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.

Usenet has the tendency to provide a public forum for those who would normally be scribbling in a closet. For example, take Daryl “Shawn” Kabatoff. For the last few years, he’s methodically gathered “statistics” from various sources, ranging from local newspaper obituary pages to the food court of the Saskatoon Midtown Plaza mall. With all the raw data he’s collected, he’s attempting to prove daily that our full names are in “mathematical harmony” with our birthdays.

His rants normally focus on a single individual he’s met or read about, starting with calculations related to their birthdate and full names, blending in whatever other personal information about their family members, spouses, birthplace, and career he’s been able to glean. From there, it descends into a mix of numerology, religious zealotry, and personal torment. I’ve never seen anything like it.

With all the prime numbers, Fibonacci sequences and biblical references, it’s like reading the notebooks of Maximillian Cohen and John Nash combined. Unsurprisingly, several posts unfold to reveal a history of painful mental illness. If you have some time, take a look. I’ve detailed his posting history and a several sample posts below.

August 9, 2004: The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix published an article about Daryl and his encounter with one woman.

September 22, 2004: Does anyone have a photo of Kabatoff? If so, please e-mail me.

Continue reading “Dar Kabatoff's In Town” →

It looks like the days of the well-funded secretive tech-related startup aren’t completely over. There.com has $30 million in funding, a swooshy logo, a newly-installed climbing wall, and a mysterious homepage (a la Transmeta and Red Swoosh).

I’d dismiss it as hype, if it wasn’t for three things:

1. Interesting founder. The company was founded by Will Harvey, the creator of several old Electronic Arts games, like The Immortal, Music Construction Kit, and Zany Golf. (He also ported Marble Madness to the Apple II and IIgs.)

2. Good team. David E. Weekly, the talented programmer who deconstructed the Napster protocol and helped people bypass Napster evictions and port blocking, started there at the end of March. He says that the work involves “remarkably exciting technology” and the team is “very bright.” Other notable team members are AI-expert Jeffrey Ventrella (try Brain Maze and Gene Pool), Amy Jo Kim (author of Community Building on the Web) and Organic’s old creative director, Janis Spivack.

3. They have a Vice President of Fun. (Unfortunately, it’s the same guy who helmed A Fork In The Tale, the full-motion video adventure game featuring Rob Schneider and bundled on five (!) CD-ROMs. The game was an expensive mistake, Any River Entertainment’s first and only release.)

I’m going to guess that they’re planning some sort of multi-user game community, like Habbo Hotel meets Everquest. Any guesses?

A Google search for “onion” doesn’t return The Onion homepage anywhere in the results. A little more digging reveals that the Onion homepage isn’t in the Google index at all. Any idea why? Maybe Aaron knows.

Occasionally, there’s an idea so simple and powerful that you have to drop whatever you’re doing and implement it immediately.

Yesterday, I read the Jon Udell article that’s making the rounds (via Mefi and Flutterby). I didn’t immediately grok it, but seeing it in action (1, 2, 3) did the trick.

Visually, I was inspired by Mark Pilgrim’s concise display, but didn’t want to periodically parse through my Apache logs. I wanted real-time results without limiting myself to one particular web server log format. So I wrote a Perl script that’s now included on every entry page via SSI, using flat files to store the data.

As a result, there may be some issues with scalability on heavily trafficked sites, but I’d think most weblogs wouldn’t have a problem. Anyway, if you want to try it, all it requires is Perl, server-side includes, and a world-writable directory to store the files in. Download Waxy Backlinks now. Installation info inside.

Continue reading “Backlinks” →