March 19th, 2008 by cybrpunk
I just saw a notice that legendary author and theoretical scientist Arthur C. Clarke has just died at the age of 90. He was in a hospital near his home in Sri Lanka which is off the coast of India (and not too far from my location). This will be a very sad day in the Science Fiction industry and fans alike.
For those of you not familiar with Clarke, he wrote the well known 2001: A Space Odyssey [and it's sequels] and co-authored the movie based on the book with the equally iconic and departed Stanley Kubrick. Clarke also authored a great many other science fiction short stories and novels that are considered classics in the genre. Many of his stories have to do with the mingling of science and faith and questions regarding humanity and existence instead of the typical pulp fiction that many sci-fi writers go for.
Farewell Arthur. I hope that you now know all the answers to the questions you always hoped we’d ask as well as the answers.
March 19th, 2008 by cybrpunk
No it’s not going to be about poop or doctors today. That’s not all I talk about here at cybrpunk.com. Today I’m going to bitch about chatting in Google’s Gmail. At first I loved the idea of the simple tiny chat window in my favorite free webmail service. And I still do mostly. Mostly. But it seems like ever since they started this integration with LAME… er… AIM, nothing has worked as well since. People show up as online but not able to receive messages. For example:
me: So have you tried Soulstorm yet?
Mike did not receive your chat.
me: What?
Mike did not receive your chat.
me: What do you mean that Mike did not receive my chat?
Mike did not receive your chat.
me: Now your just mocking me aren’t you?
Mike did not receive your chat.
me: you bitch
Mike did not receive your chat.
Obviously trying to reason with the Gmail chat doesn’t work as you can see above. Neither does name calling it seems. I know that Yoshi has problems with it too, but he probably has some super elite custom software that interfaces with Google directly to talk to their satellites to track who’s daring to speak to him. Or so I like to imagine.
Of course my biggest complaint about chat is that most of my friends are asleep when I’m awake. But I can’t think of a way to blame Google or AOL for that.
