Google: Wave, an early version of a collaboration and communication tool, was recently announced and released to developers. It consolidates email, instant messaging, blogging, wikis, multimedia, and document sharing, into one interactive application. By presenting Google: Wave to the community now, Google has committed the project to open-source development in hopes of inspiring IT professionals everywhere to find revolutionary new ways to apply their own applications to Wave, before the product’s launch later this year.

“We’re banking on Wave having a very large impact, but a lot of it depends on our ability to explain this to users. That’s part of the reason why we’re putting this out early to developers,” said Lars Rasmussen, Wave project co-founder. “Now is a good time for developers to start picking up the APIs, building cool applications and extensions, so when we do launch later this year our users and their users can enjoy all these things together.”

In their eighty minute presentation at Google’s annual I/O conference co-founders Lars and Jens Rasmussen, of Google: Maps acclaim, demonstrated a number of of already functional applications. This included multiple Wave Clients, Photo Sharing, multi-user live-interaction, contextual spell check, live language-translation, and API’s interacting with applications outside the demonstration hall.  With just minimal interaction, Wave easily co-opted its operation with data mining, Google: Maps, an unspecified blog client, and Twitter.

Wave is built on Google Web Toolkit using HTML 5, and is designed to let developers extend its functionality and integrate it with other Web services. By design, Wave lets people create a document using a client no more advanced than a Web-Browser, where multiple users can add and edit rich text, multimedia, gadget applications and feeds concurrently.

See for yourself at:

http://wave.google.com/

Google is kicking strong with the announcement of their privately sponsored version of Skynet CADIE.  Microsoft, or multiple entities including “Enigma software”, seems to have generated some concern over  the conflicker virus/worm.  The Bread Art Project is something I’ve never heard of before, yet is being rather conspicuously advertised in a few key places.

I can go on further at a number of interesting things that are popping up on the web as server-times clock over to 4/1, but verfifying them all is just so much work!

So pop into the forums and share your favorites (or at least most suspicious) and I look forward to seeing what we all can find.

For now, Happy April Fools Day!

The Winston-Salem Nimrod Chapter had the pleasure of heading over to Raleigh on Valentine’s Day for a meet-and-greet with Troyski. We decided that the best way to deliver Troy’s GameStop gift card – his prize for winning our Super Bowl pool – would be to hand it to him in person! Horribly shocking, yet utterly refreshing.

Troy suggested we meet at a place called Rush Hour Karting just south of Raleigh, not too far from his home. Us Winston Folk hadn’t driven Go Karts in a great long time. Funk, D Eye, Aezuriel, and ParadoX piled in the back of my truck for the ride down I-40, all the way to a quaint, fairly nondescript warehouse-looking building. Troyski brought along two of his brothers making for eight in our group; which was perfect for a Sprint Series. The Sprint allowed for a warm-up and qualifier, followed by a 10 minute race. We went through a brief orientation (Safety First, D Eye…) before helmet selection. They gave all of us “head socks” to wear with the communal helmet, and required that we all wear neck braces. Aezuriel topped out the XXXL, but had to make do as XXXXL helmets are a special order kind of thing.

We were seated in the following karts:

One of the cool things I really favored is that they kept us in the same whips from qualifying to our race. We really didn’t have any komplaints complaints about the rides, except one minor nibble from D Eye, which we’ll discuss in a few… Oh, and the Dumba** listings above are Troyski’s brothers Tim and Chris.

For these races, the only thing that matters is time. Rush Hour uses your single-best lap time to determine placement. Our qualifying fell out like this:

Troyski really was hard to catch! Funk was riding his rear almost the entire qualifier, until I T-Boned him on the rib crack* corner. We were both on a hot lap, so that little mishap really dragged us down. Also, I can’t write this post without pointing out the irony of D Eye besting ParadoX. For non-Nimrods, y’all needn’t read too far into it. For Nimrods, though, I expect y’all are rolling on the floor right about now.

The Sprint Race results a a wee harder to decipher, so we’ll be posting the final results as soon as they’ve been clarified.

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Dear Fellow Nimrods:

If you peer closely enough at the image above, you’ll see that our site traffic is up 27,600%. Frankly, that’s awesome. Keep up the good work.

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Mike Shaw Retrospective

1/13/08

The following comes from guest-blogger, Old East Cross:

Ypsi’s last Shaw at Café Luwak

Café Luwak has on display, through the end of January, a collection of artifacts as significant to the subtext of the city’s history as anything you’ll find in the Historical Museum: the art and personal effects of Mike Shaw, the last Shaw in Ypsilanti.

Mike’s ancestors reached Ypsilanti in 1823, the same year the city was founded. They owned the land many our homes rest on, and Mike’s great-grandfather, a mason, laid the stone foundations for many of our homes.

Mike died this past August in his final Ypsi apartment, reportedly of heart-failure, and someone anonymous to me, rescued a portion of his art and belongings from the curb as his apartment was being cleared for the next tenant. What was salvaged is now on display at Café Luwak and includes Mike’s art, hand-stitched coat and journal.

There’s no sugarcoating that Mike was not always an easy person. Mike served as a Huey helicopter gunny chief in Vietnam in from 1964-70. Ninety percent of combat casualties airlifted out battle were carried in Hueys. As Mike relayed to me once, “Sweeping their shit out of my Huey…ya, I’m a big hero now.” That’s how Mike summed up his contribution to the war, sweeping out the dead. Reports conflicted that the Vietcong bullet that sent Mike home was still lodged in his head. Figuratively, anyway, it was.

Mike wore his memories everyday — an oily green army hat snagged with various pins and parachutes, army boots, fatigues. Somedays he’d belt on a six inch bowie knife, its handle, like Mike’s rings, was plastered with approximations of semiprecious stones and colored glass that he stuck on with epoxy. One item never absent from Mike’s uniform was a hand sewn pouch, draped over his shoulder and resting at his belt line full of peanuts habitually tossed at squirrels.

In what always seemed to me to be an act of penance, Mike became Ypsi’s protector of trees and squirrels. He was convinced both were under attack. He took note of cars and kept track in his journal. Putting an end to the violence was his obsession. “This shit has been going on since July,” Mike explained to me once. “It’s not so much the squirrels as it is the presence of death day after day. No one is safe. You also should take measures about nightcreepers, they begin at sundown and only stop when caught or run out of victims.”

Mike came after me with a bat once because a squirrel had disappeared and he thought I must have snatched it, since he hadn’t seen any cats. (He’d threatened a previous neighbor with an axe for trimming low-hanging branches, i.e., squirrel escape routes.) The next day he delivered a large bag of his limited coffee rations to me with an apology note. Mike’s fluctuation between kindness and conflict was constant. He was a violent pacifist; an intelligent, introspective, paranoid; meekly overbearing with a winking wit; and a hermit socialite. Groundhogs ate out of his hand and he trained his dog to bite. He was the type person you could never anticipate, but always, ultimately, trust. He knew many in town and dropped in for long conversations that he would decide when would begin and end. He also spent days-on-end alone in his apartment. He was eventually evicted from the Kircher-owned property after the city condemned it, a year after Kircher had turned off the heat and electric on him in Jan/February (for “repairs”) even though Mike paid the utility bills.

After the property was condemned for neglect, Mike spent a few winter weeks homeless in Ypsi, living in a neighbor’s garage, the Harmony Hotel, and finally, the woods. He ended up in Sumpter Twp for a time before finding his way back to Ypsi a year or so before his death. “Damn it, I used to like it here,” he told me once. Mike always served as a reminder to me to ask who we’re creating a new Ypsi for. As the town slowly gentrified around him, Mike found fewer and fewer places to call home among the homes his ancestors laid the foundations of. As we relative newcomers sweep into town, I think it’s worth considering the history we’re displacing. Maybe with Mike’s passing the last trace of living history is gone. I suspect it’s not. Mike was a caution, for me, to not casually sweep out the dead and call ourselves heroes for a fresh coat of paint. As Mike said, “They say they want to renovate the park. How do you renovate a park? Cut down the old trees and plant new ones?” I’m glad Mike persevered to find his last breath in the same place he’d taken his first. Few of us will be that lucky.

I’m also personally grateful to whoever rescued some of his artwork and to Café Luwak for displaying it. Mike was proud of his art, although, often apologetic for there being say, too much green or orange, which happened frequently when he’d run dry of all other colors and was forced to make do with what was left until an art student donated more. He spent most of his time, as he would say, “Doing whatever it is I do,” which, other than maintaining a census of neighborhood squirrels, was gluing, painting, and creating with old paint, rocks, cement, and epoxy.

Whether or not you knew Mike, I’d encourage you to stop by Luwak and pay your respects. It’s a fitting memorial for Mike. I’m not being haphazard or patronizing when I say I think he’d be proud to have his art displayed. And, it’s the final page of what may be the last family story as old as our town.

Again, to whoever collected the display, thank you. And to Mike, rest and peace.

And thank you, Old East Cross. This is a beautiful post.

[If someone doesn’t already have plans for these pieces, please let me know. I would hate to see them lost. It might be a long shot, but I’m thinking that maybe the American Visionary Art Museum or the Museum of American Folk Art would be interested in them. I’d be happy to make a couple of calls and see.]

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While the story wasn’t focused at gamer-centric content, it was provocative enough to dig deep into my childhood memories… I began to remember the good ‘ol days of GamePro and Nintendo Power, and then began to wonder whatever happened to them?

Come to think of it, I have been digesting my content – gamer or otherwise – online for a very, very long time. So I ask you, dear Nimrods, how long has it been since you’ve subscribed to a gaming magazine? Not the the free giveaway kind but an actual, intentional paid subscription? If you still subscribe then what benefit does print hold that maintains superiority over comparable web content?

[Read arstechnica]

[Image courtesy of Joystiq]

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Long story short, we’re getting some pretty cool new functionality. I won’t go so far as to implement all of it yet because I need some user input. One thing I can do though is make our front page better by making it more useful.

Our front page is for all. One thing I haven’t seemed to express very well is that our site is a sounding board for all of our members. We want the front page to remain gamer-oriented (to help prevent confusion) but we would like for everyone to contribute when time permits. The new install will better empower you to write for us!

If you haven’t read along the bottom of the page, we’re using WordPress. This stuff is rock solid blogging software with an incredible support system and web interface. In addition to the slick built-in editing tools, there are several other really cool programs to help people post stories. I’m using Microsoft’s Live Writer to create this post. It’s really simple software which automates formatting and entry for everything from text to embedded media. It also adds nice, subtle touches like the drop shadow underneath the picture at the head of this post.

Better still is the potential for a new forum. This is the stuff I don’t want to implement just yet because of the hassle of migration (or lack thereof). The benefits would be an embedded view; that is, the forums would fall inline about where this post is. Smileys, private messaging… All the goodies are intact. The drawbacks (aside from user and post migration) would be the learning curve (everyone would have to figure out where things are…) and larger formatting than we currently use. This site layout is optimized for a minimum resolution of 1280×1024. I need to know if this is a serious problem for any of you.

The other reason for the upgrade is to try and accommodate you, the end user. I’m not quite sure how far we can or want to go, but some among us feel like our site would be better if our users have “personal” space a la myspace or facebook.  I’m not convinced that this new setup is fully capable of such a goal, nor am I convinced that “personal” spaces is what Team Nimrod is about.

So far as I’m concerned, we’re about gaming. We’re about a high quality online gaming experience so as to make the most of our precious time. More and more Nimrod children are being added to the ranks, so I also ponder our direction towards a family friendly environment. Not that we aren’t family-oriented, but perhaps it should be a focus. Perhaps not. Y’all tell me.

Ultimately, this site is about you. What you want and how you want it.

In the meantime, please use the link in the right-hand navigation to reach our existing forums.

Lastly, on behalf of the Winston-Salem Nimrods, I wish everyone a Merry Christmas. May you all have many blessings this year.

Prime