A long time ago I wrote a thing called the Temple of Ego. It was inspired by a few other websites but basically the goal was to aggregate all the data you put out on other services, creating an overall stream of all your activity on the web.

FriendFeed just opened to the public and it does just that. It’s slick and does what it’s supposed to do. I’m at http://www.friendfeed.com/bradsucks/

It’s extremely simple but there’s a lot of potential here. Searching, filtering, shuttling data from one service to another, openID, trust networks. With a nice simple API a lot of services could be built on top of it. It’d be the new meta-Twitter.

I played Half Life Episode 2 and Portal over the weekend. EP2 was good, Portal was brilliant (and many props to Coulton for the awesome credits song).

Anyway I was trying to search the Steam forums and you have to prove you’re human by entering a CAPTCHA. I got so many wrong I gave up. Here’s a small sampling:

Can you guys read any of these? I had to check with friends to make sure I hadn’t suddenly become colorblind or something.

Early data points to Valve’s CAPTCHA algorithm sucking and my vision being fine.

WordPress 2.3 is out and I’m now upgraded. I’m fairly excited about tagging though I’m not sure if Windows Live Writer supports it yet, which could be a downer. If you notice anything broken (other than my spirit) please let me know.

Time to take stock of my social networking participation.

Twitter - Still updating on Twitter against all odds. Being able to monitor and update it via IM is really all it’s got going for it. I’ve had to start ignoring certain people though because the noise level got too high.

Pownce - I’m really not sure what to do with Pownce. It’s nice, but the lack of IM makes me lazy about it. I really like the reply-to-posts feature. I’ve started experimenting with uploading songs I’ve been listening to, which is fun but would be way more fun if everyone I knew had access to it.

MySpace - I still log in and add friends who request it and try to reply to messages in there. Spam has reduced from a few months ago so MySpace doesn’t bother me much anymore.

Facebook - Even though I only have around 70 friends on there and don’t whore it out like MySpace it’s rapidly becoming the most annoying social network. Check out what I’m met with when I log on:

Hey Facebook, I’ve got 1 leave me the fuck alone request for you. Oh and a fortune friend request.

Because I like money, I was real excited about Amazon’s Flexible Payments Service, the new Paypal competitor from Amazon. I was looking forward to adding it to my digital download store, but much like Google Checkout it doesn’t support Canadian merchants. Lame.

I’ve committed some updates to the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store:

• thumbnails (in case you want to sell photos/artwork with it)
• fixed the “continue shopping” link
• stopped paypal from opening in a new window or tab (transactions should all happen within one now)
• added some totals to the admin page

Here it is on Google Code.

Here is a chronicling of some items I purchased recently:

ALLSOP Mouse pad - For many years I’ve been using a mouse pad with a wrist-rest on it. In fact it’s been the same one, so it’s nasty and gross and needs replacing. The new one has a feature called “memory foam”. This is code for “if you use the wrist-rest for more than half an hour, it squashes down under your wrist and no longer provides enough support”. Awful.

Belkin WaveRest Keyboard Wrist Support - I wanted to replace my rusty roller-based wrist-wrest and the only one they had in Staples that wasn’t some retarded hot/cold gel pack was this one. It’s not high enough, my wrists sink down into the gel, it doesn’t fit on my (admittedly a little weird) IKEA Jerker desk the way my old one did. Awful.

APC 650VA - After 11 days of rain and thunderstorms and power brownouts, I finally invested in a UPS / battery backup for the Linux box in the basement. It seems to work great and the forecast is coincidentally showing sunny weather for the rest of the week. Great!

Apple’s little problem with ripping off artists - A list of Apple’s marketing rip-off offenses. I’m not sure why they don’t get more heat for this as Apple is loved by the artsy types.

The White Glove Tracking project is done. I did a few frames a few months ago:

On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed below) is the culmination of data collected. It is released here for all to download and use as an input into any digital system. Just as the data was gathered collectively it is our hope that it will be visualized collectively.

There are already some visualizations, very neat stuff.

As a follow-up to my hard drive terror I guess I’m now in a full-blown Windows apocalypse. I was fairly sure it was the power supply crapping out on me and it was only crashing during the night, so I was waiting till this week to get a new one.

Then yesterday it rebooted in the middle of doing something. Then would only give me an “lsass.exe - System Error Object Name not found” error and reboot when I hit OK. Much research and fiddling hasn’t righted things so I think my Windows is just toast.

Anyway if I’m extra slow to answer your emails that is why.