I’ve been dreaming of adding them since I started iCalFix, but in the harsh light of day, I don’t have enough time to follow through on them. So I’ve finally decided to “get over it” and open-source iCalFix. The sources are now available on github.

I hope this helps out all of you guys who really wanted new versions, additional features, etc. I’ll still be involved with it – I think – but now others can modify it whatever way they like it.

Hope you enjoy it!

As of March this year, I am now fully “out” and living as a woman. First, let me thank all the people who did know on the way and supported me, as well as everybody who took the news and then proceeded to show me that my fears were unfounded. My transition has been incredibly smooth – not a single negative word, and tons of love and support.

My only explanation is that I have a fantastic family, awesome friends, and I work for one of the friendliest (and kick-assingest!) companies on this planet.

As a result of all this, there has been a name change, too. “Robert” just doesn’t work so well as a woman’s name…

So my shiny and new name is “Rachel” from here on out. That makes it a little weird to maintain a blog called “robertblum.com”, but fret not – I will stay around. In fact, even this site will stay around – I am where I am now by virtue of having travelled a long road, and unlike for many other transgendered people, there does seem no need to hide my past. (Again, thank you, everybody!)

So robertblum.com will stay around, but experience a slight change. Looking at my web stats, there are three groups of people who come here:

• People interested in iCalFix (which is in sore need of an overhaul, I know)
• People who come here searching for my productivity articles
• People who know me personally and just want to know what I’m up to.

The last group, I’d like to direct over to rachelblum.com. This is where I will keep my more personal stories, as well as my daily thoughts.

If you’re in group 1 or 2, you’re welcome to follow me there too – I will continue posting about the subjects I’ve posted about here. But I will also cross-post articles that fall under productivity/Life Hacks/icalfix on this web site – so if you’d rather have “Just the facts, ma’am”, I recommend you stay here.

I am fairly certain I will get a question or two about my transition and anything related to it – if it’s a frequently asked one, I will post an article on rachelblum.com. And if you don’t want to ask right here on the site, feel free to send your questions to transition [at] rachelblum [dot] com

And now I finally have the time to actually tend to this thing.

Back then, we had a glut of games, clearly overwhelming the consumer, leading to less-than-expected sales. Just last year, we experienced a similar glut. Granted, it was a glut of high-quality titles. But even bloggers dedicated to gaming felt overwhelmed by the flood of it.

Back in ‘84, we relied on a marketing gimmick to sell more – license of other IPs. Culminating in the now-famous ET game. These days, we instead license ourselves and produce sequels. But ultimately, we seem to be in a situation where pure merit doesn’t seem to be enough. Many critically acclaimed games from last year just couldn’t pull in enough sales if they didn’t have prior name recognition.

But even more importantly, back then the industry failed to see a new and coming trend for what it was – personal computers. It was the beginning of the heyday of the Sinclair, the C64, the BBC. And I think the industry is again failing to see a trend. At least the “old guard” is. We’re still producing first-person shooters, racing games, strategy games, etc., with a never-ending quest for graphic realism.

Meanwhile, the market shifted below our feet. Those games are becoming a niche market. What really sells are easily accessible games, things you can just jump in, have fun with, and be done after 15 minutes. Looking at the weekly charts right now, 4 in the top 5 and 6 (maybe 7, depending on how you count Super Mario Bros.) in the top 10 are this kind of games. Think that’s just a glitch at the top? 11 in the top 20. 14 in the top 30.

Even worse, #46 (Mario Party 8) has 6.3M sales. The three “traditional” games in the top 10 together just barely approach this number. And they contain two games that have almost cult status – Left4Dead (for its unique gameplay) and Call of Duty, a long-running and well-loved franchise.

So not only do these games take up half the spots in the sales charts, they outsell traditional games by a factor that’s not even close to funny. The first one on the list that you can’t disqualify by saying “but it’s a bundle”, Mario Kart 4, sold fourteen million copies. Grand Theft Auto IV, probably the biggest seller of last year, only manages 11. Meanwhile, Nintedogs sold 22 million copies.

And, like back in ‘84, the thriving market has a low barrier to entry. Back then, with the PC surge, everybody could just buy a PC and write a game for it, while the console manufacturers closely guarded their secrets. Right now, traditional games have enormous development cost. GTA IV cost $100 Million. Meanwhile, the new crop of games is dirt cheap to create (in comparison), and they can be created rapidly, allowing for experimentation. (Brain Age took about 90 days for a prototype). Furthermore, DS development is easy to get started at home (It’s not exactly officially approved, though), and even the Wii is much less expensive to develop for than the XBox360 or the PS3.

And funnily enough, as it was in ‘84, so it shall be in ‘08 – while the rest of the industry struggles, Nintendo cleans up. They currently – with the DS and the Wii – cover about 60% of the console market.

Does that mean “traditional games” are dead? No, certainly not. Neither did the console video games die in ‘84. But we need to rethink our approach to them, just as we did then. What we’re currently doing seems to be not working well enough. And it’s not going to work better if we just repeat the mistakes often enough.

As with many forwarded links, it’s ready for the trash can. (Really. It’s so bad I refuse to link to it. If you have to know, here’s a Google link).

It was pretty much clear it was bogus when I read the title: “2nd Great Depression can make you rich as BANK COLLAPSE is just weeks away, says expert”.

The “journalist” posting this garbage goes by the name of Derek Clontz, and he claims he has “News those other journalists don’t DARE print”. Yeah. That has a reason – they fact-check. Here’s how that would work.

First off, anything on the Internet that promises to make you rich is bogus or an outright scam. But assuming the title would’ve actually been decent, there are a couple more things you can do to verify claims.

• Check the date

  A lot of info is time critical. It’s really embarrassing if you find a prediction that “the economy will collapse in 6 weeks”, you repost it blindly, and it turns out it’s actually an article that’s almost a year old. Granted, in this case it applies only to the re-poster, but please, always look for the expiration date on the can, so to speak.

• Check the source

  If the article you’re reposting claims to be from an eminent source in the field, you might want to double check if it’s indeed a well-known authority. Google is your friend. The “expert” cited in this article doesn’t show up in either Google or Wikipedia. At least not credibly. That doesn’t automatically discourage information – “unknowns” can have great insights, too – but it’s a warning sign.

• Check the Numbers

  Really. Do check them, if just as a ballpark.

  If somebody predicts that 140 million Americans will be out of work, you might want to engage your critical thinking skills for the slightest moment to figure out that that’s 50% of the entire population. Account for “too young” and “too old”, and suddenly pretty much every adult American is out of work. If you want to get more detailed, dig deeper. In this particular case, the bureau of labor statistics has detailed employment stats. As it turns out, there are only 145 million employed Americans in the civilian labor force.

And if that’s too much work for you – JUST DON’T FORWARD LINKS!

The Pledge: The fact that many things adults told us when we were kids actually contain kernels of truth – even though it sure sounded like they were just corny proverbs. Which of course brings up “I wish I had known then what I know now”.

The Turn: With the Internet and Google available, we actually often can know now what in the normal course of events we’d have to learn via experiences later on. We can glimpse into millions of people’s lives and learn from their experiences.

The Prestige: “I wish I had known then…” talks about of knowledge in the sense of experiences. While it certainly would be nice to know stock prices or lottery numbers in advance, this is not the kind of knowledge it talks about. So I started wondering if there are two words to express the different kinds of knowledge. And how you classify knowledge.

And it turns out that it’s a topic that many great minds have spent a large deal of time on. It starts with Aristotle and the concept of “scientia”, gets mulled around for a couple of centuries, and then Francis Bacon starts looking at this. And turns out a whole book¹ – “Of the Advancment of Science And Learning”, in which he develops a catalog of knowledge.

This idea then bounces around in lots of other brilliant minds for another 250 years or so, when it leads to the Dewey classification.

And then it gets weird. In the 19th and 20th century, we start classifications based on principles. We get classifications based on logical positivism, Marxism, sociology – you name it. (To be fair, previous classifications were also based on assumptions – it’s just that we’re starting to explain our bias at that point). We also get Scientometrics, which discusses how to measure science.

I still don’t have my word, though. According to the Library of Congress Classification System, this knowledge probably falls under AY – General Works/Yearbooks, Almanacs and directories. But that’s about as good as it gets. “Raw Data” is probably the best description for this kind of knowledge.

The irony? Raw data – lists of words matched to websites, without any deeper meaning – makes Google work, which gives us access to all kinds of knowledge. The one thing that no classification really covers enables us to create and think about classifications. There’s a moral somewhere in this…

Since I’m always working on one website or another, trying out new ideas, this is something that interests me very much – coding the 17th website is just not that exciting. One of her recommendations was Squarespace.

I’m simply blown away. It’s a very easy point & click way to build web sites (including blogs, discussion areas, photo galleries, what-have-you) that really doesn’t require any code. It comes complete with pre-built traffic measuring tools, log viewing, etc – and pretty, too.

And in case you really need your own custom tweaks, you have full access to the CSS, and limited places where you can even inject additional HTML.

Since I’m currently tinkering around with re-building my wife’s jewelry web site, I gave it about two minutes, just playing around – here’s what I got so far.

It’s impressive enough that I’ll spend some serious effort on this over the coming days. (Add to that the fact that they’re fairly affordable – $8 a month is certainly in line with other hosting solutions, and they do all the software patching for you )

Oh, and if you’re – like me – paranoid about your data, they have full XML export facilities. And blogs can be exported in Moveable Type format, which pretty much every other blog software can import.

After that, I decided to drive home and celebrate. And when I came home, I saw the first polls for Californias hate amendment, proposition 8. Let’s just say the elation was gone. It took me a while to get over the disappointment – I’ve been moping around, more or less.

But this afternoon I made the decision that this is not going to happen ever again. I’ll dedicate what spare time I have to help building a grass roots effort that will be able defeat proposition 8 and all similar efforts. I’m still not over the fact that “all men are created equal” is so hard to understand for some.

Anyways – this is not going to turn into a daily or even weekly thing on this blog. It deserves a separate effort. But until that is up, I’ll ask for your help from here:

Please help out. If you can spare an hour tomorrow at 2pm, be at the Los Angeles LDS temple at 10777 Santa Monica Blvd., between Westwood Blvd. and Beverly Glen.

We’re planning to protest the fact that one religion thinks they can enforce their version of morality on all Americans.

If you’ve missed yesterday’s debate “That One” moment, you should really watch it

via DailyKos

• How come the Feds are injecting $630 billion without any bill or congressional oversight? If they can do that anyways, why do we need a bill?

• This whole thing smells like the story of the guy who cried wolf.

  Politicians, and especially our current administration, have lied to the American public so often that we won’t believe them if they tell us there’s a grand emergency. After everything we’ve been through in the last few years, most Americans doubt their word there’s a need for this. To them, it’s just a ‘fat-cat’ bailout, so they’re overwhelmingly opposed. Or at least the vocal minority that calls their elected representatives is. (Looking at my 401k, I tend to disagree. But I’m not an economist, so what do I know…)

• What’s up with the strange voting pattern?

  One explanation that makes a lot of sense is that both parties played games – commit enough votes that it passes, but not enough that the public sees your party as the offending party. And at the last moment, a lot of Republicans got cold feet and backed out. Passing or not passing a bill like that based on political calculus is sickening, so I really hope I just have an overactive imagination.

• Overall, I’m not certain blocking the bailout isn’t a good thing.

  If you’re going to spend $700 billion, you might want to think things through. And as I understand it so far, the ‘compromise’ bill the Democrats achieved wasn’t much of a compromise.

• There are plenty of armchair economists who have ‘better plans’. Can we instead get some people who really understand the issues? And that certainly excludes Paulson and Bernanke – it was their job to see this coming. Pretty much every financial predicition they made was wrong since they’re in office.

• How much are $700 billion?

  Beats me – but there’s a nice graphic showing a stack of $315 billion

• So $700 billion is the price tag to save our economy? Where can we get that kind of money?

  Well, if you look at the 400 richest Americans and they all gave half their money, we’d be set. And even the poorest of them would still have around $650 million left over – probably enough to survive. I’m not proposing this as a solution – but maybe we should think a bit about the fact that we have a society where 400 people can make or break our entire economy.

Oh, and if you want to learn more about this whole thing, here are good starting points:

• One of the better written explanations
• The definitive podcast on the history of the crisis

Yes, I know. I’ve been gone forever from here, and I’m sorry about that. Life has conspired to keep me busy. In the last few months, I had the pleasure of:

• Buying a place (with my wife out of town, so I could make the fax machine work overtime)

• Overseeing the remodeling

• Packing and moving

• Flying to Germany to settle a few things regarding possible dual citizenship.

• Having my in-laws over for three weeks of vacation time. (Which was awesome – lots of free help with the moving…)

• Volunteering for No on Prop 8. BTW: If you care about equal rights at all, I’d appreciate if you could donate some time and/or money.

But now that most of these things are wrapping up – almost moved in, citizenship interview at the 8th, in-laws back home – I’m ready to write again. And boy, are there topics out there. Expect some commentary on politics and finance on this blog in the near future…