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An Outsider’s Look Inside PAX East 2011

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I married into a strange and foreign culture, with a language and customs I still struggle to understand.

I married a gamer.

My love of gaming was cryogenically frozen circa the Atari 2600, so when my husband made his annual pilgrimage to PAX East this weekend, I thought it might be enlightening (ok, amusing) to tag along and try to absorb as much of the rich and varied traditions of nerd culture as possible.

PAX, or the Penny Arcade Expo, is a massive convention catering to gamers of every stripe – Halo fiends, huddled groups of Magic the Gathering players, LARPers loping through approximated history with katanas and sabers. The spawn of Penny Arcade web comic creators Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik (better known as ‘Tycho’ and ‘Gabe’), it’s been growing steadily since the beginning in 2004 and has now split into two locations each year – Seattle (‘PAX Prime’) and Boston (‘PAX East’). Total attendance for just PAX East this year alone topped 69,500. If you had trouble with your WiFi connection in Boston this weekend, you know why.

Pax East 2011The show floor is the main draw. It’s the glitz and din of Vegas, and the high rollers are using 20-sided dice. At the Duke Nukem Forever booth (made up like a Bellagio side lobby), ‘naughty schoolgirls’ lean into eager fans for staged photo ops. The soft clicks of a thousand Xbox controllers mingle with simulated battlefield roars, and acres of LCD panels flicker with fantastical violence and adventure. It’s quite a thing to behold.

The real show, however, is the crowd. Yes, it is an ocean of nerds. There is no mistaking this for a radiology conference. Yet, what is most striking upon witnessing this massive gathering of an oft-maligned group is the sheer vibrancy and variety of the people within. Everyone is welcome, and everyone is having fun. I may not know my Master Chief from my Big Daddy, but I was made to feel like part of the team by everyone I encountered, from random cosplayers to battle-weary game journalists. And while I may not speak the language here, I had one hell of a time tossing back beers at a dive bar with my new found friends – something I don’t see happening after my upcoming interior design conference.

So…here’s to the nerds of the world. They know a good adventure when they see one.

(Photos courtesy of the author)

Should You Upgrade To Internet Explorer 9?

The long awaited Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 will be available for download starting tonight at 9PM Pacific.  If you’re on a Mac then the answer is no because Microsoft gave up after IE 6.  But if you’re on Windows and you don’t use your computer for work related tasks that might be incompatible, then the short answer is yes, eventually you should upgrade.  This is true even if you don’t use IE that often since the most of the new security work will go into IE 9, it follows standards more closely and it’s faster.

Tonight after 9 Pacific you can go to beautyoftheweb.com to download the installer.  Eventually Microsoft will push IE 9 through Windows Update but that will be many months.  Other than speed improvements, there are some interesting new integration features with the Windows 7 task bar, a cleaner look (it looks like Firefox 4) and support for HTML 5.  A full list of new features is here.

The speed numbers below are always changing, but the important thing is that IE 9 is on par with the other major browsers.

The address bar also gets an overhaul and now gives inline search as you type results.

Also coming soon is Firefox 4 which has recently hit release candidate and will be finalized in the coming months.  As you can see from the graph above, Firefox 3 is really slow.

The more cautious out there might want to wait a few weeks to update so that any major early bugs and site incompatibilities can be worked out.  And before you tell me that you don’t care because you use Chrome or Safari, that’s cool, but you should upgrade anyway there are some sites that still refuse to work with those browsers.

Screenshots courtesy of Microsoft.

Did Arianna Huffington Force Out Engadget Editor?

The bearded and bespectacled Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky has announced he’s leaving the fourth most popular blog in the country.  He gives no reason and says he has a few fantasy projects he might work on.  That translates to I have been fired and have no new job.

Engadget has been owned by AOL since 2005 when the founders sold the blog group Weblogs, Inc. for a reported $25M.  In that time they have had steady growth and are well regarded.  So, what changed? AOL purchased HuffPo and put Arianna Huffington in charge of the AOL blog empire which also includes the Techcrunch group of blogs.  It seems strange timing for the editor to “leave” unless Arianna wants to put one of her own in charge or Topolsky didn’t want to go along with the AOL Way.  This comes in the same week that AOL laid off 200 people.

Source and photo Engadget.

Product Review: Ooma Telo

Voice over internet protocol (VOIP) is how you make phone calls through your internet connection and is a common way of ditching traditional land line service.  If you’re in the market for a VOIP solution or want to look at alternatives to your existing VOIP provider then this may be one option.

When I was looking for a VOIP solution I considered Ooma, Vonage, MagicJack and Comcast Voice.  I wanted a low cost, high quality, reliable connection and did not have any need for international calling.   I quickly ruled out MagicJack because it requires a computer be on at all times and that’s not very friendly to my power bill or the environment.

Vonage and Comcast offer a similar service for comparable prices.  Comcast offers their Triple Play service which combines cable television, internet and phone service in one package, but for me the package includes a slower internet speed than I have with them now and I the package deal is only really attractive for the first year.  Vonage seemed reasonable, but the monthly cost wasn’t better than Comcast.

The Ooma Telo on the other hand is a one time fee and has no recurring costs.  The device itself is relatively small and unobtrusive.  It’s a matte black finish and can be placed anywhere that you have a wired internet connection.  I keep mine in the living room and plug a cordless phone base station directly into it.  Ooma offers a handset but I uses a Panasonic cordless phone instead.  I opted to have my original land line number ported over by Ooma and they assigned a temporary number to my device while the port was happening.  Once the port was done the temporary number seamlessly transitioned to my original number.

The voice quality sounds like a traditional land line and I only rarely hear digital artifacts on the line.

The other features that Ooma offers are all accessed through their web based portal.  The portal gives access to listen to voicemail, see call logs and change settings.  I subscribed to a community black list of known telemarketers and have entered a few numbers into a personal blacklist of my own.  You have the choice of sending blacklisted numbers to voicemail or just having them go into the void.

In case my network goes down (we are talking about Comcast here) I enabled is call forwarding on outage.  When there are network problems and the Ooma device is unable to get online then all calls are forwarded to the number of your choice.  In my case I send them to my cell phone.

For voicemails I have them sent to my email as a mp3 attachment and can listen to them on my computer, cell phone, on the portal or directly on the Telo device.

Overall it’s been great and has saved me a lot of money.

Everything We Learned, We Learned from Classic Video Games

This article was written by BaldwinP. Please give up some love.

Let’s start with the easy ones.

1. Mushrooms make you grow up big and strong. But as a side-effect, you may see turtles and other mushrooms walking around the place kidnapping princesses.
2. If you swallow the right pills, you can run around eating up ghosts!
3. Dropping blocks and doing lines is addictive.

I’m sensing a theme here.
But seriously, once upon a time when the Internet was a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye, video games were often educational as well as being fun. Instead of a computer in every home, laptop bag and hip pocket, computers and game consoles were a big investment for a family to make. Inevitably, this meant that many families wanted to be reassured that Little Bobby or Susie would be improved by the magic thing with the screen and a Golden Age of learning from video games began. Grand Theft Auto was not what most game-buying parents envisioned back then (unlike the more recent parents of Little Bobii, Soozzie and Maddisynn; in retrospect, the baby names were a warning). Without further ado, a nostalgia learning trip for the 70s and 80s children among us:

Civilization
Civ players could tell you how many hours of sleep they lost to that “Just One More Turn” impulse, but how many hours were spent reading the “Civilopedia” and learning about bronze working, clicking through to discover about the military brilliance of a Greek Phalanx, before jumping ahead to read about Women’s Suffrage and then ending the turn with a report from a historian like Gibbon or Toynbee? The school projects of a million nerds were born here… and so, one suspects, was Wikipedia.

Sim City
“Argh, traffic! I can’t stop the congestion, stop complaining!”
“Argh, housing prices! I build more residential zones and it does nothing!”
“Crime, ha! MORE POLICE!” …. “Argh, out of money, and they’ll hate me if I raise taxes, what to do?”
In retrospect, there was no better training for running a real city or country. If only George W Bush had played Sim City while sitting at his desk, the world would be a different place. For a start, Sim City has no war button, although it did have monster attacks and nuclear meltdowns to contend with…
Maxis went on to make games including evolution-simulator Sim Earth, genetic-experimentation-simulator Sim Life and ant-simulator Sim Ant before throwing over this educational lark in favour of The Sims.

Oregon Trail
What we learned: the past SUCKED. Be grateful we live in the present with computers and no dysentery and only having to eat horses in fancy restaurants.

I welcome your comments on your favourite classic games (educational or otherwise) in the comments. And remember to be careful with those mushrooms, or you might end up turning a family-friendly icon into this:

Gawker Editor Invents Dying Person As A Joke UPDATED – No, he didn’t.

EDIT:  Chen just posted a piece on Gawker stating that he is not the person behind Lucidending, and that his statement on Twitter was a joke.  It looks like I was wrong, and I apologize for that.  I’m not going to link to the Gawker piece because I still feel this is a pretty pathetic way to garner pageviews, but it appears that the only thing Mr. Chen is guilty of is being careless in a public forum.  Once again, my apologies.  Honestly, I’m glad it’s not true.  The thought that Mr. Chen could steep so low was disheartening.  I’m glad I was wrong.

On March 6th, a person on Reddit with the username “Lucidending” posted that he was going to die on Tuesday, the 8th.  He had cancer, and was exercising Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act to die.  The thread, referred to as an “AMA” (Ask Me Anything), became one of the most popular posts in the history of the site.  As of this writing, there were 9,823 comments, most showing an abundance of support or compassion for Lucidending.  People took the time to share stories of loved ones who had lost their lives to cancer, and others composed songs for the OP.  People from as far away as India wrote in to lend their support.  The story was carried by various news outlets, including USA Today.

The kicker?  It was fake.  Some people were suspicious when Lucidending said that he had been given the cocktail to end his life, and already had the I.V., so administering it would be easy.  The Death With Dignity Act doesn’t allow for the drug to be taken intravenously.  It has to be ingested either by mouth or feeding tube.

On March 8th, Gawker’s Adrian Chen wrote in his twitter feed, “I have a confession to make: I was lucidending.”

On February 4th, Mr. Chen posted a story about a woman who was soliciting donations for cancer research, and was accused of fraud by a fellow Redditor.  She turned out to be legit.  From his Twitter account, it seems that Lucidending was a prank to turn the tables on Reddit’s “hardheaded skepticism.”

 

 

 

Yup.  Point made.  The woman who was asking for donations used a personal PayPal account.  I wouldn’t send money to her, either.  Making up a story about someone with cancer who is going to kill themselves is a completely logical reaction to that.  If you ever watched someone you love waste away in front of you, Mr. Chen, then you might have some idea how heartbreaking it is to read a post like Lucidending’s.  I hope you never have the experience that makes you understand how heinous your prank was.

Your Facebook News Feed Is About to Get Angry

Hello, my name is Dogs of War and I’m an addict.  I’ve been addicted to Angry Birds for what seems like a millennium and I’m powerless against those egg stealing pigs.

There is one thing I will not do though, and that is to play Angry Birds on Facebook.  I have my phone with me at all times and that is about as much as I can handle.  But tens of millions of you will be playing Angry Birds on Facebook and publisher Rovio hopes to make some serious scratch.

The mobile version is bird focused and has no social interaction outside of wanting to get a higher score than your friends.  However, the Facebook version will give the pigs more time in the spotlight and like all successful Facebook games will feature social interaction.  So, get ready to use that “hide” button to save yourself from constant updates about your mother and high school friends getting 3 stars and saving the eggs.

Picture and source: El Reg.

Organized Hacking Contest: Pwn2Own

Hacking is usually an ‘underground’ sport, something nerdy Eastern Europeans do in their mother’s basements. The only time a hacker would come together to meet another hacker would be on an IRC channel. Not so anymore, with conventions like Defcon, Blackhat, and CanSecWest.

CanSecWest has an interesting contest. A hacking contest. The targets are the most common browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. A new feature this year is the addition of smartphone hacking: Apple iOS, Windows Phone 7, Google Android, and BlackBerry OS. In total there is $125,000 in cash prizes. Another cool aspect of the competition: if you hack the computer running the target browser, you get to keep the laptop.

Like any good contest, there are the favorites. Charlie Miller, a software analyst from Baltimore has won the contest 3 times before. In 2009 Miller took down Safari running on an Apple in 10 seconds! He scored $10,000 and a laptop for his troubles. “Nils” (The contest allows anonymous entries) – a German computer science student, won last year, cracking Firefox, Safari, and Chrome in less than 10 minutes. In 2009, Nils broke the encryption for IE 8 the day before it was released, netting a new Sony laptop and $5k. George Hotz, the 21 year old who broke the Playstation 3’s copy protection (not to mention being the first person to ever jailbreak the iPhone) will be competing this year.

The biggest challenge this year is Google’s Chrome browser. Chrome runs in a ‘sandbox’ mode in Windows (basically insulating bugs in Chrome from affecting the underlying Windows system.) Google has put up $20,000 if someone can break Chrome’s sandbox mode in the first day.

Contests like this just aren’t cool in the computer security world. They provide vendors with information on how to improve the security of their products. When someone hacks a browser/device they also share technical information on how they did it with the contest organizers, TippingPoint. Details on the hacks aren’t released to the public until the vendor has time to fix the bug.

Pwn2Own runs during the CanSecWest conference, being held in Vancouver CA between March 9-11 2011.

Masterpiece Twitter: Ice-T and Coco

By Danzig and Dancing Queen

During its nearly five-year storied history, Twitter has remained steadfast in its commitment to bringing the best…or just bringing 140 character expressions from individuals around the world. The Twitterverse is filled with eclectic characters and contemporary celebrities who have filled the ether with their random thoughts on life, love and luxury.

In this weekly series, Danzing and Dancing Queen will risk brain cells and credibility scouring the Twitterscape to bring you the best of Twitter. We will then perform dramatic recitations of these tweets for your listening pleasure. Please, enjoy.

This week we feature Ice-T and his wife, Coco.

WARNING: Pictures and language are NSFW (Not safe for work, for the uninitiated)

Ice-T, as performed by Danzig: 

Coco, as performed by Dancing Queen: 

*Danzing and Dancing Queen are not professional actors, but do play actors on Crasstalk.

How Obsessed Are We With Facebook? This Much.

 

Yes, we all know that many, many people are on Facebook.  A lot.  But seeing the numbers, in visual as well as text form, shows that many of us spend way, way too much time on Facebook.

Is this where we want to be? But is Facebook a tool to enhance our social lives, or has it become a replacement for it, and does it matter? As for what it’s doing to users, it was reported on Wednesday that two researchers at Cornell found that using Facebook boosts self-esteem. On the other hand, an Oxford neuroscientist warned that Facebook and other social networking sites may be leading to less empathy, a shakier sense of identity, and an aversion to real-life interaction. While it remains to be see whether children are in imminent danger of growing up into sociopathic confused shut-ins, that a large percentage of people now spend more time interacting online (hi, guys!) than in face-to-face situations is vaguely troubling even to one who has been more or less glued to a computer since the age of eleven, when I discovered AOL message boards and was unaware that there would ever be anything better than a dial-up modem.

What does Mark Zuckerburg think about all of this? I don’t know, but I imagine it goes something like this.

 

Video: Alex Trimpe on Vimeo

Music: “Deadwriter” by RJD2

Image via smemon87’s flickr