The 24th day of the Da Vinci Quest will be on Wednesday May 10, 2006. Those playing might want to mark off that day around 1pm EST so you can work through the final puzzle as quickly as possible. My suspicion is that the final puzzle will be difficult to really put players in a frenzy to be one of the first 10,000 to get their hands on the cryptex.

But that’s 10 days from now, in the meantime we’re back for another daily puzzle: the tumbleweeds, er restoration challenge. This is probably my least favorite challenge. Despite this being the third time I’ve solved this type puzzle, it is more clicking around to join them together. It worked the second time, but it wasn’t from any strategy or logic on my part. After arranging the tumbleweeds in the correct order (?) another translation challenge was waiting. I was able to Google that and move on.

How did you fare?

My son came up to me yesterday and said his friend told him we could listen to music from our computer on the Xbox 360. I replied that sure we could, if we had a Media Center, but we don’t. Then he said to check out Windows Media Connect and I remembered this post too:

Windows Media Connect lets you connect your Xbox 360 console to a PC running Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later—it doesn’t have to be a Windows Media Center-based PC.

Within minutes we downloaded and installed the application on the host XP computer which has a Napster subscription on it. I thought: wonder if I can access that new Dio Holy Diver Live album I downloaded through the Xbox 360?

Wow, very cool. So you can get a Napster monthly subscription, download your favorite tunes to the PC and then listen to all of them on your Xbox 360 while playing. And check out the uber cool visualizations by Yak (Jeff Minter) pictured at the top of this post and below. My lousy pictures just don’t do the pixel music justice.

More Da Vinci related controversy as Cinematical reports:

an enormous poster of the movie (featuring an image of the “Mona Lisa” and the movie title) warrant stern removal by the Interior Ministry itself in Rome.

It’s Saturday the 13th in the Da Vinci Quest and the third of four rounds of challenges begins with the symbol challenge. For whatever reason last week seemed harder to get through then this week’s. Will next week be a real stumper? After solving the puzzle, I was asked to do a translation for a single word.

Ironically, I used Babelfish to convert from French to English, not Google. You?

If this turns out to be what really happened, this is deplorable:

Instead, the lawsuit says, the dog was given a sedative to make it appear she was dead. The clinic then gave Annie to a new owner, Gene Rizzo of Northeast Philadelphia, who cared for the dog until he had her euthanized on November 2, according to the lawsuit.

So the family thinks their dog is being euthanized only to find out later the dog was given to another owner? First of all, why? Secondly, if there was financial gain on the part of the clinic — IE. they were getting paid for euthanization that they didn’t actually perform — they should be sued.

I’m not big on the whole let’s sue meme, but this seems so wrong. Pets are human beings to some people. Man’s best friend, all that. Fido’s owner’s bite is worse than his bark.

Speaking of lawsuits, a blogger from Maine is getting sued by an ad agency over criticisms lodged to the tourism biz office, including a juicy picture with a misprinted phone number that led to a phone sex (like that doesn’t happen pretty often with 800 numbers). This story has everything except a lobster. Shouldn’t any story about Maine have in it a crustacean with big claws?

Or as Booger said in Revenge of the Nerds: “WTF are robster craws?”

Scott Johnson got his claws into the ad company side of the story (thanks Scoble) but ultimately sides with the blogger. Scott points out that Google search results play into the concern of the website.

This reminds me of Uncle Ben’s words to Peter Parker in Spider-man: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Note to blogger readers: if what you post ends up being prominent on Google search results then work very hard to remain accurate and factual when reporting the account of events, especially where you aren’t a first party to those events. If you don’t know something is a fact, don’t say that it is so. If you are unsure, check multiple sources and if you make a mistake, then print a retraction post haste. That will help your credibility not only with readers, it might just keep you out of legal hot water.

Readers should note that I intentionally use “allegedly” and “if this is true” to couch some fang-filled criticisms just as in the vet story above. I would recommend others do the same. Unless you know what really happened — and how many bloggers do — be very careful about how you describe the facts. Furthermore, I’d write most commentary from a point of doubt rather than believe because a lot of what you see and read on the web is inaccurate and not the whole story anyway. Yes, I believe strongly in the First Amendment, but that doesn’t give anybody, myself included, the right to damage a business with statements made that are incorrect and untrue. And I’m not saying whether or not this Maine blogger said or did anything wrong — I don’t really care that much about the Maine tourism business enough to investigate further. As long as people like Mr. Johnson are willing to do so, this ad agency probably doesn’t have too much to worry about. What the courts will find, if it even gets that far, remains to be seen.

Still, I am curious how many others would really be impacted and dissuaded by following a link to a blogger’s rant about the tourism business just because it was a top result in Google? I certainly don’t take the word/opinion of just one source. Do you? I’d like to think most people can weigh the bulk of information rather than relying on a single source. If that’s the case then pretty much anything coming from a single source, no matter how influential in Google, shouldn’t be that damaging.

I guess this is our lesson of the day? Maybe there were some lobster claws in the story after all. Hopefully no wallets are pinched in this one on either side. I think some bloggers go too far but I’ll let readers judge for themselves if that’s the case here. At least on the latter part. On the vet side — again, if that story turns out to be true — absolutely, positively shameful.

The 5th Hmmcast crests the 10 minute mark but in the name of sharing (and shilling for) some more comments. Includes Hmm-worthy comments by regular readers and a Da Vinci book author who has been sued by the Da Vinci Code publisher Random House. This author claims he was plagiarized by Dan Brown and in the comments the author plagiarizes me (no, not really).

This also includes a screwed-up spoken cliche: “diamond in the rubble” — what’s that? Must be some Flinstones on the brain since we’ve been working our way through the first season DVD. Done in a single take.

Most Hmm-worthy posts from April 22 - April 28, 2006
- Dude, where’s my comments? (6) [apr 22]
- Day 7 of 24 Da Vinci Quest: symbol take five grid (3) [apr 23]
- Scoble says he’ll quit on the spot if Mini is fired (0) [apr 24]
- MySpace not so good enough for ad space? (1) [apr 24]
- Another sex is good for you two times a week study (14) [apr 24]
- The change country trick to try out Yahoo Mail beta (1) [apr 25]
- *Comprehensive IE7 beta 2 review [12 screenshots] (7) [apr 25]
- Day 10 of 24 Da Vinci Quest: it’s video time again (16) [apr 26]
- Make 3D models free for personal use with Google SketchUp (1) [apr 27]
- Wikiargument over Hacking Netflix being link-worthy and professional enough on Netflix page (4) [apr 27]

This week historical news events
- Microsoft buys videogame ad company Massive for $200-400 million, third quarter
- Judge uses Da Vinci Code in his ruling, and it’s cracked
- BlogExplosion sells for more than $100,000
- Nintendo names next gen console, codename Revolution, actual name: Wii

Technology used for Hmmcast
Podfeed plugin for Wordpress, Radio Shack 4-channel mixer, Sound Blaster Live 5.1, ACID Music 2.0, MP3Tag, Photoshop (for the cover art), SecureFX (FTP podcast), Libsyn podcast hosting, WinAmp.

Comments by
Author Lewis Perdue, student Andrew Ferguson, software developer Sterling Camden

How to subscribe to Hmmcast
RSS Feed - just copy/paste this to your favorite podcast client
iTunes - Hmmcast is now available and listed in iTunes, just search for “hmmcast” or “TDavid” in the iTunes podcast menu.

If you don’t see the download/play mp3 menu below just click on over to the website. Thank you for listening and reading.

Duration: 11:41

Day 12 in the Da Vinci Quest appears to be easy by having us arrange one of the scrambled Google Maps via the Geography Challenge, followed by a somewhat uninspired question but then comes the kicker: finding the hidden cross buried in the map.

Clever. Future versions with this hide and go seek twist could prove to be some of the more difficult puzzles in the overall quest. This is also the most time consuming to block out so it’s spoiler-free. As you can see, I got this one done finally, but I stumbled a bit. And on my busiest day of the week, too.

We’re halfway done, ready for things to get harder?

We’re in the process of moving our offline business — joy, joy — with the actual physical moving taking place this weekend. One of the “executive decisions” the office manager made was dumping DSL for cable. Comcast has been outstanding for us in our online business and residential service so I thought this was a good move. Comcast came out to the new office yesterday and apparently there was some problem with the physical location that the Comcast rep said they couldn’t do it. I thought they would jump through rings of fire to get people hooked up? Especially businesses, no?

Of these subscribers, about 34 percent came from competitors selling DSL (digital subscriber line) service, compared with about 23 percent of customers a year ago…

We’re not the only people trying to rid ourselves of the local telephone company. For a very brief time we were going to go down to them just forwarding our existing telephone number to our Vonage VoIP lines but when Comcast couldn’t come through at our physical location then we were back to the local telco. You know how much they wanted to charge just to forward our existing main phone number to our VoIP lines? $18 + $4 tax. 22 bones for a computerized redirect. What a scam. Oh, and it took them three business days to do this. Three business days?

And yet we are at their mercy. Still. We were almost rid of them. I still can’t get over why it costs $22 for a forward, nevermind why it takes three business days to change. That’s a great example of customer noservice. And what about the $4 tax? WTF?

I’ve been thinking about this ads inside games thing for awhile. The business side of me is in conflict with the recreational side. The business side says, yeah, do it while the recreation side says: please don’t.

Not sure about you folks, but when I sit down to relax, to unwind, to play some games for recreation the last thing I’m looking to do is view advertisements. Fine if they want to put them in the outside areas of the Xbox Live Microsoft but be very, very careful about putting ads inside the games we’re playing.

For example, if I’m playing a classic coin-up like Robotron 2084 where the screen is a blur of aliens and frantic firepower, ads will never be anything but a major distraction there. Of course there are no plans to put advertising into games like that, but there are plans to put them elsewhere. And as long as it generates revenue it isn’t completely off the table in business.

Microsoft has purchased an in-game advertising company called Massive for an estimated $200-400 million:

Video game publishers, who are struggling with rising game development costs, hope that in-game advertising will come to represent a meaningful source of revenue.

Microsoft, which already runs a large advertising business around its MSN Internet unit, has won over gamers with its Xbox Live service that connects gamers to the Web through its Xbox and newer Xbox 360 consoles.

I’m sorry Mr. Game Developement Company if you spent a minimum of $10 million making some super cool graphic eyefest that doesn’t sell to expectations and now feel the need to subsidize through some sort of ad network. We buy into the idea of playing a game, not becoming some ad demographic.

Here’s a better idea: make fun games. We’ll buy those. In large quantity even. Ever since this obsession with making the most fantastic looking games rolled in all it’s done is made the cost of making games more expensive. I’m having more fun on the Xbox 360 (when I actually get a chance to play that is) playing the games in the Xbox Live Arcade. Games like Robotron that I’ve already bought a handful of times on other consoles before.

Of course I’m an old fart demographically speaking. They don’t want to advertise to us older thirty somethings. They want to advertise to that hot young market that doesn’t watch as much TV any longer. Too bad, my money spends just as good.

Ok, maybe not all advertising in games is bad
I could see a racing game with billboards with real, clickable ads being not too distracting. Guess it just depends on the game. The problem I have with the ads in games concept is that once advertising creeps into more and more games, it will carelessly be inserted into all games and then players become ad prey while they are in recreation mode. If that becomes the case and I can’t do anything as a gamer about it, then I at least want a piece of the action. That’s right, share with me for my time spent in games viewing ads you are making money displaying to our family. Pay me for looking at your ads while we’re playing some driving game that we already dropped $60 to own.

Better yet, just keep ads out of the games, altogether. We aren’t there to shop, we’re there to play. What do you think? What’s next, clickable ads in Windows solitaire?

This page debating the merits of whether Hacking Netflix should be listed or not in the links section of Wikipedia is a great example of why I don’t spend more time at that site. Thanks Dave.

There are editors within Wikipedia that will fight over really small details like this. It’s a link and Hacking Netflix is clearly one of the best Netflix-related sources out there so why shouldn’t it be linked on the Wikipedia page for Netflix? It’s unfortunate that the Hacking Netflix author got involved and tried to add his own link back. He should have stayed out of there and let them debate whether he was an amateur or not until they all turned blue. Maybe the Wikitruth will link Hacking Netflix?

For the record, I don’t think I’m an amateur here. I’ve been writing for years and long before this blog. I’ve been paid to write and continue to be paid to write here every day. Do I write a lot from the first person and provide detailed first person accounts and reviews? Yes.

I could write more from the third person and polish the posts more but you know what? I like them raw, visceral and in the first person. That’s a great part of what attracts me to the blogging format and that I don’t have to spend extra time polishing these posts is part of the reason I continue to share on a daily basis.

If I had to spend hours editing and polishing then I’d want — no, I’d need – to be paid more for my time. Not sure there would be a market for this extra time on the reader/subscriber side, so Hmm readers get almost verbatim what churns out of my head, mostly raw and unchanged. This might be amateurish activity, but that doesn’t make this an ‘amateur’ blog. Or maybe it does in the Wiki Gods eyes. Let them play power games with their precious web encyclopedia. I have no desire to argue with somebody who might not even be wearing pants.

It’s this kind of anal-retentive activity that will bring the Wikipedia glass towers crashing down. I realize this is a drum beaten here before (last time here), but I see evidence like this almost every time Wikipedia is mentioned and it really damages the desirability of using the site beyond a sometimes quick reference.

None of this suggests that the Wikipedia doesn’t have value in other areas, of course, but counterproductive arguments, declarations and dismissals of sources because they aren’t “professional” enough continues to make Wikipedia something less than comprehensive and attractive to this professional. Or amateur. Hack. Whichever readers prefer.

One of the industrious Tablet PC Heiny’s, Loren, is such a tease. He shares a screenshot of him inking with his Tablet PC inside Firefox without using ActiveX:

How was this done? The solution employed here uses a special Firefox plugin that provides inking capabilities. The nice part about this solution is that no ActiveX is required and the inking surface comes up quickly. The downside is that the user is going to need to install the ink plugin. Actually, this isn’t a bad deal.

Not a bad deal at all. When is this stuff coming out for the rest of us? Loren thinks it will take him another couple weeks and because it’s a “side project.” The cost? His plans are to make it freely available.