Christmas In July!

Numero Uno Son's birthday is in August, so in addition to finding gifts for him, I also took the time to snag a few "un-birthday presents" for his sister and his mom and (of course) his dad.

Since his birthday hasn't arrived yet, I can really only discuss the stuff that I'm getting, namely:

• Korg nanoKEY2 Slimline USB keyboard - a "small is beautiful" itty bitty controller for my music rig. I can grab this and my MacBook and some earbuds and head off to The Tea Lounge and get totally wired and make hours and hours of music that no-one will ever want to listen to.
• Logitech THX-Certified Speaker System Z623 - a not-so-portable music rig component. I don't really care about the "THX Certification" -- but the 200W bass cube should give me some of that wonderful "the mothership is hovering over the kitchen" deep bass experience I've been lacking.
• Western Digital MyBook Live 3TB NAS device - Yes, another one. Well, actually, this one's a bit bigger (3TB). But it'll be a nice backup for our current 2TB unit ("The Big Disk")(I guess we'll have to call this one "The Bigger Disk"). It'll be interesting to see how (more likely "if") two Twonky DLNA media servers work simultaneously on the same network.
  
  This is, BTW, part of my overall vast scheme that I call The Family Darknet. As the years go by, my family's information assets will continue to grow. The kids will leave home for school, and they'll each take a copy of everything with them. We'll set up some kind of system that automagically keeps everyone's copy up-to-date over an encrypted Internet channel, and over time devices will wear out and be replaced, but the data will live on. As other branches of the family become more technically sophisticated, they'll be invited in to participate. It'll be cool: a huge, highly redundant distributed data repository that will hold all manner of data about our family. An "inheritance", if you will, not of money but of information. At first it'll just be videos and audio and photos, but if it lasts 100 years? Who knows what kinds of goodies will be in there? It could be a genealogical dream. It could also have pragmatic benefits, as well -- in the same way that college fraternities will keep files of old exams and papers, it might be nice to have a family repository of wills, deeds, and other documents and contracts that we could benefit from.

Alas, it's important to pay for these goodies, so .. time to get back on my head!

A "Sandman Slim" movie?

Wikipedia says "The Dino De Laurentiis Company is currently developing Sandman Slim as a feature film." That's all I know, and I don't even know how current that tidbit is. But I'd love to see this happen. I wanna see what a na'at looks like.

Also, the third Sandman Slim novel Aloha From Hell is due on 18 October 2011.

Google+

So Google+ is here at last! Seems to me it's their 4th generation social networking platform (the others being Orkut, Wave, and Buzz), and containing a little bit of each, plus also some pretty strong responses to Facebook.

g+ is currently undergoing some growing pains. What I'm mostly noticing now is that there are tons of people from Second Life or other MMOs who have established identities that have already crept out into the real world in many ways, and (unsurprisingly) the people behind these identities don't want to give them up. Not really a concern of mine, but I still have many many friends in SL who are very up-in-arms over this.

From my own personal and selfish viewpoint, g+ is something I've been waiting for: a simple scheme for sharing content with the rest of my family. g+ hits the target perfectly; all this other stuff about setting up "circles" for work and friends and etc, well ... I think the sad fact is that I'm simply not really a very social kinda guy. If I've got something I want to share with the world, I'll post it here on my blog. Otherwise, all I wanna do is tell the wife and kids that I just stuck the Back To The Future movies up on the /Shared Video/ drive.

It's surprising just how fast g+ has grown, though ... I'd imagine those guys over at Facebook are holding lots of meeting, trying to get a handle on things.

FWIW, I'm now gplus.to/craigbecker.

One last thing: the "Hangout" feature for video chat is pretty sweet. We were playing with it at work the other day, and if they can deliver multi-party video onto computers and mobile devices, it could really be a game-changer.