Freyburg

At least by the Guardian’s estimation.

KInd of a tough question to ask, and it sort of falls in the “What if the Nazis invented the bomb” and “If Kennedy hadn’t been shot” realm of idle speculation, but there’s some interesting stuff in this article from New York Metro about what the world would look like without the massive change that 9/11 wrought.

The 9/11 attacks just shy of five years ago were supposed to cripple the world economy and hurt America wheres it matters most; the wallet. While the airlines and tourism are still reeling from those attacks and others, Newsweek makes a good case that the economy’s doing just fine, thanks, despite the efforts of Bin Laden and Co.

After a couple of months of playing World of Warcraft, I haven’t gotten very far. I’m only level 24, and the better half is beating me handily with the second character she created (while I’m still on my first.) So I’ve decided to take a different tack with the game; I’m going to become Mel’s financier, scanning the auction house for deals and cornering the market on bat wings and magic wands. The end result? Well, Mel’s character will be enriched by her sugar daddy skeleton, and I’ll hopefully eventually earn enough virtual scratch to sell it to the highest bidder on eBay. 🙂

In a neat bit of Internet mashuppery, someone has combined a low-grade flight sim with Google Maps and created Goggles. You can fly your plane over the maps, shoot at things, bank, climb, and crash. It’s a fun little time-waster, and I spent a few minutes buzzing over Tokyo before smashing into what I think was part of Shinjuku. 🙂

Joe “Up With War” Lieberman has been soundly trounced in the Connecticut Democratic primary by up-and-comer Ned Lamont. Lieberman is going to run as an independent, but the contest is being seen as more of a comment on the American people’s distaste for the Iraq adventure than anything else. Hopefully this is the first, if oblique, step to tossing the Republicans out on their ear in 2008.

Chinese geeks are taking American shows and subititling them for a Chinese audience, and not bothering with little things like copyright or royalties. It’s all voluntary, networked and virtual, with people in different locations collaborating through the Internet. I wrote an article a few years ago about American fansubbers doing the same thing with anime (thank you, Google cache). Sadly, Shift magazine is no longer with us, but I’m setting up a portfolio section shortly where I’ll put up some of my long-form writing, including that article.

Iraqis love their cellphones. They function not only as a lifeline to avoid roadblocks and getting kidnapped, but also as one of the few forms of teenage self-expression that extremists won’t clamp down on. Insurgents use them too, to detonate bombs and keep in contact with one another. Check out the NY Times article here.

I’ve added a Meebo Me widget to the right side of the site. What is this tomfoolery, you ask? Well, as long as I have meebo or some other chat client up, I can get instant messages, right through Freyburg.com. So the next time you’re reading my random musings, you can tell me what a wrong-headed dink I am, to my face. W00t!

Just stumbled across a bunch of archived writing by George Orwell. Two good ones off the top: “Why I Write” and “Bookshop Memories.”