WIL WHEATON dot NET

Hab SoSlI’ Quch!

Posted: 17 March, 2006

Picture_3
I published a story for the SG Newswire this morning about a USB flash drive that encrypts your data, and automatically self-destructs if someone attempts to brute-force the password too many times.

The drive is made by a company called Kington, but whenever I look at the name, I keep seeing Klingon. I guess it’s some sort of geek dyslexia.

So I made a couple of geeky Klingon jokes in the entry, using the Wikipedia entry on Klingon as a reference.

Holy cow, man, I love the Wikipedia, and I spend way too much time just randomly reading entries and filling my head with facts, but I haven’t read an entry as entertaining and just plain cool as the Klingon entry in a long, long time. If you’ve got some time to spare, you should totally check it out.

When you’re done with WikiPedia, and you still need more Klingon goodness in your day, browse the Klingon tag at Flickr;
it’s a great collection of fans, the guys at Star Trek the Experience
in Las Vegas, and all sorts of people and pets with wrinkly foreheads.

Image comes from the "Klingon Convention Trauma" merchandise in my CafePress store.

The party started at eight. Why are we going to a bar at ten?

by Wil

Posted: 16 March, 2006

Trent: They’re gonna give daddy the Rainman suite, you dig that?
Mike: Do you think we’ll get there by midnight?
Trent: Baby, we’re going to be up five hundy by midnight!
Mike: Yeeeeaaaaahhhhhh!
Trent: Vegas baby! Vegas!
Mike: Vegas!

-Swingers

The briefest of updates: I heard back from my manager about the Sci-Fi hosting gig. It’s all very good news, but I can’t talk about it until Monday.

Okay, maybe I can talk about it a little bit: They really liked me.

There are still about a million things that have to happen before it turns into a job for me, but at least I know that they liked me, and liked what I did. That’s all I can ask for, right?

state of the exile

by Wil

Posted: 16 March, 2006

The day I got the WWdN database fixed, and had all the old WWdN entries rescued and readable was the day I found the path out of Exile.

Now that I know there are two ways out of this prison (in a pine box, or through that large opening over there that we all like to think of as "off limits, as a favor to me,") it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to stay here.

Which brings me back to the Typepad vs. MT w/plugins issue. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I like about Typepad, that MT 3.2 doesn’t have out of the box, and I came up with three things: Typepad has a great WYSIWYG editor, it easily and seamlessly handles uploading images and enclosures, like the RFB files, and all those little things on the right side are so easy to add and remove and update, I can’t believe I ever did any hand-coding of tables and filled them with php includes (which I also had to create and edit by hand.)

But I miss WWdN, and all its lameness and non-W3C-compliance. I miss its out of date FAQ and musical suggestions. I miss its clunky archives and the sense that, even though it’s a shitty house, it’s my house, goddammit.

Redesigning issues aside, can I move back to WWdN and still have as much control as I have right now? And most important: will it be easy?

I’ve been playing around with three different editors that all have WYSIWYG editing, and various other features:

Flock, which is a browser that is built on top of Firefox with integrated blogging tools.
Performancing, which is a Firefox extension that puts a WYSISYG editor into your browser.
ecto, which is an editor and publishing tool that lets you compose and edit entries outside of your browser.

Flock is pretty cool. It’s got a nice editor, and I especially like how it seamlessly integrates Flickr images and del.icio.us bookmarks into your blogging experience. It integrates lots of tools and appears geared toward blogging and anything which involves a tag. If I was all about that sort of thing, I’d be really into flock, but since I’m not, I can’t see myself using it.

Performancing is also really nice. I love that it easily inserts technorati tags and adds del.icio.us bookmarks whenever you update one of your blogs, (if you want it to), and I love that it lets you see a ton of information on the page you’re viewing. It’s a free Firefox extension, and free is good.

But I think ecto is the way to go for me. It does all of the things that the other two do, and adds in too many features for me to list here. I was introduced to ecto when Xeni told me she uses it to update boingboing, and even though I have to buy a license for it, if it’s good enough for boingboing, it’s totally good enough for me.

Last night, while I was goofing off with ecto, I ended up quasi-live-blogging part of an episode of TNG:

I’m watching one of my favorite (and most heartbreaking) episodes of TNG, The Offspring. It’s one of the best episodes we ever did, and it nearly reaches —

UGH!
There I am in the ugly grey space suit on Stage 9. I’m not acting very
well right here, even though the scene is really about the Admiral.
Nice package on Wesley, though. Eww. Gross.

Gods. Data
has to say good bye to Lal now. This always makes me cry a little bit.
Lal says, "I love you, father," and Data just looks at her and says, "I
wish I could feel it, too."

It’s such a testament to the writing
in this episode (and the actors in the scene) that Data didn’t end up
doing a cheesy "I love you too," thing. It’s so true to his character
that he remains emotionally unattached, because Data doesn’t have
emotions. (I always thought it was an insanely stupid fucking move to
give Data his emotion chip, like giving Geordi sight. Weak.)

Heh.
I just said, "Course is set, sir." See? That’s why I hated working on
TNG in those days. Even though the episode is great, just saying those
stupid lines bored me to. fucking. death.

Now G4 is running an
ad for Star Trek 2.0, which I think is going to be the dumbest thing to
happen to the original series in 40 years. And now, it’s time for
Futurama on [adult swim].

So I have three things left to do before I can return to WWdN (in this order):

Find an editor that I like, that’s easy to use and reliable. I’m pretty sure I’ve done that.
Figure out a way to easily update modular content for the non-blog areas of the site. This feels like it should be fairly easy, but I haven’t put all that much time into reading the MT forums or digging through the plug-ins. I suspect the answer is to use MT-Includes that are files linked to various MT Templates. Alternatively, I can figure out some sort of web-based php backend that will let me update all that information without having to go into an html editor offline, and ftp the damn thing whenever I want to make a chance. And don’t even talk to me about ssh-ing into the server and using vi from a shell prompt. Those days are long behind me. This is, I think, the stickiest widget.
Complete the re-design. We’re working on this, and once we figure out a couple more things, it will go live very quickly.

laugh all you want but if you call too soon you might scare off a nice baby who’s ready to party

by Wil

Posted: 15 March, 2006

Mike: So how long do I wait to call?
Trent: A day.
Mike: Tomorrow.
Sue: Tomorrow, then a day.
Trent: Yeah.
Mike: So two days?
Trent: Yeah, I guess you could call it that, two days.
Sue: Definitely, two days is like industry standard.
Trent: You know I used to wait two days to call anybody, but now it’s like everyone in town waits two days. So I think three days is kind of money. What do you think?
Sue: Yeah, but two’s enough not to look anxious.

-Swingers

The audtion yesterday was fantastic. I thought I’d be there for thirty minutes or so, but I ended up working with them for almost three hours (and making it home too late for my Tuesday night poker game.) I read with six different women who are all in the running to co-host the show, and I was shocked at how much fun I had. If I book the job, I’d be the geek, she’d be the babe, and everyone in the audience would have something to enjoy.

In fact, when I got home, I told Ryan, "Dude. I had the best afternoon: I got to sit with beautiful women and talk about Sci-Fi! Three of them were former Miss USA contestants, and one of them was Playmate of the Year for 2005."

"Dude." He said. "You are my hero."

I have this post-audition ritual: after I leave, I find the first trashcan and dump my sides in it. It’s how I let go of the whole thing, because I’ve already done everything I can do, you know? I’ve pushed my chips into the pot with the best of it, and now I have to wait for five cards to come out and hope that I win when it’s all over.

This time, I did dump the sides and my note cards (I have the notes on my Powerbook for easy re-printing, should I get called back) and I’ve tried to get on with my life . . . but holy shit is it hard. I had so much fun while I was there, and the prospect of getting a weekly gig where I get to geek out about Sci-Fi stuff — and get paid to do it! — is just too much. I’ve already called my manager twice today to see if we’d gotten any feedback.

"I haven’t heard anything, yet," he said, the second time I called. "Normally, I’ll call the next day, but if they don’t call . . ."

"It’s like you just met a girl in a bar, and you don’t want to screw it up by calling too soon, isn’t it?" I said.

He laughed. "Yeah, it’s exactly like that."

"So . . . are we calling today?"

"I think it’s best to wait until tomorrow, because they have to take your tapes to executives, get approvals, and all sorts of things."

"So, what, two days?" I said.

"Yeah, there’s a lot of things that have to happen before they give us any feedback, so we’ll just have to wait until we hear from them." He said. "Then there’s the whole negotiation thing, too."

"You’ll call me, right?"

"I’ll call you right away." He said.

I hung up the phone and looked at the calendar. I thought about drawing a circle around the 17th. I may have done it.

I’m sure I’m going to feel like a real jerk if this doesn’t happen, but
I love this feeling of excitement and optimism that I have right now. It’s much nicer than the usual alternative.

made of plastic and elastic

by Wil

Posted: 15 March, 2006

The Dresden Dolls are on a grueling tour right now, and Amanda is writing about it in her blog, which is wonderful and a great example of why we should always trade quantity for quality.

There’s an entry this morning which touched a nerve with me. She’s talking about the new album:

The reviews are 98% amazing, but we will focus on the 2% that think the
music is terrible and the lyrics are trite and overdramatic. How does
one scrape oneself out of the goth pigeon coop? This has been a problem
from day one. I never thought that wearing whiteface on stage would
land us in the predicament of being compared to Marilyn Manson. Are you
shitting me? Have you listened to our music, fool? We have as much in
common with Marilyn Manson as we do with Cher. Did people lump KISS and
david bowie together?

I
had a lot of frustrations with O’Reilly and the release of Just A Geek,
but the worst thing of all was that they classified my autobographical,
narrative non-fiction story as "Science Fiction," because I was once on
a Sci-Fi show. That’s as idiotic as comparing the Dresden Dolls to
Marilyn Manson, and a great way to limit the potential audience.

When someone doesn’t like my work, there’s not a lot I can do about
it; I try to dig something constructive out of it, and move along.
But when someone just doesn’t get it, and uses an entirely
inappropriate comparison or categorizes me with another artist based
on something as stupid as what kind of makeup I wear on stage (ahem), it
makes me want to deliver the cockpunch.

I don’t know what it is about artists, but so many of us can’t ignore
the bad reviews. It’s almost like we think that they know something
real, something secret, something that nobody else is willing to tell
us. I think that, deep down, we all know that this thing we’ve created
really doesn’t suck, so we listen to all the people who want to
convince us that it does. It’s like we have a dysfunctional,
battered-person relationship with some invisible force called The
Critics.