Another Word for Nerd

Got my first used XBox in today. I should have another one arriving sometime this week or early next. I’ll be “hacking” both, either with a “mod chip” or flashing the onboard TSOP BIOS chip. Doing so will let me run non-Microsoft-signed code and install bigger hard drives. One machine will be an XBox Media Center server, while the other will actually be used for gaming, or maybe XBox Linux.

You can’t really beat $150 for a 733Mhz small form-factor PC with built-in TV out and nVidia graphics. The only downside is that it only has 64MB of memory.

My last console was a Sega Dreamcast that I owned for about a month (didn’t really like it), and before that, a big collection of Atari 2600 consoles and cartridges. I never actually owned a Nintendo (NES, SNES, or N64).

As a toddler, I lived in a house next to the railroad tracks. I’ve always liked trains, and Amy and I occasionally ride Amtrak from Austin down to San Antonio and back on the weekends for fun.

Today, I ran across Tales From The Krug, where Al Krug, a locomotive engineer for BNSF, has stories and pictures from his 30+-year train career. I’ve wasted most of an afternoon enjoying the site.

Six Apart have relaxed the licensing terms for Movable Type a bit after the backlash over MT 3.0D’s release. However, while they’ve made it cheaper to have multiple authors and weblogs, they’ve not changed the pricing scheme; it would still cost me at least $150 to host everything I’m doing on MT. I think that this has woken up many people who had been using MT2.661 and made them actually read the license and terms of usage - now that they realize that they *should* be paying for MT, they’ll be looking for an alternative weblogging system.

For me, it’s not entirely all about the money. I could easily afford $150. The fact is, WordPress has gotten me spoiled. Three sites took me less than five minutes total to upgrade to WP 1.2-RC1 from 1.2-Delta last night. WordPress is a hundred times faster, with no rebuilds to see the effect of site changes.

Alpha/Beta testers have been promised a “significant discount on Movable Type 3.0″, but a lot of people (myself included) have already “seen the light”, moved on to another “personal publishing platform”, and aren’t willing to move back.

Edit: Shelley Powers has an excellent interpretation of the revised license terms along with some commentary.

Ray Stevens said it best:

It was too late…She’d already been mooned

At midnight, the wife-type-person said “Hey, let’s go to Waffle House!”. So, we drove 25 miles and had breakfast, the first time I’ve eaten at a Waffle House in eight years.

I blame this all on Chip Rosenthal. Chip, what do you have to say for yourself?

Mark Pilgrim has switched to WordPress, and donated the $535 that upgrading to Movable Type would have cost him, to the WordPress developers. I had $10 sitting around in my PayPal account, so I just donated that to them as well. This is a great piece of software,

Wouldn’t it be interesting if Christianity worked like GEICO?

“Here’s a Bible, but for comparison, we’ll also give you a copy of the Koran, the Torah, the The Book of Mormon, the Principia Discorida, the Necronomicon, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.”

Yes, I have strange thoughts while waiting at Sonic for my breakfast in the morning…

Why does a Waffle House open in Austin right AFTER I start my diet? I’ve lived here eight years, talk about timing.

The latest crazy search strings that led to this site: “fruit roll-ups tongue tattoo pictures” and “lowes laser dog fence system”.

Six Apart’s announcement that the usable versions of Movable Type were moving to a required for-pay licensing model was the encouragement I needed, and my last MT-based site, CiscoHELP, is now using WordPress.

Looking at the news this morning, I moved away from MovableType just in time.

Six Apart has switched to a for-pay business model, crippling features in the freely-downloadable version. The cheapest license (for up to 5 weblogs with 3 authors) is $69.95 - even after the $50 of donations I made, that would still cost me an additional $20. To use MT for my “Help” sites would cost me an additional $150.

Ben and Mena seem to think that the Underpants Gnomes business model works:

1. Take forever to release a new version, and when you do, not have any major new features
2. Charge your users for software that used to be free
3. . . . .
4. Profit!

Matt has no plans to charge for WordPress, which is licensed under the GPL.