It kind of dawned on me recently what Twitter really is. It’s not blogging, or IM, or texting. It’s really the worlds largest IRC channel, only with some finer grained control over who you see and pay attention to.
I’m still a bit skeptical about its long term prospects, but I think I understand it a bit better now. And even though I’m skeptical, I find myself using it. So is it the Next Big Thing or the next CB radio? Stay tuned…
CNET has a story about Barcade, a Brooklyn based bar/old school arcade:
In Brooklyn’s warehouse-turned-artist district of Williamsburg, young hipsters flock to Barcade to sample its roster of microbrews and mingle with the likes of Pac-Man, the Mario brothers and Frogger.
I remember back in high school, arcades were all the rage. Games like Pac Man, Donkey Kong, etc. filled dimly lit rooms and the sound of cheesy synthesized game music was drowned out only by the sound of tokens spilling out of change machines. Well now it’s all come full circle, except now your arcade experience can be augmented by microbrews.
This just seems like a lot of fun, as well as a trip down memory lane. Next time we’re in the city, we should try to go. Of course, now it will end up being impossibly crowded. If it isn’t already.
They also have a Flickr stream and a MySpace page.
UPDATE: I wanted to mention my favorite video game at the time, but couldn’t remember it. It came to me: Tempest.
A belated Happy Tenth Anniversary to Scripting News, the oldest continuously running blog on the internet. It was the first blog I ever read, probably around six or seven years ago, and it’s been in my various readers continuously ever since. Dave is sometimes controversial, but always interesting. Here’s to another ten years.
I’m a little late to the party, but today I downloaded and tried Times Reader, the standalone application that downloads and displays the New York Times.
At first blush, I like it a lot. It took a long time to download, mostly because it uses .NET 3.0, which I didn’t have on my XP machine (it’s a built in part of Vista though), and therefore had to be downloaded. And it also took a while to populate (it archives a weeks worth of news). But once it was done, it was smooth sailing.
I think the main reason I like it is that it’s well laid out. It has sections and columns, just like you’d expect a “real” newspaper to have. There’s a front page, which seems to correspond more or less to the print edition’s front page, and each section (Sports, Business, etc.) also has a page. Each is laid out something like a traditional newspaper - in columns, with the size and position of the headline being a visual indication of the “importance” of the story. Pictures and graphics are positioned like they would be in print as well. There’s an aesthetic there that’s somehow missing from most online news. And the display is very nice - crisp and clear. All this makes for an experience more like reading a traditional newspaper, but with the advantages of being online. Which is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I like the convenience of getting my news online, but I miss the structure and organization of a traditional newspaper, as opposed to the constant linear flow of articles that you tend to see online.
Of course, time will tell if it works well for me or not. It’s free for me, since I already subscribe to the print edition. I’m bummed that it’s not available on OS X, my primary OS at home. I’ve heard that Microsoft is working on a cross platform version of WPF (and some other parts of the .NET CLR) and that when it’s available, the Times will port the Reader. We’ll see if that ever works out. But so far, it’s great.