This morning started out like any other morning. I was working on my paper at the bar of Eastham’s chocolate sparrow. I had gmail open and noticed a new feature being offered.

Group chat.

I decided to try it out with Ben and Shamus. As expected, it worked. But… was there a limit to its capabilities?

We immediately set out on a goal to try and pull in 100 people into a single chat. We soon determined that this was HUGE overkill and I dropped our goal down to 50. 50… seemed possible. After about 30 or 40 minutes of telling people to invite more people and seeing our numbers raise and drop over and over again we hovered at 47. There was suddenly a huge drive and our numbers jumped to 51. FIFTY ONE. (fifty two if you include me). There was a choir of congratulations and then suddenly everyone left.

Unfortunately, my screenshot showing the number 51 failed. But the image above gives a quick visual display of how many 50 really is.

Was there a limit? well… not directly. But firefox wasn’t very happy with us. The lag time jumped considerably and people were having trouble joining.

Thanks to everybody who participated!! I hope you had fun.

Check it out.

The Bible’s most INTENSE verses.

My spam filter cleans out HUNDREDS of spam related comments a day. And even with the technologies JonAbad installed on the site, a few still get through now and again and need to be manually deleted.

What I find interesting is the progression of spam from pure advertisement to complimentary. We used to get spam that just threw the product in your face. Then spammers got a little more creative (not intelligent) and started complimenting my guest book. This is particularly humorous since I don’t have a guest book. The latest craze seems to be ping-backs (references to your blog that in-turn throws a comment onto your blog). they use the link as “vote” on search engines to get higher in the list.

Sometimes the ping backs are just ping backs. nothing special.

othertimes though it’s a link to your blog with more compliments thrown in. Things like, “Read this great article on mikedidonato.com”

Oh Spam. I don’t find your antics cute anymore. Seriously. cut it out.

As I step over the doorway into a two weeks of pure mayhem, I anticipate with clammy excitement the completion of a monster paper and a trip to Texas. I start to complain and dread… and then I realize, well, Sander’s got to go to Korea.

And at least Texas has delicious Barbecue.

If you have a trampoline make sure to check your model to be certain you’re not going to fall victim to this major product defect that’s been in the news. I’m not sure which exact brands have the problem. Just check to make sure that your trampoline is not like the one shown HERE.

If it is, you’ll probably want to return it immediately as it can be extremely dangerous. DO NOT JUMP on your trampoline before checking to see if it suffers from this defect. We don’t want anyone getting hurt.

On Friday I played some guitar hero and was captivated yet again by Muse’s Knights of Cydonia. It turns out you can listen to all of Muse’s music online. Go here go to ‘media’ and then select an album. I haven’t explored their new stuff yet, but the Absolution disc is fantastic.

Interesting fact: Muse is considered ‘New Progressive’ rock.

This weekend was decidedly mixed.

Thanksgiving was, of course, splendid. Any holiday that pulls family together and offers two days off from work gets a recommendation from me. Friday after an exciting breakfast with Abby and Ted, I got a haircut and then tried to zip back to CT in time for Kung Fu. I didn’t make it in time, so instead I went to Tony and Paulette’s place for some pizza and some Guitar Hero III.

Most of Saturday was spent researching my paper.

Let’s talk paper for a second.

The class is international business. What I need to do is write a 10 page single spaced paper that talks about something relating to international business. I want to write about intellectual property. My original thesis was an attempt to try and show that the sharing of intellectual property with developing countries is better for mankind. But right now, after a few weeks of research I want to say that really… we need something totally different. Capitalism based intellectual property hoarding seems to work, but it’s not very efficient. Peer Production seems genius and super efficient, but there are some fundamental difficulties that relate to what sorts of markets can benefit from creative donated collaboration.

If we look through the Kaleidoscope of Geekery, we’ll notice that Star Trek operated off of a Peer Production basis where the characters were not rewarded with monetary funds but instead with notoriety. Of course they had replicators for food. Star Wars was a capitalistic society. Perhaps my thesis should talk about what changes would be necessary from our current international business system if we were to start engaging in intergalactic business.

Anyway, my changing my thesis to “we need something new” is weak. It’s not quite specific enough – nor does it have as much to do with international business. So with a monster paper due in four days… I don’t know what to do.

Continuing with the weekend, Saturday night I watched the new Die Hard movie with the Scott family. It was hilariously fun. Sunday was spent working on the paper, doing chores, and playing about two hours of Rockband.

Now, it’s totally cool if you want to criticize me for playing Rockband when I have a huge paper due because Rockband… is probably the most amazing game ever. With Shaun on the guitar and me on the drums… well… it was two hours of intensity like none other.