On a whim, I decided to search the California Unclaimed Property database to see if I had any unclaimed money waiting around for me. I didn’t, but my mother and grandmother both had standing claims, totalling over $175! Free money!
Take a minute to search for the names of your friends and family in your state’s online database, and let me know if you find anything. Just look up your state, visit the government website, type in a last name, and grab that cash. Happy hunting.
One week and 257 spam e-mails later, we’re back home from the trek to San Francisco and other points north. More on the rest of the trip later, but first: California Extreme!
This year, I played some older obscure games that were underappreciated in their day, along with some old favorites. Get your copy of MAME ready and try out these obscure gems, hosted here for your convenience: Rescue, Q*Bert’s Qubes, Pooyan, and Make Trax.
Like last year, there was an entire section devoted to old laserdisc games. Most of these full-motion-video games were pretty terrible — all style and no substance — but one game fails miserably on both counts: Gallagher’s Gallery, starring the inventor of the Sledge-O-Matic. If you can find a more irritating game, I’ll be impressed.
For a taste of the rest of the event, a selection of photos are available from the night before and Saturday afternoon. (I’ll add links to others as they appear.)
America chooses Kelly Clarkson, but Sideshow Justin has other plans…
Every form of media is pirated online. Music, movies, software, console video games, television, music videos, and books are all routinely traded via FTP sites, IRC, the Web, and Usenet. So what’s left? Not much, as it turns out.
One exception is periodicals; magazines and newspapers are cheap, published regularly, and unbelievably tedious to scan manually. Full issues of Playboy are traded in niche online communities, but so far, general interest magazines have evaded the pirate community. Until now.
“Enigma of Esoteric Nothingness,” a new group of scanner junkies, has dedicated themselves to the task of scanning in monthly periodicals (in addition to their regular e-book output) and distributing the PDFs (usually around 20 MB each). They haven’t made much of a dent in the local newsstand… So far, just a few issues of PC Magazine, 2600, Time, Mad, and Scientific American. But it’s a start. Take a look at their bundled .NFO (information) files for the June issues of Mad Magazine and Scientific American, and this Usenet post that details all the books/magazines they’ve scanned, as of late July.
The official Steve Martin website has a very active web-based message board where fans of Steve can talk about everything from The Jerk to Novocaine. Poke around for a while, and you’ll undoubtedly run into “Chocolate Lover”: the alias of Texas-based painter Lynn O’Neill.
Most of Chocolate Lover’s 1200+ posts are about her innocent crush on Steve Martin and her love of his work, but her recent posts are far more personal.
On August 20, she writes about a thank-you card she received from Steve. On August 22, she said her greatest fears are “being mistaken for a lunatic,” “annoying the people I care about,” and “failing.”
On August 27, the tone of her posts changed, appealing to Steve Martin directly (although he doesn’t appear to ever read or post). She starts posting very personal information, followed by painful and desperate pleas. “I don’t know why you’ve turned on me.” “I am not a liar.” “I have NEVER been hurt so badly.” “Steve I am for real. Why are you doing this? … I feel like I am dying.”
Her last two messages are the worst. This thread gets continually worse, as she posts several times throughout the night, begging Steve to call her. At around 1am Dallas time, she posts a final goodbye… “I hope Steve doesn’t change his PO Box out of fear of me, I really am harmless, just a little weird. I’m going to the doctor because I don’t want to feel anything for a while, but I will not return after that.” She hasn’t posted anything since.
Just launched in the UK, Shazam is a search engine that plays “Name That Tune.” Cell phone owners dial a number and play a 15-second song clip (presumably from the radio or a club) into the phone’s receiver. After comparing a hash of the clip against their database of 1.2 million songs, Shazam returns their best guess via SMS text message.
The audio recognition algorithm was developed by chief scientist and co-founder Avery Wang. His 1994 thesis on sound separation is available for download, which provides some clues into how they may be extracting music from voice and other background noise. (More information about the service from the BBC, The Guardian, and Red Herring.)
How long before someone (Google, maybe) creates a web-based version that allows you to upload sound clips for identification? And contribute properly-tagged MP3s from your own collection? A truly comprehensive database of music would help people like Alan Taylor and all these other poor souls.
Only two more weeks until California Extreme, the world’s largest classic arcade game convention! For one weekend every September, the San Jose Convention Center is transformed into 18,000 square feet of pure classic arcade and pinball goodness (big panoramic photo). The games are all on free play, the hall is dimly-lit, and the air is thick with nostalgia.
Last year, the show took place less a week after September 11, so the turnout was smaller than expected, but still bigger and better than the previous year. (See the full list of games from 2001.) This year should be the best yet.
The only problem is that I’m forced to choose between California Extreme on September 7/8 and Fray Day 6 the week after. (Not enough vacation days left to see both, sadly.)
If things have been quiet around here lately, it’s because all my free time has gone to the Gettingit.com redesign. This is the perfect exercise in pointlessness: redesigning a defunct, three-year-old webzine that hasn’t published an article since 2000.
Well, not entirely pointless. Webpower, the company that funded Gettingit, finally killed the old story database a couple weeks ago, leaving the entire archive offline. I’d foreseen that inevitability a while back, and whipped up a Perl script to crawl the old site and save the stories locally. I’m glad I did.
Take a look and let me know what you think. Built in a couple weeks with no budget and PHP/MySQL/Apache by my side, I’m proud of it. I did everything except for the monkey logos, which were provided by the extremely talented Goopy.
Set your TiVos: HBO, Monday morning, 4:20am. Leprechaun in the Hood (2000, Horror). An evil leprechaun and a powerful producer pursue three rap artists who stole a magic flute. Features Ice-T, Coolio, and Ensign Travis Mayweather. Not to mention, Willow Ufgood rapping a song entitled “Lep in the Hood” over the end credits (sound clip).
Unethical idea of the day: Write a web crawler that grabs the list of recently updated MovableType or Blogger weblogs, and posts a spam comment to every weblog entry. Sound too far-fetched? Maybe not; a porn site recently spammed Andrew Burke’s weblog. I’m sure it won’t be long before someone automates the process and ruins online community forever. (Or at least until someone writes a SpamAssassin plugin for weblogs.)
