Month: April 2004

The other day, my wife IMed me a few links to Chopping Block, and I’ve wasted quite a few hours this week reading through the archives of this deliciously twisted comic.

I keep reading the back issues thinking, the creator of this strip is a genius, I’m just glad that he’s not my neighbor. Stuff like this and this is indicative of someone with a very strange way of thinking.

This Wired story about the selling of items for MMORPGs was simultaneously fascinating and irritating (sounds like most of the people I dated in college).

Wired writer Julian Dibbell bet that he could make as much selling items for MMORPGS as he was making in his job as a professional writer. Last month he earned a profit of nearly $4,000 or the equivalent of $47,000/year by selling items from games.

Cool. Of course one advantage Dibbell had is that few people do this professionally yet because almost no games actually allow it which creates the same sort of problems that are faced by consensual but illegal acts in the real world, such as prostitution (in both cases, for example, since the transactions occur on the black market, the authorities in each case will usually do nothing to enforce the contract between buyer and seller. Get taken for a ride while trying to buy some item for EverQuest? Sony could care less about your problems).

What annoys me is this insistence that such goods are not real because they are not physically tangible in the same way that, say, a hamburger is,

Since last summer, Dibbell has boldly proclaimed on his blog that on April 15, 2004, he would “truthfully report to the IRS that my primary source of income is the sale of imaginary goods, and that I earn more from it, on a monthly basis, than I have ever earned as a professional writer.”

But a +15 Sword of Whatever is just as tangible and physical as that .99 song download from iTunes which, like the item for the MMORPG, is generally purchased only to be used in conjunction with a program running on a computer or portable device (and the way Dibbell defines it here, I’d argue that even music on a CD is largely “imaginary.”)

Information is real. I spend 95 percent of the time in my job receiving and generating data and information. I suspect my grandfather, who worked in a factory all of his life, would complain loudly that this isn’t really work either since it doesn’t involve creating or shaping or modifying anything that anyone can hold in her hands at the end of the day.

But, just like the +15 Sword of Whatever, I can assure you it is very real (besides, if this stuff was imaginary, my wife wouldn’t always try to swipe it first while we’re playing these games online or on the PS2).

Sources:

Virtual Trader Barely Misses Goal. Daniel Terdiman, Wired News, April 16, 2004.

I missed this the first time around, but apparently in late March a local administrator with the Transporation Safety Agency had a plane searched for a bomb based on a tip from a psychic. The search resulted in the cancelling of the flight because it put some flight workers over their allotted work hours.

The idiot who ordered this was TSA administrator Doug Perkins who told the Associated Press,

The purported psychic’s call was “unusual,” conceded Doug Perkins, local administrator for the federal Transportation Security Administration director.

“But in these times, we can’t ignore anything. We want to take the appropriate measures,” he said.

So are they going to shut down all air traffic in Texas if some 13-year-old spells “airplane” and “bomb” on her ouija board?

Source:

Psychic tip prompts bomb search on plane. Associated Press, March 27, 2004.

So my laptop arrives back today, but as far as I can tell HP’s repair center never bothered to investigate my major complaint — that the backlight on this laptop is defective. They did fix the fan that wouldn’t spin up and replaced the touchpad for some reason (I never use the touchpad and certainly didn’t have any complaints about it).

How bad is the backlight — currently I’ve got the brightness cranked up as high as it can go without being completely washed out and it’s barely readable. Have to turn out most of the lights to make out much of anything.

Fortunately I found a way to route around HP’s damage support system by finding a friendly local HP repair place. They’re going to ship it to HP ultimately for repair too, but at least I can talk to a human being and say “look, this is the problem. Get them to fix it, please.”

One lesson I learned was that it just doesn’t pay to have important data physically tied to a machine. I’ve spent most of the day ensuring all of my data is on my FireLite so I don’t have the same loss of connectivity problems I had this time around without my laptop.