Wil Wheaton's keynote at Penny Arcade Expo [mp3]

I bookmarked this over a year ago, but I listened to it again today in full. I checked back through my stuff and realized that I've never linked to it anywhere. It's worth mentioning for all kinds of reasons, mostly for the video game nostalgia trip that you will have if you are over the age of 30. Most geeks our age will recognize the name of Wil Wheaton from his role as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation as well as Gordie Lachance in the film Stand By Me (a.k.a.the best Stephen King movie ever!) as well as many other great roles. If you haven't seen him recently, he is still working and is active in the online community of bloggers and video gamers.

In 2007, he gave the keynote speech at the Penny Arcade Expo, a hugely successful fan-driven, industry-sponsored festival for tabletop, videogame, and PC gamers. He tells a series of biographical stories starting in his early youth and moving to his role as a parent. Honestly, it's the most topical speech on video games and what they mean to us today. If you have not already heard it, you must hear it now. Give yourself an hour and then hit play.

Wil Wheaton's keynote at Penny Arcade Expo 2007

The following video is only an excerpt of the speech intro but it's coupled with a few moments after the speech as Wil graciously meets with a fan. It encapsulates the reaction a little to see a fan shaking his hand.

Found via Delicious.

More Information

• Article on Stage Select
• Article on Macworld

What To Do With This Site?

I mentioned this before, but this site was birthed from something left behind by another site that I didn't originally create or develop. Read some of the previous archives for more details:

• January 2007
• February 2007
• March 2007

I felt weird about it at the time mainly because of the traffic, Google Pagerank and the promotion that had previously gone into promoting the "techlifeblogged.blogspot.com" sub-domain. I felt luck to have gotten it, but didn't want to take advantage of it too much.

With PR updates over the last several months, the value has dropped to zero and the traffic is low. There are still lots of visitors to older pages originally created by Scott (where I redirect them to his site as best I can) and a fair number of visitors to new posts that I've created.

But it may be time to end this project. I have too many pots percolating at once and this year promises to be even busier. My plan at the moment is to update the page template to something simple and post the content over FTP to my own site. From there, I won't necessarily delete the whole site as it is still working in the occasional redirect. But the URL will become a sub-page or subdirectory off of my home page. Since he hasn't stopped by, I'm going to assume that Scott won't mind if I do this.

Anyhow, that's the direction for 2009.

Mac vs. PC (In The Style of TRANSFORMERS)

The marketing team at both companies need to sit up and watch this one.

NEVER SLEEP AGAIN!

Thanks to LucasArts and Bioware, I will likely never sleep again.

Thanks to Tim Absath of Ctrl+Alt+Del for posting this one.

Why is My Flickr Pro Account Expiring?!!

First the whole digital television thing and now this. My Flickr Pro account is going away. Yahoo! owns Flickr. Since we've been using Yahoo! DSL for the longest time, I've had a Flickr Pro account available to me that I've abused thoroughly put to good use. It would seem by the yellow alert box that I saw in my account today that this will be downgraded to a standard account soon.

AT&T and Verizon Internet Services have reworked their broadband packages and will no longer be offering Flickr pro to subscribers after January 31, 2009.

You can read more about this in the Flickr FAQs.

Update (2009/03/05): I'm not sure what changed, but it looks like my account is now a Pro account again and it says that it will be free as long as I maintain my Yahoo! service. So, this must have changed. *smile*

Did You Know?

This video is enlightening and disturbing at the same time, which is an interesting mix. However, the presentation of some of the data seemed disjointed and unrelated. Like at the end? The bit about the illegal songs downloaded? What does that have to do with population expansion? Found via Shashi.name.

Say Goodbye to BlackBerry? If Obama Has to, Yes He Can - NYTimes.com

As hard as it might be to believe, the President of the United States of America is not really allowed to simply email people from his Blackberry. Because of really high security protocols and the need for all presidential communication to be retrievable via subpoena, email in this regard becomes difficult.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive.

With today's ultra-wired world, do you find this one difficult to believe? Check out the full story in the New York Times.