VonGeekenstein

Since I can’t think of an article to write today, I’ll post a question to y’all, if you don’t mind. I have a lot of friends who are of opposing sides to this argument. Some feel cloud computing isn’t secure enough to trust with their data. Others, like me, who put all of their information in the cloud (I bow to my new overlords, Google) so they can access it everywhere.

In my own case, all of my calendar, email and contacts are through Google, so I can access them anywhere, and I really like that. I don’t really have a trust issue with Google for some reason — I think I’m way too small a fish for them to care about what info I have stores there as long as I click on their ads — but I can see where folks might.

So, let me ask y’all. When it comes to your data, whether it’s your calendar, your contacts or whatever else, would you trust it to the cloud or not, and why? I’m looking forward to discussing this with you. Thanks for reading!

Say what you want about the controversy surrounding the secondary gaming market, whether you agree that it takes money away from developers or feel it’s just a great way to save money on games, one can see it’s not going away any time soon. Now, according to Gamasutra, two major retailers, Target and Best Buy, are both entering the used game market. This is freaking huge, as it opens up the opportunity for retailers to make more money on games, and opens up opportunities for customers to save money on games.
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I talk to a lot of people on any given day, whether in person at work, or through various technological implementations. While back in my day — which was a Tuesday — there were only a couple of methods to communicate with people not in the same room with you…namely the telephone or a written (gasp!) letter, these days we have so many more options. Email, IM, text messaging, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, chat rooms and so much more. I’m finding that, for example, I’m using the actual phone part of my phone so much less and less than texting, instant messaging, email and so on.
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According to an article on Ars Technica entitled, Apple loses big in DRM ruling: jailbreaks are “fair use”, the Library of Congress has added a bevy of new exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act altering the way we’re allowed to use much of the digital media and devices we have.
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For the past year or so, a new type of location-based social networking has been growing in popularity. Services like Foursquare, Gowalla and recently Yelp all allow you to “check in” to a local place, allowing everyone to read about not only what you’re doing, but where you’re doing it. I know a lot of people who use these, and while they may seem fun to some, they’re freaking annoying to others, like me.
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After writing yesterday’s article about being on Facebook more than Twitter, I kinda started feeling bad. Why? Because while a lot of my friends are on Facebook regularly, some of my best friends (you know who you are) are pretty much solely on Twitter, and I’ve kind of fallen out of touch with them as a result. Now, one can (and should) say that one shouldn’t NEED to use Twitter to keep in touch with close friends, but times being as they are, it’s one of the best ways.

That being said, I’ve resolved to try and get a better handle on Twitter in order to keep more in touch with more of the people that mean the most to me. I’m going to start by using solely the lists that I’ve made. Also, if y’all have any suggestions as to a program — like Tweetdeck, but maybe better — to use to monitor Twitter more effectively, I’d love to hear it. Thanks for reading, and I’ll be Tweeting at y’all soon.

So as you may know, I’m something of a social network whore. I’m somewhat addicted to them, because they make it easy to have conversations (or snippets thereof) with many of my closest friends. However, the more I’ve used them, the more I noticed my habits have changed in their use, and I’ve developed a preference. Whereas once I used to be on Twitter most of the time, now I’m on Facebook much more often. Why is that? Well, I’ll tell you…
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Recently, Blizzard entertainment announced plans to make real names mandatory on their Starcraft 2 forums, with other forums like World of Warcraft to follow. This was met with a wide array of opinions, both positive and negative. While I’m in the positive camp, I know many, many people who prefer pseudonyms over their real names when online. Well, giving into an overwhelmingly negative response, Blizzard has rescinded this rule today, allowing people to hide behind their pseudonyms at their leisure. Now, as someone who uses my real name on everything I do online, I personally don’t understand the big deal, but I seem to be in the minority.
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For the past thirty years, my gaming has been primarily on the PC (with dabbles into Atari consoles and more recently, the Sega Dreamcast), but that seems to have all changed recently with the acquisition of my first console in ten years, a Playstation 3. Now I got the PS3 primarly as a mixture of Blu-ray player and media center…I mean the games looked kinda cool, but I had plenty on my (admittedly old) PC to play, so I figured I wouldn’t really play too many. Boy was I wrong…
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Sorry about not updating in a while folks, had some real life crap take away the brain space I usually use for writing, but now things are looking totally up, so I’ll be back on a regular basis bringing my (hopefully interesting) opinions and such on geek stuff. Today I’m going to talk about why, in the face of design flaws, bitchy PR responses and more viable competition than in previous years, I’m sticking with the iPhone platform. I current have a iPhone 3G I got back in August, 2008, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. Sure, there are some things I wish it did better (like it’s awful, awful notification system for one), but it’s been two years, and the poor thing has started to get glitchy — like having to turn off the phone and back on to get a good GPS signal more and more often — so it’s time to upgrade, especially since my contract is up with AT&T next month.
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