just so I feel caught up
Mood: happy
Posted on 2008-12-29 10:52:00
Tags: travel gay politics links
Words: 326

Back from vacation! Christmas and related activities were good and fun and relaxing. Enjoyed spending time with family and got a lot of work done on whereslunch.org - only remaining things on my list of "must fix before launching" are dealing with IE and possibly adding tag editing (which will be a pain).

Driving back to Houston tomorrow to watch Rice play in the Texas Bowl, and driving back the next day - glad I have a plan for that now.

There has been some controversy about Obama inviting Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. He's the pastor of Saddleback Community Church and while he has focused on poverty and the plight of AIDS victims, etc., he did endorse Prop 8 in California. It turns out he did so on a Friday 10 days before the election on his church's website (not anywhere more public) and neither he nor his wife donated money to the campaign. Obviously I don't agree with him, but I'm all for engaging people we disagree with, and Rick Warren is no James Dobson or Fred Phelps. Plus, it's just an inauguration - not like he'll be writing policy or anything like that!

Oh, what the heck...some more links:
- 90% of the copies of World of Goo are pirated - yeah, yeah, I know not all of those people would buy the game, but this is kinda depressing. It's cheap ($20), it's DRM-free, and it's a good game!
- The US Census Bureau just released the 2009 version of the Statistical Abstract of the United States = tasty tasty data. Maybe I will do a project in R...
- A Russian professor predicts the breakup of the US in 2010. The map at the bottom is pretty awesome. I definitely think states like Kentucky and Tennessee would be excited about joining the European Union. Sheesh!
- No big surprise: text messages costs carriers nothing - I didn't realize SMS was designed to fit inside a control message, neat!


3 comments

Comment from spchampion:
2008-12-29T12:36:31+00:00

Gwen and I bought World of Goo for our new Wii and it's great fun. I remember watching you and David playing it, and I'm glad I now have my own copy.

However, nothing matches Mario Galaxy in terms of fun. That's an awesome game.

Comment from djedi:
2008-12-29T14:10:43+00:00

I love World of Goo, but disgusted by the lack of knowledge of statistics and inaccuracies in their "propaganda". They got their 90% estimate by assuming every person who plays has a unique, static ip address per copy of game purchased then counting those (versus number of copies bought). That's a bunch of crap. Most people have dynamic ip addresses. Ours actually changes fairly often because the router gets reset a lot. They actually mention this but figure it's balanced by all the people who would be behind the same router, like at work. Yes, so everyone having a new ip address let's say every month is exactly the same as the number of people who play at work.

Summary, never trust pirate numbers from software companies - or in general, only put more than 10% of trust in statistics that are from the affected parties.

Comment from wonderjess:
2008-12-31T17:06:42+00:00

Not like he'll be writing policy...like that pesky Larry Summers.

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