My training continues for the Blogathon 2003. Staying up to 2am now without too much trouble, and yesterday was up until 5am, so I am almost ready.

I am still looking for your support and you still have time to get your pledges in for me to support Adult Sites Against Child Pornography. You can donate as little as $1, if you want, so break open those piggy banks. Now what am I planning on doing?

Webcam - a live webcam will be running so that you can watch me typing, blogging, playing videogames, surfing, eating (Tabasco!), playing guitar, coding away and more!

Radio show - at 4am PST / 7pm EST Sunday July 27, 2003 you can tune into Script School Radio live and catch me broadcasting the final 2 hours of Blogathon 2003. Peter from crushing krisis is planning on calling in and sharing an original song of his.

So what all will I be blogging about during these 24 hours? Stay tuned.

(source: Mediapost) My current personal favorite internet Radio @ AOL was ranked as the number one Internet Broadcast Network with 21,679,740 hours of Total Time Spent Listening (TTSL) for the month of June. What do I like about Radio @ AOL?

1) broadband sound is great,
2) commercial free (only station IDs so far, but I bet this changes) 
3) plenty of different music “stations” within the network 
4) follows the KISS principle that AOL is so great for: Keep It Simple Stupid. LIVE 365 has the diversity as far as stations go, but AOL is doing things right so far.

If you are like most people, you are using windows passwords that are alphanumeric. Some people, god help them, just use words with no numbers. According to this story cracking your Windows password if you use alphanumeric passwords is still more possible than not. To tighten the security add symbols to your passwords like ‘$’.

Just listened to an interview today from Sylvester Stallone on the Jim Rome Show and he had a number of interesting things to say:

- Rocky 6 is written and ready for production: it is about fighters having a “puncher’s chance”. He said one of the producers was having some hangups with it (he didn’t elaborate) but otherwise it is going forward. Fans of Rocky sequels will rejoice. Stallone admitted he was disappointed with Rocky 5 and how he made Rocky too mortal. I suspect this movie, if it ever comes out, to be a cross between Rocky 3 and 4 and to sell much like Rocky 5. Time to hang up the gloves on this franchise, Sly.

- His kids wanted him to do Spy Kids 3D and he is the bad guy in it. I am looking forward to this movie, actually, and we have plans to go see it. I like 3D movies and hope that this isn’t a dud and will help to spur on more 3D development. [update 7/4/04: reviewed Aug 3, 2003]

“Phishing” doesn’t involve boats and water, but it does involves hooks and consumers. It is the term that applies to the various email cons to get legitimate users of a service to visit a bogus site and give out their sensitive personal/account information like: usernames, passwords, credit cards, addresses, social security numbers. Here’s a common sense solution: don’t trust any email correspondence asking for your information. Go to the website that the email supposedly came from and file a complaint and then as this article says, forward the email with headers to the FTC.

(story: AOL launches teen Visa card) Is it just me, or do I find the whole idea of teens with Visa cards utterly disturbing? At one time this was the only way adult sites could make sure that people signing up for their sites were adults but awhile ago this became no longer an option when credit card companies decided that minors with plastic was going to be ok. Credit cards aren’t IDs, I understand that concept, but without any other ways to check ages for adult-oriented content, this whole Visa thing concerns me. Why should I give my children a Visa with X dollars on it when I can visit the site they want to take part in and just pay for it. Parents should be involved in what their kids are doing and that very much includes online purchases and acceptable sites to surf. This kids with plastic thing falls in with kids having cell phones, and I haven’t really understood that either. Hmm.

(story: Web Music Leaks Spur Studio Clampdown) Credit more hysteria and lost $$ to the fear of P2P piracy, but this time it’s hatched in the recording studio during production of the material. I’m not advocating to let these artists be ripped off, but from reading this article it sounds like with every take that these headline artists feel that they need to have an armed sentry monitoring the mixing board. Safes in walls? Huh?

Here’s a better idea artists: make you fans part of the recording process. Sell web memberships on your site to access outtakes from studio recordings. Start a blog or two, or heck every band member start a blog, to journal what’s happening with the upcoming CD!

Fans are well, fans, so give them what they want on your artist websites. The Van Halen website is one where years fans have been wondering what the deal is. Why secret all this recording stuff away in some vault for some rainy day where posthumously it can come out … like all the “new” Beatles stuff that keeps making it’s way out? Sure, they can still keep some of what they are doing under lock and key for future sales, but make money during the process — make the web work for them! Embrace the web, instead of guard against it. Why oh why don’t more artists at least try this? Hmm …

On a positive note, buymusic has just been released touting some 300,000+ songs to download, with many full albums. Prices range from 79cents per song and $7.99 for a full album and up. It’s 128k. I did some searching and unlike rival EMusic, buymusic has a lot of current and older music. They’ve got Black Sabbath

This MSN story: Digging for Googleholes should be titled Digging for Articleholes. It would seem that the author didn’t spend any real time searching or using the many advanced search functions. Something netizens learn about search engines right away is that the more specific you are with queries, the better the results will be. One word searches, in my experience, don’t usually turn up what is expected. You?

Thanks to Dave Winer, who linked to Michael Gartenberg’s weblog I have just learned that AOL’s weblogs are now LIVE! Yesterday, I was saying I had just checked out AOL 9.0 Optimized beta. You can create one too, but you must be an AOL member (a good sticky feature for AOL so that members never leave and thus, lose their weblog, I guess). I set up my AOL Journal (blog) in about 2 minutes and here is the URL to the blog (you know you want to bookmark it! LOL): http://journals.aol.com/tdphpscripts/Technologyontheweb/

It adds a bot to your IM list (see #1) so you can just type a normal IM to the AOL Journal bot (see #2) and it will create a new blog entry (see #3). Slick!

How about adding images? Didn’t figure that out on a quick view yet. Also, I’m not sure why it added the words “feeling” and “hearing” to my blog entry. Maybe the AOL Journal bot has issues Hmm

Update: There doesn’t appear to be a way to add pictures through IM to the AOL Journal bot (yet), but when you use the Add Entry link (doh! see above) then it is pretty obvious how to add pictures. The feeling is your mood at the time of the entry and you can choose that from the dropdown menu, and you can also select what music you are listening to (for the hearing). You can also update through IM using the following codes:

Journal Commands
Change Journals: Type journal: followed by a journal name (e.g. journal:my first journal).
Add Subject to Entry: Type subject: followed by a journal entry subject (e.g. subject:blogs).
Add Music to Entry: Type music: followed by a description of what you’re listening to at the moment (e.g. music:springsteen).
Add Mood to Entry:Type mood: followed by a mood (e.g. mood:happy).
Quit Journal: Type quit to leave the journal you’re currently working on.

I love videogaming. It’s one of my true passions as far as hobbies go. I’ve bought pretty much every major videogame system that’s come out since the NES and several systems prior to that like Atari 2600, Atari 7800 (I played the 5200, but never bought it), Colecovision, etc. I was one of the sorry suckers who ponied up for the 3D0 (Trip Hawkins, you bastard!) when it came out and costed some $600 USD! Atari Jaguar? Been there, done that. And of course all those various “systems” that came out from Sega (Sega CD, 32-X, Dreamcast) before they gave up and just started making games for their competitors. So I think this amount of videogaming as a fan, customer, etc more than entitles me to call the developers out:

Stop making systems and games which are in love with technology! Please! I’m tired of games with a zillion shaded polygons that aren’t fun. Go back to the drawing board and dig up the brilliant minds that are trying to make games fun and addictive. Enough of these movie license games, where most of them just plain suck. Make videogames fun. I used to look forward to new games coming out and buying new games and I still have a subscription to EGM, but I can honestly say that 99% of the games that come out today I’ve already seen. What console video games are out that are worth playing over and over until your fingers hurt today? Grand Theft Auto Vice City sort of got me excited, but that’s the last notable game I can think of. Brute Force? C’mon. It’s no wonder there was a 9% drop in video games according to articles like this one, besides the fact that it is summer and just too darn hot to be inside playing games. Do you like videogames? Do you wish they were more fun? I do. Really. Hmm