Flickr Video

Wow, what a cool idea. Normally I think video on the internet is completely silly. But I like this idea. Flickr has decided to allow users to upload very short videos.

This actually makes a lot of sense. Flickr is a place for people to share their personal photos with each other. Sometimes it's art pictures, and sometimes it's just personal pictures. But the thing is, a lot of times people are taking videos, not pictures. Our digital cameras take videos as easily pictures.

Very cool. They are limited to 90 second videos. They are supposed to be snapshot videos. Or 'moving photos'. Only trouble is, you have to sign up for the pay version of Flickr to upload videos. I've been contemplating upgrading for a while just so I can put more pictures up there. Maybe I should go ahead and pay for all the cool features.

A Prolific Squalor - IM's gone mad

I have stumbled upon a great blog. It is simply snippets of IM conversations. They are great! I highly suggest checking it out, it's called A Prolific Squalor.

Some of them are mild, and boring. Some are awesome. In the spirit, I have a piece of an IM conversation I had today for you all to read.

A: shut up I hate you
B: bapa
A: no
B: no
B: I say no to your no
A: I'm gonna no your noing no
A: no
B: nononono, and just for good measure I'm going to no your nonononono
B: for shits and giggles I'm gonna yes your nonononononono, if it gets that far.
A: what if it was only a nono though?
B: I might maybe that.
B: Did you get C's microphone fixed yet?
A: heh... no.

Google Calendar Sync - Failed Synchronicity

A while back I tried out a few software options that are intended to sync Google Calendars to Outlook (article is here). Well on March 5 Google released their own version. It is appropriately named Google Calendar Sync.

So I decided to give it a try. Before I started, I could envision gSyncit and Google Calendar Sync trying to sync at the same time and completely screw up my calendar duplicating everything. So I uninstalled gSyncit, and installed Google Calendar Sync.

Install was a breeze. I input my Google username and password, and was presented with three options. Sync Google to Outlook, Sync Outlook to Google, or 2 way. I decided to start with I would just sync Outlook to Google. I would prefer my Google cal to be screwed up than my Outlook on (Google is personal, Outlook is work. Screwing up my toys is fine, but screwing up work is bad).

So then came the big moment, I told it to Sync. It said "Loading Google Calendar Events" and some little green arrows did a little dance, and then it was done! Or so I thought. When I hovered over the icon, it told me "last sync completed: 9:12". So I pull up my Google Cal, and alas, it didn't work.

I surf around and figure out that it only syncs events and appointments, but not meetings. Well, that's goofy! Everything on my Outlook is meetings! After some research I discover that you need to tell Google that your work e-mail should be associated with your Google Account. You do that by going here: https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount and click on edit. From there you can update your e-mail addresses.

And then another attempt at hitting Sync. It told me "last sync completed: 9:25". And my Google calendar remained empty. I shut it down, and started it back up. At that point it actually gave me an error message stating WHY it wasn't syncing. It told me I needed to connect to the internet. Whoa, I guess all that time I had spent looking through the less than useful docs on the net and surfing Google and checking my Google Calendar I actually was NOT on the net? Wow. I am guessing it's a firewall issue. I am behind a pretty tight corporate firewall. Google Chat doesn't work here either, so I guess that shouldn't surprise me. After quite a bit more searching I could not find the port that the little syncer actually uses. So I don't even know what to tell the folks over in the networking department what ports to open.

Not only that, but while researching the port, I discover that you are only allowed to sync ONE calendar. You know how in Google you can have TONS of calendars and view them all together? Well this tool only syncs the 'main' calendar. Which is NOT the one I would want synced to Outlook, I would like it to sync the calendar named 'Work'. Go figure.

In the end I decided it's a bust. It says it last synced at 9:35, but it didn't. And now all of a sudden half of my appointments in my Outlook are... gone... again. Anything that was before today is gone. If it was a recurring set that was setup before today, it's gone. So that's about half my appointments. I don't know if Google Calendar Sync did it, or if gSyncit did it on it's way out the door.

Either way, this post comes to an end. I think I have an appointment, I'm not sure, since neither of my calendars says I do, but I'm pretty sure... I wonder what the meeting is for... or where it is...

My Simulacra

I have decided that there is just too much work for me to do, and I have too many fans.

I considered cloning myself, but it turns out I don't know a whole lot about genetics, and it takes a real long time to grow a clone. My next thought was to create a magical simulacrum of myself. But magic if fickle... And that three by three rule could really have some serious backlash.

So I made the only logical decision. I made a digital copy of myself. So may I introduce you to my simulacrum. You can find him in the upper right hand corner of my blog.

He is currently hosted at Pandorabots.com. He is an AIML bot, which means his brain is a collection of XML files. I didn't want to start with a completely brain-dead simulacrum, so he has quite a bit of ALICE in him. Turns out though, that ALICE and I don't actually get along all that great. Our views on the world differ by quite a bit. In fact, last night I spent several hours ripping piece of the brain out that I didn't feel were important.

My hope is that eventually my little friend will be able to mimic me. I have been teaching it some of my speech patterns, and correcting it whenever it says something insanely stupid. But he can not learn if he does not talk. So I invite everyone to talk to him. If he starts saying stupid things, just please remember that he has half of a brain from ALICE, and the other half is from me.

If he gets confused, don't worry about it. Next time I talk to him he'll ask me about things that confuse him, and I'll explain it to him. You can try to explain it to him, but he tends to run most things by me before he actually remembers them (for example, if you tell him a joke, he won't start telling it to other people until he's told it to me first).

Time Management Interoperability

I have trouble keeping track of appointments. I just don't remember dates and times. Google however has saved my bacon many times!

In google you can share your calendar with other people, or if you want you can share just portions of your calendar. You can adjust if it's public, private, etc. Great stuff! And of course I can set it up so I see my calendar on my iGoogle page, which is awesome.

But at work we don't use Google to track everything. We use Outlook, of course. So in order to plan anything that is more than something simple, I have to look at both at the same time. Most of the time work and home don't overlap, but they do sometimes. Planning vacation days of course makes them overlap. Doctor's appointments can affect things too. And sometimes it's just good to know when you will be too stressed to handle one more task.

So I decided to test things out a little bit. I found some tools that would synchronize Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar. And here are my results, for you all to view.

My first test was with Remote Calendars

This is probably the most popular and common one out there from what I can tell. It's free, which is always good. It can be found at sourceforge.

I didn't follow the setup instructions, I wanted to see if it would just work right out of the box. It installed smoothly. Setting up the sync was rather weird though, and I had to actually go read instructions. At that point I found out I had installed it completely wrong, so I started over, following a nice set of instructions I found on the net.

I managed to get my Google cal into my Outlook, which made me very happy. When I tried to go the other way, it didn't do anything. I fiddled with it a bit more, to no avail. So I tried to start over. At this point, I apparently did something very stupid, and Remote Calendars deleted my ENTIRE outlook calendar, with no warning. Boom, gone.

Maybe I should have backed up my calendar first, but I didn't think of that, and it wasn't listed in the instructions. I spent a good hour recreating my Calendar, and promptly uninstalled Remote Calendar.

Out of 5 stars, I give them -1! Installation wasn't too bad, setup was difficult, it did not do what I expected it to do, and somehow or another it completely destroy my Calendar.

My second test was gSyncit

This one is costs $9.99, and is therefore less popular. However, it has an evaluation mode that is free. In evaluation mode you can sync one Google Calendar to one Outlook Calendar. It is not a time limited evaluation mode. It does not auto-sync in evaluation mode. It can be found here.

Install was a breeze here. I downloaded it, ran the file. It put a little icon in my system tray. When I loaded up outlook it asked for my Google username and password. It then let me setup a connection between my Google Calendar and my Outlook. I hit sync, it synced everything, both ways, I rejoiced.

I tried deleting, adding, and modifying items in both Outlook and Google seeing how it worked. Since it didn't autosync I had to keep hitting the button to test it, which resulted in a little popup window that would go away if I registered. Everything on the Outlook end of things worked smoothly. The Google side was a little less than smooth. Google didn't seem to like it when you change an appointment while viewing it, but nothing major.

But, Outlook must be running for it to sync. I guess it's better than nothing.

N07 L337: Word of the year

Merriam-Webster every year holds a contest to see what should be the 'Word of the Year'. Who votes on these things? I haven't actually checked yet, but I am willing to bet very large sums of money that the vote is on the net, and that English professors don't vote much.

This year's word is: w00t

Don't be confused, those are indeed zeros. Yes, the time has come. L33t speak has made it to mainstream. Is it so elite now? The funny part is that this word hasn't even made it into the dictionary yet. The word of the year isn't even a word yet.

If they start adding l33t words to the dictionary, how will they be listed alphabetically? Things could get very complicated... for example, if a l33t word begins with E, we would instead use 3, but if a l33t word begins with A, it will use 4 (or sometimes on rare occasions @). But 3 comes before 4 in the standard alphanumeric, but A should come before E...

Runners up to the word of the year contest include: facebook, conundrum, quixotic, blamestorm, sardoodledom, apathetic, Pecksniffian, hypocrite, charlatan

What a fascinating list of words that is! I would classify all but facebook as being rather pessimistic words. They are so very 'glass is half empty', and some of them are a tad 'glass is empty because I threw it at the fucking wall'.

I think this clearly shows the direction that the world is going in... The words we use to signify this year are mostly pessimistic. However, the winning word is a neologism that signifies happiness, in a way that is young, upbeat, and digital. As a side note, in the unpopular MMORPG known MxO (Matrix Online) I played a hacker called: n07 l337 (yet everyone insisted on calling me 7, or Number 7... some even thought it was a reference to 7 of 9).

Genius Plan (aka: fun with links)

So here's the plan. I need to steal a robot, and I need to kidnap a rocket scientist.

Using these two tools, we shall send a robot to the moon. And it shall move around 500 meters, and it shall take pictures of things. Maybe it will even snap some pictures of some old NASA junk that was left behind. We will collect our $30 million prize from Google for being the first privately funded operation to get to the moon with a robot.

Of course we'll give some money to OLC (who is likely who we would steal the robot from). And likely give a bit to Ted thanking him for his assistance (we will also release him from captivity if he wants, but only after he explains that equation to me again, because the last time he explained it to me I so didn't get it). Obviously some of the money will also have to go to posting bail after the kidnapping and theft.

But there should be plenty of money left over to take on our next step in the plan. We will work with Virtual Reality. We will combine full body sensor arrays goggles and a bit of wire-fu to create a full body 3d interactive VR experience. This will make us even more money of course.

This is just the start of the plan though! Oh it gets better! We shall reinvest that money into creating Holodecks! Of course we will license the name fro Startrek, and this corporation cooperation will be as big as iPod and Starbucks. Obviously this will completely crush the entertainment industry, which we will buy out completely. This will obviously bring in MASSIVE amounts of money.

But of course, we all know money can buy anything, even private plane landing strips on government airports. So that will let us push through new technology that will let people plug their brains directly into computers. We'll of course hook their brains up to our world wide entertainment system, along with lots of other software. We'll need a catchy name for it, something like Matrix or Web, but maybe not something that's taken yet (I kinda like the sound of Grid).

Ah, but here is where it gets REALLY tasty. These humans that we jack into the Grid, they have all this unused brain, all that useless computational power! So we will use their brains to run our distributed computing system (much like SETI@home). With that computational power we will find extra terrestrial life. And we will lure them here with tentacle porn. Once they are here, we will beat them up with Cheetos. We will then steal their space ship, and fly around the universe having a fun time.

Ah yes. It's a perfect plan.