in ancient Greece parties, but they're not nearly common enough here. 

Personally, I don't see what the big deal is.  Goats and other animals are killed every day.  I would be willing to bet that the number of killed animals every day is in the high hundreds, and perhaps even in the thousands (especially on game day).  It might be in bad taste, but that certainly is not unique to Sony's video game promotion parties.

Most of us eat animals.  In order to eat an animal, you have to kill it.  It's one of those immutable laws of nature, and also the reason why carnivores tend to have sharp teeth. 

Is killing an animal an act of cruelty?  I think most people would qualify their answer based on the intention.  If you're killing an animal in order to give yourself an erection, that's probably cruel.  If you're killing an animal in order to eat the meat on its bones, that's probably ok (to most people).  If you're killing an animal so jaded entertainment journalists can laugh and giggle while they put their hands in the cold void that once held its beating, thriving heart...well, I don't have an answer.

And maybe I just convinced myself that what I said earlier is wrong.  Maybe I do have a problem with Sony using a dead goat to promote its video game.  Maybe killing animals just for our pleasure is wrong.  Maybe we should leverage our technological know-how and ingenious American spirit to create foods that taste and feel just like meat, but necessitated no dead animals. 

Shit, gotta go.  My burgers are ready.

Pissed Catholic Mother

1 comment

I'm an atheist, and so is the kid in the video, above.  His mom doesn't like his announcement, and someone thoughtfully videotaped the fallout (but, alas, not the whole fallout, just the beginning of it). 

I can't decide if the kid in the video is actually an atheist, or if he's making the announcement as a teenage rebellion against his obviously faithful Catholic mother.  Either way, I applaud him for choosing to use atheism as the fulcrum of his rebellion; it might be the worst lifestyle choice he could have made, if you look at the statistics.   Yes, coming out to the hyperreligious as a gay son carries with it a great deal of potential (if not certain) pain.  But hyperreligious parents who also happen to be smart (which does happen, apparently) might accept the facts, that homosexuality is not a choice - their son is born that way, and sometimes these sorts of parents might realize that.

But an atheist son?  That little bastard made a conscious choice to stop believing in god, having dumped his faith in invisible monsters and moved a few steps closer to accepting the universe for what it is and not what we wish it to be.  The kid in the video is throwing the Bible into the fire, implicitly telling his parents that what they believe is wrong.  The dad seems unpurturbed.  The mom goes bug nutty.

I never really came out to my parents as an atheist, though I have been one since my first year of high school.  They know I'm an atheist, and probably knew back then, too, and we can talk about it without anger or disappointment, but I wasn't very strident about it as a kid.  I openly questioned religion on a regular basis, and expressed my preference for science over faith, but I tried not to be a dick about it.  I was lucky to have the parents I had - while neither of them are atheist or even agnostic, my father is very pragmatic and keeps most of his religion and his faith to himself, valuing it as he sees fit.  My mother was raised by a physician and amateur scientist who was known on at least one occasion to bring his kids into the garage while he dropped rocks into cement-filled pie plates to show how moon craters are made; they used to take road trips specifically to look at old battlefields or particularly interesting rock formations.  She understands my point when we have our sedate debates about the nature of faith, but respectfully disagrees. 

The overriding cultural belief is that atheists are inherently immoral.  We don't believe in god, which means we don't believe in heaven, which means we don't have any reason to be moral.  Richard Dawkins, among many others, say that the moral atheist is even more moral than the moral Christian.  We don't do good works because we're afraid of the punishment for not doing good works.  We don't avoid immorality because we think we'll go to hell.  We are good people because we believe in responsibility.  We know that doing good things benefits everybody.  We understand the value of the social contract - if you act with ethics and benevolence, then you're holding up your part of the contract.  Being good is its own reward, but good people also have good things happen to them.

Personally, I'm not sure I agree with Dawkins.  I'm not going to get into the game of My Belief System is Superior in Every Way To Yours, even if I believe it to be true.  After all, faith and religion are causing an awful lot of bad things these days.  If you ask me, doing good things is fine by itself - I don't need to know why you're doing them.

I'm very glad I have parents who were understanding, if not wholeheartedly supportive of my decision.  My mother probably wishes that I would believe in >something, but I never hear that from her.  And I still get presents on Christmas.

Today, Rachel Ray makes the point for me (these are old pictures, and you've probably seen them before):