The Seattle Times has an article up about the Penny Arcade Expo.

It’s the sort of thing I’d love to go to, but I just can’t. It’s luck of the draw — I don’t live in Seattle.

Anyhow, it’s incredible to me that some webcomics generate enough income for it to be the main occupation of its creators. I guess I picture a small part of the internet as e-commerce sites, and all the rest ‘display’ sites like this one where corporations or individuals simply foot the hosting and content development costs to create an online presence.

Penny Arcade is not a commercial site, but because they’re so popular, they have opportunities to make money outside of the site. Enough, according to the article, for the two of them to live on.

Mike

I saw a number of forum goons dismissing ilovebees as simply another low-budget marketing scheme not unlike the DataDyne site that was set up to hype Perfect Dark.

But it’s not just some marketing scheme. Well, yes it is, but it’s brilliant. Why spend a mountain of cash on a primetime TV commercial when you can set up an elaborate pre-game who’s immense plot actually ties in with that of Halo 2?

Did the Covenant find Earth by way of Dana’s website about bees? Was there a reason they were fascinated with those insects in particular? Why was there a countdown to August 24th on the main page for the last month, and on the links page, GPS locations for payphones that started ringing today at preset times? What about The Sleeping Princess, who’s taken over Dana’s Aunt’s email address? Do they tie in the with the Flood from Halo 1?

It’s so good.

The people who were there to answer the phones had to know what to say — if they did, they got an additional clue. And back online, they started putting them together to work out the next phase of the puzzle.

Like Alex said, it comes out right around commencement… maybe we should have an all-night Halo2 party. For old time’s sake.

Mike

I mentioned Gmail a while back, and have there ever been privacy concerns about that… jeez. There’s a whole slew of somewhat alarmist pages out there attempting to scare folks away from this new service. Gmail-is-too-creepy.com alleges that Google may sell you email contents to the FBI. Well, in all honesty, I’d be disappointed if they did that, but at the same time, guys, it’s email. If it’s supposed to be private, print it out on a classy piece of paper and call a courier.

The funny thing is that there’s also a number of counter-sites out there that provide a second opinion on these issues. This is one aptly-named one.

One of the major issues that the anti-Google pages raise is the issue of how Google archives large portions of the Internet in the Google Cache. When my old wizardcode page went down for a few days, I was still able to get into about half the blogs through the Cache and save them. Blitz ended up recovering the DBs, but just the same, I felt a little better for being able to grab them like that. Now I could understand someone being frustrated that something they intentionally took offline could still be viewed that way, but it was their choice to not place norobots and noarchive in the header of their document. And always be careful before you put anything online. I guess that’s the moral of the story.

Mike

I didn’t want to post this until Errol did, but now he has.

God bless you, crazy kid…

Mike

I’d seen the site briefly before, but not taken a really serious look until today when Penny Arcade linked to it. The ilovebees.com page.

Bungie, the people who make the game Halo, put up the name ilovebees.com for a split second at the end of the Halo 2 trailer that was shown in movie theatres the past few months. It’s now available online.

It initially looks like a fairly basic ‘hack look’, but a quick peek around IGN and Gamespot reveals that the ilovebees hoax is actually very well thought-out and incredibly imaginative.

The major theory about the thing seems to be that the Covenant, the villains of the original Halo, found Earth by means of an innocent honey website: ilovebees.com. So it’s full of their footprints and classified communications just waiting to be decrypted by us industrious earthlings.

Halo 2 will be great… you can always tell when the developer focuses this much on the plot. And besides — it’s Bungie.

Mike

“A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. — C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

It’s one of those books that I’ve read before because my dad owns it, but I need to have my own copy for browsing and loaning.

The fact is that whatever’s out there in the supernatural is completely beyond our human ability to comprehend, and we’ll only truly understand it in the moment that we die.

But Lewis did some pretty careful thinking about the issues, and he’s presents a believable vision of Heaven and Hell that answers a lot of questions… How can a loving God send people to Hell?

So anyways, I saw Collateral today. By all indications, it should have been fantastic. Artistically, it was great. Cruise lays on the Fight-Club criminal cool, and guns blaze.

But maybe I missed something — it just seemed a little unresolved. Sure, ‘Vincent’ is probably a much more realistic representation of a hit-man than Martin Blank ever was, but I prefer the redemption and closure of Grosse Pointe Blanke. For all its message about the value of human life, ‘Collateral’ sure leaves an awful lot of innocents dead in its course.

Mike

Just out of curiousity, I did a whois on 419eater.com to see if it turned up any ‘real’ details about ‘Shiver Metimbers’. Wouldn’t that ever be scary? You think you’re anonymous on the web baiting dangerous foreign gangs, and suddenly they show up at your suburban house with an Uzi. Brrr…

No, yeah, he’s anonymous.

It didn’t really occur to me at the time I registered this domain to do it anonymously… I guess I could have, but the option didn’t obviously present itself. Besides, whenever you see one of those articles about suspicious sites (MAVAV comes to mind), often the first thing the investigator does is run a whois and find out who owns the domain.

At any rate, it’s not something I have the time or energy to take part in at the moment… and besides, you need to be well-off enough that the scammers think you’re worth scamming. But in terms of actually shutting these guys down, making it out to be a fun-filled internet ‘blood-sport’ is going to do far more than any kind of law enforcement.

After all, they send out zillions of these emails all the time — and if the majority are being answered by scambaiters, well that’s pretty tough for them to keep at it.

Mike

So now I’ll really know how much of the traffic here actually just unregistered searchbots.

There’s some critical features missing — like it should show on this page how many comments are recieved, but I dunno how to include that in one big query. I think it’s just so obviously easy that they forgot to include it in the mySQL manual. At any rate, the thing works… so now if you want to shout out, you can do it.

Today I switched my bank account from ‘child’ to ’student’… University looms closer with every day.

Mike

Feeling excited about solving an interesting programming problem sounds incredibly nerdy, but it’s kind of like how you feel the first time you ever beat a videogame boss.

It is always exciting to get something working.

I knew I’d have to learn a ton about SQL queries and PHP to get this recipe thing happening, but I didn’t realise I’d have to learn some JavaScript as well. I’d always assumed that JS was pretty well only useful for rollovers (now supplanted by CSS) and archaic form submission.

Well, check this out. The boxes are all populated from arrays declared at the beginning of the code… but here’s the awesome part: Those arrays are all crunched out by PHP using the results of a query on three tables. It’s like a bizarre union between a server-side language and a client-side one. [ed: this is actually a much more common tactic than I'd first realised -- but NO ONE has tutorials on it.]

Anyhow, once the whole thing’s working, I’ll be conscripting some of you people to submit yummy things to it.

Learning feels great — because it’s never really lost time. You can build something that someone else will take apart, but you can’t really unlearn anything.

Mike