What I'm Reading Now: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

This will be my second Cory Doctorow book (the first was pretty great).

Cory was nice enough to podcast it for free! Audio books can be expensive, so this is a good deal. Of course he'll let you download a non-audio copy for free as well.

I just finally finished Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and it was surprisingly great, and I just skimmed the last couple of chapters of Niel Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and it was unsurprisingly bad.

What I'm Playing Now: Osmos

Jon Blow of Braid fame recently recommended Osmos. Osmos is only $10 with no DRM. Those three factors make it the kind of game you can just buy outright without checking the demo, which I did.

It's fun, innovative, and challenging. PC gaming is hot right now, and it's all a credit to indie games. Almost all my favorite games of the last two years have been indie games, with the exceptions being L4D & TF2. Even Portal was made by a small team of recent college grads, even though Valve hired them and published it. Puzzle Quest, Braid, PvZ, World of Goo, and Cogs round out my recent top picks.

The Raiders were robbed

Anyone who watched the Raider game last night could See Louis Murphy catch the ball in the end zone, bring it into his body (control the ball), and easily plant two feet in the end zone before being tackled.

The moment those 5 conditions were met (catch - control - left foot inbound - right foot inbound - ball past the plane of the end zone), the clock should have stopped and a touchdown ruled.

The Raiders were robbed by the replay official.

The funniest part was after halftime; either Steve Young or Mike Golic explained to the MNF audience that he checked with the instant replay crew, and showed the angle they used to make the call: then they showed the only camera angle that completely obscured the ball throughout the play. It had been ruled a touchdown on the field. If anything, it should have been ruled "the evidence is not conclusive to overturn the ruling".

I'm no Raider fan, but they beat the Chargers up & down the field for 58 minutes on Monday night, and they should have at least had a shot at overtime.

(Also, what's with the blackout on pictures? I can't find one picture of the controversial play on the internet. Did every cameraman fail to take a picture, or does the press collaborate with NFL to black out screwups by officials?)

Public Opinion: The news is unreliable at best

When dropping my daughter off at school this week, my wife saw a reporter with camera crew approaching parent after parent, exchanging only a handful of words and then moving on.

When they reached my wife, they asked if she was for or against the plan for the President to address the nations schoolchildren with his "stay in school" message. On hearing that she supported the message, the reporter said "we already have that; we're trying to find an opposing opinion" and moved on.

I think they're missing the point.

Doesn't it misrepresent the public opinion to show 1 supporting and 1 opposing view on the news if you have to wade through dozens of supporting views to find that lone dissenter? The report should be "overwhelming majority of locals support the plan", not "here's one supporting/1 dissenting view".

Backblaze custom storage: 67 TiB for $8k

This article on the Backblaze Pod includes 3-d models, part lists, and some assembly details for building your own scalable multi-petabyte SAN for about 4% of what you'd pay EMC2 for the same number of bits. I love the idea of using off-the-shelf components to tune computer hardware to specific needs.

Now I just need a method of stuffing dozens of CPU cores on as little accessory equipment as possible, to max out my distributed computing scores.

edit: added link to the backblaze article

Get To Know Your Smartphones

Wired did a great job with this smartphone article. They ignore all the 2nd-rate phones, cut through all the nonsense specs, and give you a quick side-by-side comparison of what's important: appearance, cost, major features. My only gripe is the Blackberry Storm probably didn't deserve to be in this list: as of September 2009, there are only 3 real smartphones: iPhone, G1, Pre.

link: wired.com/.../know-your-smartphones/