Let’s start this bad boy off with a bang.

First off, let me say that despite the fact that I’m now working for Microsoft, I (and in fact most people I work with) haven’t drank the DRM Kool-Aid. I would go so far as to say that most of us are actively anti-DRM, and would support alternatives to the rather horrible practice of reaming your system with rootkits or odious anti-upgrade initatives. Sadly, it seems that Apple is now part of the DRM Manson Family as well. It’s not that I object to the concept of DRM, just the implementations that most companies have decided are the ‘best option.

I cognitively realized yesterday that Nine Inch Nails Broken is 15 years old. That threw me for a rather severe loop, because that’s old enough to be considered “Classic Rock.” How’s that, you ask? Well, when I was in high school, Led Zepplin was being played as classic rock on a couple of bay area radio stations, and the average age for those tracks (at the time) was 15 years. Even despite the fact that I don’t expect to see “Happiness in Slavery” flanking Creedence Clearwater Revival in any classic rock playlists, I’m still vaguely disturbed by this concept.

Amazon’s workforce here in Seattle is also relocating, it seems. They’re moving their workspace from the Silicon North of Redmond/Bellevue back across the 5 to South Lake Union, also known as Paul Allens Development Wonderland. All cracks at Allen’s real estate deals aside, I can safely say that I’m pretty happy that he’s invested so much money into the community, if for no other reason that SLU is Queen Anne’s back yard. What’s more, I guess this means the South Lake Union Streetcar is going to be seeing a lot more ridership than I’d originally anticipated. Which is pretty cool, just because it’s a street car.

So I think I’m repurposing this blog. Initially I didn’t really know what I was going to use it for; I just assumed a theme would come to me when I got around to posting on it. Funny fact – a theme will help you post, and not having a theme is often an impediment to posting on it. As such, I think this is going to be my technology and futurism blog. It’s more interesting than me babbling about web tech, and is probably also more relevant to my daily life than that. Since I’m not currently working on web stuff, I think it’s probably for the best.

The UMPC B1 is really what we all ought to be looking for in a palmtop. It may not be as powerful as your desktop, but it does the job. The resolution may not be as good as your 21 inch monitor – but it’s fine for a palmtop. What this creature lacks in power, it makes up for in terms of form factor, integrated peripherals, and a touchscreen. This is the Shadowrun commlink. This is the PocketPC. I want one of these. A lot.

To put it mildly, I am amazed at the effects displayed in this demo of Photosynth. The program takes photos – either ones you input into its database, or you can access commonly photographed places/locales, such as the Louvre or pretty much any location in Washington D.C. – and stitches them together into a flowing domain that you are capable of navigating. What’s more, you can scroll around in real time to view all angles of your PoV as well as navigate in/out to closer or more panoramic views of your subject. It doesn’t just autostitch photos. It enables you to treat a collection of photos in the same fashion as Google earth treats its maps – one great continuous experience. Pretty. Damn. Sweet.

I’m going to skip writing a large or sweeping review of Mass Effect in order to concentrate only on those things that make it different or significantly superior to other games. This doesn’t mean I don’t like the game, it just means that I feel certain things bear more mention than others.

The two great triumphs of Mass Effect’s much touted dialogue system are that the dialogue choices you make are not verbatim – they suggest the tone of what you will say, but rarely dictate it exactly. For instance, the dialogue choice “Cut the chatter!” actually results in, “Quiet down, you two! You’re soldiers. Try and act like it.” What’s more, you’re actually prompted for your dialogue choice before the current conversation ends. What this does is preserves the flow of conversation such that what you’re viewing feels like a continuous dialogue, rather than the more traditional stop-and-go of RPG fame.

Perhaps the most glowing praise I can give Mass Effect is that in terms of writing and pacing, I personally would not have done anything different. What’s more, Mass Effect’s sense of style and world construction is so monumentally similar to Singularity Effect that I could, without changing anything but alien names, drop Mass Effect into a Singularity Effect tabletop game and it would fit perfectly. Witness the fact that even the names are similar, and refer to nigh-identical concepts.

What this means in practice, however, is that the writers of Mass Effect – like myself – are obviously huge fans of the author David Brin, and the world of Mass Effect – like the world of Singularity Effect – owes him a great debt. There are many references to concepts in the Uplift universe, not the least of which is the repeated use of “uplifted” to indicate “genetically modified to be sentient”; a religious awe and adoration of the Protheans/Progenitors; lost Prothean/Progenitor technology forming the basis of what galactic society is trying to remember how to build; the similarity of form between Salarians/Volus/Turians & Humans/Asari indicating common patron lines between the them.

It’s not like they’re ripping him off or anything. They consciously nod his direction. I’m just amused that great minds think alike, so to speak.

Despite the fact that I so recently finished the site, it’s already bugging me. Not the design itself, but the technology I used to implement it. Allow me to list the problems I feel are rife in the site:

• Tables being used for non-tabular data. Big no-no. Will have to fix. Is easy to fix, it’ll just take some finagling for both firefox and IE.
• I was dumb and didn’t make a universal php header to tack to every page. I should’ve, since it’s so easy to do, and it’s the same for every freakin’ page…
• HTML 4.0 Transitional, my eye. It’s getting upgraded to XHTML 1.0.
• Not enough cyber ninjas. I’ll have to work on that.

While at Scott’s house, I discovered something fantastic and amazing. It’s a small fact, but one that amuses me immensely. That fact is that this site has apparently been deemed unsuitable by Trend Micro’s antifraud programming, which is designed to cut out objectionable sites. What’s even better is that the category of objectionable this site fills is ‘cult/occult’. Apparently cults and the occult can defraud you with a glance. Especially ones so well masked as a homepage, a blog, and a portfolio. Amazing.

But the real meat of this post is something I was mulling over while working on the site itself. I’d like to discuss the death of Hypertext. You must think I’m joking, posting this on a Movable Type weblog, upon a site I coded with my own too hands. No. I’m serious. Not quite deadly serious, but I never really get deadly serious to begin with. Hypertext is a withering ideal, despite the very acronym which gives it life. Let me explain.

Back in the old days of dinosaurs, Ma Bell, beforeVint Cerf started inventing crazy geek humor t-shirts, there was an idea called hypertext. Hypertext, contrary to what you might think, is not HTML. HTML is a way to format a document which makes it hypertext-friendly. Hypertext is fundamentally an organizational method - a rhizomatic cross-linking system which enables documents to be both referent and referred. Hold on, back up - let me take the Saussurian theory out of what I’m saying. What I mean is this: hypertext is about putting links everywhere they’re wanted, and even a few places they’re not, and having them make sense in the context of what the document is saying. Have you ever seen how Wikipedia organizes their links? If it’s an interesting concept, it’s linked. That’s real hypertext.

Used to be, no matter where I went on the net, I’d see nested links like that. Pages constantly in cross-communication about who referred what to whom. That’s how I found a lot of my early bible o’ bookmarks. Also inadvertantly, how I found the woman who designed my first tattoo. Our pages were a mess of links; we didn’t have any goddamn ALT text, or any CSS to hide our links, or Flash to look pretty. We had some images tacked to a metaphorical corkboard and some newspaper clippings in between them. A digression - do you believe me about the lack of ALT? Well, sure, we had it, but nobody used it. Do you believe me about CSS? It’s true. I’ve been using the web on a daily basis before CSS1 was adopted. And you can be damn sure that was before Flash.

Anyway, back to the main story. The web was based around cross-linking anything and everything, from what at the time seemed revolutionary, to the things we created, most of which seem fairly banal in retrospect. So where’s all the hypertext ethos vanishing to?

Well, maybe it never existed in the first place. I can’t honestly say that my experience with the web is definitive. I don’t have any evidence that the hypertext ethos was as widespread as I recall it being. But I can tell you this much: rampant crosslinking seems to be dying out, outside of wiki-style communities and the more old-school web users. In my experience, the need for explicit description of links (to save us from ‘NSFW’ links), greater insularity on the part of users, and a general sense of web self-regulation has diminished the hypertext organizational mode. We don’t need rampant crosslinks any more than we need excessive bookmarks. We’ve traded our hypertexting for Googling. We don’t Gopher information any more, we Wiki it. Hell, I know fairly heavy net users who don’t even know what FTP is, much less stands for. Why? PHP and ASP driven web-panels and automated file uploaders handle all their file management needs. They need never even touch the dirty shell that’s evolved from what I had to use, back when I logged in through the CNet ISP (before it was a household name) in Danville.

I’m not passing judgement. I’m just observing an organizational shift in how we present, preserve, and shuffle the data that make up so much of my daily life. It’s not that hypertext is a superior or inferior method - it’s just an interesting method, but one we don’t use much any more. Hell, I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. Look at this page. It has links in places, but not in the same fashion that a proper hypertext document would have. Because I’m lazy. Because you can Google and Wiki it. And because my brain organizes the net as a series of rooms with corridors between them, not as a rhizomatic structure. But taking a trip back to the earlier days can be fun, no?

And sometimes, you can find embarassing photos of yourself from nearly a decade ago.

The Deus Absconditus site in all possible anti-glory is now up and running at long last. While there are a few things I’m still going to tinker with in my spare time - namely adding streaming audio to the blog, and trying to get my PHP to spit the gallery out in a more orderly fashion - I think it’s all come together fairly well. The gallery is automated, the PHP runs smooth, the formatting is tasty and good and doesn’t break in a stiff breeze. And I wonder to myself sometimes… ‘What took me so long?’

 And then I remember. Oh yeah. Losing a whole site and 90% of the backend code because you get pissed off is a really bad thing, and will sour you to resurrecting that design down the line. Let this be a lesson to you.

With regards to the blog: the first time you post a comment, I screen it and approve you. I approve anyone who’s obviously not a robot spammer, so don’t be shy. It’s just a spam-proofing method, and it’s more foolproof than any automated system, because it uses my judgement.

 Have fun with the site. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Pass out plenty of wolf tickets.