the indian wind along the telegraph lines

Harvest Moon

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life has shipped. This is the latest installment in the long running farming role-playing series from Natsume. If you don’t know about Harvest Moon, you should. It very well might change your perceptions of gaming.

Harvest Moon is a series of games with a very unique premise and a massive cult following. There is no fighting, jumping, racing, shooting or, really, any “action” to speak of. Instead, you as protagonist must successfully run an inherited farm, interact with other people in the village and make a life for yourself. You must tend animals, raise crops and form successful personal relationships. From the official site:

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life will span a lifetime on the farm and follow the drama that goes with it. Not only must you build and successfully run a farm, but you must also build a successful life with family and friends! This new Harvest Moon experience will take the best qualities of the series and add more

The Internet Is Dangerous?

“Is the Internet becoming a little more hazardous? The Bagle virus took a turn for the worse yesterday, with some variations now able to infect PCs without any user intervention,” says an article on the Motley Fool today in response to Bagle worm variants.

The Internet is safe, people. I’m sitting here on my MacOS X machine with no worries about Bagle. So are Linux, *BSD, Solaris, BeOS, QNX and users of every OS except Windows. The problem is not the Internet. The problem is not a virus. The problem is that there is code in use by the majority of computer users that will allow executables to run with no user intervention. Here’s the corrected headline:

Is the use of Microsoft’s Windows operating system becoming a little more hazardous? The Bagle virus took a turn for the worse yesterday, with some variations now able to infect PCs without any user intervention.

Error Will Robinson

We’ve all been in the situation where a tech support person says, “Can you read me the exact error message?”

Think these messages will help?

Thanks to pal Jotham for turning us onto this one.

The British Underclass

[submitted on behalf of nessuk]

Whilst reading through the Daily Telegraph on my way to work recently…I came across the following article, about the burgeoning British Underclass (a humorous guide). This lead to the following website, detailing the ways to ‘spot’ said British Underclass. I live in Kent….therefore the local reference for so called underclass is “Chavs”. Is this unique to the British Isles…and is there something similar in the US? : )

Sure, we call them “rednecks.” – mneptok

All Nude DSL Action

Qwest has announced plans to unbundle DSL service from regular phone service. This means that for many consumers in the northern US DSL broadband connectivity is no longer contingent upon a phone service contract. Forbes has the full story. We’ll see how this viral idea spreads to other host organisms.

Great news for us consumers. Go free markets!

“I Love You So Much It Hurts … When I Pee”

Thanks to Undermac chum JFK for this tidbit. Seems the British government is raising the ante in the war on STDs this Valentine’s Day with a hard-hitting ad campaign. The Telegraph has the full story.

SomaFM Is K-Rad

You can’t make this stuff up. I was looking at the SomaFM site and noticed something funny (click to see). I guess JeffK! listens to Groove Salad. You should listen to SomaFM too, you know.

Cicarella 2.0

Got an e-mail from former co-worker and brother-from-another-mother Mike Cicarella. Seems that his wife is pregnant with their first child! Congratulations, Mikey!

Now, will you have the stones to name your kid like this guy did?

Orkutized

Google is jumping headlong into the associative web community market (i.e.Friendster) with a new service called Orkut. It’s gonna be huge.

Right now it’s in beta, so going to the link isn’t going to be too rewarding an experience. The only way to get in is to be invited by an existing member. Soon enough, though…

Friendster has been hobbled by its popularity. At least, I hope it has. Site performance at Friendster is horrific, and has been for months. I have to hope it’s because of load and not inattention. With the wind of Google in their sails, Orkut suffers none of that. At least not yet. We’ll see how it scales, but I’ll bet they’ll do fine.

I’ve already found an issue where I cannot post karma info for people with Safari and need to use Firebird. That needs to be fixed before release, folks.

It’s been fun poking around the past day or two, despite it being flaky at times. It’s like Friendster, but without the suck. I’m surprised by how many people I know are in on the beta. I’d invite you all, but that’s not in the spirit of things. No blanket invitations.

Watch for an Orkut invite, or announcement of its release. This thing will be massive. As friend Scot’s blog remarked last week, “If Google can do for social networking and blogging what they’ve done for search, and once their web services APIs become available to developers, they’re going to become the unstoppable internet platform.”

Snatched

GarageBand has some interesting loops. I was mucking about with them and found that I could recreate the theme from Snatch with built-in loops in about 3 minutes.

Don’t believe me? Try it yourself. Here’s the recipe.

• Percussion Combo 8
• Upright Funk Bass 17
• Shaker 8
• Club Dance Beat 54
• Far East Drums 1

Still don’t believe me? Can’t run GarageBand? Too lazy? Click here to play.

Mix liberally and add chilled over an overly litigious attorney and there’s a recipe for disaster.

I hope Guy Ritchie is an Apple fan.

And since DK is curious, this was made on a G4 500 with 384MB of RAM.