bitsifter
friday, september 6

[sift this] When the Dad first got the satellite dish, the family spent the first 5-10 hours sitting in front of the tube trying to figure out what channels lived where. When the Satellite TV Week finally arrived, we had lives again -- no longer would everyone have to drop what they were doing because the Sister had found HBO again and, hey, "Victor Victoria" was on.

Bitsifter Rule #2: Surfing the web is a waste of time. Between the time your started this sentence and finished it, 500 new web pages appeared. Do you seriously think that you'll ever see 1/100th of the world wide web? Fortunately, the cream of the web will always rise to the top. Whether by Usenet, e-mail, or word of mouth -- chances are, if it's worth experiencing, you'll hear about it.

An annual favorite that has yet to disappoint in recommending the absolute best of the web is the Cool Site of the Year awards. The site sports roughly ~30 must see site on the web. New categories which award personal web sites (managed by one person or a small group) and cool web technologies bring new depth to the catagories.

A quick scan of the sites shows that each are suggesting to their subscribers that they vote for their respective site. This is somehow relieving that in the increasingly finicky world of the web, it's still cool to be cool.

[sift this] Summers always have a distinct theme about them. There was the summer were everyone (even the parents) drank in the dining room until the sister passed out beneath the table. There was the summer the parties were wild enough that we found ATM cards in the hot tub. And then there was the summer we played Doom.

As parties went, it wasn't very interesting. People show up, people drink, people stumble off to the hot tub to stare at the stars. Any semblance to a normal party ended when four of us would wander into the office, beer in hand, giggling. See, our household is unlike most in that we had a Novell network before most folks knew what AOL stood for. As we each sat down out at our computers, there was no guilt about using the company computer, no need to wear ear phones, and very little logic thanks to the alcohol. It was the summer we learned the word "Frag".

This summer, I learned the word "Gib".

As reported by the Digest earlier this summer, id Software released Quake to the world and, slowly, Quake is becoming a world. Thanks to the game's support of the TCP/IP protocol, games can be held across the company or across the world. With a huge variety of maps in the registered version plus an amazing 16 player maximum per game, you got the beginnings of a virtual world.

Sure, it's bloody. The carnage is profound, but this is merely id's take on it. With the engine being licensed to just about everyone and a slew of 3D level editors on there way, the sky isn't the limit, it's just another texture.