That is to say, they say that up to 8% of the male population is color blind, and it probably stands to reason that a similar proportion of gamers are afflicted. Which is an interesting fact, as Joystiq has a nice piece on color blindness and gaming.

This is something that’s actually very close to my heart.

I was diagnosed as being color blind when I was about 6, when I failed all of the Ishihara plates in the opthalmologist’s office. Being an x-linked recessive gene, nearly all of my uncles had it (thanks mom!), but I wonder if they too had problems with Bust-A-Move. [As a further aside, as dictated by the occupational health department, I am no longer allowed to read urine strips either … a stinky job that i do not miss, actually :) ]

Since colorblindess isn’t really “seeing in black and white”, but really distinguishing between colors that are close together on the colorwheel, especially if they are close in value (intensity), I have particular trouble with blue and purple; green and brown; red and green (of course); yellow and green.

This creates real difficulties when games hinge on distinguishing between these colors.

For example the seminal arcade game, Bust-a-Move.
Although you can distinguish between balls based only on their symbol inside (star, whatever), it can be tremendously difficult to do at higher levels when the game is fast and furious. The extra split second it took my brain to process the information — rather than color, because they looked the same! — made it notoriously difficult.

A very familiar refrain was “God *expletive* *expletive*! Why aren’t these *expletive* bubbles collapsing?”

Since colorblindness is an X-linked recessive trait it probably means an inordinate number of gamers are actually affected. I wonder why there hasn’t been a more concerted effort to be more sensitive to color blind gamers then?

Its not a political correctness thing, but a being-more-inclusive-sort of thing in my eyes (pun intended).

I mean, how frustrating is it when you’ve reached the 22nd stage, and you just can’t *expletive* finish it because you can’t tell the difference between the green and yellow balls?

If you read the “comments” section in the Joystiq article, there are dozens of commenters commiserating with the author (who describes Rockstar’s Table Tennis game to be a sisyphian challenge) about games where being able to distinguish colors is critical to completion of the game.

For example, in the Joystiq article, there is a picture of a ball with the number “45″ on it … but because of the color arrangement, I can’t see it. I only found out about it after one of the commenters picked it up! (more…)

I am not a web designer, nor a code developer, nor digerati, technorati or any other sort of new media guru. But I am blogger who has an interest on topics ranging from the evolution of all media, the social web, web2.0, marketing, and a trailmix of everything in between. I am also the editor of the BlogHerald, one of the oldest blogging institutions in the blogosphere. (During the day, and possibly night, particularly when I am on call I am also a 3rd year Resident in Internal Medicine).

I started blogging in earnest at the end of August 2006, but DJI has gotten links or mentions on a few notable sites:

• Wired
• News.com.com
• Bokardo
• Guardian Unlimited
• ValleyWag
• LA List
• Crunchnotes
• Techmeme
• TailRank
• GigaOM
• Kuro5hin
• Wikipedia
• BuzzFeed
• BusinessWeek
• Good Morning Silicon Valley

Rick Segal, a Canadian VC, has referred to me as an “expert”

Jeremy Wright, President of b5media, and author of BlogMarketing has referred to DJI as one of a few “recognized leaders in their industries”

i-boy.com calls me a “geeky techy newshound”

Garth Turner, a Canadian politician, thinks I’m “very amusing”

Mark Evans, VP of b5media and former columnist for the National Post, thinks Deep Jive Interests “has replaced Dead 2.0 as my favourite Web 2.0 voice of reason.”

Om Malik, of GigaOM, says he “loves the blog”

Mike Arrington, of TechCrunch, calls this a “really excellent blog“.

Hugh Mcleod, of Gaping Void, drew a cartoon featuring “me”.

Other Honors:

Cheers,
Tony Hung, MD.
anthony{dot}hung{at}gmail.com

In getting this nascent blog off the ground, I’ve run into to the challenge of what should I — or any blogger — really blog about?

And what to do if I can’t write about anything?

Elise Blauer over at Blogher has a meaty post about how one should think about the content of one’s posts.
To summarize:

1. Be Useful, Entertaining or Timely
2. Focus
3. Use Images and Photographs
4. Write Well
5. Consider Headlines
6. Make us Care.

Its an interesting post that seems to focus less on the content and more on the process of constructing a blog post. Less of a what, and more of how, I suppose.

Nick Wilson of Performancing has a nice article which focuses more on the content of your post — the What, so to speak. However, the twist on his post is how to to be excellent “Linkbait”, which, I suppose is crafting your post so that people find it so interesting, intriguing, and compelling that other people will comment … and ultimately link to it.

(Linking, certainly from Google’s point of view, seems to be the lingua franca of the web at the moment)

He says its critical to try and create posts which are either:

1. newsworthy (new news as it were)
2. contrarian (and controversial)
3. aggressive (deliberately so)
4. resourceful (useful)
5. or funny (self explanatory, ‘natch).

In the New York Times, under Pogue’s Posts, Anna Marie Cox, formerly of the Wonkette also describes her recipe for blog success — and with regards to content, reinforces “process”issues: (more…)

In a moment of absurd paranoia, I booked my own domain in the fears a that someone would

a) beat me to the punch, because someone else wants to squat on this fabulously huge website

b) concoct a similar three word combination that they would want to use for their own website / blog.

And lo and behold –> www.deepjiveinterests.com is now this website!

Thanks to a post I did earlier in the year for myself, transferring the entire Wordpress installation, database, and everything was pretty painless.

A visit to GoDaddy (and $8.95) later + some magic behind the scenes at Dreamhost (with some Nameserve switcheroos) + some MyPHPAdmin fiddling == new migration to this account and domain name.

Well, I have with some interest been following the whole Rose vs. Calacanis debate, mostly because I am really a huge Digg Fan.

As I know it the following has happened:

1) Jason Calacanis, now a hired gun for Netscape — which has “Digg-ified” itself — offers to pay posters to submit articles to Netscape
2) Kevin Rose of Digg (now in its 3rd iteration) doesn’t think this is a great idea, and says so in his podcast (and summarized here).
3) Jason Calacanis rebuts via his Blog.

4) Kevin Rose counter-posts via HIS Blog.

Leo Laporte has weighed in: His vote is for Kevin.

Others have also weighed in: Anil Dash, Steve Rubel, as well as Thomas Hawk. So has Kevin Lim at Theory.isthereason.

And of course, coursing through the comments of a variety of sources, people fall on both sides of the equation.

Here are my thoughts.

(more…)

So I have no idea how it fits into the GTD flow of things, but surely there must be some way to integrate overall “efficiency” into your every day process of things … whether at home or at work.

God knows when I get home I have a variety of things … but at the end of the evening, where has all my (expletive) time gone?

Slimtimer.com is meant to be used to keep track of time so consultants, team managers and members etc can keep track of their hours.

Quite frankly, its also a cool way of monitoring exactly what you’re doing, so you’re able to monitor your own efficiency.

Sort of an auto-efficiency tool, if you will.

As with all things, your own diligence in keep up with the tool is directly proportional to its usefulness — wordy translation: if you use it, it becomes useful.

But, slimtimer is super easy to use, and through its Ajax-y interface (how web2.0) updates itself minute to minute and hour by hour through every single “thing” you want to track.

For example, I decided to track, certain “actions” I’m liable to do this evening.

“goof off”, “surf web”, “sort through inbox” (hello GTD!), “read internal medicine” and so on.
By clicking on an “open timer” link, a separate pop up will go up, with all of the tasks you’re interested in; of course, you’re able to add new tasks at any time by clicking “alt-a”, and “tags” as well.  But, by simply CLICKING on that task you want to keep track of, the timer will start going up.  And CLICKING it again turns it off — brilliant.

The best part of it is how its able to generate report so that you can literally see how productive or unproductive your evening was! The “Reports” section on the main web page is also able to digest your time by day, week, or month — but also, by the given activity that you’re interested in.

Want to know how many hours you wasted surfing the web last week?(if that was an interest you diligently kept track of — and its easy to do), simply run the report, and select “week” and you task!

Yes, I suppose I am a glutton for punishment.
Who really wants to know how unproductive their time really was?

On the other hand, a tool like this can easily tell you where you’re WASTING you’re time — and quantify it!
But on the flip side, it can also tell you how you’re really dividing your time, and whether you’re really allotting your time efficiently.  Did you really spend as much time reading that report as you thought?  How about working on that web development?  Versus watching television?

You might be surprised.

I was!

Two huge thumbs up to SlimTimer and all new tools like it — from a GTD perspective.