Technology: June 2004 Archive Page

Most Americans claim they don't believe what they read in newspapers or see on TV -- only a third say news organizations generally get the facts straight -- yet their opinions continue to be influenced by the media. Multiply this curious effect by the dozens of cable TV news shows, the hundreds of newspapers and perhaps thousands of websites and millions of blogs dedicated to disseminating news, and it offers great bounty for any media columnist. --Adam L. Penenberg --New Media's Age of Anxiety (Wired)

Chunking | Forms | Frames | Fitts Law | Flash Usability | Guidelines & Principles | Link Rot | Liquid Design | PDF | ROI | Writing, Reading & Content | Articles & Related Links --Usability (The Net Place)

Great collection of links to practical online articles on each of the above subjects.

The story of John Henry, told mostly through ballads and work songs, traveled from coast to coast as the railroads drove west during the 19th Century. And in time, it has become timeless, spanning a century of generations with versions ranging from prisoners recorded at Mississippi's Parchman Farm in the late 1940s to present-day folk heroes. --Carlene Hempel --John Henry: The Man - Facts, Fiction and Themes (ibiblio)

I've got a John Henry project I've been sitting on for several years... I'm planning to dig it out soon. This site has a good biography (which actually cites the online abstract of a talk I gave at the MLA years ago, though that was 3 websites ago.)

Update. 29 Jun: A few other nuggets: NPR (good bibliography), Garst (recent research claims Alabama, not West Virginia, as source of the legend).

Spirit has begun to negotiate her way up into the Columbia Hills where she has encountered a strange rock called Pot of God that she found contains hematite, something that may well lead to the discovery of past water there. On the other side of the planet, Opportunity has continued her descent into Endurance Crater and is now investigating some intriguing rock layers that are already expanding the water story at Meridiani Planum. A.J.S. Rayl --Spirit Finds Hematite; Opportunity Discovers Signs of More Water (The Planetary Society)

That should be "Pot of Gold," methinks. In other, completely unrelated news about pot...

I readily admit that my accomplishment has no practical social purpose or business application. But as a story that spans 18 years from Hoey's palindrome to mine, it has a moral about how it is becoming easier to do big things. Hoey is an excellent computer scientist, but he said he spent days writing a disk-based B-tree package for his program. I was saved all this, because a dictionary now fits in main memory and I could use straightforward binary search. --Peter Norvig --A Man, a Plan, a Pointless(?) Program (Google Blog)

Norvig used the power of Google to assemble the world's longest palindrome (a text that makes the same words backwards and forwards, such as "Madam, I'm Adam.").

Okay, but Norvig's palindrome is pretty much a list of words, not a narrative. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the palindrome story written by Nick Montfort and William Gillespe is worth checking out, even if it's much shorter.

U.S. investigators said on Wednesday they had arrested an America Online employee and a Las Vegas marketer for stealing the Internet provider's customer list and selling it to a purveyor of "spam" e-mail. --Andy Sullivan --US Charges AOL Worker Sold Customer List for Spam (AP|MyWay)

Retro video gaming has become something of a pop culture phenomenon lately, with video game music and themes featured in television commercials for Hummer and Saturn sport utility vehicles. A top 20 R&B hit, "Game Over (Flip)" by Lil' Flip features sound effects from "Pac-Man."

It's not just nostalgia that's fueling retro video interest, says O'Hara. He thinks the old games were simply more fun to play: "There's a phrase that's used a lot in marketing - 'easy to learn, hard to master' - that describes most classic video games." --Michael Felberbaum --Classic Video Games Make a Comeback (AP|MyWay)

The Queen has allowed herself to be the subject of the first royal hologram. --Queen's holograph 'makes me look lost in woods' (Telegraph)

Thanks for the offbeat suggestion, Rosemary.

blind users are finding that they are spending disproportionately more time sorting through their junk e-mail than their sighted colleagues. That's because sighted users can simply scan large batches of messages for that one important piece of mail, whereas blind users must listen to the subject line of each message before they know whether it's spam or not.

It's a process that has become so unbearable that some blind users say they are giving up on e-mail altogether. --Amit Asaravala --Blind Get Earful of Spam Daily  (Wired)

Tiny, even microscopic, cameras, deployed ubiquitously, should worry us in any number of ways. Individuals will lose even more of their privacy. Companies will find it difficult to maintain traditional notions of trade secrets. And governments will confront a world in which, to some extent, people will spy on the official snoops, not just the other way around.

Technology has already led to some of these changes in what for the most part are relatively small ways compared with what's coming.

How can we respond appropriately? --Dan Gillmor
--How do we adjust when cameras are everywhere? (Sillicon Valley)

Blogs and E-Mail DownJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Grr... blogs.setonhill.edu is down again. I noticed it while in the middle of drafting an e-mail message, and the university e-mail also went down. Grr.

The U.S. Army, riding the success of its action video game America's Army, has set up a video-game studio with industry veterans to write other kinds of software to simulate training for a variety of armed forces and government projects. --John Gaudiosi --Army Sets Up Video-Game Studio  (Wired)

Flying a foam composite rocket ship powered by laughing gas and burning rubber, Mike Melvill took off faster than a bullet over a ramshackle airport in the desert Monday and overcame serious malfunctions to become the first astronaut to reach space in a mission entirely funded by private entrepreneurs. --William Booth --Starship Private Enterprise: Rocket Plane Becomes First Civilian Craft to Reach Space  (WashPost (registration, will expire))

I don't like linking to The Washington Post anymore, since the site requires registrations and the links expire, but this is good writing, from the headline on.

"There's a silence in the family," says a newsreader, "because they're glued to the box".

An arts producer tells me that sleeping habits have changed: "Now people stay up late to watch their favourite programmes".

Another explains how the main family room pre-TV would have seats facing inwards to ease conversation with family and friends or to face the altar, but now television households re-arrange their rooms to the fount of visual stimuli. --Susie Emmet --Bhutan gives TV cautious embrace (BBC)

A great quote from "the maroon-robed lama":

Change is not to be feared", he says calmly, "without choice you cannot choose the right path".

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Blogging is dead, long live blogging. I suspect that over the next few years we will see a lot of calls suggesting that blogging has died, and I suspect that in a sense they will be right. The act of keeping a "Weblog" as a separate entity will become something of an anachronism. The broader world of collaborative Web publishing will continue to grow and converge with other technologies, including IM and e-mail. Imagine asking someone today if they are an "e-mailer." That question made sense, among a certain group, 15 years ago, when you weren't sure if someone had e-mail or not. I have a feeling that the production of public media -- whether in the form of Weblogs, wikis, collaboratively filtered lifelogs, or some form that I am too shortsighted to predict -- will be the moving force of a new era. --Alex Halavais participates in an e-mail interview by Mark Glaser
--Scholars Discover Weblogs Pass Test as Mode of Communication (Online Journalism Review)

Only getting around to blogging this now.

The genre of "e-mail questions to a bunch of people and compile their answers" certainly speeds up the process of getting the news out, but of course it only works when the people you interview want to talk about their subject.

Weblogs, Comments, and Law (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

IANAL ("I am not a lawyer"), but here are some links I found interesting.

While a newspaper has a responsibility to check the accuracy of letters to the editor, if person A were to start a cafe, and person B walked into the cafe and made statements that the court deemed libelous, it doesn't seem likely that person A should be held responsible.

If Person A rents a hall, calls a public town meeting and invites people to walk up to a microphone to say whatever they like, and Person B makes statements that a court deems libelous, would person A be legally responsible for any offense committed by person B?

Last year, in Wired, the article "Bloggers Gain Libel Protection" described a ruling involving the re-use, in electronic form, of information taken from elsewhere. Thus, if a blogger were to quote an excerpt from someplace else, and the author of that excerpt was charged with libel, then according to this ruling, the blogger would not be responsible. Let the reader beware -- the title of the Wired article mentions blogs, but the case actually centered around an e-mail.

I missed it when I blogged the original article, but Jack Balkin quickly put it into perspective:

This does not mean that bloggers are immune from libels they themselves write. It means that they are immune from (for example) libels published in their comments section (if they have one) because these comments are written by other people and the blogger is merely providing a space for them to be published. Congress wanted to treat operators of chatrooms and other interactive computer services differently from letters to the editor columns in a local newspaper.

Balkin also notes that corrections, clarifications, and retractions are part of the weblog culture, in ways that traditional print journalism doesn't provide.

If that's so, when blogger A posts an inaccurate statement, visitors to blogger A's website can publish corrections -- by commenting on the post (and thus adding their text to the main text), or perhaps simply by sending an e-mail. The technology and practice of weblogs makes it easy for bloggers to correct their mistakes or give space to opposing views. This built-in series of checks and balances is part of what makes the online media so exciting, from a "power to the people" perspective.

A 24-foot sailboat was raised Thursday from the murky depths of Monterey Harbor by divers who filled its hull with pingpong balls. --Kevin Howe --Sunken boat raised by pingpong balls (Monterey Herald)

SHU Blogs Down

The SHU blogs are down. I exchanged three e-mails with the sysadmin yesterday, who described the problem as something minor, that a reboot would fix. I haven't heard back from him since yesterday afternoon and don't know what to say. Let's all keep our fingers crossed.

Update: The sysadmin writes,

Argh! The machine has hard errors on the boot drive, it turns out.

I believe I can get it booted, but it looks like I need to start planning a migration to a newer box.

What If... There Were No IF? An Alternative History of Games, sans Crowther's Colossal Cave (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

During a break in the Princeton video game conference a few months ago, David Thomas asked me, what would computer games be like today if Will Crowther hadn't created Colossal Cave Adventure? I pulled Nick Montfort into the brief discussion that followed, but then the next panel started, and the topic went onto the back burner.

Here is a possible alternative history of computer game design, based on the premise that Will Crowther never wrote his 1975 original.

For want of Adventure, the magic word XYZZY is lost. (Computer users around the world are forced to think of less-guessable passwords, and information technology is more secure.)

For want of Adventure, Zork was lost. (But now everyone uses a really cool spreadsheet called VisiCalc.)

For want of Zork, Roberta Williams does not create "The Mystery House."

For want of Adventure, Adventure International was lost.

For want of Adventure International, Ken Williams does not work briefly for Scott Adams.

For want of Ken and Roberta Williams, Sierra was lost. (A generation of youngsters don't bother nagging their parents to upgrade their video cards from CGA to SuperVGA; when an explosion at a factory in Japan cripples the world's supply of memory chips, about six people notice.)

For want of Sierra Online, Leisure Suit Larry was lost.

For want of Leisure Suit Larry, Grand Theft Auto was lost.

For want of Grand Theft Auto, Grand Text Auto was lost. (The creators choose the name "Rogues' Gallery" instead, because it got more votes than "The Pong Throng" or "VisiCalc User Forum.")

For want of the text adventure genre, the entire field of computer science seems lifeless and boring to a significant number of young men and women who briefly consider it in the late 70s and early 80s. They drop out in droves. The ones who don't end up running computers at financial institutions, but are eventually put out of work by high-school dropouts using VisiCalc.

For want of the text adventure genre, the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre is lost.

For want of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, scholars groping for a way to describe hypertext to their non-technical colleagues think harder and come up with a better metaphor, one which magically prevents the premature dismissal of hyperfiction, leading to its rapid acceptance into the literary canon.

For want of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, a generation of youths watches more TV. Later, in college, these youths daydream during their hyperfiction survey courses, wondering how their life would have turned out if they had dropped out of high school like their stoner friends did.

Oh, and Dave Thomas has a scar, Nick Montfort has a beard, side-scrollers all scroll the opposite way, and all ships have funky spikes on their warp drive nacelles.

A bit more seriously, now...

I've read many anecdotes from programmers whose early experience with interactive fiction games turned them on to computers, so I do think that without text adventures, some of these people might not have considered careers in computing. While it's a meme that Adventure set the field of computer science back two weeks, I'd prefer to think that after everyone finished Zork, they went back to their jobs energized by what computers might be able to accomplish, and perhaps they shifted their expectations in such a way that might have affected the development of CS in positive ways.

Since the average computer user didn't have access to CRTs that displayed fancy graphics, and since a significant chunk of computing took place on printer terminals, I suppose that ASCII genres such as Rogue, and strategy games such as Wumpus and mainframe Trek would have attracted the attention of the amateur hackers and students who, after playing Adventure or Zork, tried their hand at creating their own amateur interactive fiction.

Hosting the wild speculation up to the next level...

Perhaps the players who lost countless hours playing interactive fiction would have instead spent more time getting their game fix at the arcade. If coin-op video arcade games developed a little faster, then perhaps users of personal computers wouldn't have been at all satisfied with the bleeps and blips that they saw on their home computers... maybe they would have been so disappointed by the offerings of home computer entertainment that they would have preferred dropping coins in the arcade, playing games that emulated familiar TV shows (however badly), to typing in lines of code from magazines in order to play games on their home computers. This might have delayed growth in the market for PC games, paving the way in the future for a direct transition of loyalty from the video arcade to the gaming platform.

They circle in front of the motion detector, the doors open, and the birds fly through and take lunch up to the kids that are nesting in the building. Then it's back to the door, buzz by the motion detector -- and fly through again to hunt for more food.

--Birds Learn to Operate Automatic Doors (WABC-New York)

Update: In Virginia, it was a bear.

In other news, dolphins evolve opposable thumbs.

The 363-foot-long behemoth has lain on its side in front of JSC since 1977, a favorite sight of tourists, but also a victim of the elements. --Apollo moon rocket to get face-lift (CNN)

The Houston Space Center was one of the places I visited on my honeymoon (10 years ago next month). If I recall correctly, there was a shuttle mission in progress. Very cool!

Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs' owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs' contents.

Meanwhile, the affected bloggers cannot access their work, a situation that angers many, who said they believed they should have been given advance notice that the Weblogs service would be terminated before their sites became inaccessible. --Michelle Delio --Thousands of Blogs Fall Silent  (Wired)

I noticed this as it was happening, and had planned to investigate and post a followup, but Clancy beat me to it.

I applaud those bloggers who remembered to thank Winer for the years of free service he provided, but I also sympathize with the bloggers who suddenly found themselves without access to an important part of their lives.

Children as young as seven in one British school are using weblogs as part of their normal routine, and are doing better than non-webloggers as a result, their teacher says.

Weblogs, easy-to-use personal journals published on the internet, get children more interested in school work they might otherwise have disliked, says junior school teacher John Mills. --Giles Turnbull --The seven-year-old bloggers (BBC)

Want to play a game that involves Monty the Mole? Commander Keen? David "Knight Rider" Hasselhoff? With RoN you can. The fact that anyone can freely contribute to the series means that its potential for growth is unrivaled. Indeed, at the time of writing this article, there have been over sixty RoN games. Even King's Quest could only manage eight... --Robert Lacey
--Deconstructing Reality  (Adventure Gamers)

Hmm... this is more about the communal construction of virtual reality than it is about the deconstruction of reality, but it's a good article nonetheless.

I couldn’t have been less interested. The pedagogical approach was entirely vocational. Just as my French and Spanish courses revolved around hypothetical trips to Paris or Madrid (like I was going to get there any time soon), my programming courses were filled with unlikely scenarios that read like a cross between an inter-office memo and a GRE logic problem: “You own a small hardware store in Schenectady. Write a program that will display items in your inventory sorted in such and such a way, but not screwdrivers on Tuesdays when the moon is full.” --The Pedagogy of Programming (MGK)

NASA's Mars rovers have completed their long cross-country quests and are now at two very different sites that scientists have been restlessly waiting to reach.

--Mars rovers arrive at long-awaited sites  (New Scientist)

After six years of regulations and restrictions that have cost builders, local governments and landowners on the western fringe of the Great Plains as much as $100 million by some estimates, new research suggests the Preble's mouse in fact never existed. It instead seems to be genetically identical to one of its cousins, the Bear Lodge meadow jumping mouse, which is considered common enough not to need protection.
--Research: Endangered mouse never existed (CNN/AP)

Microsoft, amid an IP spree that has won the company patent protection for everything from XML dialects to video game storage methods, mistakenly received a patent on Tuesday for a new variety of apple tree. --Microsoft patents an apple (ZD Net)

Hooray for ZDNet for not using the alarmist headline, "Microsoft Receives Patent for Apple". This is apparently a story about a clerical error.

The National Crime Squad announced today that it is working with the FBI, the Canadian Mounties and the Australian Federal Police to set up what they call "patrols" on the internet.

Officers will actively monitor chat rooms used by children where they think paedophiles are likely to be.

A logo will come up in the corner of the screen to show that the police are present - the National Crime Squad quite liked the idea of a flashing blue light - and they may even join in the conversation. --Stuart Tendler

--Q&A: Cyber cops for children's chat rooms (Times Online)

Now, I'm really not interested in just complaining about the fact that LeapFrog hasn't made this move. It's a massive strategic issue for them, and they do have shareholders to answer to. At the same time, I refuse to accept one justification I heard at the conference, namely that shelf space pressure was one reason to shrink from third party development -- LeapFrog products get a full aisle of shelf space in Target and Wal-Mart. Rather, I think the good folks at LeapFrog just need an outside perspective on the matter. And why shouldn't that perspective be a public one? --Ian Bogost --The Truth about Third Party Development on the LeapFrog Leapster (Water Cooler Games)

I've exchanged a few comments with Ian, who asked me, "What kinds of games might change your mind about the value of the Leapster as a supervised computer activity?"

The Amazon reviews of Leapster praised the concept and quality of the software, but there were more than enough problems with durability to make me pass on the hardware. Since I'm not really comfortable (yet) with the idea of letting my son have unlimited access to his games, I'd rather buy 3 or 4 edu-games for the PC we already have than risk a Leapster.

My son is not that picky about graphics, so he's happily playing some old (mid 1990s) games, and he prefers the 1994 (or so) Star Wars X Wing vs Tie Fighter to the more recent X Wing Alliance... So the fact that I can share with him games that I enjoyed means something to me.

In terms of content, what would it take to get me to change my mind? I don't know... I'll know it when I see it. We don't get cable TV, so he doesn't know who Spongebob or Dora the Explorer are, so the branded content is actually a liability in my eyes.

Some educational games make a funny blooping noise when you make a mistake or get a wrong answer. My son enjoyed trying to knock Curious George unconscious so much that he never paid attention to the letter-recognition game, and besides, he already knew his alphabet. So he got stuck on a level -- by his own choice -- for several days.

I would love to have been able to tweak the level of encouragement the game provides.

I know my son prefers games that feature a plot with an opponent to overcome... For several years he has been enthralled by Lego Stunt Rally, which has completely captured his imagination (to the point that we have to limit his access to that game, or he will make car brake squealing noises for hours at a time, re-playing races in his mind).

Sometimes I'd like to see the "plot" suffer an extreme setback if the kid is careless...

Oh wait -- I just thought of a game that might make me buy Leapster.

My son needs some work with penmanship... I had, and still have, terrible handwriting, so I'm senstitive on this issue.

If there were a game where you played... I don't know... a construction foreman, and you traced out shapes on a blueprint, and then construction teams built the roads according to the layout you designed, and then you had to drive on the roads, wrecking your nice cars if the wobbly lines drawn on the blueprint were too far from the norm. A game like that might also include map reading, simulation, basic math, and abstract thinking. Oh, and of course there would need to be random citizens with fruit stands to be smashed.

Throw in a villain with a handlebar moustache and a cool car that can spew smoke screens and drop oil slicks, and I'd buy it.

Planes, ants, Chewbacca making the calculations for a jump to hyperspace -- anything that moves in a boundary would work. It's drawing on the touch screen that would make the difference. But it's that touch screen that seems to be the source of a lot of frustration from consumers.

Ditch the reader and have students purchase a choice game or two, or perhaps an anthology of classic games (which are also available for free). Have students play games and reflect on their experience rather than work with print texts. I would like to say to an incoming class, "We won't be reading any novels in this class. We don't be doing any reading, as a matter of fact. Instead, we're going to play videogames." Is this insane? --Matt Barton --Videogames in Composition & Rhetoric (KairosNews)

Er... yes.

While I agree that it's not necessary to read novels in order to learn freshman composition, students have to read essays if they are being asked to write essays.

I'd say about half of college students consider themselves "gamers," though many of those who don't say they used to play games. If there's a meaningful selection process, by which students can select a section with an emphasis that appeals to them, then a games-focused freshman comp course sounds wonderful.

In passing, Matt suggests that Quake could help students learn how to drive the Martian rover. The distance between Earth and Mars results in such a great time delay (about 20 minutes) that the skills one develops in a twitch game really wouldn't help much. Chess would probably be better (as it forces you to see multiple alternatives and plan ahead for them).

But, as Matt notes, the purpose of a rhet/comp course is not to train people for specific jobs. I think he's much closer to the target when he mentions political simulations and other ideological games. I also like his observation that there is a demand for slide presentation skills, but that we aren't doing a very good job teaching those skills.

While my school requires all students to demonstrate basic PowerPoint skills, I actively discourage slide shows in my classes, since I find them typically to be of such low quality and I haven't the time to teach how to use a slide presentation effectively. I'll be teaching a "Writing for the Internet" course this fall again... maybe that will be the right place to tackle this issue.

I felt one paragraph called for a more detailed response:

Perhaps videogames are the last tool available to modern compositionists that can actually inspire students to learn to write. Of course we could allow students to "play games" with the texts they produce, constructing choose your own adventures. I see things on a deeper level; teach programming (or at least a game making software tool) so that students may express themselves in the language of their generation.

The last tool? No, just the latest tool. And all that is playful is not games... that is, "playing games" with existing works of literature is completely different from what goes on when you interact with a computer game.

The narratological approach that Matt uses makes a great deal of sense in the particular branch of computer games that I study, namely interactive fiction. But I think it's probably too much, at this point, to ask the average student to learn a computer programming language and construct a game in a freshman comp course. At an engineering school? Sure! But at a liberal arts school? Sadly, no.

See also a recent blog conversation under "Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game Studies." Both kinds of scholarship are important, and I did spend one day introducing my upper-level English students to IF programming, but these were juniors and seniors, whom I could assume had already mastered the basic reading and writing skills that a freshman comp course is supposed to give them. But "user mods" and the "remix culture" are certainly valid and important topics to address, in terms of the attitude of today's youth towards the dissemination of intellectual property, and the open source philosophy (of which Matt is a devoted supporter).

A college writing class is a good place to get students to think about their own creation of intellectual property. And having a freshman comp class create and peer review wiki articles may be a useful way to get them to think about the function (and limitations) of peer review.

If videogames have not yet risen to the elite status of famous novels, it is no fault of videogames, but rather money-hungry developers, narrow-minded players, and traditionalist literary critics unwilling to replace their pen with a joystick.

Don't forget the importance of the cult of the author as celebrity. Modern videogames may be inspired by brilliant designers, but they are products of huge committees of highly-specialized workers and outsourced labor -- including many people who have no narrative skills at all, and whose daily activities aren't in the slightest comparable to what a novelist does. The people who do this work have to feed their families, so naturally a huge commercial videogame project is going to follow the corporate model.

Matt's doing some important work getting people to talk about the issues. He's not yet at the fist-shaking, "Fools! I shall crush them all!" stage, which is probably good for society in general.

I agree with him whole-heartedly when he writes the following:

It is of utmost importance that we teach people to see a videogame with the same critical apparatus they bring to bear on poems, novels, screenplays, and films.

You bet. But replacing the reader with videogames? That's going too far.

It seems that what we really need is a reader, geared towards college freshmen, that covers videogames intelligently -- along with reality TV, "cool hunting," weblogs, text messaging, and other cultural practices that our students know well.

Be careful what kind of art you make. The Feds may come a knockin'? --Michael Mateas --Feds can't tell art from terrorism (Grand Text Auto)

I'd heard about this story in passing, but now that I see how few degrees of separation I am away from the artists in question, I see the situation in a new light.

Unscrewed: Finding Replacement Screws for Palm Tungsten T3  (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

A few weeks ago, I was comparing PDA's with Josh Sasmor (a Seton Hill math professor), when Josh noticed that one of the four tiny screws on the lower body of my Tungsten T3 was missing. I forgot to bring the charger home one weekend, and took the following week off, so my PDA's batteries died and I didn't use it for more than a week. When I picked it up again, I noticed that now, three of the four tiny screws were missing.

I hit the Internet, and found that I am not alone. Palm does not sell replacement screws, and in fact will not replace them at all unless you send in your PDA for servicing -- which costs $125, plus shipping and the time you have to spend without a PDA -- and that you might get somebody else's used PDA back instead of yours. A few posters in online forums mentioned finding replacements in out of the way places, so I was hopeful (though Finn never replied to my e-mail). One online poster said a railroad hobbyist eyeballed the screw, said "Looks like a #80," opened up a drawer, and presto -- problem solved.

After checking Wal-Mart, Lowe's (a hardware chain), three eyeglass stores, two jewelry stores and a Radio Shack, I was feeling pretty discouraged. The culture here in Pennsylvania is small-town friendly, so I didn't get the idea people were blowing me off; but nobody had a drawer full of odd screws, and nobody knew how to get in touch with a supplier who might stock such parts. "The parts I'm supposed to need just arrive from the warehouse," said one employee.

Today I was in downtown Greensburg, and found screws that fit at Bortz Hardware. They had about twenty in a little drawer; The part number: 0-80X 1/8, flat head Phillips, 64084. I bought seven. When I told employee Peggy Felton about the Tungsten problem, she looked in her drawer and said, "I'll order more."

Update, June 25 (photo added): The replacement screw, on the right, sticks out ever so slightly on the downslope edge, but it seems to fit tightly.

If you're looking for replacement Tungsten T3 screws, you might want to give Bortz Hardware a call at 724 834 3770. (I have no financial stake in the transaction... I'm just hoping I might be of some service to somebody whom Google throws my way.)

According to the chatter on user forums and an online petition, Palm's position is that the screws were lost due to user error, and thus the replacement is not covered by warranty. Many unhappy consumers note that they have owned countless electronic devices with tiny screws that do not need to be tightened regularly, and feel it is a design flaw.

Oh... the price Bortz Hardware charged for the screws? Eighteen cents each. That sure beats $125.

But time has slowly killed these loops and the pastoral (and ambient) ideals they once represented. What we hear on The Disintegration Loops are not poetic images of nature or beauty but nature and beauty as they truly exist in this world: always fleeting, slowly dying. What makes these works so memorable is not the fact that the loops are slowly disintegrating but the fact that we get to hear their deaths. In a very real way, we experience the muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life. What's more, these muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life are, in their own way, incredibly beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than the original, pristine loops ever could have been.

As with any natural occurrence, these individual loops all die very individual deaths. "D|P 3," for example, begins as a bright, bold, orchestral melody that, over the course of 42 minutes, is slowly reduced to a sputtering, churning blob of its former self. The melody disintegrates slowly, until, by the end, only portions are audible; the rest is silence and noise.
--William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops I-IV (Haunted Ink)

What makes this album review especially blogworthy:

William Basinski lives in Brooklyn, less than a nautical mile from the World Trade Centers. On September 11, 2001, as he was completing The Disintegration Loops, he watched these towers disintegrate.

Via MGK.

I didn't have quite as dramatic an experience, but I do from time to time look back at the page of literary quotes about the Twin Towers and urban technology that I collected the afternoon the towers fell.

Video-game characters in a comic strip were not unheard of, but the remarkable thing about Anez's comic was that rather than using drawings of the characters, he used the actual video-game character art -- "sprites" in programming jargon -- along with some simple backgrounds and word balloons. The effect re-created the feel of the game with a minimum of artistic effort. --Lore Sjöberg
--You, Too, Can Be a Comics Whiz  (Wired)

A history of videogames, just as a history of any software "type" or "genre," will reveal an open-source origin and a legacy of "borrowers" and "derivers" hoping to capitalize on what was originally free, whether through buying up copyrights or creating enhanced commercial versions. With an increase in the size of a software corporation comes a decrease in the level of innovation one finds there, until finally, in 2004, gamers are confronted at the videogame store with hordes of cloned videogames and programmers are threatened at the courtroom by battalions of lawyers frantically protecting someone's "intellectual property." The protection that intellectual property law affords software developers is possible only by seizing the rights of the users of that software, even those who legitimately purchase it. As corporate lawyers, CEOs, and investors further entrench themselves in the software market, gamers and programmers will find themselves in the same dismal position as the ship in a game of Space Invaders. --Matt Barton
--The Videogame in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Armchair Arcade)

I left a few (unrelated) comments on Tetris, Galileo, and the open source philosophy on the Armchair Arcade site.

I doubt anyone could accuse me of literature. Online text games tend to have quite a different emphasis than a book. I am not trying to tell a story as much as I am trying to describe a location and an atmosphere. I try to make the descriptions detailed and interesting enough for people to believe they are actually there. I think this is one area the creators and I have tried hard to do well from early on, making the room descriptions very detailed. --David Bennett --Discworld MUD: Slinging Dirt with David Bennett (Armchair Arcade)

Bennett created a MUD based on Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.

To paraphrase Matt Barton's hyperbolic words playfully, let's remove our lips from the poisoned suckbottle of proprietary software and switch to the wholesome breast of open source. --Clancy Ratliff
--Taking Copyfighters to Task (CultureCat)

Beware, open-source activists, if your praxis is not as pure as your theory!

In the theater world, it turned out that the Marxist ideology was pretty much incompatible with modern theater -- the Marxist protagonist has to be spotless, blameless, and involved in no personal struggles or inner conflicts that cannot be resolved by the embracement of socialist doctrine.

The attention that Marxist purists spent keeping Marxist-friendly dramatists in line alienated some of the best playwrights, since even the ones that were most interested in Marxism were also interested in creating viable theatre, rather than pamphlets.

At any rate, my analogy isn't meant to be taken too far. I think "poisoned suckbottle" is a meme worth repeating. Well done, Clancy!

Since the best way to make a good choice is by using the Internet, I ask all my readers to reach out to a senior citizen who doesn't understand computers. Clip this column and invite a senior -- perhaps a relative or someone who lives in your neighborhood -- to line up his or her pill bottles and receipts so you can help with the online drug card selection process. --Terry Savage --Help a senior use Web to pick a drug discount card  (Chicago Sun-Times)

Another great suggestion from Rosemary, who observes, "The pocess should be easier and I hope there is phone number people without computer access can call to get help."

A parody helps change a corrections policy at The New York Times. An online critic's query ends a career at the Chicago Tribune. Bloggers' scrutiny is making its mark on traditional journalism. --Mark Glaser --To Their Surprise, Bloggers Are Force for Change in Big Media (Online Journalism Review)

Another great suggestion from Rosemary.

As an example of the new pricing plan, suppose you posted an entry to your blog reading, ?I had a cheese sandwich for lunch today. Then, I got behind the slowest woman in the grocery-store line! Grrrr!? By my count (TypeKey will handle the sentence diagramming automatically in MT3.0014d), this entry contains 6 adjectives/adverbs, 4 nouns, 3 articles, 2 passive verbs, 2 pronouns, 2 prepositions, and 1 interjection. Therefore, under the new license, your entry would cost a grand total of 84¢ ? no matter how many blogs or authors you have! Now, that?s not so bad, is it? --Six Apart announces more changes to Movable Type license (Apropos of Something)

Don't worry, it's just a joke.