Interactive Fiction

A great article on one of my old joys of computing: Interactive Fiction. Zork, Hitchhickers Guide to the Galaxy, Deadline, Advent. The article is a great summary of the history of IF, the current boom in new IF and four full interviews wtih current IF authors.

Remember, beware of the GRUE.

Computer Hell

Dead computer.

Rebuild Software.

Corrupt Hard Drive.

Rebuld Software.

Domain Registration Expired.

Computers Suck.

Cold Weather.

Seems like just yesterday, we were having nice 60 degree days. Now the National Weather Service is forcasting a week at 0°.

Hell is Cold this morning

Well, Apple shipped iTunes for Windows. Apple's attitude is wonderful. How many other firms would put a headline like this on thier home page?

Microsoft Internet Explorer is Crap

It has been a few weeks since I bashed Microsoft.

I have finally started designing my web sites with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is a way to provide web pages with much greater layout control. You can almost create pages as complex as you could in a desktop publishing program such as QuarkXPress. CSS is an internet standard. It has been around for years. And is widely supported by all of the web browsers versions that have been released for the last 3 or 4 years.

Unfortunately, Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows is a total piece of shit. It supports CSS, but not the official standard. NOOOO. The rat bastards and Microsoft have created a series of Internet Explorer for Windows versions that all support different versions of Microsoft's very non-standard crap CSS implementation. Yes, Microsoft knows how to properly support CSS. Their version of Internet Explorer for Macintosh has done so for about five years.

Microsoft is not evil. They are very successful marketers, and monopoly builders. And they are often very poor programmers, and do not play well with others.

Advice to my Windows using friends. Use Netscape Mozilla for a web browser. It is highly standards compliant and very fast. Oh, and NO annoying popup windows will bother you while you browse the web.

Red Truck

I had dinner with Shari and David Daly-Miller. The big event was the introduction of fine beverages from Palisade Brewery. The Grand Valley now has a nice local quality micro-brew. I very much enjoyed their Red Truck IPA.

Colorado Wine Festival

This weekend is the wine festival in Palisade. Alas, I fear that I will be too busy to partake in this event! What with the Spamival that I am hosting Saturday!

Vrey Ctue

Mitch Kapor reoprts on an inetretsing bit of brian sicecne:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Soup Kitchen

I did my monthly duty at the Catholic Outreach Soup Kitchen with the UUUS crew.

Kylie at the Renaissance Fair

This weekend, the annual Grand Junction Renaissance Fair was being held out at the Mesa County Fair Grounds. I took my niece Kylie out to see it. It was the first time that I actually took her out anywhere myself. We had a great time even though there was a light rain most of the time we were at the festival.

Question: How much does a cloud weight?

200,000 Elephants

Carlson Vineyards

Wine season is upon us. The annual Colorado Mountain Winefest is one of the biggest events of the year and is a huge tourist draw. My favorite winery is Carlson Vineyards. Yes, this is the closest winery to where I live, but I do love their wines and Parker Carlson's whimsical style. Carlson makes very fine wines, including fruit wines. If you are think that fruit wines suck, then you must be thinking of those sickly syrupy California fruit wines that are closer to cough medicine than wine.

The fruit wines of Carlson Vineyards are beautiful. They fit perfectly with cheese, fruit or desert. I think that their plumb wine is a thing of wonder.

Standings September 2

In the two weeks since I created the left and column that contains links related to Grand Junction, Mesa County and the Western Slope of Colorado I have seen my Google standings go from around 350 to 275.

Mesa County Volunteer Connection

Mesa County Volunteer Connection provides an online center to discover volunteer opportunities in the Grand Junction area. The site lists a large number of local organizations that provide help throughout our community. Wether You are interested in helping kids, the poor, the environment, the sick, those seeking to learn, the cause of justice or any other cause, you will find a volunteer job here. The site is operated by the Western Slope DOVIA (Directors Of Volunteers In Agencies).

Unfortunately, the site has a rather poor navigation interface on the home page. There is a stylelized map with different houses representing various volunteering categories. You have to drag the mouse over the buildings to see what link the building represents. Once you get into the site, there is a nice navigation menu at the bottom of the page.

4000 Holes

Sometimes I wonder if Jobs doesn't really think this way.

Henrietta Hay

I found the web site of Grand Junction columnist Henrietta Hay. It looks like Henrietta has most of her columns from the last 10 years collected together on her website. This is perhaps the important archive of essays about Grand Junction that I have found online.

Henrietta Hay is a sports-car-driving liberal in a conservative town. In Grand Junction, Colorado, she writes a weekly column for the local Daily Sentinel . In spite of (or because of?) her renegade views, her column is the most popular feature in the paper. Oh, and this week she turns 89 years old.

Link Roll Extended

I might have mentioned MIT's OpenCourseWare program over a year ago when it was just gearing up for launch. Wired currently has a story about the impact that OpenCourseWare has already had after just one year. The story is basically this: MIT is providing the world the content of an MIT education for free. Full course text books, lecture notes and video, quizzes, and any other resources that can be digitized. Of course, this does not provide you with an MIT degree, nor do you get all of the intangibles that attending MIT provides for a tuition of $40,000 per year. Yet, I have to say after browsing the OpenCourseWare offerings, this is an powerful tool for the self-motivated learner and the resource short educators around the world.

As the Wired story says: "Someone should get a Nobel Prize for this".

Fun Junction American Gods

Lifted from a letter to venus3331

Tonight I went out with some friends for their kids birthday party. We took a bunch of kids to Fun Junction to ride the amusements. This was the first time that I had ever been to Fun Junction. How have I missed this for the past 8 years! Do You know of the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman? He is best know for being the creator of the Sandman graphic novels. A couple of years ago, Gaiman wrote a novel entitled "American Gods" about how various Gods and Goddesses from around the world had followed the human migration to America. Since Americans no longer respect these old gods, the gods are pretty much down and out, existing in various impoverished sub-cultures. (However, there are new gods such as the Goddess of Television who are very powerful.) The somewhat decaying kitsch feeling of Fun Junction feels like a scene form American Gods. I half expected to see the norse god Odin in the form of a kindly 60 year old one-eyed man scamming kids at skee ball.