Don't Install MacCinema

After a close call with this threat to Mac OS's hitherto ironclad security, I'll be extra careful about what I install on my machine.

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Yahoo to End GeoCities

Yahoo has said it will shut down GeoCities, the free website hosting service it purchased ten years ago, this year.

GeoCities was one of the most popular ad-driven hosts where people built their personal web pages back in the days before blog hosts became the easiest way to do so. It also became known as a virtually infinite graveyard of some of the most pointless, ill-looking and dysfunctional pages on the entire internet. Any time I was looking for information online and found a link to a GeoCities page, my hopes of discovering anything relevant on that page sank considerably. Most of the time the link would lead to a page that hadn't been updated in at least three years, and whose images had all vanished because the user's allotted bandwidth had been used up.

Hallmarks of GeoCities websites included random GIF animations, illogical linking, seizure-inducing color schemes and hit counters that looked like this:

(The way I'm describing it, GeoCities sounds an awful lot like MySpace...but trust me, it was totally different.)

Countless internet users, including myself, can truthfully say that GeoCities was their first ever "home on the web." The service GeoCities offered was perfect if you wanted to build a website with basically no content, and you wanted to do so for free. I took advantage of this perfect storm of pointlessness and created my first website, entitled The Hall of Crushes, in 1997. It was, as you can imagine, a high-tech shrine to unrequited love; kind of like the movie High Fidelity, only instead of my lost loves being played by Catherine Zeta Jones and Lili Taylor, they were portrayed in cute little caricatures I drew myself. It was a vigorous exercise in self-indulgence.

Aren't you glad I stopped being self-indulgent?

Mathew Chromecki: "It Wudn't Me"

I received the comment below on my August 2008 post "When There's Nothing to Write About, I Make Fun of Other Writers." It contends that the attribution of the essay entitled "Right so, what am I doing here?" to Mathew Chromecki was a failure of editorial oversight on the part of Tokyo Notice Board. In light of the possibility that I have credited the wrong person with writing so bad not even light can escape it, I will not refer to authors of bad essays by full name in future TNB dissections.

Dear Jesse,
I've enjoyed reading your blog. I'm new to making Web logs. I found yours when I was surprised to find it on a search engine list with my own name. I was then further intrigued as to quotes assigned to me I never made. After opening your page and read your comments from something I never wrote, I chuckled. You could never know that TNB accredited the article to the wrong person, could you? But this is not the first time. Imagine receiving a check in the mail for something you didn't write? It's a small publication house. Now, I wish I could tell you who wrote the article, but I don't know myself. I do, however, sympathize with your sentiments. Where there is too much "I" in an essay, it begins to sound like depression writ large; somethings are best left unsaid.
As a happy coincidence, I, the real Mathew Chromecki, am pleasantly acquainted with M. Guffin who, by my humble account, is a fine bassist and accomplished music teacher. Guffin, if you happen to read this, I hope all is well you.
Thank you for your attention, Jesse. All the best for your blog.

My Xbox is Well Again

My Xbox 360 came back from the shop today (in about half the time I was told the repairs would take). It seems to be in good order. It will be able to eat solid foods again in about a month, but sadly, it will never play the violin again.

QWOP

Fiance pointed this Flash game out to me after it became a favorite time waster with her co-workers. Use the Q,W,O and P keys to move the runner as far as you can before he falls. My personal best distance so far is 13.5m; Fiance's is somewhere around 25m.

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