This weekend I installed Movable Type 2.0 on fourhman.com, which means that these news posts are now being served to you through a complicated cgi process. Which automatically creates archive pages... allows for the kind of blurb links like at the bottom of this page... and can have multiple authors.

I was successful in ignoring the first wave of Rumble Robots, but this "Invasion" set I had to get. Armies of RC robots who battle with infrared beams? Excellent.

Naturally, you've got to be skeptical. Any RC toy under $100 has to be of questionable quality. Plus, the Invasion robots claim to let you control multiple robots with the same controllers... and there's this whole weird bar code scanning element. This could be very very bad.

But it's not as lousy as it could be (although I haven't tested out the multi-bot angle yet.) The RC is fine, within a limited range. The robots themselves are pretty cool looking... but - as the packaging is free in pointing out - they could certainly look cooler if you buy additional plastic weapon and armor kits.

I bought an 5 gig iPod, Apple's answer the the MP3 revolution, a few months ago. Overall I'm quite happy with it. It syncs superfast with iTunes the second you plug it in. It doubles as an external hard drive. It's tiny. It sounds great. It has a "Cool Factor" of about 100. Why then does Apple insist on messing with consumer confidence by releasing poor "updates" for it?

A pair of gaming industry articles surfaced recently... Naturally concerned with Important Ethical Issues facing the gamer population. Aren't they all?

Gamers' Perks, or 'Playola'? (thanks Penny Arcade): The gist here is that game reviewers get crazyass free trips and prizes from game companies. (As you well know if you've been watching those terrible movie segments on the monthly PS2 demo disk.) Yes, they do. It's common practice for any promoter to give away free stuff to reviewers/buyers. It's why I have a Jerry Springer keychain and a Jamie Foxx Show baseball cap.

If you were to draw a graph of the United States Postal Service's stamp rate increase over the last few years, it would greatly resemble that old Encyclopedia Brown story where Encyclopedia Brown takes a bet about throwing a basketball 10 feet and having it turn around and come directly back to him, without bouncing or having anyone throw it back, and he wins the bet by throwing the ball straight up into the air. That Encyclopedia Brown was one smart motherfucker.

This June, we get another stamp increase... up to 37 cents. If you check their website, the USPS lays the blame at "increases in costs for fuel and health benefits." I suspect they're just doing it so anthrax mailers now have to shell out 37 cents to kill various American pigdogs. If we could find out the average price point of X grams of anthrax, maybe the USPS could eventually make it wholly unprofitable to poison senators, abortion clinics, and gay/lesbian activists.

FOX has cancelled Ally McBeal, which is one of the few shows I bother to watch. My wife is going to miss it much more than I will; I usually watched it as kind of a low-impact Twin Peaks (a show I enjoyed mostly for the shockingly goofy moments set against the dark supernatural backdrop.)

I don't know if tv just sucks or I'm just outgrowing it. The one thing that is really starting to grind me is the easy assumption that Television Will Be Tonight's Entertainment. It's like a giant excuse to kill time before passing out for the night, and I'd much rather be doing something else. Fuck, I'm not talking about going skydiving instead, I just don't want to feel like I'm wasting time watching tv simply because there's nothing else worth doing.

A few months ago, I was innocently finding ways to kill time at work when I get a message from some lady who works for the PA State Attorney General. Seems she wants to see if our business website would be willing to have a "hotlink" to the Atty General's PA health care site. What do I care?, I think. It will take me about 2 minutes to code in a link. So I call her back and get told that they are still in discussions on the matter and she'll get back to me. Weeks pass, but she does indeed call again, this time prepared with some crazy URL and a few graphics. So up goes the link. To her, this was a huge deal. Probably meant she completed X tasks from her Inbox and achieved some kind of bureaucratic coup that rubber-stamped "OK" on a dozen official state documents. To me, it was another boring piece of monkey work that burned me 2 more minutes towards going the fuck home. It's all a matter of scale.

Today's discussion topic: the Scooby Doo movie. My contextual additions are italicized in gray.

Joe: Did a search at Target.com.
Joe: "The search didn't find the "resident evil" you were looking for. Try another search using the hints below."
Joe: Thought that sounded funny.
Matt: That is funny.
Matt: I saw that copy was still going this morning. Hope shines brightly. I'm downloading a huge file from Matt's Mac. This is the third time we've tried it.
Joe: Yeah. 2 hours to go when I left for work.
Matt: Stupid crappy upload DSL speed.
Joe: Gandalf: "Perhaps Matt's server was meant to stay up. Perhaps Joe was meant to download the file. And that is an encouraging thought."