Got to try out the XBox video game Rock Band. It’s a pretty over-the-top sequel to the Guitar Hero games, with the inclusion of a microphone for singing and a drum set. So now you can form a virtual garage band with your friends using the standard rock band combo of drums, guitar, bass, and vocalist.

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Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot by Julian Dibbell documents a fantasy built on a fantasy: one man’s quest to earn more money in the online MMORPG Ultima Online in a year than he does as a writer for Wired magazine. Along the way we gain insight into the nature of addiction and the increasingly blurry line between work and play.

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I just finished the “hard” level with 6280 points and two health to spare. Actually I got a lot of help from a coworker that was using this basic map that fills up the top left corner, and alternates squirt towers with the plus towers. I pretty much stick with that and put some anti-air ones in the middle. The dart tower and the line going up the right side came about when I got desperate on the final levels.

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Argh. Over the past few days I officially wasted about eight hours playing this inanely addicting Flash video game: Desktop Tower Defense.

It’s pretty basic: you build a maze with turrets of varying ability. Bad guys stream in from the gates above and to the left. They try to escape through the bottom or the right. You can’t move your turrets around; they just fire at the bad guys automatically. The strategy comes in how you build the maze, the turret types, and how strong you make your turrets through upgrading.

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Alright. I’m offloading all the technology stuff into a “Tech Notes” moniker because there’s just too much stuff going on and I can’t flesh everything out into a full post.

Google Gears

Holy frak. I was excited about Adobe’s Apollo and Microsoft’s Silverlight but here we go: Google is starting to make their web applications workable on the desktop, without an Internet connection. The simplest way to demonstrate how this can be practical is through the most obvious, useful example: Google Reader can now be used offline.

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Oh yeah… StarCraft was one of my favorite computer games ever, and Blizzard is going to take another stab at it. This should rock. Zerg, Protoss, carriers, the whole nine yards. Here’s a post with some juicy screen shots of the alien on alien action.

There are also some videos of the gameplay, which I’m trying to download, but I think the servers are kinda slow.

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I gave up on Second Life a while back. I haven’t logged in since, and even stopped writing about it on this blog. But two recent developments spur me to mention it again.

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Why? So I can vote in this Nintendo Wii poll, that says dogs are more popular than cats. The travesty!

All kidding aside, it’s still on my short list as the next console I get. I’m still enjoying the PS2 but the price of the Wii and the games I’ve played around with make it extremely appealing.

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The news that Yahoo! is creating mini-sites or mini-portals is worth commenting a bit on. Here’s their site for the Wii. Basically one complaint I’ve had about Yahoo! is that although I use Yahoo! Finance daily, have a Yahoo! SBC account, and occasionaly use del.icio.us and flickr, I don’t do much cross-property browsing.

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I decided about a week ago I’m through with Second Life. At least until the promise lives up to the hype, which I figure will take several years. My final intention is to get in there and blow what few Linden Dollars I have ($200), or give it to some cute red haired furry avatar who could make far better use of it than I.

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