Jay McGavren's Journal

Just try *this* with that pansy-ass PS2...

Gamespot.com reports:

When called to investigate a shooting last Friday night, police in Anne Arundel County, Maryland found an unlikely culprit–an Xbox. The Baltimore Sun reports that 34-year old Robert Preston Kersey had grown enraged by his roommates constantly playing their Xbox at high volume. According to the police report, Kersey emerged from his bedroom at 2 a.m. brandishing an automatic pistol. Rather than shoot his roommates, Kersey took aim at the offending Xbox and fired a single shot at the console. While the bullet’s impact disabled the Xbox, its thick plastic casing deflected the 9mm round, which ricocheted away harmlessly.

The tally of my e-mails sent so far today:

From work: 23 From home: 0

My life is starting to get seriously imbalanced, and I don’t know what I can do about it (other than pray for this promotion)…

I need a speel chekcer.

I think I’m losing my intellectual edge as I get older… The latest symptom is my spelling. I used to be able to write dozens of pages without a single goof, but the past couple weeks, I’ve caught myself swapping “they’re” for “their”, backspaced over mistyped words and then mistyped them again the exact same way, and worse. (And that’s just what I’ve caught.)

Spelling isn’t that big a deal, I guess. Just please, please don’t let my programming ability be next.

I’m at home for lunch, and I just had a guy deliver me a package… for an address on 58th street. I explained to him that I was on 56th, and the best he could muster in reply was “Oh. Okay.” As he took the package and turned around, I had to stifle a laugh at the “Dependable Delivery” logo on his shirt back.

Every time I receive affirmation that someone actually read an article I wrote, or used an image I made as wallpaper, it’s really gratifying. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve had a barrage of such affirmations (a friend wearing a t-shirt I designed, another listening to some music I recommended, and so on), but a month ago I wondered if anyone even cared about the stuff I wrote or produced.

We need more feedback from the world around us. Every Web page should have a counter built in so the author can tell whether people are reading what he wrote, and whether he should write more of the same. Peer to peer programs like BitTorrent should have a facility for reporting total number of downloads back to the original author of a file (not just to the person seeding). Those of us who aren’t paid to produce content do it for the positive comments we get, but we shouldn’t have to post e-mail links begging for feedback. People don’t have time to write a comment on every artistic work they like; why can’t our machines provide at least some of the feedback for us?