Slowy Joey

Apparently it takes a long time to switch domain registrars.

Due to shinannigans, Ghostrazor.com will not be unpacking until Wednesday this week, and it will probably do weird things at that point in time for a couple of days.  I’ll be updating the wordpress.com version and the new version at it’s new home in tandem so hopefully no downtime will actually occur.  Maybe.

Downtime

My blog is currently hosted with Wordpress.com

While it provides some nice features, it also puts in a lot of restrictions.  I can no longer tolerate these restrictions, and as such I’ll be rolling my own Wordpress offsite.  The practical upshot of this is Ghostrazor may be unavailable between now and Sunday.

When I’m back, I’ll put up a post on an exclusive Will Wright lecture.

Zero Punctuation Reviews Super Paper Mario

Yeah, yeah, I’m aware this isn’t really news of note, but having newly discovered this font of hilarity, I thought I’d mention it.  Choice Yahtzee quote:  “I don’t really think that America is populated entirely by assholes and cowboys; I know that some Canadians live there too”.

Randy Pausch

Randy is a Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon, and co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center. He also serves as the Director of Carnegie Mellon’s Stage 3 research group, where he oversees the development of Alice.

He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. In 1995, he spent a Sabbatical with the Walt Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, and currently consults with Imagineering on interactive theme park attractions, particularly for the “DisneyQuest” virtual-reality based theme park. Randy is the author or co-author of five books and over 60 reviewed journal and conference proceedings articles, and his primary interests are human-computer interaction, entertainment technology, and undergraduate education.

Randy has been for some time diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.  He gave his last lecture, entitled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” is an inspirational and touching presentation, and a must watch.  It’s available here for streaming.  Watching it will really give you a perspective for what you’re doing with your life, and how to focus on the things that matter.  A worthy watch (It’s two hours though, so keep that in mind).

Why it sucks to be a Canadian

I should really be studying for the distributed computing final I have tomorrow morning, but hilarity wins out.

Citizen Game posts a (less than) amusing truth about living north of the 49th parallel: You get screwed in the exchange rate. Once upon a time, our shining little loonies and toonies were worth half a big green American bill. This is happily no longer the case.

Never the less it would seem that the US would like to pretend that it was the good ol’ days of the ninties and charge exchange rates to that tune. I’m not going to bother showing the analysis here, but the image below sums it up pretty well (you can go to Citizen Game for the full run-down).

I would mention however that exchange rates are not the only place where we get nailed (or even the worst). My biggest beef is in the lack of digital content that we get up here.

In the USA, there are lovely services such as TiVo, Amazon Unbox, iTunes Music Store, Zune Marketplace, Xbox Live Marketplace, and so on. These lovely services will allow you to pay them money - in real dollars - and in exchange they will give you media content (movies and TV shows in particular). In Canada I’ve heard it’s theoretically possible to buy a TiVo system, but there’s some magic you have to pull. Rogers will allow you to rent a PVR system from them at an approximately cost of $15,000 a month, with an initial start up fee of whatever you’ll get for putting a second mortgage on your house. iTMS sells music, but nothing else, and the Zune and Xbox Live Marketplaces just aren’t available here.

What is going on here people? You wonder why we download so much media off torrent sites up here? Maybe it’s because for some reason nobody wants to let me have the ability to give them money so that I can watch the Colbert Report whenever I like. My guess being that nobody seems to be able to secure licensing rights from the IP owners for distribution in the great white north. This does not make any sense to me whatsoever, but I would guess that the enemy of Mankind, Rogers Communications, has something to do with this as they are responsible for all problems in Canada.

I may have gone on a bit of a tangent here, but to return to the land of Videogames, Gametap has a restricted set of titles for Canada as well (and that I _Really_ don’t understand).

In conclusion, if you don’t allow someone to buy something, they will steal it from you and lobby their government to make it okay to do so.

We are experiencing Technical Difficulties

Sorry for the issues, I seem to be having difficulty getting blogger to allow comments, so I’ve had to recreate the entire blog and copy all the posts over. In the process I’ve upset my DNS server, so it will be aproximately a week before this all ends up back on Ghostrazor.com. The RSS Feed will probably be booched too.

Please bear with me. =)

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