My Average Day Lately:
Get home from work and do freelance work while playing Scrabble on Facebook and watching soccer (Superliga or MLS) on Telefutura.
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July 29, 2007
July 24, 2007
From Boing Boing:
Here's the link to the original post on Boing Boing
Monday, July 23, 2007Gamer kidnapped, ordered at gunpoint to release his password
John sez, "An armed gang of four kidnapped one of the world's top RPG gamers after one criminal's girlfriend lured him into a fake date using Orkut, Google's social network. After sequestering him in Sao Paulo, they held a gun against the victim's head for five hours to get his password, which they wanted to sell for $8,000. And yes, the story gets even better."
According to the police, the captive is the world leader in GunBound, a turn-based RPG-style multiplayer online game. Developed in South Korea, in this artillery game you get more experience points, offensive and defensive capabilities depending on your skills during battle, as well as money to buy more weapons, armor and all kinds of gear for your multiple avatars. You can only play with one of your avatars each time, but all of them belong to a single account.
The game looks to be quite popular, so the four gangsters decided they could make some quick cash if they kidnapped him to steal his user. Their plan: use one of the criminal's girlfriends, called Tamires, to get him into a date using Google's online social network Orkut, which is also extremely popular in Brazil. After contacting and seducing him, she told the GunBound wizard to meet her in a shopping mall.
Gunbound. Wow.
July 18, 2007
The Magic of Feed Readers
With the mind boggling amount of information available on the internet, it can be pretty daunting knowing where to start reading. My days used to start out by going through my list of bookmarks one by one only to find that the majority of them hadn't been updated since the last time I checked. This is especially true for blogs.
In order to make my ingestion of information a little less painful and a lot more efficient, I've finally started using Google Reader. With the app you can subscribe to feeds supplied by the websites you normally read. Just about every website offers them nowadays. If you're not sure what I'm talking about just look for the little orange radar looking icon (or blue rectangle with 'RSS' in it) in the address bar of your browser the next time you're reading a blog. Clicking that icon will subscribe you to the feed and from then on you can just login to Google Reader to see which of the feeds that you're subscribed to have been updated. You can even read all the new entries right there.
I'm currently subscribed to over 60 different feeds and counting. Brilliant!
July 12, 2007
Facebook Graffiti
Facebook recently opened up its site so that people could develop applications for it. Most of the applications are pretty lame but there's one that's captured my heart and my imagination: Facebook Graffiti. It's a paint program that's even more basic than MS Paint. You can pick the color, width, and opacity of your brush and that's it. Nevertheless, with years of doodling in MS Paint and Photoshop under my belt, I got to work tagging my friends walls. Here are some of my favorites:
There are more in my flickr if you're interested.
July 11, 2007
Slowly working on writing more often...
So here's my third entry in a little over a week. Wow. I'm going to try to write more often and am planning on a quick redesign of this site in the near future. The colors are just too neutral and boring.
In other news, I recently accepted a new position at my work and am now a web developer. That means I'll be doing more programming and less repetitive production. Although working at AMEX isn't what I want to be doing long term, this will be a great learning experience, especially since we're going to be switching to Ruby on Rails soon and this will greatly expedite the learning process. I figure my new position as a web developer will be more fun, highly educational (in a very marketable skill), and allow me to pay off some debts and save up money so that I can completely focus on pursuing a film career later in my twenties.
As far as the film career is going, I recently show a wedding in where we got some great footage but which I haven't edited yet. I have nine hours of footage to edit and I've never worked with that much before. We'll see how it goes. It's going to be a pain in the ass to capture and sort through all that.
As for "Gas," it's still alive and kicking and will be screening at the Asian American International Film Festival here in New York on July 21st. For more information on the screening go here.
July 9, 2007
E-Mail I Received Today:
"Dear Shopkeeper,
Thank you for using CafePress.com!
In accordance with our Intellectual Property Rights Policy, Lester G. Freundlich, representative for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, provided us with a notice stating that your use of a poster created for the MTA Subway System [infringed] upon their intellectual property rights (copyright).
Accordingly, we have set the content that is alleged to infringe the rights of the third party to “pending status” which disables said content from being displayed in your shop or purchased by the public. You may review the content set to pending status by logging into your CafePress.com account and clicking on the “Media Basket” link. The content set to pending status will be highlighted red.
If you believe that you hold the rights to the content alleged to infringe the rights of the third party, we encourage you to contact the alleged rights holder directly for a resolution to this matter. Below please find the contact information for the party alleging infringement.
Lester G. Freundlich
Senior Associate Counsel
212-878-7219
Fax no: 212-878-7398
Lfreundl@MTAHQ.org
We apologize for any inconvenience that our actions may cause you. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance."
July 2, 2007
New Server
I've recently migrated this site to a new host. I'm now administering my own virtual private server through a great hosting company called Slicehost. It involved a lot of apache2 configuring and learning to love the terminal and vim but with the help of my new friend, my e-mail is now working and this site is up and running on my slice. I'm not sure if there's a noticeable difference in terms of speed when visiting this site, but I know the backend is definitely running much much faster.
Next up: migrating Lucid Screening.