From what little I’ve seen so far, it looks indeed scrumptious. It’s still not for me, though – I’m holding out hope for a Delicious client that actually downloads and cached the web pages referenced, so I can search locally. Since most of my links are research-y in some way, that would be a tremendous improvement.

When I first started blogging, I got my start – the Home Of The Rant – on livejournal. First on the free edition, and then, when I needed more features, on the paid edition. And writing is indeed rather addictive, so I staid with it.

Well, I staid with blogging. Somehow, livejournal was not quite what I was looking for. So I floundered about, tried out quite a few blogging systems, and even wrote my own. The latter one? Total suckers’ bet. Yes, you learn about web development – but for me, it takes time away from what I really want to do, write.

So I moved on to WordPress, and my own webhost, hosting ‘Groby Unplugged’ – this site.

More shopping. I tried both Virtual Private Servers and shared hosting and in the end stuck with shared. Not because it’s technologically better, but because it’s less headache. That might change if I ever get popular enough that performance matters – but for now, it’s doing fine. (In case you’re interested, I’m with Dreamhost. If you sign with and use my affiliate link or mention the code GROBY you get $50 of your bill. And I get $47 – which I much appreciate!)

You’d think now I’d be settled and could just get blogging, right? Well, sort-of. The more time you spend on this, the more you realize what you could do if you just spent some time – or money. There are tons of plugins to explore (free). There’s certainly the lure of professionally made themes. (Not free. Not by a long shot. Bring money!). And you do spend a lot of time on just keeping your blog software up-to-date. I love wordpress – but if they could have a few less security holes so I don’t need to update every 30 seconds, that’d be fine by me.

And of course, sooner or later you’ll discover that your writing spans to many fields of interest, or at least I did. So, at some point, I took my programming topics off to a new blog – codingadventures.com. And all was good – for a while.

Then I transitioned, and started rachelblum.com. And I felt programming for the web and game programming were different enough that they justified two blogs – so there’s Rachel’s Lab Notes for the game programming topics now.

And there were, of course, several – aborted – home-written blog projects in between. Drupal, Django, you name it. I probably tried it. And always realized that I’d rather write than re-invent blogs.

But now that all that is done, I finally can write, right?

Well, sort-of. Turns out writing isn’t always easy, either. You need topics – and I refuse to just bang out another top-10 list if I can’t think of anything good. Often, the editor gets just closed again.

But when it doesn’t, it has been worth the whole journey for me.

And since health care reform in general is something I deeply care about, I joined the Facebook boycott group, and shared it on my FB page – despite the rather juvenile, foaming-at-the-mouth activist ramblings on said group.

I did get disagreement, of course, and was about to write a long reply explaining my reasoning when I realized that it was too long to make a good “status” message. So here we go.

First, just so we are clear, I’m not trying to stifle speech or imply that the CEO did anything legally wrong. I simply chose to deny him my money and encourage others to do so, since he’s using wealth built on that money to insulate himself from the reality of health care in the United States today. A large majority of his customers are progressives. His position is 180 degrees opposed to the progressive position – that’s enough for me to stop giving him money.

I did however, during my research into this, found quite a few examples that this guys moral and ethical compass could use some readjustment. (See his shenanigans on Yahoo message boards to drive down competitor pricing for a good chuckle). That just added one more reason to boycott Whole Foods.

But, let’s take a step back and look at the article, and the underlying ideas.

Overall, it’s a sales piece. His closing point: “If you just bought healthy food – and I just happen to know the store to do it – you wouldn’t need health care”. Looking at the individual points, there are some decent suggestions hidden amongst a bunch of misinformation and bad ideas.

First, let’s talk about “deregulation is good” – the gist of his suggestions. This one is so laughable that I’m surprised anybody can still bring that up with a straight face. Let’s just take a look at recent history what deregulation has gotten us…

The current economic crisis? Check! The S&L banking scandal? Check! Californias power disaster? Check! The wonderful situation with our current cable/cell phone companies? Check! And the list continues.

But yes, deregulation works – for business profits, and in the short term. As the end user, you will be screwed, inevitably. (No? OK, so how much of the bailout money did you see? And how many of you get million-dollar-bonuses after having screwed up your job to an unbelievable magnitude? That’s what I thought. But you sure get to pay off the debt we incurred in the process.)

Furthermore, it doesn’t address the issue of pre-existing condition. Insurance companies will still be able to easily weed out anybody who’s a threat to the bottom line. Only a mandate to insure every applicant guarantees fairness. Insurance is about pooling risk. If you weed out high-risk groups to increase profits, you break the idea of pooling risk, ultimately creating a class of uninsurable people, and a class of people who overpay for medical services. Wait, we already have that…

On the flip side, we need a mandate that every citizen be insured simply to avoid the “smart” people who will go uninsured until they desperately need insurance – a lop-sided mandate would encourage that behavior.

And then of course, there’s the “The Constitution contains no Right To Healtcare” strawman. Of course it doesn’t – it’s a compass, not a map. You’ll notice that it also doesn’t talk about police an fire departments, public utilities, the FDA, USDA, and a host of other regulatory agencies that help ensure we’re not living in frontier land any more. And don’t have the corresponding low life expectancy.

And that is why the government needs to be involved in health care.

The fact that a search actually brings up relevant other entries from the blog is something that I like very much. If I’m searching, I appreciate any extra help I can get.

And since I want it for my blog, I spent some time trying to figure out how they did it. Since they are using WordPress, I am fairly certain that they are using the Landing Sites Plugin. That’s both good news, and bad.

The good news – not much extra work is required. The bad news – the guy who wrote landing sites seems to have withdrawn a bit from blogging, and the latest version has some issues with later WordPress versions. Circle Six has some info on work-arounds, and the WordPress plugin registry has some more.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong about the status, since I plan on using this fairly soon…

And just as a reminder to myself, there are also a few things I’d like to avoid in my version of this. The font size seems completely oversized – I’m on the article page, and all I see are related articles.

I also don’t think it’s a good idea to link back to the search engine you came from twice.

Still – props for inspiring me to tune up my response to Google searchers a bit.

And while searching, here’s a list of other plug-ins I found that might well be worth evaluating:

• C6 Old Post Alert – display if a post is old

• In-Series – allows managing series of posts

• Related Entries for your 404 page – show entries related to the term that got your visitor on the 404 page

Besides the fact that it has a name that sound like it’s right from the brains of Robert Scoble and Dave Winer, it’s a wonderful solution for this problem – it backs up data from all your various web sources to one central location. (OK, right now it backs up twitter, photobucket and flickr – but more is promised).

The only downside: That one location is on the web too. You can back up to your own S3 account, if you choose so, but “le web” it is. Which means that the data is still technically out of my control, and if I pick my own account, I get to pay the (not insignificant, for a non-business purpose) S3 fees.

As soon as somebody offers this with the option to go to a local disc, my problems are solved. (Yes, I could route to S3, back up from there, delete S3 data. I’d rather pay somebody to do that for me)

I just came back from cruise to Mexico with my in-laws, all relaxed. Petra’s Dad wanted to know about the news in Germany – and this is the picture that greets me. Hail? In July? With hail balls almost several inches in diameter?

And while it’s rare, it’s not an unheard-of occurrence. German summers do occasionally come with hail & rain. I think I’ll stick with sunshine…

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!