Gah, I barely made it to Linuxworld this week for a couple hours. I've worked at two businesses 3 blocks from the Moscone Center, so I try to go to the big Expos every year.

Highlights:

- Unreal Tournament- Sun was showing off their new workstations using Unreal Tournament. They held a competition, with prizes like a nice Apparently myAmygdala did pretty well.

I did pretty well at first--I was in the lead for about 3 minutes, and this was my first time playing Unreal Tournament. but then got snookered by the 'R' key. On other FPS games, the 'R' key typically for 'Reload'. In Unreal Tournament however, it stands for 'Chat"--so instead of reloading the gun, I kept getting the Chat prompt, filled it with phrases like "wwwasda awsdawdwww" and promptly got fragged. They would not let me redefine the keybinding, so I ended up dead last.

- The dotOrg Pavilion: I'm mostly interested in the projects at the dotOrg pavilion-- KDE, Gnome, Debian, the LTSP, OpenGroupware.org, X.org always have good, fun exhibits. I spent 2 hours talking to the developers up there. Great folks. I got several bootable CDs, inclusing the new CAOs distro which apparently was started by some smart folks that I knew at the Lawrence Berkeley Labs, a bootable version of the Mambo CMS product

- O'Reilly's Make 3.0 is coming out: I signed up for a subscription and got version 3.0 of the Magazine. This one has a couple appropriate articles on Halloween tricks, so I'll be sure to check it out.

Lowlights:

- Segregation: The big commercial vendors were all in the big huge hall downstairs. The dotOrg Pavilion and a handful of other commercial vendors were hidden up on the second floor. I bet many attendees did not know they were there.

Perhaps this is actually a good thing. With the huge loudspeakers & noise of the commercial vendors in a different room, you could actually have a fun, pleasant conversation with the dotOrg folks.

The Moscone Center hosted a huge Coin Show two weeks ago, and they had a similar setup. The commercial coin vendors were all downstairs in the big exhibit hall, the nonprofit & government booths were upstairs.

- OReilly Booth: The OReilly folks always put on a nice set of educational presentations. This year their microphone/speaker didn't work at all, and you could barely hear the speakers over the ruckus of the Novell/IBM/HP/Sun areas.

(Cross-posted to WWdN)

The final table of the 2005 World Series of Poker started at 4pm yesterday afternoon, and wasn't finished until just after 7am today. I'm not sure, but I think that's a record. I'd call Pauly to be sure, but something tells me he's crashed out until at least Sunday.

Two qualifiers from PokerStars made the final table, and one guy, who qualified using free play points, made it to the final two tables, finished in 13th place, and won $400,000. Not bad for a freeroll!

Speaking of Pauly and PokerStars, we're doing a charity tournament on Sunday in memory of Pauly's friend Charlie Tuttle:

Charlie is from Clarksville, Tennessee and he's a twenty-six year old music enthusiast who loves hanging out and playing poker with his friends. Charlie was dealt a bad hand in life when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, which he has been battling this past year. A couple of weekends ago, he was hospitalized because two tumors in his chest pressed up against his lungs, causing him breathing problems. I don't have to tell you how serious his condition was.

Felicia Lee, who is fighting her own battle with cancer, knows several top professional poker players, so she got several of her friends to call Charlie: John Juanda, Marcel Luske, Max Pescatori, and Barry Greenstein to name a few. In fact, when Barry Greenstein won his bracelet in the $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha event, he dedicated it to Charlie.

As Pauly wrote:

Situations like this one make you reassess what's really important in life. Las Vegas is a city built on greed. Poker is a game that often attracts some of the lowest forms of life. However, in the past two weeks, there has been a small group of professional poker players who have earned my respect and admiration. Amidst all the darkness and debauchery, I have caught a few glimpses of the bright side of humanity. The hearts of some of the biggest sharks in Las Vegas are filled with compassion.

Thank you, Charlie, for inspiring us all. We'll never forget you.

Charlie passed away on June 22 and his friends have organized a charity poker tournament this Sunday at PokerStars. It's going to be a lot of fun, and I hope to see lots of WWdN readers there.

Details:

SUNDAY, JULY 17th
18:00 EDT (15:00 CDT)
PokerStars
Buy-in is $20 — all of it goes to charity.
"WPBT Charlie Tournament" under Tourneys -> Private tab in the lobby

I'm sure this is just begging for vandalism (unless those douchebags have grown up and finally kissed a girl) . . . but there is an error on my Wikipedia page that needs to be corrected. I'd do it myself, but that's against Wikipedia editing policy.

I am not in Brother Bear. Willie Wheaton, Wil Wheaton, Jr., and Reginald Maudling (Mrs.) are all not me. I've tried to get this taken off imdb, but someone (well-intentioned, I'm sure) keeps putting it back, and Wikipedia editors (also well-intentioned) are putting Brother Bear back up . . . so we're in an infinite improbability loop, and my towel is getting dirty.

Would someone please correct that, and cite this journal entry so it doesn't get corrected back?

I submitted a poll. It wasn't rejected right away which was a good sign that it might be accaped. But, alas it was rejected.

I've always been curious how many ./ers are parents, uncles, or have been around babies at all.

Number of diapers changed in your lifetime?

1. None, Cowboyneal was born potty-trained!
2. 1 - 10 : Occasionally baby-sit for my sister/friend/mother.
3. 10 - 100 : Newborn! He's so cute!
4. 100 - 1,000 : Yo kid! It's 3AM, let me sleep!
5. 1,000-10,000 : I use a KSH script to automate repetitive tasks.
6. 10,000+ : Perl is better for messy situations.
7. The goggles, they do nothing!!!

2004-11-16 23:18:07 Number of diapers changed in your lifetime? (Polls,It's funny. Laugh.) (rejected)

One of the more recent trends in the Internet world is the concept of Social Network's and the Semantic Web. Social Networks are supposed to make it easier for you to interact with friends and communities online and make the web function more on a human scale.

Some of us remember Six Degrees, who tried to do this years ago and went under, and are coming back with a new site. I have had email lists for this sort of thing going for over 10 years now, and participated in newsgroup-type systems years ago, done the personal webpage thing, etc.

The Social Network sites offer great feature over my old, archaic mailinglists-- Friend-of-a-friend networking, personal journals, the ability to form interest groups, etc.

I'm looking to settle on one or two sites for my journaling wants. I'm looking for a Blog/Journal; flexible look-and-feel; User communities so I can talk to people with similar interests, ask technical questions, etc.; and a Friend-of-a-Friend service. I'd like the service to be indexed by search engines so that I'm not just speaking to a closed group.

Here is a short list of the communities I have participated in recently. There are dozens (hundreds) more:

Friendster - Probably the most well known. A "Bulletin Board", ,
Tribe.net - Like Friendster combined with Craig's List and a heavy influence of Burning Man. Pretty cool. Event listing, classifieds, but no journal capability! Arg!!!
Orkut - Invite only, which makes it more scalable and more "elite". Closed to the outside world which means that non-member's can't use your information at all.
Livejournal - One of the first Blogging sites. Confusing interface.
Blogspot/Blogger - Like LJ, but with a great flexible look-and-feel.
Slashdot - I have a ton of friends and foes on this site, but the journaling aspect leaves alot to be desired.

Here is my problem. There are many (too many?) social networking sites. Each site is isolated within it's own separate universe, with little or no interaction between the various sites. The lack of interaction adds an artificial barrier within the whole social networking idea. If one friend uses Friendster another uses Tribe, and another uses Livejournal; there is no interaction between these tools.

Likewise, I will post this journal text to the journal in each of my social networking accounts as an experiment. Unfortunately, the responses to each individual journal entry will remain separate, with no social interaction between the readers.

So my choice is to:

- Use all of the sites (too much work!)
- Look at different sites, become overwhelmed and give up (This is where I've been for the last several years)
- Pick one and stick with it
- Do it all on my own server, run it over my DSL line. This is also alot of work, and it there is no way for me to participate in the FOAF's out there.

Arg, what to do? What to do?

I quit my job today, and am starting a new, better job on Wednesday (yes!). As I left the office for the last time, I had a funny thought and thought I would share it.

After 7 years in the IT business, I now know why the cupholder is broken.

I just got back from Starsky and Hutch.

Surprisingly funny. I bet the DVD will be great.

Best part was how anyone in the theatre under 30 didn't get about 70% of the best jokes.

Now I'm hoping that they'll make a CHiPs movie. I wonder what other late 70s to early 80s TV shows would translate well into movies?

Oh, and if you're not watching TRIO every night, you're really missing out on some fantastic television.

There's no "Ask Slashdot" topic available for user journals, but I am intrigued by this reader's question, and I thought it was worth a try to tap into the collective wisdom of Slashdot.

Hi Wil,

you mentioned some time ago in your blog that you did a presentation on writing your book(s) using open source tools. Have you posted these slides (or whatever the medium was) anywhere?

I'm asking as I am about to embark on a writing project that will be north of 80,000 words (assuming I get past the 5,000 word 'pain barrier' that killed me last time) and recent experience with M$ Word has, quite frankly, scared the bejaysus out of me.

Anyways, if you get this it would be great to see you share some of your experiences using OSS to write.

thanks
Conrad

[1]http://www.wilwheaton.net/mt/archives/001401.php

I replied:

Hi Conrad,

Sadly, I didn't use any slides . . . that's *way* over my level of preparation for anything I do.

My talk pretty much focused on how I used OpenOffice.org to compose and edit my two current books, and what some of the pitfalls were.

I can summarize briefly for you: OO.o is a fantastic word processing suite, and did everything that I needed it to do. I was particularly impressed by the "stylist" in OO.o, which exists, I think, because they use some sort of XML-ish language behind the scenes. The stylist allowed me to assign something similar to "classes" to diffferent areas of my text, and was extremely useful in the design of "Just A Geek."

The only time I ran into an annoying limitation was moving to and from the .doc format, because OO.o and MSWord don't play nicely in regards to formatting. I worked around this by using .rtf format, when I needed to send my work out to other people (for notes and stuff). There were a few limitations in formatting, but they were purely aesthetic and didn't affect the actual data in any way.

I briefly looked at Abiword and KOffice, and found them both to be well-written and stable, but they were far more limited than OO.o.

In terms of just putting together a manuscript without regard to formatting, you could work very easily with Kwrite, or Kate, the same way that many other writers use BBEdit on the Mac.

When I finally had a finished product that I liked, I used OpenOffice.org to print to a .ps file, then used the ps2pdf13 command line tool to convert it into a .pdf document, which I sent to my printer. I understand that the newest version of OO.o has a very robust built-in pdf converter which makes that extra step unnecessary. I should also point out that converting files to .pdf on *nix always results in smaller filesizes than if you'd done it on a Mac or Windows platform. Hooray for us.

I'll post this e-mail to my Slashdot journal (CleverNickName) and maybe some of the Slashdotters will have good advice of their own to share with us.

Best of luck with your novel. Just go one scene at a time, and you'll be past 5K words before you know it!

Wil

My presentaton was pretty much limited to "I like this, I don't like this, and this thing was cool." I didn't have the time to get into a 1:1 comparison among all the different Open Source word processing suites. Do Slashdotters have any comments or suggestions? I find myself using Kate more and more when I compose weblog entries or shorter columns for magazines and the like. I occasionally use Abiword to compose and format letters and fax covers when time is a factor (Abiword loads much faster than OpenOffice.org.)

You made the top ten list!

No PointsName Hp [max]
1 20342 Morc-Mon-Hum-Mal-Law died in Sokoban on level 6 [max 9].
Killed by an owlbear. - [79]
2 15917 Morc-Mon-Hum-Mal-Law died in The Dungeons of Doom on level 12.
Killed by a xan. - [68]
3 4171 Morc-Wiz-Orc-Mal-Cha died in The Dungeons of Doom on level 6.
Killed by a water elemental. - [59]

It's cold comfort to be three fucking rocks away from beating Sokoban, only to have a fucking OWLBEAR show up out of nowhere, and whack 70 fucking hit fucking points right off you in one fucking turn.

Gods, I love this fucking game. >:-)

RetroCRUSH is a pop culture website run my my friend Robert Berry.

On November 20, 2003, Robert wrote a humorous article called The Worst Sex Scenes Ever: A Look At The Most Unsexy Sex Scenes". On December 30, 2003, his article was stolen by the UK Tabloid The Daily Star. Robert writes, "The UK tabloid 'The Daily Star' printed the same feature, with the same movies I used (even failing to omit a joke entry for the film Deliverance that I also included in my feature). Instead of crediting my site, however, they credited a seemingly fictitious American magazine named FILM. Not only did they highlight the films I mentioned, but they lifted three separate quotes from my article and attributed them to FILM magazine readers who responded to a (apparently non-existent) poll." It was subsequently syndicated to at least 30 other news organizations without crediting Robert, who is the author of the story.

Robert recounts his conversation with Kieran Saunders, the News Editor at the tabloid: "He said, 'Well, if it's on the internet it's up for grabs. You can't copyright anything on the internet.' I told him that was untrue and he then refused to speak with me further, and said all future communication needed to be sent to their legal contact, Steven Bacon in London. I even tried to call back an hour later to speak with the actual author of the piece, Emily Rose, and Saunders answered the phone, stating, 'I told you never to call here again, speak to our legal group' before ending the call."

From bOINGbOING:

Brazil to fingerprint Americans in retaliation for Homeland Security indignities
The Brazilian government has retaliated against a US plan to fingerprint Brazilian visitors to the US by fingerprinting US visitors to Brazil. The judge who enacted the regulation has exempted citizens of countries whom the US intends to fingerprint from the Brazilian requirement, and has had a little Godwin's Law moment in his publicity regarding the decision:

"I consider the act absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and worthy of the worst horrors committed by the Nazis," said Sebastiao da Silva in the court order released on Tuesday.

How dare they! How dare those ungrateful Brazilians! Don't they remember when the USA saved their asses in that one war? They OWE us! They're acting like the Bush administration ignores silly things like treaties, international law, and diplomacy! Those are just relics of the Old Europe.

I tell you what: if those Brazilians hate America so much, they should just move to France.

Someone left this in my blog. It must be seen to be believed.

The hilarious (and scary) thing is, the dialogue it generates is right on par with the stuff they used to give us to say.

I made it into the Hollywood Reporter!!

It's a very positive article, and it's nice to read something about me in the entertainment press that isn't framed in a negative light:

Wil Wheaton might have become a minor celebrity with roles in "Stand by Me" and "Star Trek: The Next Generation," but he has become a major online star with his www.wilwheaton.net Weblog. So much so that the actor signed a three-book deal -- for books directly stemming from his blog -- with a major publisher.

The first book from publisher O'Reilly & Associates is out shortly and is titled "Dancing Barefoot," a book Wheaton self-published and sold 3,000 copies of from his Web site in four months. Up next is "Just a Geek," which will contain some of his blog writings on the rigors of being an ensign on the Starship Enterprise. The third book is tentatively titled "Wil Wheaton's Website Design."

This is really awesome, because everyone in the industry reads the Reporter. I understand that there's a mention in Variety today or Monday, too, and together they could translate into some meetings for me.

O'Reilly put out a press release to announce my deal with them!

This is pretty damn cool:

Any honest computer geek will admit that his obsessive coding is, at heart, a futile attempt to create a world as cool as those depicted in science fiction. New evidence of the symbiotic relationship between Sci Fi and geekdom surfaced today, as O'Reilly & Associates, the geek publisher-of-record, announced plans to publish three books by Wil Wheaton, blogger, geek, and the actor who portrayed Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

"This is a very exciting relationship for me, for several reasons," said Wheaton. "First, I am a huge geek, and without O'Reilly, I wouldn't know HTML from LMNOP. I never would have been able to get Linux running, and Perl would be one of the not-quite-as-good-as-Mrs.-Garrett replacements on Diff'rent Strokes. Now, I'll be able to get my books into more stores than I ever was with my own Monolith Press. I can't wait to see how Dancing Barefoot does when it's got a major publisher behind it."

Wheaton's first two books, Dancing Barefoot and Just a Geek, are almost unbearably honest tales of life, love, and the rigors of being an ensign on the Starship Enterprise. First self-published by Wheaton in May 2003 and available only on the Internet and in select independent bookstores, "Dancing Barefoot" quickly sold out its initial run of 3000. The O'Reilly edition will be available in all major bookstores in early 2004.

I posted this announcement at my lame website, but I'm so excited about it, I'm gonna repost it here:

I have totally signed a three book deal with a major publisher. O'Reilly and Associates, to be precise.

Okay, I'm totally trying to play it all cool, but . . .

HOLY MOTHER OF CRAP!! WOOOO!!!!!! ROCK!

YEAH!!! KICK ASS BABY!!! UNGH!!! UNGH!!!

*pant*

*pant*

Sorry. I've been getting those massive rushes of excitement with alarming frequency. I hope you all understand.

This is a very exciting relationship for me, for several reasons. First, I am a huge geek, and without O'Reilly, I wouldn't know HTML from LMNOP. I never would have been able to get Linux running, and Perl would be one of the not-quite-as-good-as-Mrs.-Garrett replacements on Diff'rent Strokes.

This means I will be able to get my books into more stores than I ever was with Monolith Press. It means I'll be sent out on a real book signing tour. It means I'll be on national television and radio to promote my work, and maybe even get a review in major newspapers or magazines.

Dancing Barefoot sold 3,000 copies in less than five months, without any of that, and I can't wait to see how it does when it's got the power and budget of a major publisher behind it.

It also means that I will never royally screw up days worth of orders again, and I will be free to work like crazy on Just A Geek because I won't be running the business any more.

I spoke with my editor at O'Reilly this morning (" . . . my editor at O'Reilly!" that sounds so cool!), and he told me that O'Reilly is so excited to carry Dancing Barefoot, they're going to have a printing available in time for the holidays. They are currently working on a plan with Powells to get it out there right away, and I understand that they are in talks with Amazon as well. If you've been kicking yourself in the pants, or punching yourself in the back of the head because you wanted Dancing Barefoot for a holiday gift and missed out, you can stop the madness right now!

It should be in most major book stores very soon and y -- Oh my god! I'm going to walk into Vroman's and see my book on the shelf!!! AHHH!!! That RULES!

RAWK! \m/

Oops. There it goes again. :)

O'Reilly will also publish Just A Geek in Spring of next year, and I'm going to write a currently untitled technical book on personal website design that I think will come out in Summer.

So, you see, when I made my audioblog post back in July, I had just gotten off the phone with Brett from O'Reilly, who had called to tell me that none other than Tim O'Reilly himself had come back from OSCon talking about "the Wil Wheaton phenomenon" and instructed Brett to tell me that he wanted to be my publisher. Since that day, we've been working out the details. They were actually finalized a few weeks ago, but we all decided to wait until today to release this epic news, because I guess December 2 is a good day to release news, and there's a good chance some mainstream media outlets will pick this up.

I want all of you who read WWdN to know that none of this would ever have happened without you. Many of you have been here since the early days of Where's My Burrito?. In this strange, impersonal-but-personal way, you've gone with me through the ups and downs (mostly downs) of my Sisyphean struggles in the acting world. You were excited with me when I was added to Nemesis and cried with me when I was cut. You have been there when I've loved, and when I've lost. I've introduced you to Ryan and Nolan, Ferris, and Anne, who is more than my world . . . she's my entire universe.

You've supported me so much . . . I can't tell you all how wonderful it feels to share my tremendous joy with all of you now. Everyone who has read Dancing Barefoot, or come to see me at a show, or left a comment on this site, Soapboxers, Farkers, Slashdotters . . . I'm sure I'm forgetting people . . . but every single one of you owns a piece of this amazing new chapter in my life.