It’s 1 am and I have a commitment in the early morning, so I’m going to bed before I start typing anything significant.  Instead I’ll cop out with a bunch of twitter hash-tags:

#fopl

#w2e

#cultureclash

#piratecatradio

#hackathon

And by the way, if you want to swing by the Web 2.0 Expo, you can get a free floor pass by registering with this code: websf09hack

Technorati Tags: expo, hackathon, the web, w2e

The world — and by “world” I of course mean “everybody who’s at SXSW right now” — is all a-twitter about FourSquare, a website aiming to turn your social life into an adventure game complete with experience points and trophies (they call ‘em badges), and the self-proclaimed sequel to the ill-fated Dodgeball.  While I am definitely #notatsxsw, the flood of SXSW tweets about #foursquare got me more than a little curious.

So I signed up, and of course my four bigshot social media maven friends (who are NOT #notatsxsw) were already on there.  I poke around a bit, getting a feel for what would be the “action” of this game.  The site is brand spanking new, so while the mechanics are largely in place, the content is not. 

It takes me 2 minutes to realize you could rack up a ton of points just clicking “sure I done that” on lots of random tasks.  My immediate reaction: this is a web-based button-masher.  So of course, since my brash editorial brain craves a global audience, I took it right to Twitter:

nthmost: #foursquare isn’t a fun game because there’s no accountability. It’s a web-based button-masher. iPhone app doubly so.

about a day ago

Sat Mar 14 23:40:46 +0000 2009

MyFriendTim: #foursquare maybe scoring is not so revolutionary. # of friends on FB or followers here is already real world score

about a day ago

Sat Mar 14 23:53:27 +0000 2009

nthmost: @MyFriendTim true, but that’s the #twitter game. #foursquare should be better at being the game it’s trying to be.

about a day ago

Sat Mar 14 23:56:54 +0000 2009

MyFriendTim: hmm don’t have #foursquare but I got the idea that it effectively scored stupid acts not that it stupidly scored effective acts

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:10:50 +0000 2009

nthmost: @MyFriendTim I just signed up an hour ago to check out #foursquare . I already have 5 pts b/c I found stuff I could click “yeah me too” on.

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:13:50 +0000 2009

MyFriendTim: re #foursquare ugh. Stupid scores for stupid acts

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:16:32 +0000 2009

nthmost: People make a lot of tasks like “go to We Be Sushi on Valencia and get the Early Bird Special”. Uh, yup. check. done it. #foursquare

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:15:15 +0000 2009

nthmost: But okay, maybe it’s yet another form of lifestreaming, similar to how the stuff you click “favorite” in YouTube can show in your FriendFeed

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:16:45 +0000 2009

nthmost: But in that case #foursquare != game. If they don’t want to be a game, that’s cool too. Someone else could make the game I’m wanting here.

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:18:35 +0000 2009

nthmost: @MyFriendTim Tasks don’t have to be stupid. They’re player-created / controlled. Which of course means >95% stupid. #foursquare

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:33:20 +0000 2009

MyFriendTim: I’ll check it out but I am with you. I don’t want amplifiers of current status games but want more interesting markers #foursquare

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 03:07:19 +0000 2009

nthmost: #foursquare Tasks could be interesting in aggregate. Could help suggest what to do in strange cities, help ppl find others who do cool stuff

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:37:19 +0000 2009

As it happened, @foursquare was tracking mentions of #foursquare, and caught me in the act of my loudmouth editorializing.  [will clean up all Twitter copy-pasting later]

@nthmost Sorry you hate foursquare (and fun. & puppies). I hope we can still be friends. JK – we got tons of stuff to fix. Bear w/ us!  4:56 PM Mar 14th from web

@foursquare I kid because I love. I just submitted a nice fat suggestion for you. (I do hate fun though. >:-|  5:02 PM Mar 14th from TweetDeck in reply to foursquare

@foursquare I actually just spent a lot of time looking at your site hoping to see a list of “what’s coming”… didn’t find it  5:04 PM Mar 14th from TweetDeck

@nthmost. Ha. We love you too. And no list of what’s “coming soon” because we ran out of time (I was fixing bugs at airport!). Soon tho!  5:10 PM Mar 14th from web

I honestly do love what they’re setting out to do.  I just think it could be a much better game, if a game is what they want to be, by incorporating some really basic principles of what makes any game fun and addictive.  Of course I briefly considered “well I’ll just make my OWN douchebag game!”, but that lasted all of 10 seconds as I realized I had no interest in starting a website defined as successful by having ever-increasing overhead and no income.

Hence, I headed over to the FourSquare suggestion box and wrote the following, complete with lovingly hand-crafted HTML for best readability (this is straight copy-paste):

More Fun with a Little Accountability

Accountability may not sound like Fun, but a little goes a long way in making a game more fun and addictive. How about sparking creativity by letting players optionally create simple tests to “prove” the task was done?

Examples:

• amount of the bill at the restaurant after ordering a specific meal
• color of the person’s hair that the player was supposed to meet
• name of the guy who owns that little hole-in-the-wall cafe
• second word in the last paragraph on page 31 of the King’s Quest III manual

In other words, tiny bits of data that would be really easy to get if you’re there doing it, and either impossible to get otherwise, or just a silly pain in the butt to remember to look up on the web just to get the points.

Format could be similar to a captcha. Task-creators should have the option of showing to the player that there will be a validation required, otherwise people might later click “I’ve done this” and find they’re missing the data they need, possibly being unable to get it again.

Certain badges could be comprised only of tasks that require proof. Since proofs would be totally optional, a feature like this would add a layer to the game rather than change the way the whole game works.

–Naomi Most, March 14, 2009

Tangential thoughts: This experience has caused me to evaluate my “voice” on Twitter and around the net.  I’m happy with all of the above interactions. “People love a loose cannon”, as a family member once quipped at me over 12 years ago.  But I have some thinking to do as to how best to capitalize upon this persona’s comfort with having strong, somewhat abrasive opinions.

Technorati Tags: editorializing, foursquare, fun, game design, twitter, voice

I’m well aware I need a haircut, a kick in the pants, and a stern talking to. And yeah, there’s some glare on my glasses from the screen. TOO BAD!

Nthmost Twitter Manifesto

What’s great about Twitter is that it’s like a party, and the type of party you’re at is defined by who you’re following, who’s following you, and how you choose to use this platform.

Maybe you’re at a sports party and you’re trading stats, betting on performance, and ordering pizza with weird toppings.  Maybe it’s a family reuniun.  Maybe it’s like a total cafe scene where you’re surrounded by underground art and obscure music.

Mine is a cocktail party. I want to be at a party where I’m engaging in conversations with wicked smart people and learning a lot, sharing ideas, and sometimes just being clever for the sake of witty banter. That’s me.

I share links and post pictures either to start conversations or to contribute to the conversations that are happening around me.  I have strong opinions and I want to encourage other people to have strong [well-reasoned and interesting] opinions and to participate in a discussion through them.

I’m not the type who’s documenting the minutiae of her life. Nothing wrong with that, I’m just not doing that.

I can be noisy sometimes, so you might wanna turn off the mobile notifications for me. I very rarely twitter about where I am, and if I want your attention specifically, I’ll send you a Direct Message.

Finally, I do not automatically Follow people back. I do check out every single one of your profiles, though, to see if you’re having the kind of conversations I want to get into. If you just have 1 message posted and it’s a link to something I’ve seen a billion times… nuh-uh. nope.  Just sayin’.

–Naomi Most, March 14, 2009

Technorati Tags: manifesto, nthmost, theory, twitter, video

I sit at my computer gently tapping away at some project or another, my third cup of black tea by my side, the increasing light gradually revealing my nightly crime: that yet again I have forgotten to go to bed.

Those who’ve known me a long time would no doubt recognize the scene as belonging to the early dot-com era when I lived with my grandmom, worked a programming job by day, did freelance websites (and a lot of Starcraft) by night.

Yet the author of the above statement was my housemate, just this moment, coming up to take his shower.  His tone was facetious, of course.

My grandmother would have said something very similar, though much more concernedly.  One morning, awake and floating down the stairs at 6am as she always did, utterly perplexed at finding me still at the computer where she left me, she recited me these two lines of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

“I burn my candle at both ends,
it may not last the night…”

I felt chastised.  But I never felt I could explain what it was that kept me up all night.

I also never knew the other two lines of the poem, strangely enough, until a few years later:

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends–

It gives a lovely light!

Ah hah, I have my answer for my grandmother, sadly too late (she is dead).

The light of the world isn’t enough for me; I need to create my own.  Whether it burns me away just doesn’t matter, not right now.  I’m striving for something brighter — sleep be damned.

Insomniac phase 1: 1998 : web 1.0

Insomniac phase 2: 2009 : web 2.0

Technorati Tags: insomnia, kathleen mauchly, poetry, the web

I caught the BART displays at the Fruitvale station in a state of reboot a few nights ago.  Apparently they run Damn Small Linux.

I know that’s old news, but it’s moments like those, when you catch the thing in person and then glance down at your keychain and realize you have the exact same operating system sitting on an object about the size and thickness of a thumbnail, that make you realize you’re living in the future.

Then you snap out of it and wonder where the hell are the flying cars and robots to do your laundry.  Dammit!

I really do carry around a copy of Damn Small Linux on my USB keychain!

Technorati Tags: bart, linux, sightings, the future

Me: [cheery, using fun new Japanese veggie tool] I CAN haz grated yam!

Chick: huh?

Me: Oh.  I can haz cheezburger?  lolcats?

Chick: uhh

Me: Oh man!  Ok, if you need instant funny and you’re on the web, you gotta–

Chick: Yeah I can’t spend all day on the internet like you.

[Yeah, you are SO not my friend.  What are you waiting here for, again??]

Me: [nonplussed]  Hah.  You want to see “all day on the internet”?

[I pull up CHRIS.PIRILLO.com/live/ ]

Chick: [confused but awed] Wowwww, I wonder when his birthday is?

Me: (aside) oh boy, I know where this is going.

Chick: I bet he’s a Taurus.

Me: uh huh.

Chick: Hey when’s your birthday?

Me: *headdesk*

Technorati Tags: lolcats, net culture, superstition, vulcan

• No laptop or desktop computer hardware can be trusted
• Hardware is only as good as the software you install on it
• Universal Serial Bus, while definitely the bus of the devil, is the only consistently, possibly even “universally”, supported peripheral interface
• all OSes are inherently sucky

Where do you put your big stuff?  Video, music, project files, plans for perpetual motion devices, and so on?

Well first off, external hard drives with USB interfaces is the obvious fulfiller of the hardware portion of those requirements.  But how about partition formatting?  NTFS and HFS+, the proprietary darlings of Microsoft and Apple respectively, are just about as compatible on a single system as an atheist and a Mormon in a coffee shop; support for these two in open source platforms can be rocky.

For a long while, FAT32 served as the lingua franca of formatting, with native support available in Windows and “good enough” support in Linux and OS X.  But it’s not without its problems.  In addition to its non-case-sensitivity (“SCREWYOU.TXT” is the same thing as “screwyou.txt”, which is lame), I find it slow and messy, and probaby the most fragile filesystem in terms of error and damage control, just a notch about FAT16.  It’s beyond the scope of this blog to bother explaining my opinion, lest I never post anything, ever, so let’s just leave it at “I hate FAT32″.

Enter ext3.  Long the standard of Linux drives everywhere, it suddenly gained greater relevance as the Mac OS became the UNIX-based OS X — you can use ext3 natively on this system just as you would on any BSD, Linux, or UNIX system.  Suddenly, Mac and Linux boxes have something in common.  Windows, however, remained just out of reach, unless you were willing to experiment with the safety of your data.

It wasn’t until last year around this time that I found a stable ext3 reading/writing experience for Windows in EXT3 IFS [located at fs-driver.org].  And wouldn’t you know it, it’s Free.

I experimented with all 3 OSes at my disposal: OS X on my G4 laptop, Win Xp and later Vista on my Dell laptops, and Linux on my other Dell laptop, and found basically nothing to be unhappy about.  It’s awesome to be able to format a USB thumb drive with ext3 and use it seamlessly across Windows, Mac, Linux, and even my Playstation 3.

A few months ago, I was retiring my G4 laptop and I needed to move my 180GB digital music collection (mp3s, mp4s, oggs, they all coexist peacefully for me) to a larger drive that didn’t make an ominous clicking sound.  Having acquired a lovely external Lacie 500GB drive for a keen $80 or so, my choice of hard drive formats switched from FAT32 to EXT3.  It’s been 8 months since I did so, and I haven’t looked back.

So, my solution for cross-platform hard drive storage: ext3.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Or at least until something better comes along.

Technorati Tags: i want my mp3, linux, osx, ps3, windows

Part of the freakiness is the soundtrack — it’s an ambient dose of extreme jibblies.  Maybe I’m a big baby, I dunno… but YOU try wandering through dimly-lit disease-ridden sewers, with insanely fast feral ghouls popping out at you before you can see them, complete with a hard minor-chord orchestral hit as your character takes a hard major flesh wound, and then tell me if adrenaline hasn’t kicked your heartbeat into a startle-induced overdrive.

One solution is to switch to an in-game radio station, namely Galaxy News Radio, so you can dig the swinging sounds of Danny Kaye and The Andrews Sisters as you slice through yet another leather-clad raider with your homemade gas-powered fire-sword that sets your foes ablaze, or sneak around doing a little reverse-pickpocketing with live grenades.

But with only 20 songs and some really repetitive newscasting going on, it’s just not a solution.  Only so many times can I listen to DJ Three Dog dispense helpful tips such as “don’t feed the yao-guai”.

I want to make my own radio station in Fallout 3, but I think that’s not going to be possible on the PS3.  One guy has managed it on the PC.  It’d be great to see an XMP-based music streaming capability, or at least a way to make a playlist out of music on your PS3 that shows up in your PipBoy as a custom radio station.

Off the top of my head, here are some songs I’d throw into a Fallout 3 radio station.  While it doesn’t match the atmosphere of culture that hasn’t progressed past the late 50s, I can imagine these songs existing in subcultural parallel to the goofy doo-wop the game provides.  Some might even be post-apocalyptically ironic.

The Misfits – Ghouls Night Out

Dead Kennedys – Kill the Poor

Covenant – Hardware Requiem

Nine Inch Nails – Capital G

Project Pitchfork – Timekiller

Technorati Tags: fallout 3, soundtrack

I live in this building.  I am spoiled on novelty.

Technorati Tags: blackmore, jousting, oakland

“I wonder if I can get Wikipedia formatted nicely on my phone.”

google google google

“Ah hah, Lexipedia.  Nice…”

read read read

“Wait, 250 MB!  Nyohh.  I’m not fitting that on m- Oh wait.  I have 8 GIGABYTES of storage on my phone.  Right.”

download download

“Wow.  My phone has about 20 times more hard storage capacity than my first PC.”

sound of scale forming on brain

“I feel old.”

Technorati Tags: wikipedia