What’s this? My favorite Genre, Author, and state of mind, all in one post? Hurrah!

Ok, I discovered a wonderful thing last year, right before the infamous wipe of my archives. This wonderful thing was a new Gibson book. I was so happy in my discovery I created a Wikipedia post on it, and then forgot about it. Right before Harry Potter premiered, I checked up on the article, only to find it was coming out a few days later. Huzzah!

But at the same time I had started my internship at Adobe, and thus it slipped again from my memory. Thankfully though, Michael Heilemann showed me the light, when I stumbled across his post. Praise the gods, Spook Country has been released and I will be going to buy it tomorrow. (more…)

Popularity: 33% [?]

You know what I love? Hot Coffee. You know why I love Hot Coffee? Because thanks to the whole lawsuit thing, Hot Coffee doesn’t remind me of the wonderfully delicious drink, instead it reminds me of coding and the nerd culture as a whole.

This weekend I attended SuperHappyDevHouse 19, known affectionately as shdh19. Shdh, is at it’s core a place for geek, nerds, designers, and developers of all kinds to meet, greet, and possibly even get a few personal projects pounded out in code. This time, shdh was located in Los Gatos, which was awesome because it was near my house. I originally went with the goal of programming, but ended up spending more time meeting people, which was better for me, I think, because I really don’t know a ton of people in the area with the same interests as me. This of course is due to the fact that I haven’t attended more of these events, not because they don’t exist. Because in all honesty, finding computer “enthusiasts” in Silicon Valley is like finding people with bad teeth in fifteen century Britain. (more…)

Popularity: 28% [?]

Thunderbird that is. According to this post by Mitchell Baker, the Thunderbird product is not getting enough love, and I totally agree. Having thought about the topic a little, I think one of the better solutions is to break Thunderbird off and create the Thunderbird Foundation. Although I don’t have a buisness background, or even a deep connection to the Thunderbird movement, here is my reasoning.

• Thunderbird is a powerful product but the shadow that Firefox and the infamous Outlook cast is dark and long. While many know of Thunderbird’s existence, it is not a mainstream product the way Firefox is. Creating a separate foundation will, in theory, promote much needed hype and help Thunderbird establish itself more as it’s own product and not the bastard child of Firefox.
• In terms of Outlook, Thunderbird has heavy competition. Outlook is one of those applications that works well enough, but it is so widely used, especially in the business world that many users aren’t realizing it’s potential. I believe that if Thunderbird gets moved to it’s own foundation, it could have the opportunity to have more money and people thrown at it, not too many mind you, and become a more professional app.

(more…)

Popularity: 30% [?]

I have a disturbingly large amount of broccoli on my plate this weekend. First off, Friday night, Harry Potter. I don’t know how much needs to be said about Harry and his wacky adventures, but I’ve been reading this since the first book came out in Britain, and I am hooked. It amazes me how much this book sucks me in. I normally get sucked into books, but I swear I’m addicted to HP and all of it’s goodness. What’s even funnier, I don’t like Harry too much as a character. Sure he’s interesting and angsty and all, but the two things that suck me in are Harry’s past (you know the whole, good morning Harry, your life sucks, time to go be a wizard thing) and the supporting characters. Ginny, Hermione, Ron, the twins, Neville, all of the professors, etc. It’s just how well developed the world is that J.K. Rowling writes about. I feel as though I can reach out and touch it, yet not too much is described so my mind can wander.

On Saturday, I will be attending WordCamp. In all honesty, I would much rather attend Sunday, but more about that later. I am really excited about the general idea, and I’m hoping the event will get me excited enough to get me writing more often. As I said, I had hoped to also go on Sunday, because I love the developer side of Wordpress, I’m even thinking I might finally release the few plug-ins I “wrote” (as in I wrote them, but they suck), so the extra help would have been nice, but oh well.
(more…)

Popularity: 29% [?]

Hey there readers. For the 4 or so of you still visiting my page, welcome. As a few of you know, through twitter, Facebook, or just general contact, I have recently returned from a trip with my immediate family to eastern China. I visited five wonderful cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Xi An, Guilin, and Shou Zhou, each incredibly different, and all relatively large.

I’ve been staying away from the details of exactly what we did, mainly because it’s pretty detailed. But I’ll give you guys a little run down of the trip. We landed in Beijing, and i got food poisoning from the buffet dinner we had at the Hotel. While my parents and brother spent the next day touring the Forbidden Palace, Temple of Heaven, and Tienanmen Square, I got used to pucking ever half hour. The next day we hit up the Great Wall of China and some tombs. And the next day we visited the Summer Palace and took a plane to Xi An. (more…)

Popularity: 35% [?]

Another quick update, also conveniently Starcraft based. Back when i was active on battle.net, there were these awesome maps called Tower Defense. You built a maze trying to keep the constant wave of baddies from going to the other side of the map. Well, I was pointed to the this fantastic flash game called Desktop Tower Defense.

Same concept as the Starcraft maps, you build a maze with different types of towers that try to kill off all of the bad guys before they reach the end.  To understand how popular this game is, check out it’s news page, the stats are showing at least 2000 individual players each hour, plus over 5 billion bad guys destroyed each hour.

See what others in the blogosphere are saying, and also check this hilarious post on why you shouldn’t play this game.

Cya later,

/Nat

Popularity: 35% [?]

So this is pretty awesome, IGN, and the general internet, has shown me the light. On May 19th Blizzard announced Starcraft 2. I suggest you go check out the above sites, just because they give great pictures of both gameplay and concept art.

Most of the units have been retooled and things look cleaner and it sounds as though choices were made to make the three races better. The issue that i am noticing is that right now the game seems to have the same interface. The game basically looks the same.  I am really hoping that they make some significant changes because right now, i dont see why people would want to spend the money. I understand that the game is not yet finalized, but seriously, would you pay $50 for  a retooled version of an old game?

Well I’m hopeful. Blizzard has done a lot right with their Warcraft series, now if we are lucky they might make up for Starcraft: Ghost.

/Nat

Popularity: 31% [?]

I am currently taking a class called Engl 149, or Tech Writing for engineers. This class has, for the most part, been interesting. It has gone over how to properly present materials depending on audience and content. I feel that I have learned a few things, and overall had a good experience with the class.

But the one thing that really hit home was while showing my teacher a resume cover letter. My letter had a list of three websites, she said she would look at this one. No reason given, she just said she would look “at that pseudoweb one” which gave me mixed feelings. For one, I’m glad that this isn’t two years ago where this website was full of bad jokes and angry statements towards my school’s administration, but it also signals a stage which I think many of my generation are coming to, and it is biting them in the ass. (more…)

Popularity: 30% [?]

Welcome to the “new” pseudoweb.net! In reality, we aren’t that new, but we are now on a brand new server provided by Dixiesys Hosting and a new theme from Phu Ly.

The other thing new about the site is my little twitter status up top. It is powered by the wordpress Twitt-Too plugin. I also use the Firefox plugin Twitterbar to update my twitter, it’s rather convenient. Anyway, much more depressing article latter, I promise…

p.s. Add me in Twitter :)

Popularity: 27% [?]

The Apple TV has been hacked. You can now run the full mac OSX on it, plus enable USB and add functionality to frontrow You can even enable SSH.

But what is making this whole thing amazing is the fact that Apple doesn’t care. I mean there have been a lot of smart and dumb moves in terms of hacking hardware, and this is definitely one of the smarter ones. I feel that this device may flop, but still it has potential.

And while this is all very cool, what is the best news is that companies are starting to release unencrypted versions of their songs on the iTunes music store. Possible in a response to Steve Jobs letter proclaiming the DRM music was the reason for low sales of music. I am really excited for this, because the more open standards, the more chances we have.

Popularity: 27% [?]