Can you digg it

Just a quick post, before it's off to crazy farm for Thanksgiving.

A site that has been rivaling del.icio.us for my attention lately is digg.com.

Digg.com is a site where the readers rate each news story as the come up and the ones with the most votes come to the front page while the boring ones don't. So the effect is that you get to see everything that everyone thinks is cool and not a lot of boring stuff.

If you want, you can join in the fun and rate the stories yourself, but you don't have to, in order to enjoy it.

Right now they have a bunch of articles on the Xbox 360 (what's this about it crashing?? Stupid Microsoft, when will they learn.) but the articles and topics change pretty rapidly.

Check it out, it's pretty cool. And have a wonderful, if not awkward, Thanksgiving.

Best Video Games of All Time: Why Sonic Sucks

They had a site on del.icio.us today that summed up a ton of "Top 10" lists for the greatest video games ever. I didn't read them all but they have a summary of all the reviews near the bottom that show Link and Mario leading the pack of characters in the best games ever. They also make note that Sega has a very poor showing. Sonic, Sega's mascot has never been in the same field / ballpark / game as the other console poster children.

And here's why:
Sonic was always too good for his own good. He tried too hard. Sonic and his crew told people they were cool, and therefore, by definition, they were not. See at him over there... Looking so cool. But look closely at the fear in his eye. There is a hole in his soul that coolness will never fill.

Like Poochie from the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon. Being too cool is a guaranteed failure.

So, if you ever want to become one of the greatest video game characters of all time, play it cool, but not too cool. And it helps if you are a racial sterotype, or an elf.

Update: I forgot to mention that my wife's blog asks the question: "Who would win in a fight, Kirby or Rogue?" which is why I wanted to post about video game matchups.

I hate Criptically Simple Solutions

So my friend has had an iBook for probably over a year now, and his airport card has been flaky at best for most of that time. I installed tiger on it with all the updates, we messed with the hardware itself, plugging it in and cursing at it, and what not. But the problem only got worse.

We tried everything I could find, but he finally told me to switch it back to panther, when the computer could at least get on some of the time.

So I had it backing up his documents, and I was getting ready to wipe and install, when I decided to check my friend google one more time. Among the hundreds of people with similar sounding problems, but no working solutions, I found one person on a forum with the exact same problems as we did. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and he finds out the antenna that plugs into the airport card wasn't pushed in all the way... You have to really snap it in.

Damn it if that didn't fix our problem too. The apple "genius's" who upgraded his ram never plugged the airport card in correctly, and our messing with the system is what caused even more problems. This solution is far too simple to ever be found. The antenna looked plugged in when it wasn't, and it just took some brute force to correct. This isn't how computer problems should be solved! Stupid airport antenna, why didn't they just build the antenna port into the regular connection?

Simple problems like these are the hardest to solve, as all it takes is desperation.

Website: Kill Bill's Browser

Here's something off the del.icio.us feed that is kind of funny.

http://www.killbillsbrowser.com/

It gives you just some (13) of the reasons why you should be using firefox instead of IE (internet explorer).

My favorites:
The paperclip. What a truely horrible thing to be built into an operating system.

and

You won't miss hearing:

"I verified my credit card number since the computer said it had spyware, but now I can't email..."

very funny, and so true.
Also funny because we just watched Kill Bill last night

Everyone Should be Using Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a great online resource with a catchy name.  Del.icio.us is an online, taggable, social bookmark manager.  This means basically you can bookmark a page in del.icio.us, and then get to it from any other computer later on.

Lets say that you were researching a school paper and you were doing it both at home and at school.  Well, instead of emailing yourself all the links back and forth (which would be very painful to do with anything but gmail), you just add them to your del.icio.us account and your done.  When you switch computers, you just log into del.icio.us and they are all there.

Better still, you can "tag" each link and provide a description so you can find it later.  Tags are keywords that you group content under.  They are similar to folders, except an object could have several tags, but could only be in one folder.  So, you could tag each link you find with "school", "paper", and then the specific topic you are looking at.  Then when you wanted to find them again they would all be under the proper tags.  Excellent!

Even better still, del.icio.us is a social system, meaning you share your bookmarks with others and can see other peoples bookmarks.  This is particularly nice, as you can search for similar tags from other people.  For example, the science tag will give you links to such sites as the Nobel Prize Internet Archive .
My favorite tags: website, apple, css, security, and freebsd.
Check out my del.icio.us account here

And if you want to see whats cool on the Internet at this very moment, then check out the popular section.  Its delicious.

Everyone should read "A List Apart"

If I had just an inkling of talent for it, all I would want to do with the rest of my life is design websites.  Of course I am currently working towards more practical and better suited careers for myself. However, website design is just something that is inexplicably fascinating to me, and if was good at it, I would make a career out of it.

Regardless of artistic talent, we can all aspire to be website snobs.  Being a website snob takes very little talent, and just a little background reading about how websites should look and act.  A List Apart is where I go to learn about proper website design.  It is a beautiful resource filled with articles written by website designers for website designers.  Read a few of these essays, and you'll start to understand the infinite complexity of website design, or at least how picky some people can be.

And then try out your website snobbery:  when you see a site written in all flash, scoff at it and then point and laugh with others around you.  When a site is using tables instead of CSS exclaim "How crude!" to whomever is nearest to you.  Soon everyone will know you are an expert website critic.

Maybe that's what I'll become someday, a website critic.  They have movie/food/music critics, why not website critics?
I'll get my own column in the Lawrence.com paper.  And they'll increase my bandwidth limit too, so I can review more sites... A perfect plan!

Flickr Update

a quick note for anyone interested, I have just added a bunch of wedding pictures to our flickr site.  After 4 months, we figured it was about time to get these developed.
I'll be adding more soon, but these are the first.
Get there from the link on the side or

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vlandham

Some of the previews have heads cut-off, but that doesn't show up in the real picture.  I think I just set the wrong dimensions when importing.