Sometimes Silent

March 2006: Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour

I’ve been a fan of this festival since I first stumbled upon it while in Banff (Alberta, Canada). It not only delivers great films but it’s a fun event for the outdoors community as well. The ones I went to in Los Angeles and in Santa Barbara inevitably had a drawing for free prizes as a nice bonus.

Additionally, someone mentioned that the segment “Radical Reels” was entertaining this year and includes a Jack Russell Terrier who climbs!?!

Technorati tags: climbing, Banff Mountain film festival

American McGee is the creator of “American McGee’s Alice” the twisted tale of Alice in Wonderland colored with a heavy dose of tragedy, violence, and insanity told in the context of a shooter video game. [How’s that for a description eh?] Very cool and spooky with fantastic design both visually and programmatically.

I only just discovered his blog and find that he’s posting about a hypothetical situation of really “advanced” AI for gaming.

Ok, so… what if EA (for example) started putting “EA AI!” stickers on some of their games. Tell players that in order for the advanced AI to work it has to connect with some master server to “download new strategies” or whatever (you get normal AI otherwise)…

The twist is that the AI is really a sweatshop like situation where real people are controlling the mobs. I commented that his idea reminded me of the situation in Neal Stephenson’s “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”. “Project M” when EQ let folks control mobs was also a fun time for some.

Anyway, I’m glad I found his blog, its going into my RSS reader.

Technorati Tags: gaming, american mcgee, ai

So awhile back I opened an account on Squidoo. It’s a web 2.0 site which seeks to get as many folks as possible to create articles for them on whatever they’d like. These “articles” are in the form of webpages and ads are served on them. The nice part is that Squidoo shares the revenue with the author.

As a writer I find I already have enough places for my writing but as a business person I can see that gaining new “eyeballs” could be an advantage if the site gets big and any form of income which can keep giving is also intriguing.

If you’d like to sign up as well (it’s free) here’s my referral link.

So while wandering around the net looking at the so called web2.0 sites (we may as well give up, that term is here to stay) I found this site called 30 Day Tags the bold button saying Add Your Site caught me eye and I noticed that you didn’t need to register anywhere for an account. This was different from all the other tagging sites.

I experimentally added a site and was asked for an email as part of the short form, it was so they could send me a notice when my entry would expire. And they did and that’s the only email I’ve gotten from them since then.

The other main feature once you had an entry was that you could rate resources.

So, I wondered, could a site like this take off? I feared massive spamming by poker sites etc. But perhaps once mass amounts of people join the ratings will filter that out since those will all be pushed to the bottom?

At any rate, I like the graphics of the page and the relative ease of adding items — those items and a bit of luck and attention can get a 2.0 site off the ground and turn it into a hit.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, tagging