Day: February 10, 2001

Launching Your Tax Dollars Into Space

CNN describes the “successful” completion of the Space Shuttle’s latest mission. Lets see, they spent roughly $600 million to launch the shuttle to install a $1.4 billion(!) module onto the International Space Station. That’s $2 billion for a 15 ton lab which is an insane price.

It’s sad to think about how much more we could be learning about space or get closer to a manned Mars mission with this money rather than wasting it all on this pork barrel ISS which often seems like it is nothing more than a public works project to justify the huge amount of money necessary to maintain and launch the Space Shuttle.

Story of My Life

Last night Lisa and I visited my grandmother who lives about 20 minutes away. We usually make this trip about 3 or 4 times a month to buy groceries for Grandma, because she doesn’t have the energy to walk around large grocery stores.

While we’re visiting her, Grandma reminds me that before Christmas I had cashed a check for a little over $500 and deposited it into a joint checking account we share. Normally I don’t deposit any money into that account, which is there just for her expenses so that I can have access to it to write checks for her groceries and other expenses if she’s not able to do it. I’d completely forgotten about depositing the $500 so I’m feeling pretty good that I’ve got this extra money.

Of course I only got to feel good for about three hours. On the way home from Grandma’s the engine temperature gauge started going crazy. The needle started going all over the place like car gauges always do in UFO films. Unfortunately rather than a UFO, which would have been cool, the radiator in the car was shot. Lisa took the car in to get fixed this morning and the repair costs came to a little over $500.

That’s sort of my life in a nutshell.

GameCenter Dies With Scary Last Gasp

GameCenter is no more. If you believe Slashdot, it’s because after ZDNet acquired CNET, the good folks at Ziff Davis decided to nuke GameCenter in favor of their own GameSpot. Perhaps Ziff-Davis didn’t want two game sites confusing people, but on the other hand GameCenter was like a poor cousin to GameSpot even before the acquisition. GameCenter was on the short list of sites I visited daily, but it always seemed rather generic and its reviews of games were much spottier than GameSpot (i.e. it never reviewed a lot of games that GameSpot did).

But GameCenter did go out with a bang by posting a story claiming that the Interactive Digital Software Association is preparing to cave in to politicians by proposing voluntary restrictions on how they market games rated “M” for mature.

Specifically ads for games rated “M” would not be placed in magazines that have 45 percent or more readers under age 17 (I guess that means no more ads telling us “John Romero’s About to Make You His Bitch.” Hmmm…give Romero a few ad free years and maybe, just maybe, he can get all the bugs out of Daikatana!)

Web sites will supposedly have the same standard with Media Metrix being used to measure the age of the audience. I guess the theory is to completely forget all of the small fan sites that will never show up on Media Metrix but whose presence is a key factor in the success of a lot of games these days.

I hope this turns out to be a hoax or a mistake.