Tomorrow – December 30, 2006 – will mark the end of the daily publication of Fox Trot. This is a sad thing – Jason Fox is pretty much my hero, and if the comic had been around when I was in grade 6, I might not have felt so lonely. The strip will carry on as a Sunday-only publication, which is some small comfort. Very small.

Why couldn’t something less-than-worthless like the Family Circus go away instead?

Stupid world.

This is one of the most disturbing things I have come across since mainstream newspapers started publishing online. You would think there would be assorted outrage and impassioned dialog, but except for passing mentions here and there, nada. Which may be more disturbing than the original act of censorship.

If you are stumped for that last minute stocking stuffer – or gift for someone you totally forgot about – why not fly their name to Mars and give them a commemorative certificate to mark the occasion? Heck, you can even whip over to your local 24-hour drug store and get a swanky frame to put it in.

Granted, you would have to be pretty desperate to try and pull this one off, but if you happen to be reading this after midnight on Christmas eve, well, you just might want to give it a shot. Plus it’s free, so you can’t beat the value.

Let me know how it goes.

For the third straight day I went 7 for 7 on the daily “Dis or Dat” online version of You Don’t Know Jack. I would love to brag about it, but really, it isn’t all that great of a feat. When the subjects are Santa & beer, Liz Phair, and kinky sex & torture … well, it’s like they let me write the damn questions myself.

While the legions of Line Rider freaks wait with bated breath for the console and competitive versions of the thing – and in the case of the DS, a life-ruining portable variant – they can sate their drawing lust with the just-into-beta release of Line Rider 2. It plays much the same as the original, but corrects some issues with collision detection and overlapping lines that plagued the first go around. Additionally, there are some interesting new drawing and play tools:

- a straight line tool

- “textures” that have different gravities and resistance

- a magnifying glass to fine-tune your creation

- a “flag” function so that you can start your rider partway through a course to work out kinks

All of these are mucho welcome, and hopefully are straightforward and unobtrusive enough that they won’t spoil the core simplicity – and one of the foundations of the appeal – of the game.

The beta is available on a non-scheduled and non-regular basis – you just have to keep checking the site and see if you get the original or the new version. It’s like a lottery of fun.

If you really need to find a PS3 and you live in southern Ontario, tonight is the night. Most Best Buy stores are getting between 40 and 64 PS3s in sometime over night, and there are (as of about 11:00 p.m.) no lineups at all.

That, however, is not the point of this post.

The good part is that there are signs out in front of each store telling people where to line up and how many units they are getting. The signs have obviously been around since the launch, since they look a little tattered now, and they read like this:

Dear PS3 fan

This Best Buy store will be getting ____ 60 GB PlayStation 3 consoles and ____ 20 GB PlayStation 3 consoles. Tickets will be handed out to the customers in line blah blah blah

What is interesting about the whole thing is that at the three stores I drove by, they had various numbers in the “60 GB” blank (64, 60, and 40 respectively) and you could tell different numbers had been there each time they received consoles – there was a little strata of stickers that had been written on and then covered up with the next one as the numbers shifted during each delivery.

But – in the “20 GB” blank there was just a single number, pre-printed on the sign and obviously there since the day the PS3 was launched. A nice neat zero.

Zip, nada, zilch.

Sony has apparently never delivered a “bargain” model to any of those stores. Probably never will – if there are any existing examples of that particular piece of hardware, they must number in the single digits, and were manufactured simply so that Sony could say that the new console “starts at $499″ with out actually (a) fibbing, or (b) having to sell one at that price.

Then again, this isn’t actually a surprise.

The fallout from the failed casino/arena deal in Pittsburgh taking his ball and going home has everyone all atwitter again about the Penguins possibly moving to Canada. Keep dreaming. Even if the Penguins do move, it will not be to the Great White North. The terms and conditions that the NHL put on the deal were essentially a public announcement that no team will ever relocate to Canada while Gary Bettman lives and breathes. Period.

The best part of the story regarding Slippery Jim Balsillie taking his ball puck and going home, meanwhile, is not the fact that Mario hung on to his 10 million dollar deposit. No, it is the wording of Mario’s statement and the look on his face at the press conference – these are virtual hallmarks of anyone who has ever spent more than 10 minutes in a room with Jimbo. Loathing and disgust immediately come to mind as valid adjectives here.

And finally, the chances of Frank D’Angelo purchasing the team are directly proportional to how much influence the mafia has over politics in Pittsburgh. If the mob can put enough pressure on the city to get a new arena, then our boy Frank is in. You will have to put 2 and 2 together yourself on that one.

Being equipped with the sort of mind that effortlessly deals in trivia while eschewing actual useful information, I have always been a fan of You Don’t Know Jack. You can imagine, then, my delight at finding a sort-of version of the “Dis or Dat” part of the game online, with a new set of silly questions each and every day. Today’s episode has both Santa and Beer and provided me with 30 seconds of pure delight.

What they really need to do is get on the ball with a full MMO version, one where you could compete against the masses to wear the undisputed crown of questionable knowledge. Somebody get on this, already. Sheesh.

A couple of little chunks of Wii-type fun, all of which started out as individual posts, and ended up concatenated here as a result of a sudden case of lethargy:

The Wii Weather channel came alive in North America last night, one day ahead of schedule. Our friends across the various ponds already had this as of Monday, so the Wii can now be seen as some sort of global weather construct, a great and pulsing hive mind of meteorological data.

The Opera web browser for the Wii is coming sooner rather than later, and will be available as a free download on all Wii consoles worldwide on Friday. The “free-ness” of the download will last until June, but after that you will have to pony up 500 points (aka $5.00) to get it.

Speaking of Opera (and we were), add this user agent profile to your copy of Firefox or Safari:

Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1038-58; Wii Shop Channel/1.0; en)

and then surf on over to the Wii shop channel and you will see that this coming monday one of the Virtual Console releases is Super Mario Bros. (yeah, baby!) and the price is … free. Is this a glitch? Or is this the “Christmas present” that Nintendo promised to Wii owners who were online before the 25th of December?

And finally, a word about Line Rider – now officially coming to the DS and the Wii in some sort of freehand-yet-competitive way. When I first mentioned this thing a couple of months ago in These Very Pages, I couched it in terms that made it akin to exactly the sort of crap that Nintendo wants people to get busy with on the Wii. Well, whatddya know. Somebody out there must be listening. In the meantime, this video here is the absolute most crazy shit I have seen done with the toy so far. I mean, holy crap.

It should be fairly obvious to anyone that has poked into the nooks and crannies of this site that I love Christmas lights. So why the hell have I never heard of this movie until today? Was there any advertising? Is this thing still in theatres? I need to see this, dammit!

On the other hand, I will not be going to see Charlotte’s Web because, frankly, I have no pressing need to humiliate myself by bawling my eyes out at a kids’ movie. When I was a kid I bawled at the beginning and the middle and the end of the stupid book, so it is probably safe to assume that actually seeing the damn animals will make it even worse.

31: The percentage of adults in Italy who use the internet.

Take a look at the following abomination:

For obvious reasons, this “update” is the subject of conversation over at Newsarama today. I could tee off here and ramble for long and outraged paragraphs about this visual and stylistic crime, but I am unable to properly see the screen through the red haze of my simmering rage. Maybe later.

Even worse – and this is sort of like pissing on a guy after you pump his torso full of lead – is that the new format of the digests will apparently preclude the current practice of slipping in episodes from the 40s and early 50s to pad out the books. As any fan of the Riverdale gang knows, the “golden age” versions of Betty and Veronica were a sweet and guilty treasure – sassy and sexy pin-up girls, sweatered and skirted 100-proof doses of teenage fantasy bait. The last link to that bygone era is now severed, and gone forever.

Bah.

Addendum: John over at the Wired blogs weighed in with a much better rant on the de-evolution of interest in the Riverdale girls and what it all means. I defer to his pen and will let him speak on this sad, sad state of affairs.

A few people wrote to ask why the links to networking sites would be a “battleground” in 2007. Good question – and one that I didn’t properly address yesterday. Here it is in a nutshell: The bookmarking sites only make ad revenue if people take the time to submit bookmarks, and the sites that are being bookmarked gain more visitors and more web presence by showing up on the bookmarking sites. So you will start to see partnerships, where a premium content site hooks up with a bookmarking site to try and force users to build traffic between them. All of which explains why the Iconistan strip at the New York Times features a link to a startup that no one had ever heard of before last week. It’s money, and lots of it.

Also, I wasn’t the only one to feel that “Name Dropper” would work better if it showed up on the main pages of your blog as well as on single entries. After a couple of people asked about it, I modified Andrew’s original code and now you have your choice. You can get the original Name Dropper here, or click here to get the new “Name Dropper Main” that populates Iconistan on every one of your pages. Have fun!

80: The percentage of adults in Sweden who use the internet.

If you haven’t heard the term “Iconistan” yet, you will.

Actually, you just did.

Iconistan is the hot-off-the-presses buzzword for the little area at the bottom of blog posts where you are starting to see a little crowd of icons, jostling each other and begging you to send the blog post in question to one of the social news sites – Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, whatever. It’s like a little herd of street urchins clamouring for a few pennies, and as we lurch into 2007 this strip of real estate is going to become both big news and the next hot battleground for control of the interwebs.

So how does one get on the Iconistan bandwagon? If you are a WordPress blogger, then simply grab one of these two handy plug-ins:

Name Dropper: The simplest of the two “plug-n-play” solutions, it adds text links into the contested real estate to make automatic submissions to the social news sites that you select. It has a nice clean look, and you can choose which sites that you want to offer links to. The downside is that you can only modify the list of links by modifying the PHP file – not a big deal for me, but others might find it off-putting. Also, it only adds the Iconsitan crowd to individual posts – it would be nice to see it work for the main page as well (no longer true – see “Update 2″ below). I am using it right now, so check back in a week or so for the lowdown.

Share This: Taking a different tack, Share This ads a single link at the bottom of posts that pops up to allow the selection of some or all of the social bookmarking links. It looks swank, but is not overly customizable, and some people might have problems with the javascript calls on their site. I’ll give this one a shot next week.

The one thing that I really like about both of these is that they use plain text instead of the icons that give Iconistan its name. It might change, but right now the icons that you see at most places are meaningless to most people and this is a much more inclusive solution.

Now get linking.

UPDATE: It appears that Tony Conrad was the one who coined the term – must be nice to have a place in lexical history all to yourself. I’m jealous.

UPDATE 2: I modified “Name Dropper” to work on all pages, not just the single-post pages. You can download the modified version here. All other functionality remains the same as Andrew’s original creation.

Wow – after 15 full years of being mocked in the internet community for their complete and utter lack of journalistic principles when it comes to technology reporting, the New York Times is going to try and clean up their act. Someone finally clued in that quoting “analysts” in tech stories who actually work for the company they are “analyzing” might be a bit of a sticky issue. Unfortunately, the Register article is somewhat unwieldy, but the gang at Information Week have checked in with a much better – and frankly, more insightful – take on the whole thing.

I am of two minds on this. On one hand I applaud this effort because it puts the Times head and shoulders above most mainstream media outlets. On the other hand, well, this is just scratching the surface. And barely at that. They aren’t yet addressing the two biggest concerns in biased tech reporting – the “technology partner” and the “think tank”. While they don’t quote “experts” from bogus think tanks any more than the average paper, the Times is especially guilty of letting their “technology partnership” with Microsoft colour everything from their reporting to the way they develop their online tools. Until they address these larger and more devious problems, their effort in this regard is pretty much akin to pissing on a forest fire. Brave, but ultimately useless.

99.1: The percentage of annual poinsettia sales that occur during the first two weeks of December.

Mean Gene was the first of about 8 people to send me the link to the Associate Press story announcing the “recall” of 3.2 million wrist straps for the Wii controller.

Hot flash the morons at Associated Press: This is not a recall. A recall is where they take the old item away. In this case, Nintendo is just offering a new one for people who happen to be complete fucking morons. You are perfectly free to keep using the old one, which works perfectly well unless you’re an idiot.

Just to make things perfectly clear, there is a link on the new strap order page to a handy on-line tutorial on how not to be one of the aforementioned idiots. Very thoughtful.

Monday alert: There may or may not be official word of Apple’s “iPhone” – or whatever the hell they are planning to call it – tomorrow. After all this time and rampant speculation among Apple fanboys like myself, and after the ho-hum nothingness that was the ROKR, I was prepared to label this as vapourware and move on. I’d like to be wrong, but I am not holding my breath.

Yeah, so big deal. Anyone who is reading this page – or anything vaguely similar – already knows this. And anyone who is not reading this page – or anything vaguely similar – won’t understand it anyway. My father immediately comes to mind.

Hi, dad.

So really, there is no point in discussing it (unless you want to make a droll comment about it being two years after the fact) except for this: When you flip around the news dial tomorrow, you are guaranteed to hear at least one, and probably five, media drones say “YouTube” instead of “You”. Which, I guess, pretty much sums the whole thing up.

Wow – that was fast. I thought it would take at least, you know, a whole day.

Last night the NHL board of governors approved Jim Balsillie’s application to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins. They put three restrictions on his purchase, however:

1 – The Penguins must remain in Pittsburgh
2 – The Leafs and The Sabres must be paid compensation no matter where the team is located in southwestern Ontario
3 – The NHL can take over the running of the team if they don’t like the way that Slimy Jim is running things

Items 1 and 2 were not dealbreakers – he just wants a plaything, and doesn’t really care about money. Item three, however, would be the end of the line for our hero – anyone who knows him also knows that it is his way or the highway, and no one ever gets to touch his toys.

Look for the whole deal to go to shit this weekend. Jimmy boy does not play nice with others.

There has been no official announcement, but I am here to tell you that at some point before the sun rises on most of North America, the free public beta of Photoshop CS3 will be available on the Adobe Labs web site. That’s a free beta – something that, if you know anything at all about Adobe, is freaky in the extreme.

Free beta. I feel like I cannot possibly repeat it enough.

Anyway, keep looking until it arrives, and grab it quick when it gets here … there is no telling how long it will be available. Note that you have to have a valid serial from a current or mostly-current version of Photoshop or one of the many Creative Suite releases to make it go, but acquiring one of those particular serials should not be something that you find overly taxing.

While you are there, the Adobe Labs site is really worth poking around on – some of the stuff (like “kuler”) is really quite swank.

The so-called “link” between cartoonish violence in videogames and real-life violence has long been discredited. That doesn’t seem to matter to this crew, however. I would make a comment on the complete inanity of it all, but really, in this case there is no need.

The stupidity pretty much speaks for itself.

1: The percentage of MySpace users who use “password” as their password.

A whack of people emailed about this – it’s funny, but kind of lame since it isn’t actually a thumb drive or anything. There is no memory, just humping.

Kind of like my little buddy Jake.

If you carry a BlackBerry and you were thinking about upgrading your OS to any version is numbered 4.1.0.3xx … then you probably want to think again. No idea what they are playing at up in Waterloo, but upgrading your BB to the newest OS version will result in a more-or-less crippled Bluetooth interface. We found this out the hard way, and when we went googling searching for info we found that this isn’t something that we fucked up – it seems to be a problem for all current models on all carriers.

Full and annoying details are right here.

There are rampant rumours about what is going down – the best bet would be that some sort of pressure from wireless networks is the reason, although the “RIM is doing it so you buy a Pearl instead” is really gaining traction in some quarters. For what it’s worth, this is not an accident – the speeds recorded are far below the default for the Bluetooth chips in these models, and the only way to get that molasses-like performance is to purposely choke the things back.

Shiny Tim wanted to point out that there has long been a “play by email” version of Acquire over at GamesByEmail.com. I have to confess that in the age of easy scripting and flash generators, I had no idea that PBEM games and servers were still active. Shows what I know.

There was a time when PBEM chess and Diplomacy games drew thousands and thousands of users. A game like Diplomacy, wherein you had to find seven people willing to commit a full day to the endeavour if you wanted to play in person, becomes a much more approachable prospect when you have a global pool of players to choose from. Times change, however, and as to how many people still play, I have no idea. If anyone is indulging, drop me a line.

Also, it was pointed out to me that one of the more interesting things about Acquire is that it was one of the entries in 3M’s attempt at getting in on the huge board games market in the 1960s. And while the games were excellent (Twixt was a another title in the “Bookcase Games” library) they never really made an impact in a commercial sense, possibly because they were a more cerebral pursuit than the average middle-class family was interested in. Eventually, 3M washed their hands of the whole thing, went back to making scotch tape, and sold the properties off to Avalon-Hill.

Now, of course, A-H has been acquired (heh heh) by Wizards of the Coast and the new version of the game has stupid plastic skyscrapers instead of the serene little tiles of the original game. To my mind, this cheapens the experience somehow.

Once in a while someone comes up with a Really Good Idea. Capital R, capital G, capital I.

This is one of those times.

Like most ideas of this quality, it is a really simple concept. In one place we have a surplus – and, quite often, one with no real value at all to the current holder – and in one place we have a pressing need. The idea to try and connect the surplus to the need is exceedingly basic … but I certainly never thought of it. Neither did you.

You might have one or two of these devices, and donating them would be a Good Thing. One or two, however, is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There are marketing and sales drones in your office that probably have a drawer that is damn near overflowing with these things – little sticks of RAM that they have collected from vendors, at conventions, wherever. They have probably never used them, and to be frank, most of them don’t even know how.

Find these people, and either convince them to give up their underused trove, or else distract them with something shiny and empty their drawer when they aren’t looking. EIther way, deserving people win. And big ups to sockmonkey for pointing this out.

Get busy.

195,000,000,000: The amount in U.S. dollars spent by last year by teenagers in the United States on retail products.