technology

Google Grouse

Can I just take a moment to complain about something librarian-ish? I just read this article, a scientific study conducted on Google searches. Here’s the abstract: An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google’s ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google’s result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success

Life of a Gold Farmer

I just read a fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine about gold farming–the practice of players earning fake money in an online game and then selling it for real money.  If you’re in to online gaming at all, check out the article.

Joost

So this morning I read in Newsweek about Joost, this new program for watching TV over the internet.  Think YouTube, except with programs that are all approved by the copyright holders.  It’s in a beta invite-only stage, but I kindly asked someone for an invitation, and I have since signed up.  It’s pretty interesting.  The quality seems to be quite a bit better than what I’ve seen on YouTube, and there certainly are a lot of “channels” to choose from–although it seems some of the channels don’t have a lot of content on them just yet.  Still, there’s Transformers and

Website Update

Today I posted two new pages on my website, both Buttersby related.  The first is the commentary for chapter thirteen, and the second is a deleted scene from Cavern of Babel, back from the first draft of the book.  Good times. Not much else happening right now.  I’m just enjoying being at home, where the temperature is NOT 93 degrees.  In fact, I think I should make that one of my new life goals.  Never work in a place that’s 93 degrees inside.  Honestly, aren’t there labor laws that enforce that?  There ought to be.

Vampires

Okay.  After my big post last week about how I was going to persist writing Grumpy Old Vampires even when I didn’t feel like it . . . I’m now putting the project on hiatus.  I’m just no longer enjoying writing it, and I think it comes through in the end products.  I did it for seven weeks straight, though, so that’s something.  I need to reanalyze my website in the near future.  I think that for now, I’m just going to update it once a week every week (with Buttersby commentaries) and then post other pages when I finish