The Chris Courier

Hot Yoga

2011-10-23T00:14:00.001-07:00

So, I tried hot yoga today. I'd tried yoga before, but found it infuriating trying to follow abstract instructions ("reach with the roof of your mouth", "extend your tailbone", "unfurl your heart", etc). I liked the stretching, and I could definitely stand to be a bit more flexible. I also really liked feeling that I got a full workout out of the deal. Hot yoga came up because I figured in a stressful, hot environment there wouldn't be any patience for that metaphorical instructions bullshit. Also, Sweatbox Yoga has a pretty sweet intro deal. First off, I'm happy to report that I was right. I really liked this instructor. She just told you what to bend, what to flex, what to press into what, it was great. So, in short, the "yoga" part of hot yoga was great. Turns out the hot part of it isn't so great. At first it didn't seem to bad. It wasn't as hot as a sauna, and I really liked just laying on the ground in a warm room, breathing in warm air. Truth be told, I was imagining I was in Hawaii, and the heat pretty much sold that illusion. But then we did yoga. There were 3 sections. I paused once in the first section because I was short on breath. I stopped halfway through the second section because I was dizzy. And I didn't do much of the third section, except the very last bit, because I was still super dizzy. (by "stopped" I mean I either knelt or lay down on the mat. They recommend you do either if you feel dizzy or nauseous. The class goes on without you though and you can back in whenever you want) But that wasn't the worst part. After leaving, I was starved and dehydrated. I had brunch and took a nap, but it took me pretty much the rest of the day to shake my dehydration headache and that odd feeling of dizziness. Even then, my muscles still felt entirely spent, like I'd just finished an Ultimate tournament. I had no energy to do anything until about 6pm. The class had ended at 11:30am So yeah, it kicked my ass. I might do it once again and super hydrate beforehand, just to make sure this experience wasn't a fluke. Even saying that, it sounds like a stupid idea, but I guess I am an engineer.

Bike commuting

2011-10-04T08:42:00.001-07:00

I don't have the time for full, well thought out blog posts. I could make the time, but frankly I'm happy with the amount of time I spend doing other things. But for the time being, I hope to make more frequent (but shorter) updates here. I'm trying to keep up this bike commuting thing. I really like how quickly I can get to work, and I like that I'm doing it under my own power. Not so much because it saves gas, but because it helps works exercise into a daily routine that I have to do anyway. Its also awesome to use the roads and not be a car when there's a good amount of traffic. Especially riding on a freshly tuned-up bike. We'll see how long I can keep this up. I probably need to buy a few things as it gets colder and wetter, like a jacket that's actually waterproof and splash guards for my tires. For now, a change of clothes seems to be working just fine.

Lullabye

2011-05-09T23:24:00.000-07:00

I wrote this song, and it turns out its too hard to play correctly and sing at the same time. So I couldn't do a video for it. So all i have is the mp3.

Get the mp3 here.

Lyrics:
When you go to sleep at night
And you wonder whats inside
Of the closet in your room
And your head is filled with doom

Well you know that daddy's here
Just to wash away your fear
If you follow all these rules
Then you will not die by ghouls, so

Put away, put away, put away your toys
Don't kiss, don't kiss, don't kiss the boys
Say no, say no, say no to drugs
Don't deal, don't deal don't deal with thugs

while these rules are a short list
I hope there's none you have missed
For it'd be a tragedy
If you disobeyed me

Because daddy knows best
Now please try and get some rest
I just hope you listened well
Or you will see beasts from hell, so

Now you may be wondering as you drift slowly off into the night
If this song was just made up to give you such a terrible fright

That is simply not the case

But in fact this song was written by a wizard in a magic land
To protect all the children from the land's evil inhabitants

But only kids who follow these rules:

I can see you rest at ease
And this makes me very pleased
Because you are not afraid
So my rules you have obeyed

I hope you dream of something good
Just like all little girls should
I won't say another peep
And I'll let you get to sleep

My girl

Hitler Potlatch Bid

2011-05-08T23:12:00.000-07:00

We slapped together a potlatch bid this year. The deadline really snuck up on us. Craig came up with the idea and script, and I threw it together in iMovie. Enjoy.

Junk Food

2011-05-08T23:07:00.000-07:00

Download the mp3 here.

Lyrics:
Hello
I see we meet again.
As I stroll through the mall
With my group of friends
I try to look away
But my eyes stray

Okay.

We may have ended badly
But you were always sweet
Ever since I left you
I just don't feel complete.
Whats there left to do
Except admit that i love you

Junk food.

I love your every Ruffle
I love your every Mound
Once I've popped I cannot stop
I just won't put you down.
High fructose corn syrup
And artificial cheese
When you're talking dirty
You bring me to my knees

I have even more fun
When you're sold two for one

Delicious!

Doctor says that you are really poor for my health
I should give you up and exercise as well
But what does he know, an expert in his field
All his scientific tests can't capture how i feel..

I've been thinking over
Our relationship
We've become codependent
And youre a bag of chips

The truth is simply
That we can never be
We may meet again
Perhaps in aisle 10
But until that day
I have to walk away.

Goodbye junk food.

Creative Time

2011-05-03T11:43:00.000-07:00

My "update this blog daily" goal has fallen by the wayside. The last thing I told myself was that April was an odd month; so many changes with respect to work. That debt of entries could be annulled or at least be a debt ceiling I could maintain. But May, man. Once May comes around I'm going to hit the ground running.

But wouldn't you know it, it's already May 3rd. I'm still on break between jobs. I'm really excited about going to work next week, but I'm also really enjoying the time off. I've been putting my creative juices to other projects that I've been neglecting. I know I'm about 2 entries behind on posting songs that I've written. I've got some more on the way. I'm also finally making my wallet out of netflix strips. You'll see what I mean.

Also, it seems that every adventure that I take on now requires a YouTube video for admittance. I got in to the World Henchmen Organization puzzle hunt with this lovely video. And it looks like I've got less than a week to throw something together for Potlatch. Fun fun fun fun fun fun fun.

I'll try to not slack off so much on posting in here. But no promises.

Thoroughbreds of Sin: Villainous Deeds

2011-04-20T11:03:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen this yet, enjoy:

It's probably the most ambitious creative project I've done in a while. In the span of about a week, I figured out the tune, wrote some lyrics, filmed my puzzle troupe acting goofy, and edited the whole thing. It was definitely 2 late nights of editing; making music is way easier than making a music video.

I might make a behind-the-scenes post if I have time. But for now, enjoy the video.

Goodbye, Hello

2011-04-13T13:35:00.000-07:00

The big news:

Next Friday will be my last day of work at Amazon. I'm leaving to join Decide, an electronics shopping startup in Downtown Seattle.

I joined on to (what would become) the AWS Elastic Beanstalk project very early on, and I'm proud to have seen it through to completion. There are still tons of useful features that can be built into the system, and I do believe that Elastic Beanstalk will only get more powerful and easier to use as time goes on.

I'm excited to move on to Decide. It's a small, smart team with a great idea. I'll be working with a good number of folks that I met when I worked for (Live Search) Farecast. This will also be my first start-up job, so it doesn't feel like just another job at a giant company; it feels like I'm starting an adventure.

Not to mention the fact that I won't be able to talk about my work publicly again for a while. Finally. Explaining Elastic Beanstalk to your average Joe is tough. "It's a secret" is a much simpler response. :P

Behind

2011-04-09T20:48:00.001-07:00

I'm way behind on my writing schedule. This is the last you'll hear me mention it, because I don't want my blog to become countless personal account of how I haven't been writing enough.

Suffice to say, things have been happening. Those things will be written about, but later. And I'll probably abandon the "write blog posts as if they're fictional stories" trend I tried to set myself for this month. Random fiction without a cohesive narrative can't be interesting.

Stay tuned.

Master Plan

2011-04-06T19:00:00.000-07:00

Seeing as there is nothing you can do to stop what I've set in motion, I figured I'd let you in on this little operation I've got going on.

As you no doubt have noticed, things have been quite different recently. A little more characterization here. A little more narration there. You have noticed these things, and you find yourself asking, "Why?"

The answer is as simple as it is diabolical.

Little do you know, that you've become part of my experiment.

For a while, everything was good. You had worked hard to achieve a lofty goal of writing constantly, improving your ability. You knew it would be a challenge, but I kept you from thinking it was impossible. If you had thought that you wouldn't have tried, and I wouldn't have been able to conduct my further research.

Everything was going well up until last week. Something changed, shifted. I had tried to pique your interest like I had done so many times before, but it wasn't working. You just weren't biting at my bait. I kept giving you things to write about, but you just didn't want to write. Not because you had nothing to say, but because you had become disenchanted with the skill, with the process. Ideas just weren't enough. You needed style.

And here we are. Let me peel back that fourth wall. This is an experiment. This is a challenge. A challenge made exclusively for you. What you write about doesn't after anymore. But you can't keep writing it the same way it's always been.

No more rants about shitty things. No more analysis over techy things. No more long winded and detailed autobiographical tales. Just fiction. Pure fiction. For one month.

Enjoy.

James: Bargain Hunter

2011-04-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

James was thrifty, but he wasn't cheap. He knew the value of spending the extra dollar on quality where it was useful. He also knew the value of patience, and how time managed to make even the most valuable things worthless.

Video games were his only vice. He couldn't control his fascination with them. There was always a new character to become, a new setting to visit, a new weapon to use on a new kind of enemy. And James had to have them all.

Despite this drive, he still maintained his quirks. He was still James, after all.

He'd watch new games come out, and plan accordingly. A month or two after the game's release, there'd be some sucker willing to part with the game for half of what they paid for it. Then James could swoop in, buy it for cheap, and play it. And if it wasn't a keeper, he could still sell it for about as much (or sometimes more) than what he paid for it.

But that was only if a game really got to him. He usually tried to play games a few years later than everyone else. Wait until there's a "Platinum Hits" edition, a marketing gimmick to sell popular games of yesteryear as if they were new again. Or a "Game of the Year" edition, which would include all the extra maps and expansion packs they made to upsell the original game for free. And then wait til that edition dropped to half price.

Still, with all this careful watching and planning, sometimes the excitement of something new got the best of him. A game would look so good that he'd just have to preorder it. He tried his best to reason with his impulse side. Or at least put a number value on his impulse purchases.

It boiled down to this. $30 was an acceptable impulse-buy point for games that had only been out for a few months. You could pick these up used or on featured deals sites. $20 was the limit for any other game, including the GOTY editions. And unless James already knew he liked the game, he never spent less than $10. Those alway s tended to be the crap games that only sold for so cheap because no one would buy them.

Late Post

2011-04-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

He was late.

That was the only thought that ran through his head as he fled down the narrow corridor. Shit. There was no way he could make up for the lost time.

The worst part about it was that he couldn't remember where the time had gone. The last thing he remembered was sitting in the lobby of a fancy hotel, dressed in a sharp suit and waiting for his friend to come down from the 30th floor. An older man had sat next to him and tried to strike up a casual conversation. But he would have none of it. It was too late for him to care enough to feign interest in an old man's tales.

But it was all he could think about now, as he turned a sharp right corner into an even narrower alley. Those last moments, lingering images of a time when things made sense and he had the privilege to be annoyed by something so trite. The red, velvet couch he sat on. The old man's grisly voice pushing through an overgrown mustache that was peppered with all shades of grey. The radiant light glinting off of the crystal chandeliers that floated above their heads.

Somehow that had turned into a blind dash through the back alleys. A race against time to get to the only man who could explain all of this before it was too late.

DASH3

2011-04-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

I'm one of the staff members for the upcoming DASH3. For those who don't know, it's a puzzling event that takes place simultaneously across a number of cities.

This past weekend, we ran through a test of DASH3 with 4 teams. We essentially ran the full event with a skeleton crew, taking notes of solve times, routing information, and general puzzle feedback. I can't say much in the way of specifics -- I don't want to give anything away for those who will be participating in the main event on April 30th.

What I didn't know was that this was also a test of how I'd hold up in running a DASH. I've helped run other puzzle events before (like the Microsoft Intern Game) but this was a slightly different beast.

In short, here's what I've learned:

Bring a hat. It will probably be cold, and you will want a hat.
Be ready to get wet. It was dry for most of the day, but it was definitely pretty constantly raining outside.
Theo Chocolate is delicious. But I knew that already.

Thankfully, I think I survived the weekend without getting sick. Fingers crossed.

April Project

2011-03-31T19:00:00.000-07:00

I don't think I'll have a specific April Project. I've got my hands full with a lot of different odds and ends that need finishing and/or starting. Including

Recording 2 new songs. I have them written, I just need to take the time to record them
Kathryn's Health Website. I said I'd make a website for her. I should probably get to that.
Boomerang v2. Potlatch and July seem so far away. But I'd rather get all that squared away sooner rather than later.
Blog posts. I'm behind again, I think? It's so hard to keep track.

The first one will definitely be finished soon. Hopefully by the end of this weekend. But the rest? We'll see.

Beer Jenga

2011-03-29T20:26:00.001-07:00

At Laura's party a while back, we played quite a few games. Some of them were drinking games. One of which I hadn't ever heard of before, but I really liked it. It's called Beer Jenga.

It sort of feels like Jenga. There's suspense, and everyone tries to move very slowly and very carefully. There's also the moments of "oh, wait, don't move, I think it's about to collapse" and then riotous cheers when it all implodes. But it might not b what you think.

What I thought it would be is that we would play Jenga and then drink when we make it fall over. Turns out its a bit more involved than that.

To play, take a pitcher of beer. Then, put a small or medium-sized glass in the pitcher, so it floats. Everyone should have a cup of the same beer. When it's your turn, pour as much beer as you want into the floating cup. It should only be one continuous pour, but in that pour you can dump as little or as much beer as you want. If you're the one to pour enough beer in that it makes it sink, then you lose. Loser has to fish the sunken glass out & drink all the beer that's in it.

It was fun all around! It takes a bit of skill to get used to pouring just a drop of beer in. I never had to drink when we played it. Which was probably good for me, considering how much I had had to drink that night anyway.

Point of technique, though: a number of folks had squeezed their red plastic cups of beer so that they came to a nice point. They would then use this to help them more accurately pour a drop of beer.

That's bullshit. You don't get to re-shape your cup to make it easier to pour. Just pour it over the normal, rounded side. Yeah, it might be harder. That's what makes it fun. If everyone could pipette their beer in then the chemical engineering students with years of titration skills would kick our asses. And they'd think it was work.

But house rules let it slide. So it's cool. I just gave em shit for doing it. That'll teach em.

Enegy Crisis: Solved

2011-03-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

Japan's recent problems with the safety of its nuclear energy program have gotten number of folks in the US wondering how safe nuclear power is. Are our current facilities equipped to handle a natural disaster without a complete meltdown? How will we meet the power demands of the future if not for nuclear energy?

Well, I've also heard that this nation is under a somewhat large obesity epidemic. I think we can kill 2 birds with one stone here.

Why not make a different kind of gym that effectively works as a power plant? With really cheap (possibly free) dues, get a whole bunch of folks who want to work out together, give them some equipment to use that converts their mechanical energy into electrical energy, and voila. People lose weight, the community gets power.

Essentially, all we're doing is repurposing the stored energy in folks excess fat cells and using it to do more useful work. Like power my Xbox.

And folks nowadays pay tons of money for the privilege to go to these gyms that actually use electricity to help these folks run around. What a waste of energy!

I really think this could work. Either it's a brilliant new idea, or someone else thought of it and the economics don't work out. Which I'd believe. I'm not sure how much the electric company pays folks for adding power to their grid, but be biking for 45 minutes probably isn't a whole lot of power...

Plug-ins Development

2011-03-27T19:00:00.000-07:00

I've now tried my hand at writing plug-ins for Safari, Chrome and Firefox (using JetPack). I haven't tried this sort of thing before, but I really like where this kind of thing is going. The chorus of focus placed on HTML, CSS and JavaScript really make developing plug-ins for these web browser very simple.

My Plug-in
First off, a caveat. I'm not doing anything complex. All I wanted to do was automatically inject a bit of JavaScript on certain pages. It's a very short script that only took about 2 hours to write, test, and debug. A lot of the frameworks for developing plug-ins provide a wonderfully broad set of features to support a wide array of plug ins. Plug-ins that try and add UI-features, leverage browser-specific abilities, or do anything that can't be generalized to all web browsers would probably be a bit more difficult.

Safari
This was my first attempt. It's my current default browser (I rotate what my default browser is every few months) so it was the first one I wanted my plug in to work with.

The documentation was an amazing help. It pretty clearly explained how to get what I wanted done, done. Safari's extension builder provided a clean UI to configure and install my web app, even if it didn't do a great job explaining what all the options were (the documentation filled that gap).

While I would say Safari was the most user-friendly browser to develop for, there were a few highly technical glitches that might deter beginners. First, I had to deal with signing up for the Safari Developer Program, getting an Apple-signed cert that lets me install custom plug-ins, then installing that cert on my dev machine. I can see how this makes it "secure", but it was busy work I had to do before I could really get to work. It was annoying.

Additionally, when I was finished, hosting and auto-updating my plug-in was another highly technical pain point. Apple doesn't provide hosting for Safari plug-ins, so you've got to find your own way to distribute them. Additionally, you can specify a URL for Safari to check for updates, but oddly enough that URL doesn't go to the latest version of your plug-in. It goes to a very specific XML file that lists version numbers and locations for a bunch of plug ins. Again, it works, but making me manually edit and host an XML file isn't quite as streamlined as editing config options with the built in Extension Builder. It's just not very Apple-y.

Chrome
A lot of the concepts used by Chrome extensions are the same. Just specify HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and you're good to go. A good number of the configuration options are the same as well.

Unfortunately, Chrome lacks the slick tools that Safari has. Rather than a nice UI for editing config, I had to manually edit a manifest file. To their credit, the manifest was just pure JSON, so it wasn't that bad to use, and immensely better than that XML pList stuff I had to do for Safari's auto-update feature.

I also didn't have to do any nasty cert management. I just told Chrome to use the folder with my plugin and it worked.

Everything else was pretty much a breeze. Chrome provides hosting for your plug in, and you can auto-update from there. The biggest drawback was that hosting anything in the Chrome Web Store costs $5, but that's a one-time fee. And, unlike Apple's registration process, I didn't have to do that if I just wanted to toy with an extension on my computer.

However, there was a sharp moment of confusion when I uploaded my extension to the Chrome Web Store. The form explicitly asked for a zip file of my extension. When you package up a chrome extension, it zips it up and adds a .crx file extension to the end of it. But that's not good enough for the Chrome Web Store: you need to unpack it, then zip it up, then submit it. Why they made me take these extra useless steps boggles my mind.

Firefox
Last (and least) there's Firefox. I generally like Firefox as a browser, but trying to develop a plug-in for Firefox made me appreciate how much work has gone into all the other Firefox plug-ins that I use today.

At first I wanted to make a plug-in for Firefox 3.6. I started reading docs. There were XUL and NPAPI and ugh, who knows what other custom languages and technologies for me to learn. This was not going to be fun.

Then I found Jetpack. I thought it was a feature coming with Firefox 4 to make developing plug ins as easy as it was in Chrome and Safari. Turns out, it's a utility to generate all that XUL and Firefox-specific goblety-gook out of the standard HTML, CSS & JavaScript.

Well, actually, just HTML & Javascript. There's no CSS support. I had to translate my CSS to text and write some custom JavaScript code to inject it. And it turns out the JavaScript support is quite limited. You really don't have the same power that you have with developing plug-ins for other browsers.

But it's a beta. It's severely behind its competitors, but it's showing signs that it's on the right track. And once I figured out the pile of default folders and files needed to properly create a Firefox plugin, I was well on my way to being done. All the gripes I had about it had already been entered into some feature-tracking product on their site, and it's really just a matter of time until that gets it sorted out.

Conclusion
I didn't touch IE or Opera. Mainly because (a) I think it can't possibly be easy to develop for and (b) I don't use it enough on a regular basis, respectively.

But overall, plug in/extension development is on the right track. It's pretty easy to get simple cross-browser features running in different browsers. Large chunks of code were re-used for the majority of these plug-ins. And a lot of the pain was just the first-time setup cost of doing plugin development.

I'd definitely do this again, if I thought of something else I wanted to change the browser to do. :)

Off the Rails Again

2011-03-26T20:42:00.000-07:00

Shit's gone off the rails again. I'mma need time to fix it.

I was on track after my short vacation to SF, but things quickly degenerated. It was a bad week.

Now I've got more to do, the least of which is catching up blog posts. Ugh. And instead of doing any of that, I'm just escaping back into my video games.

In related news, Bulletstorm isn't as fun as you'd think.

Introducing: Lendable for Amazon Kindle

2011-03-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

Ever since I started using Lendle to borrow and lend kindle books, I've become more passionate about ebook lending. I've gone into it on other posts, but the core feature I'd like to see added to ebook lending is the ability to lend a book more than once, just like you could sigh a physical book. But we're not there yet.

Step one is getting as many ebooks to enable lending as possible. So I've decided not to buy Kindle books that don't have lending enabled.

Then I saw a problem. It's pretty hard to discern from Amazon's product page if a given Kindle book is lendable or not. They hide it all the way down in the product details section. And for non-lendable books, they just don't mention lending at all, which is vague and confusing. So, I figured out a way to make it much easier to tell if a Kindle book is lendable or not. I'm calling it Lendable for Amazon Kindle.

There are 2 ways to install & use Lendable for Amazon Kindle:

Bookmarklet
This is the most broad solution that should work in any browser. Just drag the following link into your bookmarks bar:

Lendable?

When you are at an Amazon.com page for a Kindle book, just click on the bookmarklet. The page will update, clearly indicating in green or red if the book in question is lendable of not.

Browser Plug-in
If you don't want to have to click every time you visit a Kindle book, you can install one of these browser plug-ins. They automatically update the display of these pages; all you have to do is visit them.

Safari

Chrome

Firefox 4.0

Enjoy! Feel free to leave feedback, questions, or comments here.

Ching Chong (It means "I love you")

2011-03-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

Craig: you probably shouldn't read this.

As part of my trip to SF, I did have a late night youtube-viewing session with my buddy, Beamer. It's the same situation that social networks try to make happen over large distances. But it just doesn't have the same "I'm bored and awake at 2:30am and don't want to sleep, what can I watch" vibe to it.

He showed me this recent gem about a woman who was upset that some folks would take cell phone calls in the library, disrupting her concentration. That sounds like a pretty normal complaint, but she phrased it differently:

There is so much wrong with this video. Apparently this girl has had a ton of shit heaped on her & her family for these racially insensitive comments. I won't rail on her any more than other folks already have; she knows what she said was stupid to say, she just didn't realize that ranting to a webcam in her room meant that she could be ranting to a global audience. She knows that now.

What I really like is some folks' ability to make these gorgeously creative gems out of such horrible source material.

There are also various trance remixes & auto-tuned versions of the rant. I'll let you find those on your own.

I don't really have much more commentary to add. I genuinely wish more folks had the sense of creativity and the sense of humor that these independent song writers/remixers do. Hopefully we can genuinely reduce and eventually eliminate these kinds of simplistic opinions, rather than simply shaming them to harbor their ill-targeted malice in a more private setting. But for the time being, making entertainment from their unpopular opinions seems to be a nice enough step.

San Francisco!

2011-03-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

Last weekend-ish, Kathryn & I took a trip to the bay area. We went down to see & hang with a bunch of my college friends that I hadn't seen in a while. It was also Laura's birthday, so we went to a house party nearby to celebrate.

As you can see, it was a good party.

This is one of those times I wish I had taken more pictures. But there are plenty of pictures of me looking ridiculous, so maybe not having a few more isn't a bad thing.

We definitely got a few of the California-vacation-specific achievements out of the way:

Ate at In-n-Out.
Bought liquor in a grocery store.
Walked along Pier 39 & The Embarcadero (Didn't see Bushman, but I have since been convinced that he actually does exist, based on his 4-star rating on yelp)
Had amazing Mexican food in the Mission.

The weather was unfortunately very atypical for California. We had one or two dry days, but most of it was pretty cloudy and rainy. No more than it normally does in Seattle, though, so Kathryn & I were fine. It was pretty funny to see our friends freak out about a light mist or to hear them complain about how cold the 57-degree weather is.

It was a great trip overall. It's always good to see old friends. I may make an effort to tell smaller stories from my trip. We'll see. :)

iPad Writing

2011-03-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

iPad Writing

I'm a little surprised how much quicker I've got at making blog posts. Okay, to be fair, I don't know if I've actually gotten any quicker. But they do seem to come easier. They seem to flow a bit more. They also seem to be better written, but that could just be me psyching myself up. This would be all for naught if, after writing daily, my quality of writing deteriorated.

I don't know how I got so behind. I've been writing double entries almost every day this week in an effort to increase my post count. It seems that missing a couple weekends of posts puts me in quite a hole.

I've also been giving writing on my iPad a go with the last few entries. I don't think it has any impact on the quality of my writing, but it's a nice change of pace. I feel very futuristic methodically tapping glass in order to make text appear. And oddly enough, the ever-present clicking noise to simulate the auditory feedback of a key press hasn't been as annoying as it was on my iPhone. Except if you're not the one doing the typing, or so I'm told.

The biggest issues? The same ones found on any netbook. The keyboard doesn't have an apostrophe key. It's certainly better than my actual netbook keyboard, since a full set of symbols is just an extra press away, and if I can just think forward enough to not use an apostrophe then odds are the autocorrect feature will just fill it in for me. But years of typing muscle memory a hard to overcome.

I really wish I had this in college. It would have been so nice to carry something like this to class, take notes, and in all likelihood play addictive games as a distraction in the boring classes. It'd also be great if I could get ebook textbooks. I really wouldn't need to carry anything else.

But those days are past. The best I could hope for is extensively using this for a big writing goal, like Nanowrimo. Bringing this thing with me is certainly less difficult than bringing a real laptop. So I could really write from anywhere for a month. Although I'd probably still do most of my writing from home anyway. Writing in other environments tends to be too distracting (last time I tried writing on a bus, I got very little written and a giant headache to show for it)

I've got a big weekend ahead of me. I'm probably going to fall behind on posts, even with all the extra work I've been doing to keep up. Oh well. With any luck, I'll come back with a bunch more stories to write about that should help I'll the void of posts my a sense leaves behind on the internet.

:)

Slog in the Bog

2011-03-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

A while back, I played at an Ultimate tournament called Slog in the Bog. It's really just the first tournament after winter; it's a sign that things are getting better and summer's on the way. Unfortunately, it's usually punctuated by freezing temperatures, harsh rain, and the occasionally flurry of snow.

This year was no different. It didn't have snow, but it was constantly raining and absolutely freezing. The fields had large puddles of standing water -- I'm impressed they let us play on those fields. But, they were grass fields, which always gets me excited about playing D. Laying out when it's wet and the ground is soft is the absolute best time to lay out.

I could go on about the tournament: We had crews there early and late to set up. We planned ahead and got reservations for dinner so we wouldn't be starving. We played well and ended up winning 2 of the 5 games that day. Fun was had all around. But that feels like the usual tournament recap fodder.

What I really want to show you is this:

Falling with style

In our third or fourth game, an older man was walking along the sideline. He carried a pretty big camera. It was clear he wasn't there to play, he was just there to take pictures. He noticed someone on the opposing team who also had a large digital SLR camera taking pictures of the action, and was asking him for advice. He seemed to be full of practical action photography advice that I hadn't ever really thought of: where to stand depending on which team had possession, what to look for, where to focus the camera. All interesting stuff.

Then I forgot about their conversation and went on playing our game. Due to the weather, there was a lot of swill. One point I was on was particularly bad. I was a side cutter in the horizontal. A throw went up towards a cutter in the middle, but the wind caught it and it slowly floated back down. I managed to attack that while the nearby defenders were waiting for it to fall, I caught it and fed it back to the nearest handler. Then I returned upfield.

A few throws later, it happened again, but without the luxury of time. A crisp outside-in backhand was heading right towards an in-cutter. Suddenly, the wind caught the outside edge of the disc, and it jumped up just above the receiver before she could catch it. As it was rocketing down the field, I saw it curving towards me. I sprinted towards the disc and made a flying leap to save it.

Then the old man snapped that picture.

He showed it to me when the point ended and we came off the field. He had all these photography based critiques about it. He wished he had captured a bit further in front so the disc wasn't cut off. I was a bit out of focus. I told him I didn't care; I thought it was awesome. This was really the first picture of me layout out that was absolutely clear it was me. Up until now, the closest I had was this:

...which you basically have to trust is me, since I'm so small & blurry in it (I'm the one in white).

I'm pretty sure my mouth was open in that shot too, because that's how I lay out.

My Bike

2011-03-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

I've begun to bike places more often. Part of the reason why is health: in general I like the idea of exercising while I commute. Part of it is cost: I save money on gas and parking, and members fees at a gym that I might have to join in order to get this same amount of exercise. And, part of it is just because I enjoy biking.

(part of it is also the fact that Moya, my car, tends to have her alarm go off at all odd hours of the morning while nighttime joy riders drive super fast down the road by Kathryn's house. Not being woken up, sometimes repeatedly, in the middle of the night is something amazing you don't know you have until it's gone)

The story of bike is an interesting one.

When I was growing up, I would bike every day to school. This was the case ever since I learned to bike back in grade school. This would happen rain or shine, and there always were a few days a year when I would have to go the whole morning completely drenched since it had been raining on the bike in. Fortunately, this was northern California, so that kind of rainy day was few and far between.

When I went to college, I didn't bring my bike. I didn't need it. My brother, on the other hand, did need a bike, as his had fallen to pieces over the years. So, when I left, I let him use my bike. It seemed like a simple enough solution, at the time.

A few years passed, and two things happened at about the same time.

First, I found a bike abandoned in the bushes after one of my frisbee practices. It was rusty, partially flat, and the rear brake pad has been completely worn down. It was not a great bike. But I decided it would make my trips up and down the hill to my apartment a bit faster (well, down the hill, anyways). After a week or so with this crappy found bike, I began to wonder what had happened to my high school bike.

Second, Alan was finishing high school and moving on to college. He also decided that he wouldn't need a bike once he went to college, since everything would be in walking distance.

You would think this would have a simple solution, but no.

I called home and asked what happened to my bike. I got a curt reply. "That's Dad's bike now."
"What? No, I mean my bike. The one Alan was using."
"Yeah, that's Dad's now. He's going to leave it up in Tahoe so he can use it when he goes up there."

I won't go in to my dad a lot, but this is typical him. He'll just completely disrespect us, pull some shit, then get angry and yell about how he pays for everything, even though our mother is the primary breadwinner.
Apparently, Dad thought it was an old bike in need of a few upgrades. Especially if he was going to be riding it. So when Alan left, he took it to the shop, and poured about $800 worth of upgrades into the thing. He spent the money on it, so now it's his. Plain and simple.

I told him I didn't care how much money he put into the bike, it wasn't his to repair. It was still my bike and he couldn't take it. Despite my moral high ground, he had the physical advantage of actually having the bike, as opposed to me being an hour away at University. So, I lost. My dad stole my bike.

He tried to make it up to me when I came home for the summer. On my birthday, he gave me a brand new bike. It was not well received. Not only did it drudge up our argument (after all, his unscrupulous actions were the only reason I needed a new bike in the first place) but the bike was a weighty behemoth. It had adjustable shocks, disc brakes, thumb shifters, wide tires, all kinds of things you'd expect to see in a quality off-road bike.

Except I wasn't planning on off-roading at all. I needed a commuter bike. Definitely not this. If you go out of your way to create someone's need for a gift, as tasteless as it is to get them that gift, you could at least make it a good one.

I didn't like the gift. My dad didn't understand why. This bike was worth more than my old bike, more than the upgrades that he paid for improving my old bike. Do I know how much it costs? I should love this bike.

Needless to say, I never used it.

That is, until last summer. Kathryn moved from West Seattle to Ravenna, and she had to get her old bike to her new house somehow. I suggested we make a day trip out of it. Pack a couple of snacks, plan a relatively easy route, and just explore the city on our bikes.

I went to the storage unit below my apartment to pull this baggage-laden behemoth out into the light of day. It's the only bike I had, and it would get me along our picnic route quite nicely.

When we both started biking regularly, I looked at replacing it. But there were so many options, so many different types, so many price points. I tried to take a road bike for a test drive, but I happened to try this when all the road bikes were rented out for an annual bike race from Seattle to Portland. Then, the weather turned south, and that was enough to keep me from riding my bike for a little while. It was enough time where I questioned if a new bike would be a worthy investment, or if I would just spend the cash only to have my new bike hide out, once again, in my storage unit.

So I stopped looking. Now I just use this gargantuan block of metal on fat tires to huff and puff my way up and down the Burke-Gilman trail. If I really can keep biking despite the weather, than I should give buying a road bike a second chance. But for now, this bike that should never have been bought, that I should have never gotten, that I somehow didn't manage to get rid of, will do just fine.

Term Papers

2011-03-18T19:00:00.000-07:00

Kathryn is stressing out about grading papers. Some kids just aren't trying and want good grades anyway. Others appear to be trying but don't have the communication skills to aptly transcribe their arguments. Or follow directions.

I can't stand this crap. Ages ago, from the student side of things, I hated the fact that I had to write papers for my major. My roommate, Alec, agreed with me.

"With technical topics," he'd explain, "there's always a right or a wrong answer. You either did it correctly, or you didn't. With English papers, it's all interpretive. You can have two papers which absolutely say opposite things and they'll both get passing grades."

And I took some bullshit classes to fill my English breadth requirements. I loved my theatre and poetry classes, but my Southeast Asian Studies and Repression Stories classes were both a waste of time and traumatizing, respectively. They fit my schedule, got me the credits I needed, and taught me a very formulaic way of cranking out papers that got me a good grade.

But all in all, I agree with Alec's sentiment. It's never about what you say, it's about how well you write. Which they can teach you in writing 101. But which they grade you for over and over in courses where the intention of the material is to teach you something else useful, not writing.

Maybe it's my harsh engineering-style black-or-white way of looking at education, maybe it's the fact that I'm not tasked with teaching these kids anything-- I don't have to see their faces every day, I don't humanize them. But if you're in a college-level course, and you're making me strain to understand the gibberish you've written to make some poorly constructed argument that's not even on topic, then eff you. You're not putting in any effort to write the paper, then why should I put in the effort to read it?

Chances are you will fail. No, I won't hold your hand and give you a C so you don't have to retake the course. I refuse to devalue the grades of the students who excelled in writing their papers, or even those who did a pretty good job, by polluting their ranks with your sorry excuse of an essay.

Deal with your failure, learn to write better, and try again next quarter.

Stop stressing my girlfriend out.

Sincerely,
Chris

PS: I can't tell if my hard line stance on grading would make me an excellent or a terrible teacher. I'd hope it's the former.

The Launch Party

2011-03-17T19:00:00.000-07:00

Some things sound so ridiculous when you hear about them, you think they must have been a joke when they were created. Sometimes that's about serving size. Other times, it's about software engineering.

Jokes.com

Brian Regan - Serving Size

comedians.comedycentral.com

Brian Regan Videos

Brian Regan Jokes

Brian Regan Standing Up

My team had a party to celebrate launching AWS Elastic Beanstalk (we launched in January). This was the big shindig, where everyone was encouraged to bring significant others, and all of the other teams involved in helping us launch got to hang out and have some free food & beer.

Kathryn came along with me. She was a bit nervous that the evening would devolve into geeky technobabble and she'd be completely lost. As much as I try and filter myself, sometimes I do slip into computer lingo. Or I simply forget that the lingo I'm using isn't widely understood outside the tech industry. Such conversations typically happen when I'm talking about my day:

"I just spent 4 hours in sprint planning."
"Sprint planning?"
"Yeah, what we're going to be working on next sprint."
"What's a sprint?"
"Oh, it's just 3 weeks worth of work."
"Are you always sprinting?"
"Yep"
"So then how is it a sprint?"

No surprise, software engineering has a particularly dense vernacular of common words used in uncommon ways. I don't bother to question how they're used, because when I learned them I just treated them as new words. It doesn't matter what "sprint" means in other contexts, in this context, a "sprint" is a time-bound span of work. But that just doesn't seem to work for Kathryn.

So when our cocktail party conversation drifted towards work, the overused engineering lingo reared its ugly head again. Kathryn still didn't understand why we'd overused these words in this manner, so she asked the group. Bill, a coworker who is particularly good at explaining things, tried to answer her.

"But you're not going any faster. You're always sprinting"
"But you see, it's different from Waterfall, where it took years to release updates. Now it's on the order of weeks. It's much faster."
"But you're still working at the same speed. Sprinting should be when you have to work extra hard or extra fast to get things done. The normal speed of working should just be called Doing Your Fucking Job."

...

Later on, Bill tried to explain software engineering principles in general. "It's all part of this process," he said, "Scrum is how you can develop software more quickly."
He paused. "Are you familiar with what a scrum is?"
She thought for a second. Then, it came to her, "Oh yeah, from rugby?"
"Yeah, exactly like a scrum in rugby."
"So you bash heads together and don't go very far or very fast?"

We laughed. Yes. Sometimes, that's exactly what agile development feels like.

Musings of #196

2011-03-16T19:00:00.000-07:00

I wrote this while waiting in line for the iPad 2 last week.

This is the ridiculousness. I'm #196 in line for an iPad 2. They tell us that they'll have enough. That I'll definitely be getting one. That is all I wanted to hear. That is all I want.

I drank a bit last night. Not to excess, but enough to make me exhausted. Despite my intention to stay awake til 1am and order them online to avoid the release-day lines, I valued some quality sleeping time instead. I passed out around 10:30pm consciously deciding that trying to force myself to order an iPad at 1am would be an unneccisary waste of effort. I could just order one online in the morning.

Then morning rolls around. I roll over in bed and launch the Apple Store app - an app I've really only used to schedule appointments at the Genius Bar so far. I tell it that I want an iPad. It says, "Great, that'll be 2-3 weeks".

2-3 weeks? Are you serious?

I'm normally a very patient man. I can rationalize waiting for most things. A new game coming out? It's okay; a month after release Amazon will likely have it in a GoldBox deal for 50% off. I can wait a month on that bet. Late to be somewhere? No sense in getting all worked up about it now, the car I'm in or the bus I'm waiting for won't be getting here any sooner if I'm stressing about it. And if something happens a little later, no big deal.

I don't know if Amazon Prime has set my expectations for 2-day delivery for all online purchases too high, or if Apple has the marketing ability to send me back into the mindset of a 7-year-old weeks before Christmas. Whatever it is, 2-3 weeks isn't cutting it. I wanted it and I wanted it NOW.

I start thinking tactically. How can I get what I want as soon as possible. I could just order it online. Fuck the wait; I wanted the first iPad when it came out but I decided to wait. I could wait another few weeks and get exactly what I want without another thought.

This is the cool, rational, planning me. This me makes sense.

But the 7-year-old yells "THAT'S STILL THREE GODDAMN WEEKS AWAY".

He's a cranky one.

The alternative is to go to an Apple store, wait in an epic line, and hope they have the model & accessories I want in stock. That spawns all kinds of other questions. How early should I try to go stand in line to secure my spot? What if they don't have the version I want? What if the line doesn't move fast enough (I'm supposed to grab dinner & a movie with my girlfriend tonight)?

BUT YOU HAVE TO GO THATS THE ONLY WAY I CAN GET IT NOOOOWWWW.

Or, I could go in next Tuesday morning. The Apple store is right by Kathryn's place and if you get there when they open they might have just gotten a new shipment...

TUESDAY IS NOT NOW I WANT IT NOOOOWWWW

And so, here I am. Like a tired mother giving her kid whatever he wants if it will just stop him from kicking and screaming and give me a moment of peace for once. A block away from the Apple store (that's how long the line is), seated on cold concrete, typing on my laptop.

And I've still got an hour to kill.

April Project

2011-03-16T07:00:00.000-07:00

I may be getting a bit ahead of myself. I still have 2 half-completed songs to finish and one more browser plug-in to write this month. But I'm already thinking what my April project should be. I've got lots of ideas swimming around in my head, but nothing jumping out.

iPhone Game
I want to make an iPhone game. Not a cross-smartphone webapp-style game, but an honest-to-goodness native iPhone game that I can give away or sell in the App Store.

I'm not so sure this, on its own, is a good project. My biggest motivation to do this is to play with Objective-C, the language used to write native iOS and OS X applications. I looked in to it a while ago; it's got some really interesting concepts not present in other language. But, as I've mentioned before, I can hardly stay motivated when my goal is explicitly learning.

There are other motivations. I want there to be more iPhone games so I can play them. It's also tempting to think that I could be the next rags-to-riches App developer and make tons of cash. Failing that, even if I only made a moderate sum it'd be nice to make money off of one my own projects, one of my own ideas, rather than explicitly making a living building other people's dreams.

Chrome App
The same thing could also be said if I wanted to build a Chrome Game. It'd really be just about that last bit though, not learning Objective-C. Somehow, this seems less appealing.

I'm hesitant to do either of these, because it seems like my motivation is in the wrong place. I don't even have a fully fleshed game idea, nevermind one that I think I'd actually enjoy playing. So all I really have for these projects is some vague desire to have something completed without actually knowing what it is I want to complete. So these projects might have to wait until I have a good game idea.

Kindle Book
Okay, so the theme might really be "I want to make money on one of these projects". But there are other motivations, too! I'd like to genuinely be published. I also enjoy writing fiction, I just tell myself I don't have enough time to really do it well.

Which absolutely isn't true, if Nanowrimo proves anything. I can make time to write a story. I just need to have it be a goal that I'm focused on.

This project also lacks a clear definition, but it's less worrying. Creativity can be like a strike of lightening, a giant shock appearing out of nowhere for an instant. More often, it's like static electricity: a bunch of smaller, almost invisible shocks that you only get by rubbing your feet up and down the entire carpet for a couple of hours. If I just try for long enough, I'll think of something interesting to write about.

But my biggest concern is keeping my project time diverse. I'm already writing daily in this blog. It's not fiction, but it's still writing. If I make it a month-long task to write fiction on top of my blog, I might get burned out from writing. And I'd rather not stop blogging just to focus my writing efforts in other areas.

Something else?
I've still got a while until April. So hopefully by then I'll have something figured out. Or I'll get inspired and do a completely different project. We'll see.

Easier iPhone games

2011-03-15T23:49:00.000-07:00

I realize that iPhone games aren't made to be particularly difficult. Just the opposite actually, most games are made to be a bit simple and repetitive. Their focus is on having you enjoy yourself as quick as possible, since odds are you're waiting at a bus stop, or standing in line to get on the bus, or on the bus that's not going anywhere in traffic. You don't have time for a deep, involved game that takes time to learn or skill to use.

And yet, Angry Birds is a skill based game that takes time to learn and get good at, mostly from trial and error. Cut the Rope requires you give some of the puzzles serious thought, others require quick reflexes. Doodle Jump requires persistence and a quick reaction time. These games are fun, but no doubt are alienating those with a lack of coordination, or only a few seconds to spare instead of minutes.

So, behold! My list of even easier iPhone games:

(Side note: I had intended to make mock screenshots of these games, but with all the other things I have to do this month, I'll just let you imagine them.)

Indifferent Birds
Some pigs stole these birds' eggs! But they don't seem too worried about it. Gameplay is like Angry Birds, but without a slingshot. Just after about 3 seconds in to each level, the birds shrug and walk away, and you get 3 stars.

Big Wings
This bird has always dreamed of flying. Thankfully, he has pretty big wings, so flying is effortless for him. Gameplay is just like Tiny Wings, but you don't have to worry about all that pesky swooping on the hills. You just gracefully fly from island to island, always escaping the sunset.

Leave The Rope Alone
Om Nom is a cute monster who wants candy. Thankfully, there's a bag of candy right next to him. So he eats candy. Also, there is a rope. Just don't touch it and you'll do fine.

Zero Blade
A scenic castle is seen in the distance as our hero stands at the edge of a cliff, pondering his fate. In an ancient dialog, he says "Father, I will avenge you." Then the camera pans a bit further back and we see his father standing next to him. "That's nonsense. Stop this dungeons and dragons fantasy, go inside and do your homework," he commands. "Yes sir," replies our hero. The End.

Doodle Stand
A Doodle guy stands in a wide variety of environments, including the Jungle and space. There are monsters floating above, but since he's not jumping, there's no chance he'd hit them.

Ground Control
Instead of managing planes trying to land, you have to manage planes who want to take off. The planes stay where they are unless you tell them to go somewhere. And they're not stupid; they'll out on the brakes if you try and make them drive in to each other. All you have to do is get them in line for takeoff.

Fruit Space Marine
Ninjas may need to be stealthy and work with weapons that silently slice to cause harm to their victims. Space Marines not only have guns, but they don't have to deal with pesky gravity. Fruit slowly floats on the screen, and you tap it to fill it full of holes from your semi-automatic weapon.

Hopefully someone will go ahead and make these games, so we can see iPhone games expand to even more casual gamers. Someone just taking one of these ideas and building it would be payment enough.

Unless you make it big, in which case I want 30%.

Motivation

2011-03-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

I feel like I've always got more things that I want to do than I have time to do them. I'm sure it's a common scenario. It's why I began this whole Project-A-Month deal; to force me to focus on one task at a time, give it a deadline, and to either complete it or fail at completing it. In the best case, I would complete a large chunk of the ambitious side projects that I've had burning a hole in my head. Worst case, it would shorten the list down.

I'm noticing a trend in my motivation level for various projects. Some of my projects, at their core, are about developing a skill. I want to learn Ruby on Rails, I want to learn the ins & outs of the new CSS3 hotness. These projects have the most long-term benefit. I'm learning skills that are immediately transferrable to other projects & realms.

You'd think the value these projects have would mean that I'd do them first. And that I'd enjoy doing them first. But I just can't get motivated to do them.

Then there's the other kind of projects. Write some songs. Make Statastic. Make some browser plug-ins. These might very well have the same impact as the above projects; writing songs is a good way of improving my guitar & musical skills. Statastic used some cool "HTML5" features that I had to learn. And I'm learning loads about how to build browser plugins. But somehow, these objectives are more compelling. These are the tasks that absorb my attention.

So, what's the difference?

Maybe I'm really a user first and a developer second. I have the skills and tools at my disposal to build anything. I very well could build for the sake of building, but I'd much rather build something that I'd actually like to use. The how it's built is a secondary question to what it is I want to build. If what I'm going to build isn't going to be very good, then who cares what it's built with?

This could very well describe my motivation for my work in addition to my personal projects.

Hmm...

A PrettyGood play

2011-03-14T22:00:00.000-07:00

When I first heard the term "The World's Greatest Play", I thought it was a once in a lifetime thing. It was a youtube video of an Ultimate play. A man was running towards a disc as it sailed out of bounds. He jumped at it, caught the disc, and threw it back in bounds. Another player caught the disc in the goal. Score.

I was a bit underwhelmed. "That's really cool," I said, "but how does it qualify as the world's greatest play?"

"No, no," my teammate explained to me. "That's not describing the play. That's what that play is called. That's a Greatest."

It's just called Greatest for short, following the tradition of shortening names to their unquestionably boasting adjectives ("Ultimate" for "Ultimate Frisbee"). There are also spin-offs of the Greatest; a Worstest is when you think the disc is going out ouf bounds, jump at it, catch it, and throw it back in bounds mid-air, only to have the disc hit the ground as you land in bounds. You could have just caught it, but now you look like an ass. Hence, "Worstest".

But there's a real spectrum to this play. There are a lot of moving parts. There are a lot of different stages to the Greatest that you can successfully perform, without it being a complete greatest. Even if you do everything right, if there's nobody there to catch the disc, it was all for nothing.

I'd like to fix that. Not completely, but one possible outcome at a time.

This happened to me this past weekend. I ran deep. The disc went up, but the wind caught it. It began drifting out of bounds and travelled down the field just outside the line. If it hits the ground, we lose a lot of yards, since the disc goes back to where it goes out of bounds. Even if I jump and catch it, unless I'm dragging my toes and touching in-bounds when I do, it still counts as out of bounds and we lose the yardage. So the only way to keep it is to get the disc back in bounds somehow.

There was nobody downfield, so even if I could get a decent throw off, nobody would be there to catch it. I wasn't at all close to the end zone. And I absolutely was not throwing the disc back for a loss of yards (I've done that before. You look like a complete ass if you can save the disc from going out of bounds only to lose 20-30 yards on an errant blady throw)

I ran full speed and dove at the disc. It was too low to the ground to do a real catch-and-throw before I landed. I hooked my finger under the rim as I twisted on to my back. I flung it back in bounds just before hitting the ground.

My ad-hoc plan kinda worked. When I got up, I could see the disc in bounds, still rolling downfield. The wind was furiously helping, keeping the disc from ever coming to a full rest.

Success.

This was not a Greatest. But it was a successful leap out of bounds to keep the disc in play. I propose we call it a PrettyGood. Because it's really not great. But it's pretty good.

Side note 1: It was pointed out to me that, since I didn't actually catch and throw the disc that it might be considered an intentional mack, which is technically against the rules. The rule makes sense (you can't intentionally bobble a disc to gain yards on a catch) but I'm not sure it was intended to apply in this case. What do you guys think? Was this against the rules? I doubt it would ever be enforced if it was.

Side note 2: After rolling, I ran towards the guy who picked up and got a handblock. It was immensely satisfying. :)

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood; The Da Vinci Disappearance

2011-03-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

Ubisoft released the Da Vinci Disappearance a while ago. I got it when it came out. I haven't bothered with the single player, but if it's anything like the rest of the storytelling present in the single player campaign, I'm sure I'll love it.

The real drive to get this add-on was for the multiplayer additions. There are 4 new characters to play as (to further test my memory skills when I try and talk about the characters) and 2 new game modes. The game modes are really what I was interested in. They are:

Escort -- There are 2 teams. One team tries to assassinate the VIP. The other tries to kill the other team & stop them from assassinating the VIP.
Assassinate -- Free for all. Everyone for themselves. You can kill any player you find amongst the clones.

At first, I thought I would hate Assassinate. It would be a free-for-all deathmatch that betrays the allure and strategy of the rest of Assassin's Creed multiplayer. I thought Escort was a great idea; somebody gets to be the VIP and send teammates out to take out the attackers. This would probably be one of the best co-op modes yet.

Turns out I misunderstood some things. And, after playing it a bit, it turns outthat I was absolutely wrong with which mode I'd like better.

Escort
First of all, nobody gets to be the VIP. The VIP is a computer-controlled clone. Additionally, there are 2 VIPs in each round, not just one. This splits the efforts of both teams; you're not all going after/protecting one guy. You've got two to deal with.

Misconceptions aside, the interesting thing about Escort is that the path of the VIP is (somewhat) known to both teams. The VIP follows a very direct, predictable bath from wherever he currently is, to wherever the current checkpoint is on the map. Both teams can clearly see where the next checkpoint for each VIP is.

This lends itself to a lot of stand-and-wait gameplay. If you know the VIP is going to be coming by this area, why rush towards him? Just find a good haystack, hide in it, and wait for your target to come to you.

Sounds good in theory. In actuality, I still tried playing this mode like the others and ended up walking into a pack of 2 or 3 opposing team members ready to slice my throat. Then my defense proved fairly useless since the most effective assassins jumped from a nearby roof to land on the VIP I was supposed to be protecting. There's no way to stop that. That's not even stealthy at all.

In short, trying to discern your target (who is an NPC clone) from the non-important NPC clones is more difficult than in any other game mode. Additionally, the tactics needed to play this game type well are very different than the skills that the other game modes taught me. After a handful of rounds, I was left annoyed and frustrated.

So I reluctantly decided to try Assassinate.

Assassinate
This game mode is also more complex than I thought it would be. Turns out it's not a free-for-all, at least not like other games. You can still only have one contract, one target, at a time. But you get to choose who it is.

It plays like this: Your compass gives you some vague indications of where to find other Templars. They're much more subtle, smaller indications than if you had a contract straight away; they have to be able to show you 8 simultaneous targets so all the indicators are a bit smaller. But that's all it can do, tell you in general which way to look.

If you keep your eyes peeled, you will likely see someone giving away the fact that they're not a clone. When you see this (or even if you don't and just want a guess) you can lock on to them. Once you lock on, you get a contract on their head, and you can kill them like any other target. They'll be alerted that someone is pursuing them as soon as you lock on. So even after you know they're a good targt, it's good advice to remain hidden.

And that's it. Kill your target, or realize someone is after you and be killed. You can still stun your pursuer, but only after they've locked on to you and decided they want to try and kill you. Again, you lose your target for a failed kill. Failed kills are even worse now, as if your target stuns you, then they can make you their target and kill you while you're helplessly writing on the ground.

It's a really interesting dynamic. Everyone is still trying to act like they're just an innocent clone. And whenever someone kills someone, any Templar witnessess immediately lock on and start tracking them for their next target. This requires just as much patience and skill as any of the previous modes, with moments of killfest frenzy that are just awesome.

The biggest drawback to this mechanic is that it's fairly easy to mistake your pursuer for a target. I've been walking directly at someone who I knew was a Templar. They were walking straight at me. We both began locking on to one another as we approcahed, and apparently my opponent began locking on slightly before I did. As I closed in and tried to kill him, I saw the "Stun" prompt appear, and I was very confused. Why would I stun my target? I want to kill my target.

My confusion was ended by repeated stab wounds to the chest. Oh, apparently, he was the man pursuing me. I was the target. Now I know, but now I'm dead. Whoops.

That confusion aside, Assassination is a remarkably fun game type to play that doesn't devolve into the itchy-trigger killfest that comprises most multiplayer gaming. It keeps the skill & intrigue of the rest of the AC:B multiplayer types with bigger bursts of crazy action.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood multiplayer strategies

2011-03-09T19:00:00.001-08:00

See my last entry for an introduction to the world of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood.

There are some techniques I've used to track my targets & avoid my pursuers.

Movement
How you move in AC:B is the biggest tell that you're not just an NPC (Non-Player Character) clone. The clones never run. The clones never fast-walk. They tend to walk in the middle of a path, taking wide turns around corners. Occasionally, one will peel off and walk into a standing or sitting group, or leave a group to continue walking around the Environment.

Trying to move like an NPC is extremely hard. You really have to fight the quick-twitch kill skills that other games teach you. The only time I run is when I don't have any pursuers on me and when I'm a long distance from my target. Otherwise, I just casually walk around the map. I try to blend in with moving groups as I walk around the map so my pursuers can't easily single me out. I also leave the walking group to join a standing group of people on occasion. These standing spots give you a great chance to watch your back for your pursuer without having to worry about walking just like an NPC.

Finally, the hardest part about moving around is not letting your target know you're a Templar. If they're running around like an idiot and making it super easy to spot and track them, that's their fault. Most folks are a bit smarter than that, and will be standing, walking, or sitting next to an NPC that looks just like them. If you don't have any means to tell which one is your target, either (a) guess and hope you're right or (b) just keep walking. Stopping to ponder who you'll kill will give you away, since the only place NPCs stop walking is if they're in a standing group.

Also, don't ever walk directly at your target. Folks seem to have a good sense when someone is walking directly towards them with the intent to kill.

Abilities
There are a number of unlockable & upgradeable abilities to help you hunt your target & elude your pursuer. Every time you start a round (or you re-enter the round because you just died) you get to choose 2 abilities to help you. These abilities are:

Disguise - Look like a different NPC clone for a short while.
Sprint Boost - Run really fast for a short while
Smoke Bomb - Everyone around you stops and coughs for a short while
Hidden Gun - Shoot somebody
Templar Vision - Highlight your attackers in red & your targets in blue for a short while.
Morph - Change all clones around you to look identical to you.
Firecrackers - Blind any nearby players, and make the NPC clones near you cower on the ground.
Throwing Knives - Injure someone so they walk very slowly for a few seconds.
Charge - Blitz through a croud & automatically kill/stun your target/pursuer.
Decoy - Make a nearby NPC look like you and run frantically away.
Mute - Nobody near you can use abilities or kill/stun for a few seconds
Poison - Prick your target with a poison pin & watch them die a few seconds later.

The specifics are best explained here, but that's the gist of it.

Abilities for Wanted
You need a good balance of offense & defense when you play Wanted. I've found that the higher you are in the rankings, the more Templars will come after you. So I usually start with erring on the side of offense & then lock down in a very defensive mode once I'm doing well.

For offense, Poison is amazing for getting really high-point kills. They're difficult to pull off since you have to be very close to your target to do it, but the extra points are worth it. This is especially true if you have a string of bad luck and you get a Score x2 multiplier. It's also the only way to kill a target without exposing yourself for 2-3 seconds to your own pursuer.

If you don't have Poison yet (it's the last Ability to unlock) then I'd probably go with Throwing Knives for my offensive ability. It will slow down a far-away target so you can still creep up too them without drawing too much attention.

I also carry either Mute or Smoke Bomb with me for defense. If I can spot my pursuer, I usually go for the stun; I'm not very adept at running away. Both of these abilities give me the advantage if I can see my pursuer coming. Smoke Bomb has proven to be more effective for me, since my pursuer can't move at all if he's caught in it, but Mute draws substantially less attention to myself. I typically equip both of these when I'm in defensive lock-down mode.

Abilities for Manhunt
Since you'll be exclusively on Offense or Defense for an entire round, my choice of abilities shifts dramatically. Your pursuers will be less subtle, since they don't have anyone looking to kill them. Also, your targets will be more likely to be in groups, hiding places, or otherwise giant clusters of identical clones. They don't have anyone to go after, so they can spend the entire round happily standing still.

For offense, I usually go with Templar Vision and Charge. I try and use Templar Vision from far away or from a rooftop; generally anything that will hopefully be a bit out of sight. When I use Templar Vision, I glow bright white, and basically tell my targets that, no matter where they're standing, I've just found them. If they see me, they're likely to run, and then I'll have to chase them, and the whole super-stealthy assassinate thing gets messy. So I keep my distance, use Templar Vision, and mark which of the folks in the crowd are our targets so my teammates can casually walk up and stab them in the back.

While that ability is recharging, I use Charge. It's substantially less subtle. If a crowd of target NPCs walks by, I'll just bet that one of them is a player and run at them like a rhino on fire. It works more than you'd think.

Defense is a different story entirely. I used to use Morph a lot, until I realized that it just told other players to use some ability on the crowd (like Firecrackers, Charge, or Templar Vision). I still use it on occasion, but when I do, I usually morph a stationary group of people, then move on and stand in a different stationary group. So my decoy group of clones will hopefully get a pursuer to give themselves away by using one of their abilities on a harmless crowd.

I really like the idea of Decoy, but it hasn't been as effective as I would imagine. It's just a bit cumbersome to select the nearby NPC and send them off running in a direction that isn't directly at you. But when I do send a decoy in my pursuer's direction and watch them fall for it, it's quite satisfying.

I also still like Mute & Smoke Bomb.

Abilities for Alliance
I haven't really played much of this mode. Apparently nobody else does, either. The wait times for starting this game type are unbearable.

Chest Capture
Again, I don't play this game mode a lot. There just aren't a lot of folks who want to play it. When I do, it's really the only good mode I've found for Disguise.

I've used Disguise in other game modes before, mostly at the end of a chase so that my pursuer will lose track of me, but I've only had moderate success. Usually, my target or pursuer will see me put on the disguise, or I'll lose the disguise just before I can close in for the kill. I need to work on my timing.

It works well for this game mode, though, since I just need to make the approach unnoticed. I can hang around for a while without killing anything and still make a bunch of points.

Phew. 2 AC:B posts behind me. Now I can finally get to discussing the new game modes released in the latest DLC, The Da Vinci Disappearance. But that will just have to wait for another post.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood Multiplayer Intro

2011-03-09T19:00:00.000-08:00

I've mentioned Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood here before. I just sort of dove right in to my experiences, and didn't give much of a preface as to what the game was about. Even here, I'm not going to explain the single player story; I'll let that speak for itself. But I do want to give a more in-depth introduction into the multiplayer, since I especially like it. I also just began playing the new Da Vinci Disappearance add-ons, and I'd love to talk about those, but they really require a good background.

Without further ado, here's a brief overview of AC:B multiplayer.

Story
In the near future, a war is brewing. Your side (the Templars) have tons of money and tech, and have assembled what amounts to a giant virtual reality simulation. To prepare you for the real war at hand, you and all of the other Templars are going to use this VR simulation as combat training. You assume the identity of some of the most skilled Templars in history, in scenic historic locations, and are given other Templar targets to find and stealthily kill. This should be done while taking special care to avoid your pursuers who are out to stealthily kill you.

Environments
There are wonderfully detailed maps of Renaissance-period parts of Italy and (in some maps) Spain. There are plenty of hiding spots to escape pursuers or wait for suspecting prey. There are also Chase Breakers -- doors or lifts that close quickly after you run through them and take a few seconds to reset. This is to give you some time to escape your pursuer if they're actively chasing you.

But the interesting part of these environments isn't the static fixtures. It's the other people.

There are some street vendors and messengers, but most of the world is filled with clones. There are hundreds of clones who look just like you. There are hundreds of clones that look just like the person you're trying to kill. There are hundreds of each player in the match, all standing around chatting, sitting in benches, and walking in groups. These provide the best ways to remain hidden while in plain sight and to move around the maps without attracting attention.

Contracts & the Compass
Most game types have the idea of a Contract, like the kind you'd sign with a hitman to take out your target. You can only kill the player you've been contracted to kill. And you only get one shot at killing them; If you kill the wrong player, if your target finds you and knocks you out, or if you kill a clone that looks like your target, you lose the Contract.

For each contract you have, a compass appears on the screen indicating the general direction of your target. The accuracy of the compass substantially decreases the closer you get to your target. From across the map, you know exactly which way to head towards your target. But when you're right next to 5 clones that all look like your target, you have no way to be sure which of them is your target unless they run, use a Templar ability, or otherwise disclose the fact that they're not a clone.

Game Types
There are a number of different ways to play in this environment:

Wanted - You get one Contract at a time. Kill your target to get a new Contract. Avoid being killed by your pursuers. This game lasts 10 minutes.
Manhunt - You're placed on 1 of 2 teams. There are 2 rounds that last 5 minutes each. For one round, you're exclusively on offense: You have up to 4 Contracts to kill any of the members of the opposing team. Nobody will be pursuing you. For the other round, you will have no Contracts: you must simply hide from all the pursuers on the other team.
Alliance - You're on a team of 2. You have 2 concurrent Contracts; you're hunting another team of 2. You're also being hunted by a pair of Templars.
Chest Capture - You're placed on 1 of 2 teams, again with 2 rounds that last 5 minutes each. There are treasure chests placed throughout the map. When you're on offense, your goal is to stand near enough to a chest to steal it for about 5s. When you're on defense, your job is to spot the folks going after the chests and kill them before they get the chance to steal them.

There are also Advanced versions of some of these game types. As best I can tell (I've only played them once) the Advanced mode just makes the compass even more inaccurate, so you must further rely on your observation skills to identify & assassinate your targets.

Point System
The lure of this game is really the environment and gameplay. But for those who want to know if they were the best at the end of the match, there is a point system.

This isn't like your classic multiplayer deathmatch. Not all kills are the same. If you run at your target like a madman and shoot them in the face, not only will the person pursuing you know *exactly* who you are, but you'll get a measly 100 points. However, if you're walking in a crowd, prick your target with the end of a poisoned pin, casually sit down at a bench a few feet away and watch as your target realizes they've been poisoned and desperately gasps for breath, you can get around 600 points. Stealth kills, acrobatic kills, stunning your pursuers, staying alive for a long stretch of time, and varying how you kill your targets all give you big point bonuses. Quality kills are heavily favored over quantity of kills.

The exact nitty-gritty of how the points are tallied is better explained here. The important part is to act like a real assassin to get the most points.

That's the general world of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Hopefully this will make my other posts about this subject more easy to understand. I have deliberately avoided discussing Templar Abilities. I'm saving them for my next post. I want to not only explain what they are, but how I use them & which ones work best together.

Book Review: Switched

2011-03-08T10:00:00.000-08:00

Okay. My bad.

When I got about halfway through this book, I knew I had been tricked. But I kept reading, because the point of no return for me is by the end of the 2nd chapter unless the book is absolutely terrible. And it wasn't terrible. I was just upset.

But that's my fault. I was hooked by the back cover pitch:

When Wendy Everly was six years old, her mother was convinced she was a monster and tried to kill her. It isn't until eleven years later that Wendy discovers her mother might have been right.

I was like, "Alright! A book from the point of view of a monster! I wonder what horrible things she does that are beyond her control? I wonder how she psychologically battles the drive to embrace her monster nature versus fight it and try and be a good person! This has the setup for some great action battle sequences where she no doubt confronts other monsters and fights for her life! And there should be some wonderfully deep and complex character development along the way! Oh boy!"

But that was the bait in this bait-and-switch. And the book is called "Switched". So it really is my fault; the signs are so painfully obvious in retrospect.

There was none of the action-adventure I imagined. There was but one action scene in the whole book (one and a half if you count a scene where the main character kicks somebody's knee) and the rest of it was lovey-dovey romance about the main character doting about this or that boy, or maybe about coming to terms with Troll society.

That's right, she's a Troll. Which, in this book, means she's just like a normal person except she has difficult hair.

I really wanted to like this book for political reasons. Amanda Hocking is a self-published author on Amazon who sells her books for cheap and has made fat bank doing so. All her books are available to lend. Which just goes to show: just because something is popular doesn't mean I'll like it.

What it also shows: If you want to rake in the cash, it's not a bad idea to write a forbidden romance story about ~~vampires~~ trolls, just like ~~Twilight~~ Switched.

Charlie (Sheen) Bit Me

2011-03-07T19:00:00.000-08:00

I don't have the video kung-fu prowess to digitally insert Charlie Sheen into the infamous Charlie Bit Me youtube meme, but somebody out there should.

Internet, make it happen.

I don't get most folks' fascination with celebrities. The most I usually care to know about them are what movie/album/TV show they'll be working on next. Or when someone leaves the band. I have no interest in what drugs they do, who they're dating, or really anything about their personal life. But it seems like I'm in an extreme minority with this opinion.

I have no direct problems with folks who don't agree with me. You can follow all the drama of what Kanye West said, or who Tiger Woods slept with, or who might be dating Angelina Jolie all you want. Follow them on twitter, monitor whatever celebrity gossip site you want.

But that's where these stories should be confined to. Celebrity gossip websites. Opinion pages. Entertainment sections. None of this is news. Absolutely none of it.

News is supposed to be something important & informative. Hard data about important wide-reaching issues that have impact on a large amount of people (or perhaps a disproportionate impact on a minority of people). News is supposed to be thoroughly vetted and verified so folks can trust hard facts that they wouldn't necessarily find out during the normal course of their lives. Most of all, it should provide a curated cross-section of relevant stories from all the different sections of news that have an impact in a person's nearby community, or their view of the world.

News is important. Celebrity gossip is not.

Thank you.

Introducing: Statastic

2011-03-06T15:55:00.000-08:00

Introducing: Statastic, the easiest way to gather team-wide statistics for Ultimate.

All you have to do is:

Enter whoever is on the roster
Start a new game. For each point, tell Statastic who's on the field.
Every time the disc changes hands, tell Statastic who just caught the disc.
Any time during or after the game, flip over to the Stats screen to see the most up-to-date player stats and a play-by-play point recap.

My biggest concern is step 3. I'm hoping I made entering that amount of data easy enough such that folks don't get frustrated when trying to keep Statastic up to date with the game. But with that amount of data I can do some pretty neat stats:

Since Statastic will know everything that happened in the point, I can compile some pretty sweet statistics. Currently, Statastic keeps track of points played, goals caught, assists thrown, defensive plays, and turnovers. "Total" is just the sum of the last 4 in the list. You can even sort the columns to see who's winning in each statistic.

And if there was a particularly epic point, you can just look at the point summary:

Feel free to try it out and let me know what you think. I've got plenty of ideas for new features to add, but I'm probably just going to end up using it as-is for a while to see which missing features give me the most hassle. Enjoy!

You can play with it yourself at http://chrisdownie.net/statastic

2 Mini Fails

2011-03-05T21:20:00.000-08:00

I tried my first field-test of my Stateriffic app today.

Well, honestly, the first fail was the rename. "Stat Tracker" sounds way too generic, even though that's what it does. But I don't like naming it anything ending in "er", so I tried to come up with a better name. Stateriffic came to mind, which I meant in the same vein of "Twitteriffic". Namely stat-terriffic. But seeing it spelled out looks like State-riffic. So I'll probably change the name again before I call it good.

But! My first field test was an utter failure due to a small oversight. In lamens terms, my app simply wouldn't load. In technical terms, I had assumed using Apple's apple-mobile-web-app-capable meta tag would download and cache all webapp files for use offline. I still don't think it's an unreasonable assumption. But alas, my phone didn't have any access to my code over 3G (since I haven't posted the app live anywhere yet) and so I couldn't try it out for real. Nuts.

Second is a gaming fail. Kathryn & I both play You Don't Know Jack. We both liked the decades-old PC trivia game, and I jumped at the chance to buy the new Xbox version, hoping that my hours and hours of playing other quick-reflex games would give me a slight advantage. I need all the advantages I can get when going up against her; she is a trivia master.

They have this new gameplay mechanic, called the Wrong Answer of the Game. They tell you some fake company that is sponsoring the Wrong Answer of the Game, and that's your only clue to finding it. In one of the 10 questions in the game, there will be an obviously wrong answer to the question at hand, but it will sound very similar to the fake sponsor. Choose it, and instead of losing money for a horribly wrong answer, you'll gain either $4,000 or $8,000 dollars and a special prize. It makes us guess some obviously wrong answers in the hopes of getting all the hidden prizes.

For example, I won a bucket of blood from Blood Co. when they asked a question about real-life doctors and I chose the illusive Dr. Acula. Clever, eh?

Well, there's another game mechanic called Screws. The idea is if you don't think your opponent knows the answer to the question, screw 'em. They'll have to answer, and you get money if they get the answer wrong. However, you lose money if they do happen to get the answer right. And you can only screw once per game.

We always wondered what would happen if you got screwed and then chose the Wrong Answer of the Game. It'd have to be super-devastating; you could win up to $8,000 dollars and the other person would lose, well maybe not that much but certainly a good chunk of change.

Nuh-uh. Turns out you can find the Wrong Answer of the Game, but if you're being screwed while you're doing it, then nobody can get the prize.

And I did that. Twice.

Booo.

Bonus Mini fail!
Kathryn can attest to this. They had a question that was along the lines of this. Say a headline to some tabloid is "(Jon + Kate) + 8 - Jon!". If that's actual math, what does the exclamation point stand for?

We both got it pretty quick. (The answer is factorial). But then the narrator went on to describe what that function does. He said it would be Jon multiplied by Jon-1, multiplied by Jon-2, etcetera etcetera all the way to 0.

Which is wrong. It goes to 1. Otherwise (any number)! would always equal 0.

I was quick to correct the man inside the video game. But I don't think he heard me.

Fixed width layouts

2011-03-04T19:00:00.000-08:00

I got a shiny new 24" monitor at work yesterday. Aside from it making my super-mario themed desktop look even more awesome, it also finally lets me see webpages in something that's larger than 1280x10

AWS Elastic Beanstalk - It's Super!

But I've found a problem. Very much in the vein of #firstworldproblems. So many websites have fixed width content. Which results in tons and tons of useless whitespace.

Whitespace has its usefulness. But when it's over half of my monitor's width, it's not really adding to my ability to view your content. It's just a waste of space.

And it turns out this is really common for a lot of websites. Github.com, DownChrisDown.com, Gizmodo.com. What were those developers thinking?

Techno lust

2011-03-03T21:41:00.000-08:00

I like gadgets. I also like Apple products. Needless to say, I watched the liveblogs of Apple's iPad 2 event this week.

It's definitely not what I'd hoped it would be. I was really hoping for a Retina display. Kathryn's iPod Touch has it, and it looks amazing. And you just know that this is the kind of feature that could easily cross-pollinate across all of Apple's products, except perhaps for the iPod Shuffle. It's just a matter of time.

But alas, there wasn't one. So it brings up the question. Do I want to buy an iPad despite it lacking the real feature I wanted?

It's kind of a perfect Apple storm for me right now. My iPhone is in need of an upgrade, but I can hold out until the summer to get whatever the latest and greatest iPhone is that comes out next. It's a little crazy that in my mind I've already committed to buying a device that I really know nothing about. But, knowing Apple, whatever the next iPhone they put out is will be the hottest phone on the block.

I'm also thinking about getting a new MacBook Pro. They just released updated models last week. My current MBP isn't particularly bad, but it's 4 years old. It still works fine, but there are so many better features of the more current models. Maybe it's time to upgrade?

But that would mean, in the span of the year, I would be buying a new iPhone, a new iPad and a new MacBook Pro. I admit that I really like my tech, but this may be a bit too much.

When the first iPad came out, it looked really cool. I bought in to the hype a bit, but not too much. I thought the device was amazing, but laughed when the ads called it magical. Silly marketing, you don't know how computers work, do you? Ah, well, I mean I guess most folks don't understand how computers work. Or what part is the computer. Or what part is the browser.

But it didn't have a camera. Silly Apple. Even your iPod Nano had a camera at the time. Why wouldn't you put one on your new, magical device?

One blogger had an idea that stuck with me. They *could* put a camera in it. But there was definitely a subset of people who wanted a camera, but couldn't wait until iPad 2 to get one. So they'd buy it twice, essentially giving twice as much money to Apple for the same product. I'd like to think Apple isn't that sinister, but they are out to make money. And it makes sense, whether intentional or not.

But at the time, nobody had heard of the Retina Display. That came out with the iPhone after the iPad came out. And you already hear a bunch of people, like me, complaining about the iPad 2's lack of a Retina Display. Saying that that is the killer feature that will make me buy it.

I think the Retina Display is this year's camera. They could have added it in. They didn't because they knew that they could add it in next year and the folks who couldn't wait would just buy it twice.

Well, that'll probably be me. I waited through v1 to see what they'd add in v2. I think I'm a fairly patient guy, but I don't want to wait another year to have an iPad. And it does mean that I might try and sell it to upgrade in a year when they do get to a Retina Display.

I might need to make my MBP last me through another year, though. Because those things ain't cheap.

March Project

2011-03-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

I've been so focused on getting the last features added to my stat tracker app that I hadn't really given much thought to what my target project would be for this month. While last month was mostly a flop, considering I didn't really touch my website, I think we're going to see a marked changed this month.

Boom! At least 2 new songs.
Bam! I'll finish Stat Tracker!
Thwack! Browser extensions to more easily highlight if a book is lendable!

Because having to scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the product details section requires too much focus.

I've already got good melodies and lyric ideas for the two songs. So now I just get to go out & write them. Fun times.

It'll be a good month.

I Sound Like a Teenager

2011-03-02T19:00:00.000-08:00

Or so some kid told me over Xbox Live.

Yesterday evening I was playing a few rounds of multiplayer Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. I usually have the mic on, just because it's on by default. Normally folks don't talk, even though they have their mics on. When they do, it's usually pretty terse. "Which persona is after us?" "The Courtesans" "Got it. I think I see one coming".

I also leave the mic on because right before you make a kill, it pipes the mic feed from my target into my speakers. So I can hear the person react as I take them by surprise & kill them. It's superbly satisfying to hear the exasperated yells by my targets who were sure I wasn't an NPC. I figure other folks are like me, and would like to hear me squeal when they catch me off guard, so that's yet another reason I leave my mic on.

My most satisfying kill in the game so far was a bench-to-bench kill in Pienza. I believe he was the Nobleman. I saw my target sitting on the bench. I jumped into a moving group of people who looked like they were walking buy his bench. Turns out they were. As I got closer, I peeled away from the group and sat down next to my target. I was sure he was on to me, but he didn't react.

There's a bonus for being really close to your target for 3 seconds before killing them. It's called Focus. I locked on to him as I sat down, and waited those 3 seconds. It was just long enough for him to stop suspecting that I was the Assassin after him. Once I had the full bonus, I went for the kill.

A loud yell emanated from my speakers. "WHAAAAT NOOOOO!" That was a wonderful prize.

But last night, I met someone who could not stop talking. It was like the hyperactive desire for attention that I imagine smaller children have, who keep crying "mommy, mommy, look at this" to show you that they have a marker in their hand. But this guy sounded like he was in his early teens. He was nice enough, but my enthusiasm for his conversation waned quickly.

The first few rounds were entertaining. We were talking a bit of strategy and ability preferences. He went on about how he wanted an ability he didn't have yet. I told him that yeah, that ability was pretty cool. Then he was freaked out when he got caught in a smoke bomb and I "stole his kill", and then again when he scared a target out of hiding and wondered why I didn't chase after him.

"DUDE! He's right there! Why aren't you running after him."
"Chill out. If I run, I'll get 100 points. If I let him hide & get a stealth kill, I'll get 600 points."
"BUT HE"S GETING AWAAAAYYY..."

Clearly, some folks just don't understand the real strategies for high-scoring Assassins.

That said, it turns out I do like talking strategy. There's almost as much thinking involved in stealthily hunting down a target for the maximum number of points as there is quick-twitch reaction mechanics for controlling much of the action. Maybe I'll start engaging folks more before matches to discuss strategy.

Or maybe I'll just keep getting surprise bench-to-bench kills. :)

Better is the Enemy of Done

2011-02-28T23:09:00.000-08:00

My little pet project is close, so close, to being done. I have 3 screens in total. I've already gone & redesigned 2 of them after playing with them for a bit on my phone and realizing that some of my fancy coding tricks really just got in the way of what I wanted to do. So I redesigned them, rebuilt them, and made them better.

I considered just releasing it tonight so that I could say I did something by the end of February. But I know I want to redesign that 3rd screen. Then there are a handful of small features that I really want to add. I don't think it's called feature creep if they were features I had originally intended to do, I just hadn't got to yet.

So I'm giving myself an extension. I'm not really sure what my March project will be. But I'm going to keep working on this thing until I'm satisfied with its quality. I anticipate that I'll have something good enough to release in about a week. Just in time for spring league!

Netflix vs Amazon Prime

2011-02-28T20:00:00.000-08:00

I don't really intend for a good chunk of my posts to be me complaining about Amazon.com's policies. It's really just coincidence that I took the time to write all about the problems with the Kindle lending model just as Amazon announced free Instant Video Streaming for Prime members.

First off, it's a good idea. I don't use Amazon's video streaming because I already have Netflix. I do have Prime. This move makes me seriously consider dropping Netflix because, on paper, it looks like I'm double-paying for video streaming. And even if I just had Prime for streaming, it would still cost less than my Netflix subscription.

Unfortunately, after giving Amazon Video Streaming a whirl, I was disappointed.

I thought the big advantage that Amazon had over Netflix was the business agreements that allow them to stream really recent hit movies. They even advertise them prominently on their front page. MegaMind, Due Date, The Social Network. I'd be willing to watch these again if I could, but Amazon wants to charge me $4 to see them.

This breaks the advertising pitch I thought I was told. I thought Amazon was opening up its streaming library to Prime members. This is a real value proposition that would consider making me ditch Netflix for good. But no, it's more like "Amazon lets you watch movies you don't want to watch for free, charges for good movies"

Like Kindle Lending, I'm betting this is all about the rights-holders. Hopefully over time they'll be able to have a more Netflix-like model where my Prime membership gives me access to Amazon's entire streaming library. That would really make this a worthwhile offering. Until then, it's just another underdeveloped feature.

Book Review: MetaGame

2011-02-27T18:12:00.000-08:00

MetaGame is a sci-fi book that looks at what happens when technology completely transforms society. When gaming completely transforms society. When medical advances completely transform society.

The book gets off to a pretty rough start. In this brave new world, there's a whole lot of culture, tech, and terminology to take in, and it's not exactly introduced gradually. It just kind of bombards you with all its slang and its oddities all at once. I imagine it's how my girlfriend feels about 0.3 seconds after I begin talking about work.

In this futuristic culture, science has found a cure for aging, greatly expanding the life expectancy of its people. Currency has been replaced by a simple, global point system. All of the jobs in the world have been restructured and redesigned as games, which is how folks earn their points. The individual religions of the populace have dissolved into one another; now there is only the belief in the OverSoul sets and enforces all of the rules for the game of Life.

Indeed, the amount of detail in this futuristic world is astounding. Chips are implanted so that people can interface with computers at the speed of thought. Indeed, they can even interface with each other at the speed of thought, kind of like Twitter on crack. People get small amounts of points for mentioning brand names in conversation, even more if the mention causes someone to buy said product. Which is kind of how some viral promotions on twitter work, or how this link works if you want to buy MetaGame. :P

The storyline is interesting; it's about one man's experience through a MetaGame, a very specific game run by the OverSoul himself. Apparently, it's something that happens every so often to the noble classes. I'm breezing over the story because, although it is a really good story, it doesn't captivate my imagination as much as the world it takes place in.

What irked me at first eventually came to be what I really liked about the setting. Each way we use technology, each advance, turns out to be not far off from the kinds of technology we have today.

And I, for one, can't wait until I can email folks from my brain.

Lendle: Or, The Problem with Kindle Books.

2011-02-27T14:40:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine helped build Lendle.me, a social website to help promote lending Kindle books between strangers. You can think of it as a widely distributed public library. Everyone tells Lendle what's on their bookshelf at home. Then when someone else wants to borrow a book, Lendle says "Oh, it's on this guy's shelf. I'll go get it for you." The book is then digitally delivered to whatever Kindle-enabled device you want to read it on in a matter of seconds.

It's a simple and concept that works surprisingly well. I've borrowed 2 books so far: The Grid: A Modular System for the Design and Production of Newpapers, Magazines, and Books and MetaGame. The first book turned out to be nothing like what I was expecting, but I also was just curious what kind of content a $40 digital book would have in it. Turns out to be a bunch of too-small pictures and very poorly formatted text. The second book I really liked, and I'll have a real book review up shortly.

What pains me the most about the service (which is really the discussion that Lendle is trying to provoke) is the very poor state of DRM on these digital books.

Unlike traditional libraries, where a book can be lent over and over so that the literature may benefit and entertain us all, Amazon only allows Kindle books to be lent once. At first, I thought this was a misunderstanding. I thought that it meant I could only loan to one person at a time, which mimicked physical lending perfectly. But no, once a book is lent, it cannot be lent again. It's as if the only way you're allowed to take books out of the library is if they're on fire. A slow-burning fire that takes about 2 weeks to thoroughly destroy the books you've borrowed, but a fire nevertheless.

That's just for the books that can be lent. Over half of the books that I own can't be shared. That's just downright pathetic. I can't let others enjoy the brilliance of the Mass Effect series or the excitement of The Lost Symbol. There's absolutely no technological reason why these books can't be shared; the publishers are afraid sharing will cost them money. Greed is a terrible reason to make so many people unhappy.

I hate these kinds of problems. Technical problems just require some smart people to think really hard until they come up with a solution that works. This is a social problem that requires enough negative feedback to be heard for the folks in charge to do something about it. And that takes an immense amount of time and effort that simply wouldn't be needed if the folks in charge knew what the people wanted.

In short, Lendle makes a the best of a fairly bad situation. I'll probably still buy Kindle books, but I'll be on the lookout for self-published works and publishers who at the very least allow lending. And I can only hope that Amazon will only push publishers harder to allowing a more open sharing model that functions more like physical books, and less like books on fire.

Projects!

2011-02-26T22:13:00.000-08:00

I've got the bare bones of my super-secret-alternative-to-rebuilding-my-website project completed. And I use "completed" very loosely. It just works for the one thing I've built it to do, the user can't make many errors, and there are already a few off-the-cuff design choices that I'm going to want to revisit based on trying to use it for a few minutes.

But, it's at the proof-of-concept stage. It works. So now I really wanna talk about it.

I've changed names twice already. But in this screenshot it's called Stat Tracker:

I'm on a pretty stacked team here.

If you've ever tried keeping track of fantasy scores while watching a game of Ultimate, you know it's hard to keep track of more than one player at a time. And then you'll sometimes forget how many points your guy has, so you'll have to guesstimate and hope that your player still comes out with a high score for bragging rights.

Well, with this, you can let your phone do all of the tracking for you. Just fire it up, tell it who's on the line at the start of the point, then touch each person's name as they catch the disc. At any point you can jump over to the Stats tab and see what the stats are for the whole team.

That's the idea anyway. It's still got a long way to go, and a good number of bugs to crunch out. But it's an HTML5 app, so it should work on everything that has internet access and a modern browser. Although I'll probably only be testing it on the latest-and-greatest browsers.

I'm aiming to have something done (or at least shippable) by the end of the month. :)

Lagging Behind

2011-02-24T11:11:00.000-08:00

I've been lagging behind on my blog posts. And for my February project. I'm about a post behind and I'm not really any closer than I was at the beginning of this vacation to having a redesigned personal site.

At this point, I'm throwing in the towel on my February project. I'd like to think I made a decent effort this week to get it done, but it's just not inspiring.

With downchrisdown.com, I had a really ambitious design plan. I wanted it to look like a desktop. I also wanted it to be skinnable so that with a click you could change it from looking like OS X, to looking like Windows (Win XP, at the time), to looking like Linux. I wanted it to be a css-only change, because that seemed like a cool technical challenge.

I also wanted the site to be a main aggregation of everything on the internet that is me. my blog posts, my tweets, everything. Lots of gathering dynamic content and displaying them on my main site. I had to learn APIs and it was pretty fun & challenging.

chrisdownie.net was to be substantially less ambitious. A minimalist site to host all of my created content that wasn't dynamically updated. Then it would just have links to all the various sites where I generate content. It was to be mobile-friendly. But that's all I really had in mind.

As a result, it's noting noteworthy. Nothing inspiring. It was just me doing what essentially amounted to a bunch of work to get something done. And without any real motivation other than my own wish to have it done, there's no real reward in doing it.

That said, the failure was worth the effort. I've got a pretty good grasp on how to use Node.js (which, in retrospect, was complete overkill for what I wanted to build. But I wanted to learn Node.js, so I did.) and I've been reading up on MongoDB. I'm really excited about what these technologies will enable me to do.

I'm going to build something today. It won't be what I thought I was building this month, but it'll be something fun that I've been meaning to do.

Lessons Learned

2011-02-23T22:14:00.000-08:00

Just because the bottle says "Dishwashing Soap", that doesn't mean it should be used in a dishwasher. Especially if it says "Ultra Concentrated".
The dishwasher drains into your sink if the garbage disposal is blocked.
If you stop it mid-cycle, the dishwasher doesn't drain. Especially if you stopped it because there were suds pouring out of the bottom of it. You gotta find the right spot in the middle of the "rinse" cycle that activates the pump instead of adding more water (and thus, more suds) to the system.

Also:

It can hail in Seattle. But when it does, people will still call it "snow".

Node.js

2011-02-22T14:14:00.000-08:00

I tried installing Node.js on my laptop last night. I did it on another computer a while back, so it wasn't a totally new experience. But man, it took forever. Turns out I didn't have XCode and standard tools installed. Downloading all that took about 2 hours, only to find out that my computer didn't have enough free space for the 8Gb install. Ugh.

Well, now I've got it installed. I got a Hello-World style app running. I also worked a bit with the file-IO stuff so I have a webserver that can spit out header and footer content completely separate from the page's content. Woohoo. Now I can finally build my website.

But at this point, I've spent a good total of 6 hours (last night & this morning) getting things up and running, and now I find myself not in the mood to build things. Booo. Oh well, hopefully it will pass, as I do think this is going to be a pretty slick means of building what I want.

I also took a quick look at MongoDB. I didn't do much with it, mostly played around with the tutorial. I really like how JavaScript is invading all of these different parts of the server. It makes complete sense, and I really think it's going to make developing top-quality web sites (and web services) even easier. It also reinforces the importance of good JavaScript programmers, not just folks who google for bits of javascript code to make their links blink or Java gurus who think they can code in the browser because the use GWT.

I'm sounding bitter again. I'll stop. Instead, I'll go doodle the site I want to build.

Bike Ride

2011-02-21T19:29:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, Kathryn & I went for a long bike ride. I really like riding, but I haven't been since the weather got cold and rainy. But for the last few weeks, it's been bright and sunny out, so we decided to hit up the Burke-Gilman trail and see how far North we could go on it.

Our Route

We tracked our route using this iPhone App. Kathryn had been using it to keep track of her distance running, but her iPod doesn't have GPS.

Anyway. It was loads of fun. It was a mostly flat route. I was kind of surprised how far we managed to go. I didn't realize we had reached the north end of Lake Washington until we looked at it on a map later. We did take a picture while we took a break before turning around.

Hopefully there will be more weekends like this. :)

Calm Before the Bullet Storm

2011-02-21T19:17:00.000-08:00

Bulletstorm is coming out tomorrow. The crazy-ass over-the-top adrenaline-fueled shoot 'em up with perverse humor and grotesque violence will soon be unleashed to millions of Americans.

Who will then rape people. At least according to a fair and balanced news source.

Sigh.

This isn't the first time a new video game has caused the media circus to flip its shit. Fox also flipped out over a sex scene in Mass Effect. But that was forever ago in internet time, so it makes sense that they'd have forgotten about it by now.

I really wish folks would stop trying to demonize video games. Or at least try to demonize them a different way.

It seems with this super-violent video game, the same song and dance is happening. "This is really bad for children, and they're deliberately marketing it towards children." "Everyone knows violent video games lead to increased aggressive behavior and domestic violence" Please. There have actually been studies on this. Real data, real facts, showing that the ESRB ratings for video games work better than the MPAA ratings for movies at keeping adult-targeted content away from children. They've also shown a nation-wide decline in domestic violence as the video games market has expanded in the last few years.

Rock Paper Shotgun does a thorough job examining the original shit-stirring article by Fox News. And when Fox got wind of it and tried to mislead folks again, RPS responded, taking them to task on every detail.

3 Guys, One Box

2011-02-18T12:46:00.000-08:00

Last night, we didn't have enough folks for a real game of Mini at practice. It was really just me, Craig, and Walnut standing around, wanting to do something with cones and a disc.

SO! We made up a variant of Hot Box. This wikipedia article describes the basic rules of Hot Box fairly well, if you're unfamiliar with the sport. We called it "3 Guys, One Box" or "Hot 3-way Action". (We also realized ladies might not want to play a game that had '3 guys' in the title, but we were short of better names. Feel free to suggest a different one.)

Here's how to play:

Start with 2 folks on offense, 1 on defense. Play Hot Box.
If the offense turns it over, whoever is responsible for the turn becomes the lone defender.
Score is kept individually instead of by team.
If you throw or catch a goal, you get 1 point.
If you actively get the D (rather than the offense just throwing it away) then you get 3 points.
Play until a fixed amount of points, or until you're tired.

We had lots of fun playing. We didn't really keep track of points, so I'm not sure how balanced the 3-points-per-D rule is. We also never set how many points you should play to. It might just be best if we played to 5 points and you only got 1 point for getting a solid D. Maybe we should try that next...

What do you think? Feel free to try it out & let me know if you have any other ideas for rules modifications.

Apple's demands

2011-02-17T22:00:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about all the hubbub around Apple's give-us-all-your-money policy changes. Or enforcement changes. The gist of the situation, as I understand it, is this:

There are apps on the App Store that relate to services and goods that users have to pay for. Netflix is an example: a user subscribes to Netflix, pays them a monthly fee, and can stream a bunch of movies to their iPhone. Amazon's Kindle app lets you buy e-books from Amazon and read them on your iPhone. These experiences existed before in-app purchasing came along, and before the new-fangled in-app subscription stuff came along.

Now that Apple has all these ways of selling to users (in-app purchases for things like Kindle, and subscriptions for things like Netflix), they're going to require these app developers provide an in-app means of subscribing or buying additional content. Not just existing ones, but new apps as well. Any app that is associated with a service where you can buy additional content, or you have to be subscribed to in order to use, should have a means of spending this money with in-app transactions. They also stipulate that things sold in the App Store this way must cost the same or less than things sold directly by these companies

My first response was shock. Are you serious? This looks like a money-grab move by Apple. "Great, you've built something that tons of people use. Now if you want to keep updating it (or worse, continue to let users use it) then you have to give us 30% of all your revenue. Oh, and don't try to inflate your prices to pass this bullshit tax onto your users, because then they won't buy from us because we'll be more expensive". Way to be a dick, Apple.

Now I've thought about it some more. It seems less evil if I think about it from the customer's perspective, rather than the developers. What's the current book-buying experience with the Kindle app? I decide I want to buy a book, click a button, and the app exists, I'm dropped off into Safari where I have to find the book I want, sign in (or sign up), possibly enter credit card information, gahhhhhhh. There are tons of steps. And then when I'm done, the website tells me to go back to the app. Why did I have to leave the app, anyway?

I don't care which payment system is used; Amazon or Apple just take it out of the same credit card anyway. I don't care how I buy the ebook if prices are the same. And in-app is a much better experience. And Apple, to a fault, is all about forcing a better experience on its users.

Additional content purchases make sense, even with Apple's mandate. As long as they only charge the 30% for additional content purchased on the phone (not retroactively applied to my entire Kindle library) then it's not evil. It's a win for users, Apple, everyone except App developers.

But what about subscriptions? This gets a bit murky. I already have a Netflix account. I had it before there was an iPhone App. There is absolutely no reason any of my money should go to Apple for Netflix building an excellent service that I was willing to pay for, that I continue to be willing to pay for. Apple shouldn't charge Netflix 30% for my susbscription, or even just to let me use Netflix on my iPhone.

Where the 30% Apple tax makes sense is in new customer acquisition. If I've never used Netflix, but then decide I want movies streamed to my iPhone, then it'd be a seamless experience if I could sign up for Netflix on my phone. Then, in the same app in a matter of seconds, start streaming my favorite movie. That would be awesome.

But what about recurring subscriptions? Just because I started on my iPhone, should 30% of my money go to Apple for the entirety of my Netflix subscription? What if I'm a current Netflix user, who didn't start on the iPhone, who needs to update his subscription level? If I do that on my iPhone, should that give Apple the right to charge an Apple Tax?

It's murky. It's complicated. But only for businesses and developers. I genuinely think that, once these new regulations are enforced, you'll see a good number of better in-app purchasing experiences on the iPhone.

Or, better yet, the mobile app developers will just say "screw it", build an HTML5 app on web standards that works on any modern device, keep their own payment models, and make fat bank while gaining tech cred for being such a forward-thinking company.

Just kidding. That will never happen. But I can dream, right?

Stream of Consciousness

2011-02-16T22:00:00.000-08:00

I'm once again stuck staring at the screen wondering what to write about. I can't think of anything off of the top of my head. I haven't finished any books, or video games, or seen any movies lately, so I can't just cop-out and review something again.

I try looking at news for inspiration. Well, "inspiration". Really it's just another excuse to catch up on twitter, Reader, and news under the guise of trying to write. When really none of this helps me write. Instead it just tells me that South Dakota is trying to make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions (to "prevent murder") and that there are some really cool gadgety toys that I might want but have little to no use for.

But that has left me nothing. Which really isn't surprising, because if you're not writing, then nothing will get written. Until:

BEHOLD! Stream of consciousness. It's a writing technique that's exactly like it sounds. I'm not trying to write things well. Or coherently. I'm just typing out as fast as I can letting things go.

Well, that's not entirely true. I've paused to add links to the above paragraph. I'm writing in full sentences and stopping to fix spelling mistakes. So there's some cycling to my stream of conciousness.

If we were writing this in a Wave at the same times, I could warn you to not cross the streams.

Anyways. I've done this kind of writing before when I had to crank out tons and tons of text. The end result was either a seed idea or something good I could actually focus on and write about or just a pile of dead text to add to my word count. That is, if you're keeping a word count. Which is the whole point of National Novel Writing Month, which is the primary reason for cranking out a bunch of mindless text.

I've done it a few times. Well, 2 or 3. I think I've only successfully done it once. Only once did I actually end the month on target. But that was a lot of me being like "Dear god I really don't want to write please make it stop" so then I'd write that, or something very similar, as fast as I could so that I could have my 6,000+ words for the day done and then move on.

It's kind a pity too, because I had some interesting literary devices that I never fully brought to life. Well, one literary device. I just never could figure out how to really get it to work right. Like "wooo that's great, you can do X now" but "why would you want to" is never really answered.

Fiction! That's it. Maybe when I can't think of something to write, I'll just write fiction again. It's tougher because I'd have to have a root idea or something to try and make a coherent story. That's the advantage of NaNoWriMo, I don't have to worry about having something that's even human readable at the end of it. I just have a bunch of text with a bunch of ideas all bunched up. In a bunch.

Or maybe I can just fill up my blog with mindless rambling posts, like this one.

Letter Spelling

2011-02-16T10:00:00.000-08:00

This is absolutely random.

I saw a sign on the street today that had a giant letter X, and beneath it, the phrase "ECKS". I have no idea if it's a brand or what, but it got me thinking.

How many letters in english can you spell phonetically without using the letter you're spelling. ECKS is one. The only other ones I could think of were EYE, CUE, YOO, and DOUBLE-YOO. 'Y' is close, but I can't unambiguously write "WHEYE" without folks reading whe-ye instead of wh-eye.

Apparently, this is what I do when I see signs on the street sometimes.

Music Pages

2011-02-14T22:00:00.001-08:00

I'm going to have a week off of work next week. Mostly, it's to recover from the stress of launching that we still haven't gotten out of. Hopefully it'll bring me back to a state of relax I had on January 1st, before things got fucked and they changed everything on us again.

Breathe. Okay. That part is done. Move on.

Anyway, I might actually have enough time and interest into rebuilding my site like I said I would at the beginning of the month. The real big design change is around my music. It's something I never had before. It's also something that might let me try out fancy new HTML5 stuff. Here's my idea:

For each of my songs, I can have a page that displays everything about it. It'll have the video of me performing it, high-quality audio, lyrics, and possibly guitar tabs. This seems very well suited for HTML5, with the various video and audio tags.

And then I can take it one step further. What if I added a bouncy-ball or something, so I somehow highlighted a line of lyrics in time with the audio/video? Or what if I let you click on a line of the lyrics, and it jumped the audio/video to that spot? Or what if I let you highlight a section of lyrics and then looped over that?

I'm not sure exactly what I want to do, but this seems like a fun way to present what I've created and do it in a way that's fun to develop. We'll see what I can make in a week.

Downpour

2011-02-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

Saturday was what I expect all winter Ultimate games to be like, but I'm pleasantly surprised they're not. We had a double-header with our ample supply of energetic players. The first 2 hours went by well, it was absolutely the windiest weather I've played in all year, but at least it was dry.

Unfortunately, that sentiment jinxed the second game. What began the game as a light rain turned into a fierce torrential downpour by half that just continued throughout the afternoon. With our ample subs only playing on one team this time, I was playing roughly every third point. And with all the rain and wind, there were still some really long points, resulting in a bunch of folks just standing on the sidelines, getting drenched, and waiting to go in.

My mind has this wondrous ability to think two conflicting thoughts at a time without (a) having to reconcile them or (b) realizing that they're conflicting. Most times, this ability is an inconvenience, like when I agree to go to 2 parties without realizing they're on the same night on opposite sides of town. But for situations like this, it's actually quite nice.

One thought completely agrees with what everyone is saying. It's cold. It's windy. It's rainy. I'm drenched through. This is miserable. There are too many people. I'm just standing here getting wetter, getting colder, getting more miserable.

The other is completely focused. This poor weather will make the disc slippery, make it hard to catch, hard to throw, hard to play good ultimate. They'll want to quit because it's cold, wet, and windy. This weather is our advantage in this game. Who can I yell at on the field to help communicate, to help motivate, to make sure this weather wears down our opponent more than it wears down my teammates?

Of course, this second thought isn't as fully focused as I've described it. It's really just me looking at my team, yelling at them, cheering for them, moving up and down the sideline with them. I like doing it in any weather, but I'm especially inspired in terrible weather because I really think it helps the team. It also has the advantage of keeping me moving on the sideline, so I don't get freezing cold and miserable.

But when I'm asked, I'll still agree that it's cold. That it's wet. That I'm soaked through. I'll share the same desire to not want to be there any more than I have to.

Until the disc is in play again, and all I care about is telling my teammates when the thrower is looking to get the disc to the person they're trying to defend.

Needless to say, I had a great time despite the weather. And once there was no more game to watch or play in, I had an overwhelming urge to get the fuck out of there and get into a nice, hot shower.

Fun with Friends

2011-02-13T22:00:00.000-08:00

It's easy for me to get stuck in a rut. Not in a bad way; I like having a certain rhythm to my life. Cycles of things that I like to do repeating with a known frequency. And as time goes on, the fun things changing slightly, or maybe changing frequency.

It's like a song, really. You might like one part of the song, but if it didn't keep changing you'd begin to get seriously annoyed.

I think that's why I'm not so good with planning social things. They're really sort of one-off events that break the normal pattern of my social life. That's not to say that they're bad; whenever I do these things I usually enjoy them. I'm just more resistant to them than I really should be.

This last week was a bunch of one-offs. Monday I didn't go to Kathryn's because she was swamped with work. Thursday I didn't go to Ultimate practice so I could have dinner with some tech friends and see Ignite Seattle. Friday I had to work from 9:30pm-10:45pm, then rushed to Chop Suey to see more karaoke friends. With a 1.25-hour long exception, it was loads of fun all across the board hanging with friends that I really don't get to see much with my current schedule.

If you're reading this, and you're a friend I haven't seen in a while, leave a comment or shoot me a tweet or something. I definitely want to hang out and catch up, even if I'm usually too focused on the day-to-day rhythms to notice it.

And even if I'm awkward about it when we first meet up. Because believe me, I'll be awkward about it.

Time Capsule

2011-02-11T10:00:00.000-08:00

I just wrote a long post. It's about work. It's really written more for me to say things to myself than for me to broadcast to the world. But then again, that prettymuch describes everything I write in here.

I haven't published it. I don't think I should right now. It might be one of those "write an angry letter but don't send it" stress techniques. But I've done something slightly differently. I've post-dated the blog post to appear sometime in the future. Not soon, but sometime.

Hopefully, this will do 2 things. First, keep that message to me in my sight. I'll see it whenever I look at my posts. Second, to hopefully get the story out once some of the fires have died down. I think these moments will be good to look back on when I'm not in the heat of them.

All I can hope is that, by the date I picked to publish the post, I'm not still in the heat of them.

Bad Memory

2011-02-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

I wrote a new song!

Song (mp3)

Lyrics:

Today I go to a concert
by my all time favorite band
I'm leaving so soon I will be in
an amazing auditory land

But

I cannot find my keys
Where did I leave my keys
I cannot find my keys
I thought they were right here

But now I can see they're not
Where could my keys have gone
Where have my keys gone?

Then I see them on the counter
So I grab them and I head downstairs
As I reach the curb then my
jaw hangs in the air

I cannot find my car
Where did I leave my car
Where is my car parked?
I thought it was right here

But now I can see its not
Where could my car have gone?
Where is my car parked?

Then I see it down the street
Behind a big ass SUV
I get in and I drive my car
to the concert so blissfully

I don't see where to park
I cannot park my car
I need somewhere to park
I can't just drive it in

Is there nowhere to park?
Where can I park my car?
I need to park my car

I catch someone as their leaving
and I pull right into their spot
As I stroll up to the venue
I remember something I forgot

I don't have my ticket
Where is my ticket
I can't find my ticket
It was in my pocket

But then I changed pants
Oh why did I change pants
It's in my other pants

So I leave from the concert
of my all time favorite band
I'll see them next time around
and then I'll gladly shake their hands

I cannot find my car
Where did I park my car
I cannot find my car

Oh there it is.

New Mic

2011-02-09T22:00:00.000-08:00

I got a new microphone today! Well, I guess technically calling it "a microphone" would suffice, because I have been using my computer's built in microphone to record my songs before.

I gave it a spin with the two songs I already have written. Have a listen:

Slow Car (In the Fast Lane)

Zombie Song

I have another new song, called Bad Memory. I'll post it tomorrow with the full lyrics. I probably won't be doing a youtube video for a while, but maybe if I get sick of GarageBand and want to use iMovie then I'll start doing youtube stuff again.

Also, on Slow Car, I forgot that I had begun recording for a few seconds after I hit record. So you get a fun never-before-heard intro.

Or something.

Also, in a completely shameless plug, I'm storing the files on Dropbox so if you'd kindly click this link then I'd get a little more space to put songs on the internet. Thanks.

Short post

2011-02-08T23:16:00.000-08:00

I forgot to post today. It was a rough day.

But I'm very happy now. It's been a great evening.

I'm partially drunk, too. Wooo.

February Project

2011-02-07T22:00:00.000-08:00

...might have to change. I tried making a dent in this project yesterday, but got nowhere. Well, that's not entirely true. I have a design.

I tried designing for mobile first, then the desktop. It's an interesting thought exercise. It was also forcing me to focus on what I really intended folks coming to my site to actually do. Which boiled down to a short list of things:

Read this blog
Watch, listen to, and read lyrics of my music.
Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

But I didn't want to do a full port of moving all my data around. That has some benefits, I'm sure, but I really just want to build the website and not worry about data storage. Which I realize is me being somewhat lazy.

Anyway. I had the design. But the biggest problem with this approach is that the design isn't really inspiring. It's simplicity, while making it a pretty good design, means that I don't get to try my hand at using fancy CSS3 stuff, or any of the more interesting JavaScript additions under the "HTML5" banner.

It's just a simple site that I've built a hundred times before.

So after designing in my notebook, then staring at my computer and getting frustrated about why I wasn't having any fun with this, I put it away. I tried out some new stuff on my guitar. That's still fun. Hopefully I'll have another song or two up by the end of the week.

Still don't know what I'll be doing for my project this month.

Moments of Greatness, part 2

2011-02-06T10:00:00.000-08:00

There are a few other layouts I vividly remember.

One year I was at the Stanford qualifier. I forget which team we were playing against. I was trailing my guy by a half step to the open side. The cutter did a stutter step to try and fake me out just as the thrower was committing to his un-juked cut. I didn't buy the fake and kept running. I leapt toward the disc shortly after it was thrown.

I was a more experienced player at this point. I knew I had the D. But as confident as I am, I always aim to get to the disc first however I can. There's always a chance that the offense will lay out and get the disc if you don't, or maybe it will just be macked to someone else on the team.

But in this case, I had slightly overestimated the distance I could lay out. As I flew through the air I saw the disc racing towards me. Reaching out right in front of me, I could see it in my sights. Then I began to fall.

The disc didn't fall with me. It just floated as I began to descend back to earth. I could see it keep going up and up above my eyeline, and I kept reaching higher up, from eye level to above my head, to reaching as far up as my completely horizontal body would let me.

It seemed like forever. But the disc was still in my reach as I descended. I snagged it in my right hand as I hit the ground.

My final year of College Ultimate I found myself in a familiar situation. College Sectionals in the spring, out of the running for advancement into Regionals, but playing a close game against Cal's favorite rival: Stanford.

There was one long point. Both teams had turned it, but now Stanford had the disc and they were being very patient with the disc. Our D held them to a few short upfield throws, only to have them dump it shortly after. The sidelines were relaxed since this game didn't matter for Regionals, but patient play is far from entertaining to watch. So the sidelines were occupied with heckling & cheering their team on.

"Hit the mismatch!" shouted a Stanford player.

I looked at the guy I was guarding. He had been giving me a bit of a challenge cutting, but nothing I couldn't handle. He was getting tired, and lingering in the vertical stack to keep the lanes clear and catch his breath.

He was about 6'2" compared to my 5'8" self. I was obviously the mismatch they were shouting for.

"It's not a mismatch." I yelled back to the sideline.

My guy ran deep. This was the biggest threat. I have to work hard to out-maneuver and out-position a tall guy to catch a high disc. It's substantially easier to just keep better positioning and make the thrower not decide to throw the disc. I sprinted to stay deeper than the person I was defending.

The thrower didn't put the deep disc up, but my guy wasn't done cutting.

He planted and made a hard cut in to the break side. I planted and ran with him. The thrower saw the opportunity he was looking for and unleashed an inside out flick toward my guy.

It was over in a few seconds. I ran with my guy and flew through the air just to his left. I slapped the disc out of the air with a satisfying smack. I landed about 10 feet from the sideline, right in front of the hecklers who had called for the very throw that I just blew out of the sky.

I jumped back up, and tipped my hat to the hecklers, and to my teammates roaring at the ludicrous display.

"Told ya"

Moments of Greatness, part 1

2011-02-05T10:00:00.000-08:00

We all have moments of greatness. Times when, for a moment, you are unbelievably fucking awesome. There's this tight ball of excitement that builds in your chest in the moment, which sends ripples of electricity through your entire body. It can happen very quickly, but the mind slows down the time, or at least the memory of it, so you can savor just how unbelievably fucking awesome you were in that one instant.

Some folks might have this feeling when accomplishing a huge task at work or winning in a sport. For me, all my best moments of greatness are my layout D's.

That is my only layout ever caught on camera. This is all I know about how I look to others in one of my moments of greatness.

I don't have a good memory in general. Names, birthdays, things on my to do list, why I just walked over here; all these things I forget. But these moments I remember. I can just close my eyes and feel them happening, in slow motion, all over again.

My first layout D was in a scrimmage at UC Santa Barbara against their B team. They have a gorgeous grass field that overlooks the Pacific ocean. I think it was my second year of playing ultimate; for the first year my teammates were trying to teach me to lay out, but I couldn't. I'd want to get the disc, but I always thought the only way I could go faster was to keep running, not by jumping in front of me.

The guy I was guarding ran deep and then in on the break side. I followed. The thrower tried to hit my guy with an inside out flick.

Then I jumped.

Then I closed my eyes.

I felt the tip of my finger hit plastic. Then I sailed past the intended receiver and landed chest first on the soft, muddy field. I felt slightly dazed; I wasn't really aware what had just happened. I looked back over my left shoulder just in time to see the bobbled disc tumble to the ground.

Holy crap. That was awesome.

February Project

2011-02-04T10:00:00.000-08:00

Whoops! I posted a poll and didn't post the results. What shall I commit myself to doing in February?

Well, I've tallied the results. It was a close one. The victor is of the slimmest of margins: a single vote.

I'll be designing and building a home page. I don't think it'll be a content portal for all my other feeds like downchrisdown.com is. I think I'll just leave that there for now. I just want a page where I can start posting my music and other static content.

Or maybe something more? We'll see. I should get to designing it soon. I'll keep you posted.

And yes, that single vote was me. Muahaha.

PS: I'll still likely be doing songs. I like destressing by playing on my guitar and singing goofy songs. I just won't have a commitment as to how many songs I'll write this month.

Book Review: A Microsoft Life

2011-02-03T18:00:00.000-08:00

I took a brief break from my continuing saga of Mass Effect books to read A Microsoft Life by Stephen Toulouse. aka @stepto. I don't think I would have bought this book if I hadn't heard Stepto talk on Major Nelson's podcast. I don't get a chance to listen to the episodes every week, but they provide a nice break. Stepto's relentless promotion of fair play on Xbox Live is always good to listen to. Not to mention all the good stories folks why try and skirt the rules thinking they won't be caught.

This book is not exactly what I thought it was going to be, but it was an interesting read. Firstly, I had no idea Stepto's career had been quite so long at Microsoft. It's interesting reading a first hand perspective about the launch of Windows 95 and the birth of the security industry.

I also just like reading about Microsoft. Having worked there in a few groups, I have a fairly narrow view of the company as a whole. They really don't deserve all the ire that they've gathered over the years, but they have some fantastic blunders just not understanding who they were building for. Stepto details one story of a futuristic $100 phone system (sometime in the 90s) that required a dedicated computer to operate. Of course average folks going to go out and buy another $500 machine just so their $100 phone system will work. How was this overlooked?

But even on the stuff that folks wanted, computers are complicated, unforgiving beasts. They're hard to get right. So the downfall of having a computer in every office, home, cardboard box in the world is that they will eventually have problems, and the average consumer won't have the patience to realize that it's not Microsoft's fault. They just see the name on it, and decide the onus must be on them to make something work, and since it didn't, it's clearly their fault.

Anyways. I thought this book would be a lot more about the internals of Xbox Live and all the stories of him policing the service. While that's in there (and I really enjoy those bits), his career spans a much larger swatch of time. All in all, it's a good read, with interesting stories.

Email Delay

2011-02-02T22:00:00.000-08:00

I tend to flake out in responding to people. This is mostly true via email, but it's also true via Facebook, LinkedIn, and occasionally Twitter. A lot of this really isn't me intentionally trying to ignore folks, it just kinda slips my mind. Or more often than not, I think of a reply, begin to flesh it out, but then something distracts me.

What, you might ask? Any number of things. Maybe someone from my work team asked a question. Maybe I'm just checking on my phone while at a bus stop, and the bus is here now. Maybe it's yet another tweet, linked invite or face booking message. There are literally thousands of ways where something else demands my attention away from your important communication.

And then I never really return to that same place in my mind. Maybe I just totally forget about your message until I look at my inbox/tweet stream again. Maybe I look again and I just don't scroll far enough to see it. I've practically given up on tweets, but I still try and respond to all email. Well, most email. I do long to have a completely empty mailbox now and again.

But I digress. My point is that I forget to respond to something. And then time passes and I wonder if my response was really worth sending. Or I simply don't feel like responding at that instant.

Rinse, repeat.

This used to be OK, which is why I got into this habit. But now I keep pushing things off and never doing them. What changed?

When I was little, I remember wanting to show my dad something on my computer. I totally forget what it was, but it was really important to the 13-year-old brain of mine. It might have been something age-appropriately cute, like look at this website that I built with all the spinning gifs. More likely it was a problem installing a driver on our pirated version of Windows 2000.

I'd try to get him to come over, and my mom would simply reply, "Dad doesn't want to look at a computer right now. He's been looking at one all day."

I remember thinking it ridiculous at the time; how could you get tired of looking at a computer? I saw a computer for an hour or so of my schoolday when I had programming class, and then when I got home the computer stopped being a box of work and became a floating rectangle of color and entertainment. Even when I grew up and started having internships and real jobs I would still come home and spend a good amount of time on YouTube, Facebook, all the other ol' fashioned ways of wasting time on the internet, on a computer.

But somewhere along the line, that changed. When I come home now, I don't often go right to my computer. In fact, I rarely use my home computers at all as it is for just casual web browsing. I come home and have a whole different set of priorities. Cooking, reading, playing Ultimate, playing xbox 360, all of these realms of entertainment take me away from sitting at my computer being productive. Take me away from seeing all those personal emails that I really really should respond to. I just don't think to do it, because it feels like work compared to all the entertainment options available to me outside of work.

And then when I get to work, I think I should be productive, so I'm substantially more likely to push private message responses out into the "to do" pile. Then I only ever see it at work, so it never gets done.

So. Now I know what the problem is. Here's to hoping that knowing this, I actually start spending time responding to folks at work. :)

The Wall

2011-02-02T10:00:00.000-08:00

I've begun to hit the wall in my "blog daily" quest.

It's just like running. I don't distance run. But when I do I've run until I can't run anymore, I run for about 45 minutes. Then the burning of my muscles sharply increases, I feel like I'm putting in the same amount of effort, but I've slowed to a snail's pace.

I'm not tired. But my resolve has been tested. I question why I began this quest. Am I really getting something out of doing all this? Or am I doing it now just for the sake of doing it? If I just stopped, who would notice, who would care?

Well, I began trying to write every day in order to get better at writing. I have this (probably idealized) memory of myself when I was good at writing. That was when I was writing a lot, blogging on my personal time and writing for fun. I really don't do either any more, so the idea was simply that if I could write more, then I would get better at writing again.

On one hand, I definitely feel habits forming. I'll go about my daily life and something will happen. If it's something I can joke about, tersely comment on, or brag about, I'll tweet it. But there have been a bunch of things that really deserve more time and attention to explain than either limiting my opinion to 140 characters or tweet-spamming my followers. Often I forget what exactly I meant to blog about when I actually get back in front of a keyboard, but that's another issue.

On the other hand, it's work. I'm writing just for the sake of writing. Most of the "review" posts for books/video games/etc that I do are just because that's how I've been spending my free time, that's what's on my mind, and that's all I can think to write about at the time. I could take time to really just tell interesting nonfiction stories, or dream up wondrous works of fiction, but I just wouldn't be able to pump them out in the one-post-per-day pace that I've set for myself.

So we see quantity over quality. In the hopes of eventually making quality.

The idealism of such a simple task is gone. Now it's just me with 11 months more to go of writing down inane details of everyday life in as vivid a way as possible. Or complaining about it, as I sometimes do. I'm not ready to give up the dream yet, but we'll see how I last after the next month.

Is there a writers-high? Like a runners high, but for writers?

I guess there's only one way to find out.

Video Game Review: Assassin's Creed

2011-02-01T10:00:00.001-08:00

I got this game used for $5. I really fell in love with Assassin's Creed II, and this is it's Platinum Edition prequel. Chris warned me against the game, saying that #2 was far better, and the beggars were intolerably annoying. And I was warned that water would insta-kill me and that assassinations are only a small part of the real game thanks to this review.

But for $5 and to keep me happy while I wait for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood to become reasonably priced, it was worth my time.

I was off to a rocky start at first. The glean and polish given to the 2nd game clearly wasn't here. Which makes complete sense, but it's just hard to think that way when you're playing the original game after playing it's rather well polished sequel. Also, my character is an asshole.

That's right. You start the game as an assassin who's all "I don't care about the 'creed', just let me kill templars". Which, admittedly, is how I sometimes go about in all these cities, but that's not the point. The point is that I didn't like what my main character was doing. And neither did any of the NPCs. And then they would all tell me in very stodgy dialog that I was a bad person. I would totally agree with them, but instead my character was on some kind of asshole cruise control and would just shrug them off, insult them, or kill them. Sometimes all 3.

And then at this one point I was killed, but not actually killed, which wasn't actually explained very well. Sigh.

But the story is deep, once it gets going, and the free running and swordplay mechanics are great. Once I got a few hours in and the "it's not Assassin's Creed II" voice inside me quieted down I actually began enjoying myself. And I'm glad I finally got some frame of reference for what the animus was and why I was in it; the sequel just sort of dropped me off without much explanation.

All in all, it was a good game. And remarkably impressive considering it came out in 2007.

Book Review: Mass Effect: Revelation

2011-01-31T18:00:00.000-08:00

I jumped into this book right after reading Mass Effect: Retribution. As I've said before, I'm a huge fan of the Mass Effect universe. The game shines of brilliant writing and game design, and it's fun to see the characters I've grown to know so well in the game universe coming to life in old school book-style.

Like a choose-your-own adventure where every page gives you a choice of "Do you want more awesome? IF YES GO TO NEXT PAGE"

The jump between books was a big one. While Retribution is a sort of epilogue to Mass Effect 2, Revelation is a prequel to the first Mass Effect game. Oddly enough, the main storyline revolves around the same 2 main characters, Kahlee and Captain Anderson. I'm guessing they'll be the focus of the other Mass Effect book, whenever I get around to reading it.

The book definitely feels like a prequel. The narrative of Retribution was really well done. Very intricate with a good number of strong characters all trying to get what they want. Everything happening very fast, action leading the drama. In this book, there isn't the same intensity; the drama leads the action. There's a bit more politicking involved as we witness Humanity's expansion into the verse. We learn more about the personal relationships surrounding the lead characters. All in all, very interesting, but far from the pulse-pounding action of the series' third installment.

I liked this ending better, however. It ended with a big twist, a big "a ha!" moment that any Mass Effect fan is sure to enjoy.

Slow Car (In the Fast Lane)

2011-01-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

A song about an annoying, everyday situation.

Lyrics:
At the end of a very long day
I wanna get in my car and drive my problems away
The open road makes me feel free
But who's this idiot in front of me?

It's a slow car in the fast lane
I can't believe it
I wanna go faster than 50
but he's in my way
A slow car in the fast line
why oh why
Just move out of my lane
and I can finally be free tonight

If you were doin 65 that'd be ok
On a city drive in the middle of the day
The limit is 80 you should go that speed
Or maybe 10 or 15 more, just follow my lead.

Don't be the
slow guy in the fast lane.
who I hate
The slow guy in the fast lane
makes everyone late
hey, slow guy in the fast lane
you're doing it wrong
slow guy in the fast lane
listen to my song tonight

I flash my headlights, I yell and I scream
I do whatever it takes so you know what I mean
You finally move over and I pass you by
But five minutes later who's in my headlights?

Another slow guy in the fast lane
Just my luck
Why drive a sports car
like it's a truck
A slow car in the fast lane
why oh why
Just turn on your blinker
And we can finally be free tonight

just move one lane to your right
move one lane to your right
and I can finally be free tonight

February Project?

2011-01-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

January is winding down, and I should make a decision as to what my project next month will be. Here are the frontrunners:

More Music. I've had lots of fun writing songs this month. And a month seems kinda short for something that I feel is really only beginning. So maybe I should just keep doing it another month?
Website Redesign. I thought I'd do this first, but then writing songs sounded more fun to me. But now that I have that under my belt, maybe I should redesign downchrisdown.com and bought-but-never-used chrisdownie.net sites to reflect my projects better.
Node.js Project. I've got an idea rolling around for a sweet website that I'd like to build using Node.js. Coding at work is alright, but I really want to build something that I have complete ownership over. So maybe it's time for this project.

Which project do you think I should do for February?

Lefty Progress

2011-01-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

I'm getting surprisingly good at playing Ultimate left-handed. Some of it is no doubt just from repeatedly trying to throw left handed and slowly improving. But I think how I think about playing has also begun to change too.

I'm definitely more cautious. I don't have as high percentage throws as I used to. I don't have the range that I used to. So now when I run and catch the disc, I either look for a wide open cut, or something easy & open close by. Most times in game this means just throwing my backhand no matter what the force. Unfortunately that hasn't always been an option, resulting in some okay and some laughable left-handed flicks. But again, I should have a somewhat catchable left handed flick that goes at least 5 feet. That's not that tall of a feat to ask.

I'd like to think i'm also running harder. I'm more content playing fewer points in a game because at the end of most points, I'm probably exhausted. Which works well, since we usually have about 3 lines of subs at our games now anyways. Not everyone is on board with the number of folks we have, but I like it. All the more time to just hang out with friends on the sideline.

Jabs asked me last night what I was thinking about doing in Spring, when Winter league was over. Would I stay left-handed? What would I hope to gain from playing lefty all winter?

Firstly, I hope the all the running upfield will make me a better cutter. I'd like to stay as a cutter if I can -- we have plenty of folks with good hands to handle. I just need to have the speed and the stamina to keep cutting, and the presence of mind to not get tired, and then lazily hover back until I'm a de-facto handler again. This is prettymuch how I used to do it. :)

Second, I'm hoping all this readjusting to a shorter, high percentage range sticks. If I can get pretty good (let's say about 80%) with short throws using my left hand, then it should easily be a 100% distance when I switch back to my right. You know, the throwing hand that I've been working with for, what, over 5 years now? My hucks will obviously improve, too, although not by as much (I'd put my longer lefty hucks at about 10-15% right now.) I've also stopped relying on the inside-out break, which really means I'm not forcing harder throws because I don't see an easy one open upfield. That's a job I'll leave to the handlers.

Finally, I'd like to still have fun. Focusing on my game has been almost zen-like. I'm not really coaching, so I haven't been stressed about how the team has been doing as a whole. I've just been worried about improving as a player. And even that, I haven't been too worried about.

Hopefully that's what will stick. And if it doesn't, well, I might just have to keep playing lefty.

Free idea: Hexels

2011-01-27T13:13:00.000-08:00

I read this post on font rendering. Summary: It's hard. It's at the whim of the browser/OS combination, and you can design it as best you'd like, but there's little chance of the actual product looking just like the designs.

They had some interesting examples showing how font size, color, contrast, etc. all impact how the text is rendered. These are the kinds of details that I'll now be noticing on a bunch of websites. Well done, article.

It was especially interesting to see how horrible fonts rendered with slight rotation looked when re-straightened. It got me thinking if the real bias in why these fonts were displayed worse was just a bias based on the grid-layout of pixels. Obviously, displays of higher density tended to not show poor text rendering effects, but could a differently shaped pixel help contribute to non-linear rendering at the same pixel density?

Yes, I got all technobabbly on you.

I wonder if you could make a screen out of hexagonal pixels. It would probably require special drivers to run, since I'm pretty sure all graphics are based on a rigid rectangular grid system. But technological issues aside, a hexagonal grid of pixels should let you render tilted text & curved lines with even more clarity than a grid based layout. Vertical lines might appear a bit odd, but maybe it would just be high enough resolution for it to work out?

Just an idea. I call 'em Hexels. Now somebody go build it.

Stand back, I'm going to try SCIENCE!

2011-01-26T14:39:00.000-08:00

One night, strolling along on an unsuspecting street in Ravenna. Kathryn & I stumbled upon the question from back in our school days: is centrifugal force a real force?

Well, it wasn't so clearly formulated then. I think at the time it was formulated as "Why do they call it a centrifuge if there isn't a centrifugal force?" "Or is it centripital?" "Wait, which is which again?"

Rather than pull up some internet-friendly phone type device right then and solve the issue, we just discussed it. I like arguing thing sometimes even though you could know the exact right answer in a few minutes, because conversations with a hard stop of "wait, i'll find out the truth so we can stop arguing" make interesting conversations abruptly short.

I insisted that centrifugal force was the force you *thought* you felt acting upon you while you were in something that changed direction. Like the feeling that you're being pushed to the left when the car turns right. But that force doesn't exist, there's nothing pushing you to the left; you've just got momentum going forward and the car is pushing you to the right. There is no active force to the left.

I was convinced, but Kathryn wasn't. But by that time we had made it back to her place and I think we had delicious cookies waiting for us or something so the argument was dropped.

But today's XKCD kindly linked to an older XKCD which had this very debate in it. I sent Kathryn the older XKCD as proof that I was right.

Apparently XKCD doesn't hold weight with Kathryn, so she instead sent me the link to the Wikipedia entry on Centrifugal force.

To which I then read to her a line from that entry:

"In Newtonian mechanics, the term centrifugal force is used to refer to one of two distinct concepts: an inertial force (also called a "fictitious" force) observed in a non-inertial reference frame, and a reaction force corresponding to a centripetal force. "

She didn't believe me, and said that a fictitious force is still a force. To which I responded with a different fictitious force.

But it did get me thinking. I had completely forgotten that the basis for it being a real force or not was based on weather the point of view was accelerating or not. I still don't completely remember why this distinction was the difference between what is real and what is fictitious, but it sent some wheels in motion.

Is there a way to actually have the Star Wars Force effect happen in real life by simply looking at it from an accelerating point of reference? I'm not talking about all the Force abilities, namely the ability to make the lightsaber fly straight across the room into a jedi's hand.

Imagine an empty room in space, with Luke in it and his lightsaber on the other side of the room. To an observer inside the room, everything is motionless. However, this room is actually traveling very quickly through space, based on another point of reference. This is essentially a giant space car, with Luke on one side and the lightsaber on another.

Luke puts out his left hand, and this magic "space car" turns to the left. The inertia will keep the lightsaber traveling forward in space, although as the car rotates, it will appear to move straight across the room into Luke's hand. Indeed, in this scenario, the fantastical Force of Star Wars could very well be attributed to the fictitious centrifugal force that started this whole debate.

You know, assuming that, without exerting a force of his own, Luke was able to change the trajectory of the space car. And assuming he could simultaneously change the trajectories of all other free body objects inside the space car, such that everything didn't *also* accidentally accelerate across the room and crush Luke.

All in all, it was a fun thought experiment. I really should do these more often.

Ferry Godmother

2011-01-25T12:12:00.000-08:00

My ultimate time on Saturday was cut short. Kathryn's Dad's friend was having a 50th birthday party. The party began with the birthday boy asking me if I was retarded, and then ended with him saying, "Thanks for coming, you're not actually a retard."

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We played 2 points of our second game so we'd have enough time to make the ferry. Kathryn usually cuts these things close, with a last minute dash through a near-empty ferry terminal. But she knows that I like to show up 5-10 minutes early, waste that time sitting at the terminal but knowing full well that I won't have to rush in order to catch the boat. This time, she was giving us a bigger-than-normal buffer, just to make sure I won't stress about making the boat on time.

Oddly enough, I think just telling me that there was a big buffer was enough to make me not worry about it. I still rushed to get showered & dressed after our game, but I was assured that we had been given enough time.

Then there was a bit of traffic. Not to worry; I'm sure we have plenty of time for this.
Then we couldn't find a parking spot. Not to worry; plenty of time.
Then we found one, but it was 5:30, so we had to pay for parking for the next 30 minutes. But there was a family of 6 people huddled around the pay meter, perplexed by all the buttons and words.
Then they figured it out, but paid in coins that only added 1-3 minutes at a time. And they also needed a parking pass for 30 minutes.

At this point, it's 5:33 for a 5:30pm boat. There's a chance it's behind schedule (it's saved us before) but it's mad-dash time. We bolt to the terminal and see that it still says Vessel Boarding. We buy tickets and rush to the gate, only to whiplash at the hip when the digital turnstyle beeped at me. I didn't understand. I pushed harder. I shoved the ticket in front of the skanner, and it beeped again. The beep is supposed to mean "ok", right?

"Boat's gone," said a man in uniform. "Next one is at 6:30pm".

Booooooo. Well, we had tried, but we missed this one. Kathryn gave her folks a call, then we went to Ivers to wait for the next boat in style with a drink in hand.

We relaxed. Well, we were an hour early. Plenty of time to catch the next boat. We're enjoying some snacks while in clear view of the ferry terminal, so there's no reason to stress. We talk about the various Clam-related tools posted on the walls, and how they all appear to be some sort of farming tool combined with a gun. Like an amateur Clam Shovel, which was a small spade at the end of what appeared to be a very long rifle. We concluded that there was no way to feasibly find any use for a shovel that is also a gun, even if you were trying to dig & shoot for clams, but instead this was just a failed prototype of the bayonet. They just hadn't figured out yet that a knife would be better suited strapped to a rifle than a shovel. Close, but no cigar.

We saw the next boat arrive and asked for our check. I still had another appetizer on the way, so we just asked them to make it to go. We paid our bill and strolled over to the ferry terminal once more.

Kathryn tensed up as we entered. She began walking a bit faster.

"What's wrong?" I asked. "It's 6:20. We have plenty of time".

But something wasn't right. Our stroll changed to a trot until we met with the electronic turnstiles again. This time the displays had already changed to Vessel Departed.

"Ugghhh," Kathryn said. "It must have been a 6:20 departure."

And so we sat. Kathyrn called her parents with the news that we had again missed the boat. The next one is at 7:20. We checked it thrice. We wouldn't leave the terminal. We would not miss the third boat. Instead, we stayed there and paid for overpriced and not-quite-as-delicious drinks in the terminal's bar, while playing Flight Control to pass the time.

We did not miss that 3rd boat. It would have been a fun adventure to end the night with, but that was just the beginning.

The Zombie Song

2011-01-24T10:00:00.000-08:00

My first song of the month. It took like 10 tries, but I got it all in one take, eventually. Enjoy.

Lyrics:
Well I know what you want from me
And I can't say that it's easy
But it's made me a bit queasy
to say the very least

All I ask is that you hear me
And listen to this final plea
I'd like to politely
deny you of your feast

Just so I speak clearly
So that you can understand me
Zombies, don't attack me
I'd like to be released

My shotgun wasn't enough
Holy shit, you guys are real tough
We have played a bit rough
but I'd like to call a truce

As I'm standing on this rooftop
Watching you all try to get up
Always knocking at my doorstop
I wonder what's the use

Just so I speak clearly
So that you can understand me
Zombies, don't attack me
I'd like to be released

You've had my neightbor Tim
his wife Mary, and son Jim
I never really liked them
So that's just a freebie

But that was moments ago
when I saw you down below
The one thing that I must know is
how are you still hungry?

Just so I speak clearly
So that you can understand me
Zombies, don't attack me
I'd like to be released

I see you're filled with sympathy
Or maybe I'm just annoying
but whichever it may be
You've begun to lurch away

I am thankful this melody
drives you zombies so crazy
I can't tell you how happy
I am to keep my brain

Now that they've all left me
I breathe sighs of relief
I'm glad zombies didn't kill me
Now I can live in peace.

Fancy Cocktail Party: Crank Dat!

2011-01-23T17:21:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday, Kong hosted Fancy Cocktail Party V. It's a bianual gathering at his place, where we get dressed up and hang out. Sometimes we chat about ultimate and make the non-ultimate folks uncomfortable. Other times we talk about building waterfalls with a motorized fossil of a dinosaur that will pop out from behind the waterfall and then shoot bees out of its mouth.

This was one of those times.

Best Overall Couple

I really like this picture.

Kathryn & I won best overall couple. There was a 3-way tie for this category, which I was kinda expecting. For a title as sweeping as "Best Overall Couple" I figured everyone would be writing themselves in. I mean for real, if you don't think you're in the best overall couple, then what are you doing still dating this person?

But apparently "Best Overall Couple" meant more about style than relationship happiness. Or something like that. In any case, other folks (or at least Kathryn) was surprised to find that I had voted us the best couple. But someone else must have agreed to get us into the 3-way tie.

We were tied with Bede/Corinne and Ian/Colin. We went first and got a bit goofy by doing the "Crank Dat" move from Dance Central. Ian & Colin got sexy by doing a short, close dance, then having him dip her for a kiss. It was pretty freaking cool. Bede got confused while Corinne danced around him. Somehow folks chose goofy over sexy. I think they made the right choice.

Most Classy

Fuj & I won most classy Dude & Lady. I think it was my vest that sold it. I'm still pretty surprised that I won this. It must've been the vest. Gotta be.

After the awards, Patrick took a picture of all of us left in Kong's place. These are the Fancy Cocktail Devotees. There were at least twice as many people who showed up for a while and then left, but we were there to close the place out. It's prettymuch the core of Boom that hung around til the end, with a few close friends who are really honorary Boom members anyway.

Yes, that is a White Russian in my hand. Apparently I was the only one drinking at this party.

Maybe that's how I won most classy.

Book Review: Mass Effect Retribution

2011-01-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of the Mass Effect universe. I've always praised the game for being well written (something I always love about great video games) but I had no idea that the writing could stand on its own so well.

The story begins at the conclusion of the Mass Effect 2 storyline. It centers around Cerberus and the Illusive Man, and his renewed devotion to learning all he can about the Reapers so he can best defend humanity from their inevitable return. That's all I really want to say about the story so I don't spoil the game or the book.

These are some deep, complex characters. Like the game, the lines between good and evil are frequently blurred, and I found myself cheering for the assassin who tried to kill an innocent bystander only moments ago. The pace is fast and action packed, with interesting intergallactic politics mixed in with the brutal military assaults.

This is also the first book I've read based on the world originally created by a video game. I feel like that definitely added to the atmosphere. I could vividly imagine watching the Illusive Man speak, calm and composed, in front of a giant red ball of a dying star. I didn't imagine so much as remember the music and dangerous atmosphere of the Omega space station. The immersion created by the video game while I played it definitely added to my enjoyment of this book.

I plan on reading another Mass Effect book next. I can't imagine the earlier ones being as good as this one, but I'm ready to be surprised.

The biggest irk is the ending. All of the action gomes to a sharp crescendo, a thrilling climax of an ending, and then it's epilogue time. Many questions are left unanswered. Many loose ends left around. I can only hope that these stories are concluded in some obscure side-quest in Mass Effect 3, but I'm not holding my breath.

Instead I'm just deciding to read more of these books, probably leaving more loose ends around. Although maybe with my second playthrough of Mass Effect 2, I'll see that those stories *did* actually tie in.

Here's to hoping.

This post deliberately left blank

2011-01-21T18:06:00.000-08:00

Today was not a day for writing about.

The future of web development

2011-01-20T14:53:00.000-08:00

During a brief respite from dealing with some launching pains yesterday, I was talking with one of my coworkers about the future of web development. He's one of the rare ones around here who's a genuine web developer, not just a Java developer forced to make a website because that's what we need at the time.

We were discussing the new HTML5 logo and the potential that all the new technologies branded under this logo represent, and the kind of powerful kind of applications these technologies represent. Where the distinction between current "web applications" and thick, client-side applications gets completely blurred. And really, we're already at the point where the browser is powerful enough to be the runtime environment for a good number of simple applications. With the addition of WebGL and the audio interface, we're getting close to the browser being able to support an even wider number of applications.

It got me excited. I mean, really, that's the kinda thing I want to try out. I want to toy with these new technologies and see what I can build. Right now, I understand them in concept -- and a few of them I've even seen demos of. Hell, I've written some CSS3. But I still feel my web development brain stuck in a pre-HTML5 world. I still think of HTML pages as documents, things that I need to style to look good, and that I need to use javascript to move boxes around to make animation. The power of video tags and audio tags have not fully been realized. It's not intuitive for me to think that way.

But I want it to be. This stuff is cool. And I want to be good at building with it.

That said, it sparked another series of different side projects I could do. This adds to my already long list of side projects I have already thought of, which I haven't actually attempted or haven't finished. My work is never done. Oh well.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Launched

2011-01-19T12:33:00.000-08:00

Myself and everyone on my team has been working really hard for the last year (and especially for the last few months) and we are ecstatic to finally be launching the service.

What Is It?

For the technically inclined, Jeff Barr's blog posts really do a great job of explaining what our service is and how to use it. For the rest of you, here's the elevator pitch:

Amazon Web Services has been great if you're a developer. You can use S3 to store all of your files, EC2 to run your servers, and ELB to handle with scale. All of this without the need for buying and configuring hardware; just tell us what you want to use and it works.

But historically, each of these services have been independent. If you build a webapp on your local machine, you have to then use each of the AWS services manually to upload your content, deploy on the Amazon servers, and then configure the load balancers to prepare your website for scale. While still easier and cheaper than buying and configuring hardware, but was a lot of work that wasn't really about developers building the best webapp they can.

It Just Works

For Java webapp developers, your life just became a lot easier. All you need to do is package your webapp as a WAR file, upload it to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and kick back. We'll handle putting files in place. We'll push it out to servers. We'll monitor load and respond accordingly so that if you become wildly successful your app will scale seamlessly.

We get out of your way and let you spend your time developing your application. With a few clicks and a few minutes, your app can be deployed and updated on the Amazon infrastructure. You can do it from with within your Java editor if you use Eclipse. You can do it with just a web browser using the AWS Management Console (which is what I worked on). And if you prefer that computers do the work for you, you can build a tool that works directly against the AWS Elastic Beanstalk API to do the deployments on your behalf.

Cheaper than Cheap

Additionally, this service is provided at absolutely no cost. You only have to pay for whatever resources you consume, not to use the AWS Elastic Beanstalk service itself. It gets even better: If you're a new user to AWS, you can even use a limited number of AWS resources at absolutely no cost! Just sign up for the Free Tier and launch away.

If you've been thinking about trying Amazon Web Services to host your website, now is the time to try it out. Super easy to use and very low cost (possibly free). So get out there, deploy your app, and let us know what your experiences are.

Happy developing.

Everything sucks, part 2

2011-01-18T13:37:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I lamented how everything sucked. Or, phrased in a less exaggerating and sensationalist way, how the focus on individual features and the push to get things out in the wild quickly prevented us from having wonderfully well-integrated experiences.

A subsequent idea popped into my head that I want to explore. Complaining just generates a lot of noise without any action. But what if we could actually act on the things that's bugging us? What if we could develop and contribute changes to the products we loved, to benefit ourselves as well as other users of that product?

Open Source Software
Yup, that's pretty much what the ideal of open source software is. If you think something sucks bad enough, just fix it. Here's the program, here's the code, just fix it. If it's a product with ongoing development, then hopefully you can have some central repository to commit your changes to. And, hopefully, it's one such that future releases will contain your fix, eliminating the bad user experience for all of its users.

There are two problems with this approach. One, it turns out it doesn't actually succeed at making seamless user experiences (it can be argued that it makes it even worse). Two, everybody thinks they're special and they don't want to share.

No matter how well-intentioned the open source developer is, they can't build an experience. They can only build more features. Maybe it's a tiny bug fix, or maybe it's a full feature rewrite. But piecemeal additions to a larger codebase almost never have a unifying effect on the overall experience. In fact, they usually fracture the experience, forcing it into a mere collection of well-working features.

Invariably, to have a good overall experience, someone needs to have the oversight to see how each of the individual features contributes to the overall experience. This lends itself to some sort of leadership or management role of the project, rather than a fully distributed model of development.

Unfortunately, the projects that have this kind of guidance rarely favor releasing their hard work under an open source license. I can only speculate that the drive for such tight control over the entire product, which is the very feature that can breed a wonderful user experience, is the very same drive that makes them want to keep the innerworkings of their project under wraps. They don't want developers outside of their own to change things, because they could change things in a way that is poor to the overall experience.

Then there's the business and legal side. I think software development in general is crippled by legal decisions. If you release your code, others can copy it, sell it, and try to rob you of sales. I can't deny that this is a possibility, but it's unfortunate that the possible bad action of a few bad apples is preventing me from being able to contribute my skills to interesting projects.

Does everything suck?

2011-01-17T16:46:00.000-08:00

I read this article last week about how gamers are spoiled; we keep getting better games, but we keep being disappointed because we find such small things to latch on and to say that it ruins the experience.

I also saw this comic about how to make the web design of your shopping cart suck less. The points made in this cartoon are great, and they really apply to all forms on the web, not just shopping carts.

At some point, I begin to question my own ability to be upset about the small things. On one hand, I feel like I've been trained to make mountains out of mole hills. If I don't latch on to the tiny things that collectively add to an overall more seamless user experience & complain loudly about them, then the odds of these things being noticed by people who have the power to change them is practically nil. But constantly complaining is tiring and thankless; even if I get to see all of what I want fixed, odds are there will still be more to do in the next version.

This is how I'll always have work as a software developer: there's always more work to do. But from the consumer side of things, it's just a lot of stuff that doesn't work that well.

Take Kinect, for example. I can essentially talk to my TV and have it start playing a football game from last week, while I'm standing in the kitchen & cooking. It's miraculous. This is the future.

Then I try and play music. Wait! You haven't downloaded the Zune app, do you want to download it? Suddenly my Xbox is deaf and no matter what obscenities I shout I can't get it to download the app to play me some damn music without washing my hands, finding the controller, and pushing a button. What is this, 2010?

Or I'll stand in front of Kinect and wave my hand so it knows I want to gesture at it. Then I launch a Kinect game, and it forgets that I was just talking to it. I'm standing right here. I have to wave frantically again for you to remember that I'm the only person in the room? You know what, eff it, I don't want to play this game anymore. It drops me out to the Kinect Hub and once again, forgets who I am, and makes me wave my arms frantically to control it yet again.

These experiences are terrible, the magic of modern technology aside. They're disruptive, they get in my way, and they give me something to complain about. But these aren't minor technical issues, these are serious breaks of customer flow that frustrate me.

It's my fault, really. They built a magic box. I wanted to have a magic box immediately. They got some stuff working really well, and then had to decide if building a seamless MagicBox experience was worth not giving me a magic box that worked well enough in some cases right now. They probably even asked me and I said "RIGHT NOW GIMMIE GIMMIE" but then somewhere along the line (probably with marketing) they neglected to tell me that everything wasn't diamonds & unicorns. They didn't pare down my exaggerated expectations and left me to discover for myself that what they had built wasn't actually a magic box but actually just a new kind of joy stick.

But some things really can't even be placed on marketing setting expectations too high. I expect that if I click on a label next to the checkbox, that the website will know that I mean to click the checkbox. I expect that if I press the 'tab' key, I can cycle through the important input fields in a page. These aren't lofty expectations, but since they're always secondary to the person building the website, they often get overlooked. Then I try things, find out my moderate expectations weren't met, get frustrated and have reason to complain.

One final example. It's review time at Amazon. The free-form field inputs are a wonderful expanse to let me express where I believe my peers have excelled, and where they have the opportunity to improve. But these expansive anecdotes must then be categorized into one of twelve Areas of Leadership. These are short titles with lofty explanations to show that you Save Money(tm) and Care About The Customer(tm).

They're also checkboxes without labels. But that's not my point.

The lofty leadership categories are in no way indicative of the qualities that I need to see in my coworkers. They're not the ones that they need to have in their core skill set. They're just a good-sounding collection of words that suit movie posters or book covers better than performance reviews.

And at the end of it, I have about 16 more qualities that I have to rate the person on, either "Agreeing" or "Disagreeing" (perhaps Strongly) that it is a quality they posses. Except these are all vague lofty technical qualities that we pretty much screen for in the interview process. "Writes Good Code"? "Seeks The Root Cause of Problems"? "Communicates Effectively"? If they didn't, why would they be here? This reduces all of my responses to a combination of "Agree" and "Strongly Agree", which they even obscure further by trying to compute a mathematical average of my judgements, pretending that has value.

And for the ones that I don't list Agree with, there's no room for feedback as to why. Because in reality, everyone has these traits, but some of them can use more improvement than others. Only having "Agree" and "Strongly Agree" is not enough variance for me to help them. So I have to lie and say I disagree with things, but I can't say why.

So when it comes down to it, this is what I see all day. Varied products and projects and tools that I have to interface with. Some design or implementation detail that hinders my intended task, and then a world of frustration and things to complain about. Does everything suck like this? Is there no product that really nails the full end-to-end experience and gets out of my way and lets me do my thing?

Short Update

2011-01-16T17:48:00.000-08:00

I missed posting yesterday. I'll make up for it. Honest.

Yesterday was awesome. A double-header in the morning, followed by lunch with friends. Then, in the evening, I went to a formal party hosted at Kong's house. I won the award Classiest Man.

But that story is nothing without pictures, and I don't have pictures. And I know, according to the rules of the Internet, that until I have pictures then it didn't happen. But there were other people taking pictures, so as soon as they're up on Facebook I can cross-post them here and tell that story.

For now, I'm just a dude who had a busy day, didn't write a blog entry, and has no material proof of it. :)

Anything else

2011-01-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

I'm trying so very hard to think of something to write about that isn't work. Shit is still going wrong, and we told them to account for the fact that shit could go wrong in the schedule, but they were convinced that this time, there would be absolutely no delays of any kind. Once again, the people building the product know more than the people deciding how the product should be built.

But that's work. That's exactly what I'm not thinking about, and that's exactly what I won't be writing about. Instead, I'll be writing about anything else.

Anything at all.

Hmm...

I've been really enjoying WNYC's Radiolab. They're really well produced pieces on a variety of subjects. I found the whole audio switching sort of chaotic and distracting until I got used to it, but it has its charm. I've just been putting them on while I work, and letting myself get wrapped up in the story while I push bits around. I think it's been lowering my stress.

And really that's just what I want. As many bad decisions are made, as many late breaking changes, as many scheduling and planning disruptions, I just need it not to have any effect on me personally.

But I was talking about something else.

Oh, also, I'm really liking my fancy new computer glasses. I look anyway from ridiculous to awesome, depending on who you ask, but I think they work. My eyes definitely feel more relaxed staring at a computer screen all day. I get fewer exhaustion headaches at the end of the day, and don't often feel like I'm going to crash when I get home from work. That could also be to to my other efforts to lower my stress, as well as me switching to tea instead of caffinated high-fructose-corn-syrup'd cola. And that I've been drinking so much water. But it could also be the glasses.

The color shift is really the worst part about them. I notice it less and less now, but the distinct yellow-tint to my world always takes a few minutes to get used to when I put them on. The computer screens look absolutely fine; no super-yellow screens for me. But the rest of the world that isn't beaming light directly into my eye-holes does look distinctly more yellow. And then blue, when I take my glasses off.

It is a bit odd that I'm trying to prevent eye fatigue, which could make me wear glasses, by wearing glasses which prevent eye fatigue.

Oh well.

I'm a lyricist, not a songwriter

2011-01-13T10:00:00.000-08:00

Writing songs is hard.

I mean, I realize that the whole point of it is to try and do things that (a) I don't normally do and (b) That will be a bit more challenging for me than the safe, comfortable things I'm good at.

But man, writing songs is hard.

I've got one written. Like, done. It's not great, but it's catchy, and with any luck it could save your life. You'll see what I'm talking about when I post it. I just have a rough version recorded so far so I don't forget it; I didn't want to deal with producing the final audio and/or YouTube clip when I finished writing it.

That's the other thing; it hadn't occurred to me that when I said "I'll post it on YouTube" that I'd actually have to produce a video of me performing the song. I'm genuinely not the strongest guitar player, so playing a song I just wrote and singing the words I also just wrote is hard to do at the same time. Usually, technology saves me by only making me perform one of those at a time, then just laying one over the other. I bet I could just do that with the video too. Or maybe I could just practice the song well enough to do it for YouTube. We'll see. I'm thinking of calling this first song "Rooftop Plea".

I have been trying to write these songs in different ways, but again, it's hard. With the rap songs I've written before, it was always super easy to just come up with a concept, a cadence, some clever words, and then a bunch of other words to put between the clever bits of words to make a song of decent length. With the last melodic song I wrote, I tried coming up with a chord progression before writing lyrics. That worked well enough, and I got a pretty good song out of it.

With Rooftop Plea, I tried getting the song written before the words. I did a different sort of plucking cadence than usual, and didn't use chords. And, when I sat down to write it, it was going to be a completely different song. But then I was like "This sad sap song is boring me. Let's make it something awsome". To which I responded, "Yes, of course, awesome! That's just what this song was missing"

I've gotten a bit carried away with that now into my second song. I've got some great lyrics and a pretty catchy tune. Well I have some great lyrics, anyway. Unfortunately, the tune I'm hearing is only in my head, and I lack the auditory ability to figure out what chord progression for it is. It also is by far the most complex chord progression in any of my songs. Also, I think I'm hearing an ukulele instead of a guitar.

But still! I'll figure out something. It's gonna be a good second song. Well, it'll have good words, anyway.

Book Review: Machine of Death

2011-01-12T22:43:00.000-08:00

This comic started it all, a little over 5 years ago. The seed idea. What would happen if a machine was invented that could tell you, with a mere sample of your blood, how you were going to die? It's never wrong, although its predictions can be uselessly vague. And that is your fate, regardless of your actions to reject it, embrace it, forget it or ignore it.

Well, it went from a joke in a comic, to folks deciding to make a book about it. They asked writers from all over to contribute stories with the same premise. Then they pulled them all into this book, Machine of Death.

The books authors are also really forward-thinking tech folks. The website for this book has news about it and an increasing number of its short stories available as podcasts. And, the best part, is that you can have the book for free if you want. Yup, completely no-cost and free of DRM. Just openly released under the Creative Commons license. That kind of openness genuinely does make me want to give them money so more publishers follow suit. But I digress.

Machine of Death an interesting read. Good, not great. Its flaws are in its format. Some of the short stories are pithy, uninteresting bits about more mediocre details of daily life living with the Machine of Death. But then there are some amazing tales that I'm really upset to find out they only get one chapter. Each chapter is titled with a prescribed death from one of the characters in its story. My favorites are, in no particular order, Almond, Hiv Infection From Machine Of Death Needle, Exhaustion From Having Sex With A Minor, and Loss of Blood.

Each of these stories don't precisely fit in the same universe, but it could easily be argued that they all in fact do coexist in the same universe, and the minor indiscrepancies are merely do to poor recollection on the part of a character in the story. But the diverse implications of such a device are mesmerizing. Would we establish a minimum national age to be tested by the Machine? Would we try it for a while, then ban it altogether? Would children be tested at birth? Would you become criminal if you refused testing? Could a court order you to get tested to help in a federal investigation?

All these different scenarios play out in the book. It's amazingly intriguing to see the same simple premise have such a diverse array of consequences. There are stories of love, betrayal, science, and politics.

Oddly enough, there aren't many death stories. That was probably the biggest misconception when I began reading it. I was sure that each of these chapter titles would be a death foretold by the Machine, and the story would be about a new character who got this death prescribed to him, and who tried desperately to escape, only to cause his own demise. I mean, I guess that would be a difficult story to re-tell 30 different ways. But I thought it would really be a mystery of just guessing and second-guessing what the interpretation of such a vague death could mean for the current protagonist.

But it's really not about that. Not all the stories end with someone dying. Just because some predictions can be vague, doesn't mean that all of them are. They do tend to make for interesting stories, though.

Everything is stupid

2011-01-12T15:10:00.000-08:00

I'm in a bad mood.

Wait, back up.

I feel like 'efficiency' isn't so much a good recommendation as it is a life philosophy to engineers. Anyone with technical skill wants to do things in such a way so they take less time, less resources. In fact, it's a pretty easy follow-up question to any interview question. Just ask what you normally ask, and then "OK, can you do it faster? With less memory? With less resources?"

If they're good, they've already thinking of a faster way to do things. Or they can clearly explain why their way is unequivocally the fastest. If they're OK, then they begin thinking of it when you ask. They'll at least poke around a while and try things out to see if there is something they could do differently. A flat out "no" is the only wrong answer.

But that sentiment permeates from the interview question to everything else in life. Why should I take side streets if the freeway looks faster? If I cut through this parking lot, instead of walking around it, it could save me like 2 seconds on my walking commute. What other ways can I save my time, my money, my mental and physical exertion doing things that I do often?

I definitely type 9-0 when I want to microwave something for a minute & thirty seconds because it's one keypress faster than typing 1-then-3-then-0. I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this.

The difficulty in all this comes in dealing with folks who don't think the same way. Or who don't realize that engineers think this way. Or maybe just from some group of people who are yet-to-be properly classified. These are the folks who ask you for things that you already told them. The ones who make you do the same thing you did for them over and over again, with each subsequent action having absolutely no additional consequence than the first time you did it.

I'm not expecting people to be computers. Mistakes can be made, things can be lost or forgotten. And sometimes you need to repeat yourself. But by the second or third time, the request should change from "Can you do this" to "I'm sorry to keep asking, but i need this again" and eventually to "we need to think of a better way to do this"

But no. I'm upset. Mostly because things haven't progressed past the first part. I've spent the better part of two weeks going in circles. I'm sick of it. I really am.

And it's really just a waste of my time, my resources.

It's just goddamn inefficient.

Missed a Day

2011-01-11T22:53:00.000-08:00

Shit. Apparently, I missed a day? I thought I was doing good about keeping up on the daily posts, but apparently I spaced on Sunday. And then didn't notice it until today. I'm a sharp one.

I'll have to make an additional post to catch up. So, you know, be ready for that.

It's snowing outside right now. And not like the wimpy flurry we had a few days ago, it's really coming down. The streets are just covered in white, like someone covered the whole area with sand. A white, cold, sand. That looks like snow.

Ugh my analogies are terrible. Have the years of literal thinking really corroded my creative writing side into something that is not as good because it's so corroded? Can't I still evoke imagery with words that make you see what it is I'm seeing without telling you what it is I'm seeing. Well, I mean, by using words, but by using slightly different ones than a normal person would. Whereby 'normal' I mean non-writer types. Which, by the looks of it, currently includes me.

Maybe I should just start writing in analogies exclusively, like an artist gone mad after an attacker tried to kill him one night. Left traumatized, all his works of art are shadowy images of that fateful night, evil shapes lurking in the darkness, their intentions clear as day. And try as he might, he can't shake these images form his mind, can't shake them from his work, can't shake them from the prison he's made for himself. The images just keep coming, and coming, and coming.

Except for me it'll be analogies. But less dark. More funny.

Maybe only a little dark.

TTYL MFER

2011-01-10T22:07:00.000-08:00

I don't have a whole lot to write about today. But here's an interesting chat I had with Craig a few months ago. Since then, my favorite way to say goodbye to someone is TTYL MFER. Unfortunately, it has not been widely adopted by the internet at large. Yet.

wooo hawaii

12:46 AM Craig: eggsellent

12:47 AM me: that was a terrible yolk

12:48 AM Craig: it's late, my mind is scrambled

12:49 AM me: hold up, omelette you finish, but i just wanted to say that beyonce had one of the best videos OF ALL TIME

12:53 AM Craig: aaahhh why did I start with the egg thing, I can't think of anything remotely clever anymore I give up!

you cracked me, I guess

12:54 AM me: haha

12:55 AM you went over easy.

BOOM

12:56 AM Craig: you could say that you were a "craig beater"

12:57 AM me: haha

even when we stop we're still going. :)

12:59 AM ok, well i'm going to go to bed

at least until I see the sunny side up

Craig: STOP IT

:-)

1:00 AM me: ok

egg jokes over

Craig: TTYL MFER

Playing Left Handed

2011-01-08T21:50:00.000-08:00

Today was Hangover, a 1-day ultimate tournament in Seattle. We spent the whole day running around breathing in the cold Seattle air trying to chase down a disc before it hits the ground, only to gladly fling it in the air again once we caught it. And then doing it again and again.

I genuinely like Ultimate, but I've begun to get bored of it. In college ultimate, there was always change. Every year a new batch of recruits to teach the rules to and teach 'em how to throw a flick. Every year more folks moving on up to the A team and trying to compete for a shot at the national title. And every year, your opponents changed similarly; it might have been the same teams, but it was always new people. And some years, we'd get new coaching squads, so we'd be tasked with learning an entirely new offense to the sport. Or new defensive positions and plays. It was awesome.

Things have kind of slowed down since then. I play with a bunch of folks who live around here. They don't graduate and move away. There isn't an A team to move up to that still feels like my team. There aren't coaches to teach me anything I don't already know. There aren't 60 new recruits every year to get excited about. And there's no championship to work toward. There's just us, a crowd of friends who like the sport, against other crowds of friends who also like the sport. They don't change, and neither do we.

That's part of why it broke my heart when my college alum team decided to get competitive. There's one tournament a year up here where everyone from the US (and around the globe) joins up to play some ultimate, and that's really the best time to play with folks you haven't seen in forever, and whose bonds should be stronger than ever, on account of being teammates for 3-4 years. But that's a sore spot, and a whole different story.

I needed something to change. I don't want to quit playing; that's a bit too drastic of a change. I want to try something new and work hard and improve at it, or just try something new and fail miserably.

So I've decided to be left-handed for winter. We'll see how things turn out in the long run; right now it's mostly a "failing miserably" situation. I played one game last weekend left handed and actually made some pretty decent plays. Today I played mostly left handed and didn't fare much better.

I don't really notice it, but apparently my decision to have shitty throws for the next 2-3 months (or at least most of today) has really upset some of my teammates. I tried going right-handed for half of one game, and it upset me terribly. It kinda helped me see how my mind works when i'm playing the game.

When I play right-handed, I play with years of experience. I'm not so sure that I'm *actually* the best player on the team, but i definitely psyche myself up by telling myself that I am. I play hard and controlled, thinking in high-level concepts about the entire game, like judging the wind and tilt of the disc to throw something that will fly to a specific part of the field and slow down so my teammate can get to it. All these things just come naturally to me because I've done them for so long.

And then I notice when my teammates turn it over. It hits someone in the hands, and hits the turf. Wind catches a throw and it goes too far. Or they throw it right in the ground. And it upsets me. I've worked so hard on my game, and you're just going to take my disc and let it hit the ground. It's not right. I don't like it.

But when I play left-handed, none of that worries me. I'm thinking about myself. Where I'm standing, what grip the disc is in. What person closest to me can i get rid of the disc to so I can start running again? I genuinely don't want to turn it over, but it doesn't worry me when it happens. It's more "Oh well, nice try, we'll get it back."And sometimes we do.

And that's really the attitude I want to have on the field. This isn't elite-level here. This is C pool. If we're out here to have fun, let's have fun. Yeah, turning the disc over sucks, but complaining about it and getting personally offended by it (as I do when I've got my competitive switch turned on) doesn't really help the team.

But then again, neither does being (without exaggeration) the worst thrower on the team. But, like I've told hundreds of kids before, that should just come with practice. Hopefully, it will.

Autobiography

2011-01-07T10:11:00.000-08:00

Most of my blog posts aren't autobiographical. When I used to regularly update my blog, they were, and those really were the entries that I enjoyed re-reading after a few years had past. I'd like to make more of those entries, but there are a few obstacles in my way.

First of all, I can't talk about my work. Once I can talk about my work, I may be a bit more open on the subject, but until then I'm erring on the side of saying nothing at all rather than saying something that, in retrospect, I shouldn't have. It's a bit unfortunate that my day is taken up by 8 hours of stuff I can't talk about.

Secondly, my free time is filled with entertainment. I'll be playing ultimate, playing video games, reading the internet, reading on my kindle, or doing one of the many side projects I want to get done this year. All that time spent doing those things leaves me wanting to talk about them, but it doesn't make for a very personal narrative.

Thirdly, I'm trying to keep these posts interesting. Ultimate is on my brain most of the time. Then there's highly technical web stuff. These things are interesting to me, but I have this ill-conceived notion that the internet at large doesn't need more posts on those subjects. I really should just get over it and write about that stuff anyway. Maybe on another post.

One interesting thing of note: last night was my first shot at making Thai Yellow Curry with Chicken. It was delicious. I thought about taking a picture, but it was tasty-looking and I was hungry. Not a good combination for the curry. Or for my blog, for that matter.

Scientific ESP

2011-01-06T10:00:00.000-08:00

There's a recent article in the New York Times describing the latest controversy in the scientific community. It looks like someone has done research on ESP, and a paper about their research has been accepted into a respected scientific journal. Psychic scientists everywhere love it, rigorous physics-loving scientists say that it's a joke.

I especially liked this part of the article:

In his version, Dr. Bem gave 100 college students a memory test ... and found they were significantly more likely to remember words that they practiced later. “The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words,” the paper concludes.

This feels like the very thing statisticians warn everyone against. Correlation vs causation. In other words, "I don't think those numbers mean what you think it means"

Suppose for a second that whatever scientific methods this guy used are legit. He gives you a memory test, and scoring higher on that test is highly correlated by the amount of studying you do after the test. Aside from giving a bunch of underprepared college students yet another reason to not study for finals, he also makes a big leap. Stating that this test implies a causal link would infer that there are statistical analysis methods that are independent of the flow of time.

This interests me more than the ESP. It's pretty easy to show things are correlated if they are. But to say that one causes another is another matter entirely. Usually you have to do some experiments with two nearly identical groups, one in which you inject what you believe to be the causal element, and one in which you do not. In some cases, the latter needs to be tricked into thinking they have been given something so that knowledge isn't another difference between the groups. Then you watch, and wait, and only after time has passed can you conclusively say if that one causal element that you used is wholly responsible for the differences between the two groups.

Time must have passed. You can't have a causal link that is independent of the flow of time. That's not how physics works, that's not how chemistry works, and that's certainly not something that current statistical methods allow.

But let's suppose that there are causal links that aren't dependent on time. That right now, the outcome of something is dependent on what I do in the future. How could we prove that in a statistical context?

I don't have any real answer, but it's interesting to think about.

Game Review: Halo Reach

2011-01-05T10:00:00.000-08:00

Halo: Reach is the latest installment in the Halo universe. You probably already know all about it. You shoot stuff that moves. It dies. Woohoo.

I'm not a big fan of vanilla shoot-em-up games. I kinda feel like the "run around and shoot everything" gameplay has be done countless times over again. Unfortunately, I seem to be in the minority with this opinion, as the game studios just keep making games where you're someone who runs around and shoots everything. Even the hardware vendors are in on it; the controllers themselves have triggers for each hand that really best suit being in a game where you use some device with a trigger to interact with everything. And so, naturally, most games choose guns.

Despite my boredom with this gameplay mechanic, I still bought Halo: Reach and I'll still buy a handful of other shooters for the same reason: compelling story. As I've mentioned, a good story is really why I play most games. Bungie has a reputation for great story telling, and even though I found their last game to have a pretty short campaign, it was interesting and well-told.

But this time around, they've collapsed in on themselves like a dying star. It makes me wonder if the "last hurrah" of the development company wasn't really them just going "really, microsoft? Another one of these? Fine, here's something quick but that's the last time, we're done, you're on your own".

The concept isn't half as bad as its execution. You're not the lone hero defeating an alien armada, you're the noob to an elite fighting squad who have to play defense as the aliens kick our ass. Everything sounds heroic and looks shiny, but this has to be the worst writing since Too Human. Each of the characters belt out their particular goals or problems, with all-too-authentic military dialog. Which simply means that unless you're a Halo fanboy or actually in the military, most of what they say is complete gibberish.

And that's just the cutscenes. The in-game storytelling is substantially worse, because everyone who's talking to you is in a barely-moving armored suit. Admittedly, Red vs Blue built its whole web series out of that, but they had the benefits of better writing and being able to direct the camera to show which armored suit the voice was coming from. I shouldn't need full surround sound just to figure out who's talking to me. And that what they're saying is completely incomprehensible.

What it all amounts to is a series of cutscenes (and in-game dialog) where something happens, but I don't know what. Then we have a mission to go somewhere, but I'm not sure where until the HUD pops up and tells me "Over here, 400m away". Or, if the HUD doesn't help, just running towards whatever packs of enemies are still alive.

Needless to say I was incredibly frustrated, unsatisfied, and generally disappointed at the campaign's conclusion. The multiplayer made me feel a bit less bad about buying the game, but most of the fun had there was because I was playing with my brother, and we had some pretty epic battles (only me & him vs 4 other people winning handily 50-26? BOOYA!). But just because multiplayer was fun doesn't take away from the poor job of the single-player experience.

Despite all this, there were glowing points. Being in space was awesome, if a bit long. The new helicopter is cool, if a bit awkward to handle. The story reasons behind how I got into space and why I'm in a helicopter are preposterous, but the gameplay was new and fun. I can only hope Bungie's next adventure has more of this aspect to it than the run-of-the-mill tried-and-true shooter genre.

Video Game Story

2011-01-04T10:00:00.000-08:00

I really like video games. I play all kinds, but my favorite games really center around a great story telling experience. I believe that video games are the absolute best medium for a story; moreso than books, TV or the movies. The reason for this can be justified in one word: immersion.

All story telling vehicles rely on getting you immersed in the world the author is trying to create. There needs to be a believable setting, a cast of identifiable or, at the very least, understandable characters. Bad stories are the ones that defy understanding; that leave you simply stating "that could never happen" as opposed to being swept away by the narrative.

Books try to do this by letting your mind fill in the gaps that mere words create. When you read, you hear a narrator's voice or a character's voice. Vivid descriptions conjure up sharp imagery in your mind. All of this to get you to connect with the story on some emotional level. A well written book can do a very effective job at making you care about people you've never met, who don't exist, in a place you've never been to. It can immerse you in its world.

Movies and TV work along the same lines, but whereas the world the book creates is more hidden and subtle, the world of TV and movies is a bit more overt. Good writing is still needed to give the characters volume and the air of believability, but more often then not the "immersive" qualities tend to be more technological ones; A high-def screen can give you an amazing level of visual detail. A surround-sound system can make you feel like what's happening before your eyes is actually happening all around you. These supplement the story and give your body the sense of being totally immersed in the fictitious world before you.

Story-driven video games take both of these one step further. Yes, they have to have the well-written world of books. Yes, they can have the same technological feel of amazing visuals and surround sound. But they introduce a whole other aspect that truly immerses the viewer: control.

In other mediums, the story is a sharp, straight line. The only control you have is whether to continue the story or not. In video games, it's not so simple. Even with games that have a strictly linear plot, it can't continue on unless you, playing as the main character, perform some action. The story may require you to go into a castle, but the door is closed. There isn't a button for "just go into the castle". Instead, you have to walk around the world, look through the eyes of the protagonist, open the door and walk through it to reach your destination.

It's a little contrived example, but it illustrates the point. Actively requiring participation makes the person enjoying the story feel like it's happening to them; not just around them. They have to translate simply stated lofty goals ("Save the princess from the castle") into a series of normal, controlled actions (run, jump, break that block, avoid the fireball, run more). And, just like a good story, it doesn't really matter so much what happens as how it happens.

Some video games take advantage of this control to change the story around you; Mass Effect or Fallout 3 are prime examples of this. Not only are your actions just complicated means of achieving the goal you set out to complete, but the goals themselves change with how you try to reach them. You are given liberty to fully explore the worlds that these games have created without being bound to a specific story or narrative.

This freedom is empowering. It really makes you feel like you are the protagonist. It lets the world of the story completely envelop you. It's absolutely the most immersive way to enjoy a story. Which simply makes it the best way to enjoy a story.

Book Review: World War Z

2011-01-03T10:00:00.000-08:00

The first book I've read on my newfangled kindle is World War Z by Max Brooks. This is a great book that really emphasizes the "how" of great storytelling rather than the "what". The pithy subtitle aptly describes all the "what" you need to know.

"An Oral History of the Zombie War" aptly describes the setting for this book. There was a world war. It was humanity versus hoards of the undead. It has ended, and if we are not victors than at least we are survivors. And these are the stories of those who have managed to survive, telling us first hand of what actually happened. How did the infection start? How did it spread? And how poorly prepared were we to deal with such a threat?

Each of these perspectives gives a wider view of the world than a single narrative could. You get to see the horror from the perspective of doctors first running into the disease, leaders who have to figure out how to deal with such a mess, and average Joes who have to either nut up or shut up.

Sorry, that's a different Zombie story.

It's really interesting to see how this fictional post-apocalyptic world compares with that of Fallout 3, in which it wasn't zombies that decimated the world's government and infrastructure, but nuclear war. Some small details are different, but some common themes remain. Some folks band together and form small towns; the ones found in both stories are the ones most equipped to defend themselves against their attackers, undead or no. There are a few loners who survived somehow, but their experiences have left them at odds with the world, either catatonic or insane and eager to kill anything that moves.

One thing that kinda bugs me though is the difficulty in classifying the zombie threat. At first, the zombies are really classified as a medical condition; Patient Zero bites to transfer the infection and that infection causes death and reanimation. And all the initial perspectives on the matter view it as a disease outbreak, something entirely medical (albeit devastating).

But at some point, it's not just people getting sick, it's a massive undead army waging war. Military leaders discuss how best to defend against the hoard, or how to sweep through an area and rid it of zombies. Strategists give their opinions on how they can't be treated like a normal army. All of this is amazingly insightful and a brilliant read, but I can't help wonder why the world stopped looking at the medical side of the situation.

To the best scientific knowledge, these creatures defied life as we knew it. They're not alive, but they're animated somehow. Taking out an arm or a leg, or even decapitating them wouldn't be enough to kill them; you had to destroy the brain. This wasn't found through medical research, but by everyone trying to murder the zombies any way they could and finding out that most ways don't work. You gotta shoot 'em in the head.

But if the original plague that awoke the zombie hoard was an infection or parasite of something, wouldn't scientists be trying to find out? I would at least hope that while we have our best military men working to shoot all of the zombies in the head as they can, we have some courageous scientists somewhere working with live zombies or their remains or something to figure out a cure for the recently infected; maybe a vaccine to prevent infection or best yet, a chemical agent to neutralize the zombic germ in giant packs of zombies at once. Just have 'em all fall down, back to the lifeless state they should've been in long ago.

Alas, that personal anecdote never made it into this collection. There are some stories from folks in the pharmaceutical industry, but I've left those details out for the benefit of those who haven't read it yet.

All in all, it's a good read. I'm really more the type for quick chapters and short bursts of reading, but this book kept me turning pages for hours.

Kinect!

2011-01-02T21:26:00.001-08:00

Today was my geek out day. I got a shiny new xbox with Kinect a few days ago, but hadn't yet had the time to properly set it up and play with it. So today I wired the new thing up and got all Kinectified.

Long story short, Kinect is fun. I definitely like the Dance Central control mechanism better than the one for the rest of Xbox and Kinect Adventures. It makes navigating the menu feel like I'm high fiving some friends standing in front of me but turned to their side. This is in contrast to waving my palm tentatively in front of me, like I'm trying to use the Force to command my will while simultaneously telling the xbox, "whoa, calm down. Please don't bite me."

The coolest moment was when Kathryn walked in front of the tv and it auto-signed her in. Very cool.

The worst is the amount of space it requires. Any Kinect game that plans to use depth information will be an absolute pain. Hopefully the game makers realize that depth is useless in games. At least until we have holograms. Or pervasive 3D TVs.

I'll have reviews of the games after I get a chance to play them more.

But for now, let's just say that my achievement hunting on Alan Wake and Mass Effect 2 is on hold for a bit. :)