Seen in South Africa.

So the long-awaited game Spore was released in the U.S. today, and it’s getting lousy reviews — an average of fewer than two stars on Amazon.

Why? Two reasons. First, the game’s DRM (digital restrictions management) is, in the words of several reviewers, “draconian.” You must lower your computer’s security settings to install it, and are allowed to put it on a maximum of three computers. So if you replace your PC, or get a new hard drive, or simply want to install it on a different computer in your house, you use up one of those three installs.

Further, as has been pointed out, there’s no guarantee that the servers at Electronic Arts that are required for installation will still be working in, say, three or five years. So you’re renting the game — for a good long time, for sure, but it’s still a rental.

And if you need a fourth install? You have to call EA and hope to convince them to give you another code. How nice.

But that’s not all. Not only is the DRM a major problem, but apparently the gameplay has also been dumbed down.

As reviewer Erich Maria Remarque wrote:

Evolution doesn’t even matter anymore. You can add as many legs to a creature as you want, but it won’t be any faster than a one legged creature with higher leg stats. “Creating” your creatures is pointless (cosmetic only, because everything is based on stats), and brings you about the same excitement as dressing up a plastic doll.

My advice? If you want Spore, buy a copy, but also download one of the cracked versions that are already available — versions that don’t have EA’s nasty activation system. That way EA gets its money, but you own a game that doesn’t rely on the company’s good graces to play.

Sometimes the gods make it pretty clear that a particular place is in their crosshairs….

I realize it’s been a while since I mentioned the horrible service and horrible treatment at Brambleton Veterinary Hospital in Roanoke, especially the conduct of Dr. Linda Jennings. I wanted to remind everyone of what a terrible place it is, and how so many ex-customers found this blog and posted their horror stories.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read the start of the story in this post, entitled “Avoid Brambleton Veterinary Hospital in Roanoke.”

And if you want to read more — like how employees posted pretending to be customers, or how a customer named Diane Whitemore of Roanoke lied about what happened and got caught, well, you can start by searching on “Brambleton Vet” or “Brambleton Veterinary Clinic” on this site.

Why am I bringing this up now? It’s been a while, and I just wanted to be sure that anyone looking for information on Linda Jennings finds this site and gets to know what a horrible person she really is. Carry on.

I really like Google’s Picasa — it’s a terrific tool for editing and browsing your photos. It’s “basic” editing functions are all I need 99 percent of the time; Photoshop only comes in when I need to edit part of an image. When it comes to adjusting the lighting, sharpness, and so on, Picasa does the trick.

What’s cool about Picasa (and other program such as Adobe Lightroom) is that they don’t mess with your original image. You tweak the heck out of each picture, then you export them for print, for the Web, for e-mail, etc. The original is untouched; Picasa keeps a record of the changes it made. Worst-case scenario, you lose the tweaks but not your originals. And you can always go back and re-tweak.

But Picasa had a fatal flaw. It didn’t support IPTC — the International Press Telecommunications Council’s standard for image metadata. (It is now merged into the XMP standard, but that’s another story.)

Many, many programs support IPTC data. It allows you to embed information such as title, caption, keyboard, photographer, location, etc., inside the photo itself. That means that, as long as you have the image, you have all that data. Much better than storing info about your images in a separate database, the way image organizers like ACDSee do.

Anyway, I rely heavily on IPTC. If my photo has a caption, it’s an IPTC caption. For example, my site’s photo albums use Zenphoto for the back end, and one of the things Zenphoto does is pull the relevant IPTC data out of each image and display it as a caption. And if I ever switch to other software, whatever it is will also have access to the same captions and other info. I’m not married to a particular program.

Anyway, I found that I would use Picasa to crop and tweak a photo, but then I’d have to give the image a name, caption, and keywords using

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So I got Google Chrome, the new browser that’s all over the tech news. It’s fine. It’s OK. But it’s no Firefox.

Under the hood I have no doubt it’s terrific. It’s certainly fast, and I like some aspects of the new design — tabs on the top, notably.

But it’s lacking in so many ways compared to Firefox that I don’t plan to use is as my “daily driver.” Firefox is better.

Here’s why.

Most importantly, with Chrome I lose all my Firefox extensions, from Twitterbar (for easy Twitter posts) to BugMeNot (for easy logins) to ColorZilla (for identifying colors on a page) to DOM Inspector for examining a page’s structure.

There’s no Scrapbook for saving chunks of Web pages. No Forecastbar for showing me the weather. And there’s very limited control over cookies the way you have with the wonderful CookieCuller extension.

I can’t sync my bookmarks from one browser to another. With Firefox I use Foxmarks, and my bookmarks on my home computer are the same as those on my work machine. (And with Portable Firefox on my thumb drive, those bookmarks travel with me to any computer.) If I want that with Chrome, I have to navigate to a Web site like del.icio.us instead of having it update automatically.

The toolbar is set in stone; you can’t customize it as you can in Firefox. That was one of my complaints about Internet Explorer 7.

Then there are little things.

Unlike Firefox, Chrome doesn’t remember the last download location; it always defaults to whatever is set in the user preferences. With Firefox, if I download an image and save it to, say, c:\images, the next time I go to download one it will start me in that folder (until I close the browser). When I’m working on a project that uses lots of pics I download, I put them all in one project folder. With Chrome, I have to navigate to that folder over and over. Annoying.

Chrome, as I said, is a fine browser. It may well be faster than Firefox. But it was clearly designed with only basic end-users in mind, whereas Firefox works for both those folks and people like me who have come to rely on the terrific extra functions available with all those extensions.

I’m really impressed by the Web sites that have sprung up to spread information about Hurricane Gustav. No government required — regular folks created full-featured sites for people to share information, photos, videos, and whatever as Gustav approached and struck.

Just like Wikipedia, the Hurricane Gustav Wiki allows anyone to add and edit content, creating a one-stop for information. Information like….

…traffic maps, aid agencies and donations, federal and local government resources, FEMA registration, postal services, insurance information, national and local phone numbers, animal rescue resources, health and safety information, shelter lists, ham radio resources…

You get the idea. All of this is created and maintained by average Janes and Joes. And that, my friends, is the power of social media. A government-created site would have info, sure, but you can guarantee it wouldn’t be nearly as comprehensive (ham radio info?), and wouldn’t include on-the-ground updates, e,g., “The 14th street shelter is full — don’t bother going there.”

Meanwhile, the Gustav Information Center, also set up by regular folks, is more of a social network in that users can post blog entries, photos, video, and so on. It even has an interactive map showing evac routes and shelters. If you want the latest news on what’s really going on, that’s the place to be. (It’s not just user-created stuff. It’s also pulling in mainstream news feeds related to the storm.)

Even if you aren’t affected by Gustav, it’s worth taking a step back and marveling at this stuff. The Gustav Wiki was built using the same software that powers Wikipedia. From experience I can say that it probably took about two hours to set up, if that. The Gustav Info Center was created on Ning, a site that lets anyone set up a social network in a matter of minutes.

In other words, all this incredible, high-end functionality took the creators no time at all to have up and running. And now they’re the defacto home pages for the storm.

(The Center for Social Media has a short post about both these sites, too.)

• • •

Looking at all this got me into researching social-network software in case anything interesting ever happens. :) I could use Ning, but I like the idea of self-hosted stuff. I first looked at content-management systems (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla), then social network packages (Elgg) and finally realized that what I wanted was groupware. And the big name in that category is TikiWiki.

So I’m creating a test platform to see how long it would take me to create “Whatever Information Center.” It doesn’t have to be a disaster, of course; it could be “Richmond Election Day Information Center” or “Summer Kids’ Activities” or whatever. I’m tossing around ideas in my head (not a long distance to toss) about what such a site would need and what it wouldn’t.

Who knows — maybe next time I’ll be the one running a site like this.z