OMFG, Half-Life 2 is amazing. Brilliant character animation, character AI, and stupendous physical modelling. Definitely best in show, and blows away everything else I saw (yes, this includes Doom 3). If you’re there, don’t stand in line for 3 hours. Go directly to the Standard (6th/Flower) where their showing demo screenings of the current build every half-hour on the half-hour.

Shot: 501 images (14 rolls), only 1.3GB as I switched to shooting JPEG — RAW was just way too massive.

Random fun story: Gabe and I were so engrossed in GTA3: Vice City, yelling and just in a state of pure joy taking out virtual cops with an assault rifle that we didn’t even notice that there was a filming crew moving around (with lights event!) capturing our excited squeals at how the heads popped right off the police officers.

I will be at E3 today with my EOS-10D and my F402. I’ll be taking pictures. I may even post some online later. 😉

Hyatt has been discussing XBL on his blog. I haven’t done much playing around with XBL (it’s on my list), but it seems to make a lot more sense for client-side presentation than XSLT.

brainfart: [js fragment processing / bookmarklet for creating aribrary DOM node searching/linking…]

• Twisted
• wxPython
• wxMozilla

alt: Mozilla, SashXB, XWT

Moving Outlook messages from one computer to another to another computer to import into Outlook Express is weirdly convoluted. Because of the way that the import works (it looks for Outlook profiles for importing PST’s), you have to go through shenanigans to move the files into the right place. I ended up just getting annoyed the crap out, converting the .DBX files on the source computing and moving it into the proper ID in the target computer.

(This requires another 10 more steps because by default, XP’s search not only won’t search for hidden/system files, but won’t even let you get to them until you drill down through annoying dog avatar menus to select the ‘advanced’ mode. Also, using real command lines all day, you forget how absolutely gimpy CMD.EXE is)

Anyway, one of the many reasons that personally, I use IMAP and not have to worry about any of this mail transfer business. Also, illustrative of why I hate XP. I’d reinstall W2K, but my hardware requires the ‘upgrade’.

Raises some interesting questions: Putting The Brain On Trial

He was a schoolteacher, a husband, a father. Then he became a pedophile preoccupied with sex.

Doctors who treated him at the University of Virginia hospital in 2000 believe that the man’s powerful sex addiction was caused by an egg-sized tumor in his brain.

“It turned out he was a guy who had made it into his 40s without having any problem with this,” said Dr. Russell Swerdlow, a UVa associate professor of neurology. “He had a brain tumor that was damaging the part of the brain that controls impulse.”

Once the tumor was removed, the man’s sexual obsession disappeared. Swerdlow believes this is the first known case to link damage of the frontal lobe with pedophilia.

Only in LA: Oh, what a tangled web he wove, an article detailing some of the whole Tobey Maguire/Spiderman 2 thing.

I had long suspected it, but straight from the horse’s mouth: Johny Memnonic shouldn’t have sucked (well, as much, at least, if not for Sony’s meddling).

Public Service Announcement: if you’re looking forward to the Matrix Reloaded (and if not, you should be!) and want to stay unspoiled, you might want to avoid /. this week, as trolls are not only posting a monster spoiler in posts but also embedding them in otherwise normal looking stuff (very evil).

This weekend, I actually got around to finally cleaning my apartment. Amazing what you can get accomplished when properly motivated.

There’s still some clutter still, and it’s not spotless, but it definitely is showing potential that I previously hadn’t thought possible.

Recently, I got an interesting idea in my head with regards to social software. I haven’t entirely been keeping up with the latest developments, so have been starting to bone up and go through archives for stuff I may have missed, basically using the following as starting points:

• Joi Ito’s Web
• Corante: Many to Many
• Smart Mobs
• Sylloge
• plasticbag.org
• OpenP2P
• infoAnarchy

Oh, coincidentally, there’s a recent /. post on The Debate about Social Software (watch out reading the comments, there are major Matrix Reloaded spoilers hidden there. In fact, it might be a good idea to stay away from /. this week if you don’t want to be spoiled).

Doing this sort of semi-directed research has highlighted how inadequate my tools and process for online research are (bookmarking, relating, annotating, etc).

Semi-related: Justin’s getting a lot of crap for his donation request. I look at it with some bemusement, quite a few people getting riled up about it. I mean, personally, the asking for donations thing isn’t for me (and also, if you’re getting charged $75/mo for 30GB/mo transfer, Justin, you’re getting ripped the fuck off), but I mean come on, I’m not going to rip into him about it or anything. Have these people even ever met Justin, or do they just think they can say whatever because it’s online, or they’ve been reading his writing for a few years? Anyway, interesting questions raised all around about the nature of digital identity and social relationships, self-publishing (and attendent reader-writer responsibilities), and the like – exactly what makes this so fun, right?

Andre is right, this the True Crime site is really well done, and the first video completely rocks. Definitely looking forward to see if this thing plays as good as it looks at E3.

More stolen links: Phil has a Compilation of the Indie Rock 1000 list from the CMJ Bulletin Board thread.

Also, yet another reason to NEVER EVER get a cat.