Josh Wieder

Here is to a bit of solidarity with the people of Boston following the attack on the Boston marathon yesterday. Such a despicable, cruel crime met with honor courage and self sacrifice by those immediately effected.

I've been thinking about Earth. Typically we think of the Earth as being a perfect sphere as represented by those silly globes from grade school. In reality, due to concentrations of magma, mountains and deep sea trenches, the Earth is anything but a perfect sphere. Not only does this distort our concept of a perfectly spherical planet, but it also distorts the Earth's gravitational field, causing regional anomalies. Visualization helps. Here are a few images of the Earth's gravitational anomalies in relief:

Add caption

As more of day to day life and communications takes place on IP based networks, and as the regulation  surrounding that convergence removes barriers to owners of those networks providing information gleaned from those communications to third parties (including the State) without fear of tort or criminal  reprisal, it becomes more and more clear that tomorrow's world is one with much less privacy than that envisioned during, say, the writing of the Federalist Papers. The New York Times just published a discussion on the topic that is worth perusing (even if you are not particularly a fan of the Times).

I recently came across this funny and insightful note on the issues admins face selling changes to their users. Originally aimed at online gaming communities, the same relationship management issues pop up when you update a webmail interface, introduce a VPN or really add any features to a long-standing and actively used tech product. A big hat tip goes to Wilhelm of TAGN for this. "If your community was currently being dragged from place to place in a wooden box lined with broken glass, and you told them you were going to replace the box with a hovercar lined with fur, you would have [to] pry half of them out of the box with a crowbar. And some of them will be complaining years from now that riding in the box built character, and fur makes them sneeze." -The Metaverse Mod Squad (Sanya Weathers) on Making Community Changes Without Pain

I'm a fan of video games. While being a grown up means I don't have a chance to play them as frequently as I used to, I still enjoy decompressing on the weekend with the old XBox and try to do it as much as I can. That said, I would rather jump out of an airplane without a parachute than pay $60 for a newly released console game. No matter how much I take home, its difficult for me to justify that  sort of expense. Every once in a while there are some titles that pique my interest and that at least tent me to break that rule. However, a disturbing trend among game developers has just about ensured that will never happened. I am referring to the trend in which a video game is released to the public without being finished. I could go on for quite some time listing examples, but two particularly egregious examples have been well publicized recently. The first, Aliens: Colonial Marines. Take a look at the brief YouTube video below for an example of standard game play that custo