Weekends are made to be broken

Ever have a weekend sneak up on you that you intended to be quiet and peaceful and ended up being hectic and exhausting?

Yeah, me either.

For some reason, I had thought this weekend would be fairly mundane and routine. We had Caleb’s soccer game on Saturday morning, and that was pretty much it. We had planned a get-together for my dad’s birthday on Sunday, but canceled it when he admitted he really didn’t want us to go through the trouble. Likewise, a meeting for our upcoming concert at the end of October was moved to tonight. The weekend was shaping up to be fairly boring.

And it was.

We lounged. A lot more than we probably should have. We cleaned some more boxes out of our storage shed and I hefted a few boxes up to the attic. We straightened up a bit. Played with the boys. Ate periodically. All pretty much mundane trivial stuff.

Normally a weekend intended to be unencumbered ends up being completely the opposite. I suppose our karma is being stored for a potentially painful weekend coming up? Who knows? All I know is that I got nothing accomplished this past weekend, and I’m all right with that.

Of course, I did get to catch up on about 4 to 5 hours of Metroid Prime 3. I’m at about 15 hours, and I feel like I’m over halfway through. If the game ended within the next 3 to 4 hours, I’d be okay with that. This is the first game I’ve played in a long time where I have the itch to complete it and immediately run through it again on a higher difficulty setting.

We have a lot scheduled for the weekend ahead. Here’s hoping it all doesn’t blow up in our faces!

Twitter + tracking = Twacking?

Twitter has implemented a cool new feature called “tracking“, which I am officially dubbing “twacking” because it sounds dirty. Basically on your phone or IM Twitter account you can send the message track <topic> and anytime any Twitter message appears on the network with that string in it, it gets sent to you. So I can set track metroid, and I can get a near real-time stream of people’s commentary having something to do with Metroid.

That’s a great idea. Stowe Boyd doesn’t like it because he thinks it’s supposed to be something else.

#Hashtags are declarative and imply a community. If I tag things with ‘#travels’ I would expect there to be a place where I can see the aggregated stream of all people’s posts with ‘#travels’ in it. But I don’t necessarily want to see every post with the word ‘travels’ in it, do I?

I think they need to rethink this a bit.

No, Stowe, the problem is that you are trying to make the new functionality fit a concept in your mind that isn’t the same idea. I like the idea of the #hashtags, I really do, and I think their implementation could create some really interesting, dynamically-evolving communities within the Twitter infrastructure. The #hashtags (which, like Stowe I always end up typing #hastags, I don’t know why) is a great concept for aggregating content. But this new feature isn’t an aggregating feature. It isn’t a community feature. This is a feature that allows someone to dynamically follow and discover conversations taking place within the Twitterverse. It’s purely a stream of information concept. You get hit with various, unrelated pieces of data that all pertain to a specific topic of your choosing, and you get to decide what voice to inevitably listen to. It’s a discovery mechanism. A simple utility for following topics as they flow through the endless stream of thought on the Twitter lines. And I happen to think it’s a great idea. So long as it works as intended (I haven’t had the chance to use it yet).

So, no, you wouldn’t just put track travels into this system. That makes no sense. That isn’t a topic. Don’t expect an aggregation system where there is none. Maybe you would enter track Europe or track Italy to see specific regional content as it passes through. But you aren’t going to collect this information. You’re going to set a specific topic, and watch the conversations pass, and look for something interesting.

Yes, I know it isn’t what you want, Stowe, but that doesn’t mean they need to rethink it. It means you need to realize that not every feature implemented in a given technology is going to be designed with you specifically in mind.

My new cell phone

I’m lucky enough to have a company cell phone, and my lease is up on my current phone, the one with the cracked display panel. So, I’m getting a new one. I opted to pick up an LG Cherry Chocolate.

I know it isn’t the sexy geek gadget du jour, like an iPhone or a Nokia N95. But since my last phone was a Samsung Bland Design No. 4™, anything looks good to me at this point.

My co-worker calls it a “girl phone”. But in his defense, he’s a jerk.

Final Fantasy VII remixes

I grabbed the torrent this weekend for the entire Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream, the latest OCRemix community game music project. I’ve only gotten through CD2, but it is a phenomenal album so far. Far surpassing Chrono Symphonic, which I found to be fairly dull and repetitive. But this FF7 music kicks and punches, and is great background music to keep me motivated while I’m sludging through some fairly mundane tasks hopped up on Alka Seltzer cold and sinus.

I’ve really enjoyed some of the earlier albums OCRemix has put together, such as the Street Fighter II compilation, Blood on the Asphalt and the Sonic 3 and Knuckles Project Chaos. I haven’t listened to the rest, mainly because I only download the albums to games I’ve actually played or am personally familiar with. The exception is that I have to admit I haven’t downloaded the Super Metroid album yet. The reason for that is because I’ve listened to enough Super Metroid music on OCRemix, I’m not really hungry for more.

Not sure yet what the next project will be, but here’s hoping it’s something as grand as FF7. Hopefully it isn’t just FF8.

Babies everywhere!

So, while we were all busy congratulating Robert Scoble on the birth of his baby Milan–likely the first ever Twittered birth–another baby was being born. My friends Travis and Mandy had their first child born at 9:45 this morning. I got to see the little guy briefly over my lunch break today. His name is Caedmon (not named after the Anglo-Saxon poet, I’m afraid, though I will try to convince them to spell it with the Old English ‘æ’ grapheme regardless), and he’s awesome. I should have some pictures to post sometime Monday after the family gets back home on Sunday.

Congratulations to BOTH sets of parents today!

Mooncakes are Asia’s fruitcakes

I have a co-worker who has had the opportunity to travel to our Singapore office. One of the foods he mentioned as being a particularly tasty treat while in the country was some dessert dish called a “mooncake“. Just last week, we had one of our Singapore office IT staff visit the US for some cross-training. She brought a couple of these mooncakes with her as a treat for her American counterparts; a treat that my co-worker obviously found particularly pleasant given his previous love of the dessert.

All of that puts this commentary from Cory Doctorow in profound perspective:

A couple nights back, I mentioned mooncakes at a dinner in Beijing and the table erupted in hilarity and derision — my hosts advised me that mooncakes are the Chinese equivalent of Christmas cakes — no one likes them, everyone gives them (I like Christmas cake!). They are haloed with weird possible urban legends, like the scandal of a mooncake manufacturer that was recycling last year’s filling because no one can taste the difference between year-old and fresh mooncake stuffin’.

Mooncake, indeed.

Does Netscape’s death foretell Mahalo’s impending doom?

So, the Netscape homepage digg clone is finally being killed off. Well, to be honest, the way it sounds, it isn’t being “killed”, per se. Evidently the users like the concept of social news, they just want it off their Netscape homepage. It might be moved elsewhere within the AOL network, but Riley sounds skeptical that that will actually occur.

It’s a huge misinterpretation to claim that the “death” of the Netscape homepage speaks ill of Mahalo, but it warrants discussion. Netscape was huge news when Jason Calacanis helmed the site, and it was his motivations and constant conversations regarding the site that basically kept the concept moving. Once he left, the rumors of dissolving the site began, and obviously will soon be coming to fruition.

Right now, Calacanis is heading up Mahalo. So, when he finally leaves that project behind and in someone else’s capable hands, what will become of it six months down the road? A year? Will a thin-ice concept like Mahalo continue to find traction within even a niche community if Calacanis isn’t there to cram the idea down everyone’s throats?

It really depends on who he puts in his place. The person who replaces him needs to be a motivator. A prognosticator. A person who is loud and can convince people to try something wacky, even if it doesn’t sound like a good concept at first. When he leaves Mahalo–and don’t even for a second think he won’t someday–he needs to leave behind a mini-Calacanis in his place.

Can this world handle a Calacanis and a mini-Calacanis? I submit to you that it can.

But I still don’t care for Mahalo.