The film adaptation of Po Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest is slated for a limited release on June 28. Originally written in 1995, it sounds like the screenplay was heavily changed to avoid being horribly dated. The story now takes place after the bubble burst instead of during the long short boom, and the product has changed from a sub-$300 computer to some sort of “hologram machine.”

They should have tried to create a snapshot of the era instead of hopelessly modernizing it. I mean, who funds hologram machines these days?

Well, this is depressing. Meaty.org, the real-life event organizer for online communities that I started developing last August, is now completely pointless. Today, Meetup.com launched. Designed by some of the most talented people in the industry, it’s exactly what I envisioned, with a couple extra neat features I didn’t think of.

They finished the entire thing in three months of dedicated work with a full staff, while I worked alone in my free time for the last eight months. I was totally outgunned. Note to self: Next time you have an idea like this, quit your day job and devote yourself to it full-time.

But, on the lighter side, it’s an outstanding site. The interface is perfectly designed, though I wouldn’t expect anything less from 37 Signals and Eric Costello. Kudos to the Meetup crew on a successful launch, you bastards.

My new Rio Riot, unlike most other portable MP3 players on the market, ignores paths and filenames when determining artist/album/song/genre information. Instead, it relies exclusively on the ID3 identification tags for artist/album/song/genre organization.

So it goes, only a small fraction of my 60 gigs collection has normalized ID3 tags. (For some reason, the folks on Audiogalaxy and Kazaa don’t seem care much about metadata.) Editing them all by hand would’ve taken months, so I started looking around for a good ID3 tag editor. By far, the best I’ve found is Tag&Rename. It’s fast, usable, and feature-rich. One of the more inspired features is the ability to import album information from Allmusic.com (including genres, album reviews and cover art). It can also export your collection to comma-separated values, query CDDB/FreeDB, rename MP3s/paths based on ID3 tag information (and vice-versa), and so on.

That’s hard to beat, but if you’ve found a better ID3 editor, speak up.

The Onion has some interesting keywords in the meta tags on their front page, with references to Smoove B, Marilyn Manson, Phish, the NBA, “All your base,” ferrets, and Taco Bell. Keyword jamming like this is common, but particularly dumb in this case. If the Onion is trying to attract search engines with keywords, then why are they excluding all search engines from indexing their content?

March 6, 2004: In hindsight, it’s so clearly a joke. It’s hard to believe I ever took it seriously. I just checked, and they’ve updated their meta tags with more relevant keywords. It’s very odd.

While in Arizona this weekend, I managed to drop by SonicBlue’s branch office in Scottsdale. I scored a refurbished Rio Riot jukebox (20 gigs!) out of the visit, and a few great photos of their office and internal paraphernalia.

Don’t miss this poster spelling out their corporate motto: AWESOME. I guess it could be worse.

Get free DVD/VHS rentals from Blockbuster Video until August 15. Just fill out this form, preferably using a temporary e-mail address from a site like Spamgourmet or Spamhole. They’ll e-mail you the URL for a free rental coupon. Repeat as necessary. Enjoy! (Thanks, Phil!)

Update: The promotional offer has long since passed.

After installing SpamAssassin last March, the spam on my 7-user server dropped from roughly 80-100/week to one or two a month.

So it’s not a big surprise that e-mail marketing firms are getting nervous, starting with a smear campaign against SpamAssassin. Gord Sears’s column in his marketing newsletter calls it a violation of free speech, demanding a law against server-side filtering software. Paul Myers, in his You HAD Mail column on Talkbiz.com, claims that SpamAssassin could bounce valuable mail like “discussion list posts,” “newsletters that you requested,” and “LOTS of personal emails from friends and family.”

I want to clear up a couple misunderstandings: First, the recommended SpamAssassin configuration flags e-mail as spam before forwarding it to the user, allowing for simple filtering in the client. It doesn’t delete the mail, although you can configure procmail that way, if you like. Any ISP that quietly deleted e-mail without consent wouldn’t be very popular for long.

Second, Spam Assassin has to be tailored for the individual. For the first week after installation, I had to add a few newsletters and discussion lists to the “whitelist,” which tells Spam Assassin never to filter e-mails with a particular “From” address or subject. After that, Spam Assassin very rarely accidentally flagged good e-mail as spam. And it has never once mistakenly flagged an e-mail from someone I know as spam.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a depressing necessity.

Make a fist. That’s the size of a regular kidney. Now hold your breath and take a look at this. (Warning: Icky medical photo.)

That’s a photo of Dedair’s father’s polycystic kidneys, which were successfully removed a year ago. Weighing between 16 to 18 pounds combined, they were the second-largest set of kidneys the University of Pennsylvania has ever seen. The staff retained them for teaching purposes. Blecch!

This weekend, I found that there’s an obscure sequel to one of my favorite games from the early 1990s, Out of This World (released as Another World in Europe). Only released for the short-lived SegaCD system, Heart of the Alien (front/back cover) lets you play the original game as a second character, much like Opposing Force and Blue Shift allow you to see Half-Life from new perspectives.

The game is playable on the PC, but it’s a small pain in the ass. You’ll need the outstanding GENS SegaCD/Genesis emulator and the American Mega CD BIOS v2.00. Then download the 224MB ROM from The Underdogs. (Update: Here’s a guide to burning the ISO/MP3 archive to a CD for playing on your official Sega CD system.)

Unzip the ROM archive, then use WinRAR to unpack the RAR files inside. If you want sound and music, you’ll need to burn the BIN file to a blank CD-ROM, using a burning application like Nero. If you don’t care about sound, just point GENS to the BIOS file in the Options->Directories menu and then load the BIN. It’s just that easy!

Now, does anyone have a copy of Night Trap hanging around?

Last night, at Dana’s party in West L.A., I met Eric Zimmerman and Frank Lantz from the New York-based Gamelab, quite possibly the most talented Shockwave game developers around (artist’s rendering). Their work is consistently brilliant: Sissyfight, Blix, Loop, and my personal favorite, Junkbot. (Try them all, if you have a day or three to kill.)

Also, I had a brief conversation with Justin Hall, the original personal weblogger. We almost met once before while I was working at Gettingit.com when he dropped by the office to talk with our illustrious editor-in-chief, R. U. Sirius. I didn’t know it at the time, but Justin told me that R. U. had asked him to submit cool links for publishing daily on the site. (He was trying to avoid heavy computer use at the time, so he turned it down.)

Anyway, Justin and the Gamelab guys were in town for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the computer/videogame trade show held at the mammoth L.A. Convention Center. Andre had snagged me a guest pass, but Frank kindly gave me his E3 badge last night so I could skip the hassle of pre-registration this morning. The show was overwhelming. I feel like a little kid who’s been overstimulated to the point of exhaustion.

My highlights included: Animal Crossing, Metroid Prime and Mario Sunshine for the Gamecube; Kung Fu Chaos and Outlaw Golf for the X-Box; Sly Cooper, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Contra Shattered Soldier and Tony Hawk 4 for the PS2; Deus Ex 2 for the PC; and XIII for all four platforms. Gamespy seems to be the definitive source for information about the show, with previews and screenshots for all the games I mentioned. Time for bed.