Hawthorn Thistleberry

A Galaxy Far, Far Away

2011-11-26T20:51:00.001-05:00

Following is my first draft of a list of cards for a Space Opera version of Once Upon A Time, for people's comments.

Characters

Alien
Android
Artificial Intelligence
Bandit
Bureaucrat
Captain
Child
Emperor
Engineer
Guard
Magistrate
Mentor/Student
Merchant
Overlord
Physician
Pilot
Prisoner
Rebel
Robot
Soldier
Ambassador (Interrupt)
Mechanic (Interrupt)
Rogue (Interrupt)
Saboteur (Interrupt)
Smuggler (Interrupt)

Aspects

Ancient
Armored
Bloodthirsty
Broken
Cutting-Edge
Cybernetic
Dying
Exotic
Gigantic
Greedy
Lizard-Like
Long-Lost
Man-Eating
Mutated
Naïve
Of Alien Origin
Scheming
Souped-Up
This Can Fly
Wealthy
Contraband (Interrupt)
Faithful (Interrupt)
Jump-Capable (Interrupt)
Multi-Purpose (Interrupt)
Telepathic (Interrupt)

Events

Betrayal
Breaking In
Capture
Chase
Death
Escape
Explosion
Firefight
FTL Travel
Injury
Powered Down
Purchase or Hire
Pursuit
Rescue
The System Crashes
Time Travel
Deep Sleep (Interrupt)
Orbital Insertion (Interrupt)
Upgrade (Interrupt)
Vehicle Crashes (Interrupt)

Places

A Factory
A Desolate Asteroid
A Remote Settlement
An Airlock
Deep Inside Hyperspace
Engineering
Floating In Space
Hydroponic Farms
In Cyberspace
Medical Center
Power Plant
Space Station
Spaceport
Starship
The Edge Of Known Space
The Bad Side Of Town
A Barren, Hostile Land (Interrupt)
Ice Planet (Interrupt)
Mines (Interrupt)
The Marketplace (Interrupt)

Items

Alien Artifact
Blaster Rifle
Countdown Timer
Data Crystal
Fightercraft
Food and Drink
Grenade
Hologram
Hyperspace Gate
Money
Security System
Toolkit
Doomsday Weapon (Interrupt)
Long-Range Transmitter (Interrupt)
Unknown Language (Interrupt)

Endings

A few in the more remote outposts survived.
Across the whole planet there were celebrations late into the night.
After this truth got out, nothing could ever be the same again.
And then she was back as if she had never left.
And so a new frontier was opened for exploration.
And they all hailed her as the one who had been foretold.
And years later they declared that day an official holiday.
And so the captain regained control of his ship and crew.
And to this day there they remain.
As one, the populace was befuddled and didn't know what it meant.
As the last of them left to points unknown, a terrible silence was left behind.
At least they could use the reward to repair most of the damage.
Automated systems kept working for long after there was no one left alive.
Finally the doorway slowly opened.
He found what he had truly lost.
Hunks of slowly cooling rock settled into new orbits.
It took days for the fires to burn out.
It was an entirely new form of life, unlike anything that had been before.
It collapsed into itself and vanished forever.
No matter how many treatments she got, she would never be truly human again.
Once the story was out on the network, change was inevitable.
So the cities lay in smoking ruins, but life would find a way to return someday.
So she revealed her true identity and they were reunited.
The long, arduous process of rebuilding had just begun.
The formula was finally perfected.
The ecosystem collapsed, and millions died.
The new alliance faced many hardships in unity and harmony.
The election results came in: it was a landslide victory!
The destruction was nearly absolute.
The jury-rigged repair held... long enough, at least.
The ship slowly disappeared into the inky darkness of space.
The answer to the mystery was something no one had predicted.
The rebellion was crushed.
The door sealed behind him, leaving him alone in darkness.
The ripples of this change in reality itself would take years to understand.
The threads of reality finally settled back to a stable formation.
The way there was lost forever.
The treaties were signed and ratified.
The discovery led to an age of plenty.
The secret was too dangerous, so they agreed to hide it once more.
The plot was stymied, but was it part of a larger scheme?
The creature's death meant they were safe once more.
The people's cries for change were finally answered.
The life support system wheezed back into life.
The power came back on.
These new discoveries would force the researchers to start over.
They earned promotions and a new security clearance.
They would be on the run forever, but at least they were free.
They weren't who he expected them to be.
They made this their new home and lived out all their days there.
Though they repaired most of the damage he could never fight again.
What new forms of life might arise there, scientists would speculate for decades.
With their new powers, they could ensure justice would prevail.
With her new-found wealth, she was finally able to build it.
Word about the cure was disseminated to all the worlds.

Stowe Soaring

2011-07-10T20:57:00.000-04:00

Today I got to take my glider lesson and flight that was my big surprise Christmas present. It was originally scheduled for my birthday, yesterday, but gliding is very weather-sensitive, and a low cloud cover forced Stowe Soaring to reschedule for today. The reschedule didn't work out right, they double-booked, and I had to wait over three hours for my flight. (We spent that time relaxing in Morrisville.)

The flight was preceded by ground training. They'd said it would be an hour, but it was maybe fifteen minutes, and was spent at the glider, and also included the pre-flight checklist which was going to happen anyway. Fortunately I'd already finished reading the book that came with it. The book is very dense, very dry, and very hard to learn much from because there's no chance to make each thing sink in before you're on to something else. It's really intended to be used in parallel with practical training that makes each bit real. However, while I hadn't learned a lot from the book, I did get the ideas into my head, so even the hurried training was enough to get me acclimated to the glider.

The towplane pilot wasn't their usual towplane pilot, but someone who flies DC-10s regularly, and isn't a glider pilot. So the tow up was a little bumpy, and my teacher, John, told me that he was going to handle the tow, and that it's the hardest part. I believe it. I could feel his work on the controls, and there were always three things going on, faster than I could follow. This was the only part that was a little bit scary.

As soon as the tow separation ended and we were on level flight, John told me to point the glider at a particular point and fly it. Just like that. Bam. My first few minutes trying to fly the glider were uneven at best; no matter how many times you read the advice that you work the controls with small movements, just how light the pressure should be is something you can't feel until your hands are on the stick.

It was so late in the day that almost all the lift was gone. We circled in a few thermals (columns of rising air caused by sun heating on the ground, which gliders use to gain altitude and thus prolong the flight) but while the lift had been great earlier in the day (another pilot had been up for four hours on a single tow), even my trainer couldn't get more than a hundred feet out of any thermal, and each flight came to just under a half hour. That I was flying wasn't helping much either.

By the second flight, I had gotten a much better grip on coordinated turns -- that is, working the stick (aelirons) and pedals (rudder) together so that the plane banks without yawing (slewing to the side) -- and pretty much never had the yaw string off center. This was both in straight-and-level flight, and while maintaining a bank of 30° while circling in a thermal However, I never got even close to getting the hang of using the pitch control (tilting forward or back with the elevator) and trim to maintain airspeed of 65 knots. At best, I was managing a pilot-induced oscillation of about 10 knots either way -- I would correct, overshoot, and have to correct back, and overshoot again. That was at best; at worst, I was correcting in the wrong direction, because I didn't have it down to muscle memory how it works, I had to stop and think through, every time, "I need to increase airspeed, and diving increases speed at the cost of altitude, and nose down is diving, and pushing forward is nose down" (or the reverse) instead of just getting "push forward for more speed". (Another minor issue is that I couldn't comfortably pull back since the stick was hitting my stomach, and I couldn't use trim enough to adjust for that because I never had time -- at any given moment I am supposed to watching the sky and horizon, the yaw string, the variometer, the altimeter, and the airspeed indicator, all of which were partially obscured by the pilot in the front seat, while working the stick and rudder pedals).

So I got a total of about 10 minutes of actual flying time. (And that's what my logbook says.) I didn't do anything during either the tow or the landing (not even the approach). All I did was the very simplest stuff, high up in clear air without any other traffic or significant weather. And I didn't even get to the point where I was able to do that. But I was only flying it for ten minutes, so I'm pretty pleased with the fact that in that much time, I got to where I could do banks, fly straight, and aim for a spot and reach it. Another flight and I could probably get to where I could do the pitch in those conditions, and then I could get better at feeling lift on another flight, and so on.

Even so, it's kind of amazing to imagine that anyone can keep all the things in their head they have to in order to fly -- let alone fly and also talk to some annoying guy in the back seat. What's even more amazing is thinking of people doing that in 1928, with planes that barely held together, and hardly anyone to teach you because no one else knew either.

If I had a few extra lifetimes, there are a half-dozen things I would love to spend a lot of time learning, like playing drums. Flying is one of them. Since I don't have an extra lifetime, nor even the basic courtesy of being independently wealthy and eligible for retirement, I probably won't do anything more with this other than playing with Flight Simulator X (which has a glider!). But I can say that, once, I flew a glider.

Stymied and frustrated with the dog fence

2011-06-12T16:38:00.001-04:00

I'm very frustrated that we're 90% of the way through training Socks to the dog fence, but now we're at a dead standstill, and there doesn't seem to be anywhere I can turn for help. Every time I try to seek help, it seems the whole thing gets brushed off or not taken seriously.

The fence system's manual has a detailed set of instructions to go through over a few weeks. We've gotten through most of it. Right now, Socks is very hesitant to approach the fence boundary, enough that we don't get chances to reinforce that reluctance because she won't go near it, so we can't reward her for coming back from it.

However, twice so far, she's seen something really tempting outside the fence on the road, and each time she blew through the boundary at the end of the driveway moving so fast that the collar never had time to beep. There's a series of steps in the manual to cover this, but it is entirely predicated on the idea that you can arrange suitably tempting distractions that, despite the reluctance you've built up in previous steps, she'll get to the border, while you have her on a line so you can control the situation. This lets you repeat the previous instruction, only now saying, "even when something tempting is outside, you still can't go".

The manual suggests other family members, favorite toys, or neighbors with their pets can serve as the distraction. However, the few times Siobhan and I have tried to do this, it doesn't come anywhere near close. One of us having her on the leash, the other one is not enough temptation to get Socks even slightly interested in going to the end of the driveway, let alone running full tilt down it. While she likes toys, she has no particular favorite, and her taste for toys comes and goes very quickly. Neighbors and their animals come and go at their schedule, not ours, and it seems a bit much to ask a neighbor to come stand at the end of the driveway three times a day for a week or two. I'm concerned that even that wouldn't be enough temptation for the lesson.

I tried arranging to where Socks can be outside on a line on her own and still be able to get to the end of the driveway, in hopes that the random passings of neighbors and their vehicles might be enough to give her a chance to teach the lesson (since I can't spend 12 hours a day waiting with her on the line for those moments and hoping to take advantage of them). But even with an expensive, super-long line and a newly mounted place to clip it, it's not long enough to cover our lengthy driveway. I've never seen a 100' dog line, but that's what it would take. Even if there was one, I hate to pour that much money into a line we only need for a week if it works, when I don't know if it might work.

So we've poured a huge amount of time and money and effort and pain into this system, we're 90% of the way to done, and it feels like we're stuck, totally stopped. Every day that passes while we don't do anything, as if some miracle's going to come along, is a day that the previous training gets muted a bit, and she's not getting her exercise. It feels like, five or six days ago, we gave up, and I just didn't realize. If we can just find a way over this last hump we're done.

Where can I turn to get new ideas, assistance, or any other way to make progress? I don't even know who I can ask. There aren't any experts on hand for this. People who I know don't seem to have any ideas, if they've even really trying. My post to the SportDog forum goes unanswered. Maybe I should just be trying to hire someone to stand at the end of the driveway for us. Where do you hire people for jobs like that? I am really desperate for ideas here.

Denver food

2011-05-10T11:00:00.001-04:00

Denver is not a foodie city. It has no particular signature dish, except perhaps the Denver omelet, but let's face it, the Denver omelet is not particularly unique. (Oddly, I saw more places selling Philly cheese steak sandwiches than Denver omelets. I wonder if Philly's full of Denver-omelet-specializing diners?) Most of our meals were not exceptional, or were things that were unusual for us only because they don't have that in our area (and sometimes when we travel, we slum it at a place like Wendy's just because we can't get that at home). Plus, the hotel we stayed at for most of the trip (after the convention was over) had a free breakfast, and not just a muffin and a banana, but a full buffet with an omelet station and everything; so a third of our meals were that. We also had a couple of times when a lunch had enough leftovers to become dinner too. So in the end, we only had a handful of meals that were of any note. And of these the two most interesting were the most, and least, expensive meals we had.

The honor of "most expensive" easily falls to The Fort. This is a pueblo-style building in the red rock area southwest of Denver, but if I tell you that it has a sort of cowboy frontier theme, you will get entirely the wrong idea. You'll probably imagine some mocked-up Wild West town where people in ten-gallon hats and six-shooters are either yelling "yeehaw!" or having quick-draws at high noon, accompanied by sagebrush. The Fort is certainly historical, but not quite that histrionic. It's more focused on the pioneer period, which covers the wagon-trains heading west during the gold rush, and the ranchers herding cattle through the prairies. The staff are in vaguely period garments, but not costumes; it's more subtle than that. The women wearing long skirts and shawls, the men in puffy-sleeved shirts, for instance. The building has a pebbled courtyard and lots of timber inside, but it does not have a steer-head skeleton, a Colt 45, or a cactus everywhere you turn; it just has period building materials.

The food tends to focus just enough on period meals to be interesting, without being either Hollywood or realistic to an extent that it wouldn't also be tasty. For instance, I had a prickly pear beverage which is approximately the sort of thing they would have been drinking in the area 150 years ago, but it was neither slavishly historically accurate (so much that it might not please the modern palate) nor cinematically goofy. (Even so, I didn't like it too much. But that's just because it turns out that while I love the prickly pear lemonade Bolthouse used to make -- why did they stop!?!? -- I don't really like prickly pear on its own.) They also use a fair amount of "game" meat, though they don't actually hunt buffalo, they buy it from sustainably-run local farms that raise buffalo, quail, and the like for that very purpose.

Siobhan had a game meat platter, while I had a pork belly and campfire beans dish that I eventually realized was basically the precursor to "pork-n-beans". I also tried an intriguing appetizer: pickled jalapeños stuffed with honey-sweetened peanut butter. They had a nice heat burn, but the combination didn't work as well as I might have liked. In all, the food was good, and the experience interesting and enjoyable (and I'm not even referring to how good-looking the hostess was in that), but I don't know if it was worth the huge bill. Still, I am not much of a fan of game meats, so I'm not really the one who should judge.

On the way to Roxborough State Park we had no lunch plans, but Google Maps showed there was a Sonic and a pizzeria in the village of Roxborough Park on the way to the park proper, so we figured we'd grab something on the way in, but we didn't decide ahead what it would be. We got to the one shopping center that is the village center, and pulled in, but before we could alight upon Sonic, to what did our eyes appear, but a little strip-mall-type restaurant called Tamale Kitchen. We later learned it was one of a small Denver-area chain, which had started by some people selling tamales door-to-door. But you wouldn't know it by visiting; it just looks like any little strip-mall restaurant run by locals.

I suppose technically the meal we got was not the cheapest in total dollars, but it was certainly the cheapest in dollars per amount of food, and since it ended up making three generous meals, it was easily the cheapest per meal. We stared befuddled at the menu as we read about "family pack #1" which had:

12 tamales (red, green, or a mix)
12 tortillas
1 pint of beans
1 pint of rice
1 pint of chili
a two-liter bottle of Pepsi or Diet Pepsi

for $21. Back in Vermont that would be a fantastic price; I would expect to pay twice that much. And restaurants in Denver were uniformly much higher in price than back home. So this deal was just amazing. They had several other platters which mixed in tacos and/or burritos, at similarly amazing prices.

The chili was actually chili sauce, and it was good chili sauce, and way more than you needed for everything else in the meal. The tamales were also very good. Not the best I've ever had, but certainly closer to the best than the worst. The green ones were a little skimpy on filling, but the red ones were quite generous on filling, so it evened out. The rice was nothing special, but the beans were very good.

We both had lunch from it, then I ate more for dinner, and well into the evening. It was too good to let any of it go to waste. I even used some of the chili sauce to dip hush puppies in (don't knock it, it worked really well). All in all, it was very good. Not fine cuisine good, but for $21 for that much food, you'd expect it to be awful and still cost a lot more, but it was darned good. If I could buy a package like that at home, I think we would cook half as much as we do.

There were some other meals that I'm sure Siobhan has documented extensively on Chowhound or Yelp or something, and some of them were good, but they were the kind of good you might expect to find in any city. We had a fairly good deli, but nothing to even sit in the shadow of Carnegie Deli; we had some all right Mexican, but not really a lot better than even the Mexican we can get in Vermont; and so on.

Denver activities

2011-05-08T11:00:00.002-04:00

Most of what we did in Denver can be divided up into two categories: window-shopping, and visiting parks and wilderness. The former leaves me very little to talk about, because Denver's shopping areas were dreadfully dull. You know how the local mall is like 90% clothing stores? Denver's malls are like 98% clothing stores. The first mall we visited, if you took out the clothing stores, jewelry stores, and restaurants, you'd have about three things left. One tiny Lego shop, a chocolatier, and a Microsoft store. The other big mall, and outdoor shopping area, weren't much different. There were a couple of kitchen shops, a huge store that sells nothing but containers for other things, and multiple Starbucks in the same mall... and those were the highlights. The 16th Street pedestrian mall was even worse: pretty much nothing but chain stores.

About the only store that was much fun to visit was a Guitar Center. Though not as much as it might have been if it had been possible to buy stuff there! There was also a tiny shop called The Pilot Shop we kept seeing signs for on the way to our hotel (at the small regional airport), so we stopped in one day just to sate our curiosity. (About half the store is kitschy things like model planes, T-shirts, and bumper-stickers, of interest to people who fly; the other half is specialized things like headsets, ILS charts, and FAA regulation books and checklists.)

So we spent most of our time visiting the various nature areas, parks, and wildernesses that happened to be convenient to our location and the weather. Weather wasn't always with us: it was chilly, threatening to rain, and cloudy a lot, and in fact, after a late winter in Vermont where it was wet and cold the whole year, it finally got warm for the first time right after we left, at which point it was cold in Denver. Even so we got a fair amount of sunlight.

Our first stop was the quaint village of Manitou Falls, in the Colorado Springs (or, as the signs all say, Colo Spgs) area. It's not just a charming touristy town. It's a CHARMING TOURISTY TOWN at the top of its lungs. It makes Stowe look reserved. It makes Ogunquit seem organic. It makes Port Jefferson seem sincere. We didn't linger very long, though; the deli we were getting lunch at didn't open until pretty much when we had to run to make our reservation, so we got our food to go.

The main thing Manitou Falls has going for it, apart from small, cutesy shops selling things no one needs, is being the base of the Pikes Peak Cog Railway. This is a pretty expensive ride, but it's really quite incredible. Unfortunately due to high winds we couldn't ride to the top (and graciously, they reduce the exorbitant ticket prices accordingly... to still exorbitant, but less so, prices). We only got to Windy Point at 12,000 feet. The views were still spectacular, and the ride well worth it. The conductor does a great job of keeping the trip entertaining. Still would have been nice to be able to say we got to the very top (14,100 feet or so).

After this, we went to the Garden of the Gods. This is a pretty big park that is mostly notable for having some amazing, huge rocky formations, mostly of that strikingly red rock native to the area. Some are huge, some are balanced, some are oddly shaped, and all are pretty breathtaking. In between is an awful lot of arid wilderness, along with some nicely designed trails and roads. A light walk of a couple of miles got us amongst and alongside the biggest of the rock formations, and gave us great views from all directions, both of the rocks and of the crazy people climbing them (despite the many, many signs saying not to do so unless you were a professional with a license), plus an exposure to the wilderness itself (though we didn't really see any wildlife apart from the occasional bird). After the walk, a set of roads lets you drive through the rest and see most of the remainder of the great views, rocks, and wilderness, which provides a nice balance: you get to see everything in a huge park even if you're not up to doing huge long hikes. Anyone who visits the area should give Garden of the Gods a few hours; best of all, it's free.

Back in the Denver area we visited Cherry Creek Park, which is referred to as Denver's backyard. This is the kind of park that's mostly focused on activities: picnic areas, fishing, boating, swimming, and the like. Which is not to say there wasn't wilderness and trails, but given that it's mostly a big open area with very little vegetation taller than your knee, it's really more suited to activities than feeling like you're out in the middle of nowhere (you can still see Denver from pretty much all points, even though it's many, many miles away). Some of the activities are a bit unusual, such as a shooting range. The most interesting was a model RC airplane field: space set aside by the park, and then maintained and equipped by a pair of local RC plane fan clubs. No one was flying the day we went due to high winds, but that let us get a better look (since technically we weren't supposed to be allowed into the area). It's incredible how much stuff they have, including runways wide enough to drive a minivan down. These people are serious. (So much that RC cars are entirely banned, because, after all, those people are just playing with silly toys.)

Roxborough State Park was a bit more wilderness-park-like. No camping, but lots of hiking, and it was hilly enough that you couldn't see the whole park from any single point. We took one of the easiest trails, and it was just about as much as we could do -- though in warmer weather we might have felt a bit more comfortable on it, but even so, we probably wouldn't've been up to the challenge of any of the other trails. The park had a few "learning about nature" signs that were really strikingly self-congratulatory and effusive, but once you got away from the visitor center, it was just a lovely park with interesting plants and rock formations and a nice sense of isolation and quiet. Also a lot more vegetation than we'd seen elsewhere, though even here the trees were short, stunted, twisted oaks. No tall pine forests like we might have imagined (that, it turns out, is more common on the other side of the Rockies). The picture here is a ground-clinging cactus growing at the foot of a twisty oak, a juxtaposition that seemed unusual.

We didn't end up driving up into the mountains and over them (or through them, as there's a tunnel on one of them), largely because the weather never quite seemed right for a drive like that. Some other time we need to see the Colorado Plateau, the land on the other side of the Rockies (that includes a lot of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico), where there are both the tall pine forests, and the kind of dry arid land that you can call "desert" without disclaimer. All in good time.

We didn't do a lot of museum-like stuff. We intended to visit the Denver Mint, because, how often do you get to tour a U.S. Mint? But it turns out they only offer a small number of tours each day and you have to book far in advance, and we let the window of opportunity slip away. We had also considered the Molly Brown House, but it wasn't open the one day we were looking to go to it. So in the end the only place we visited was the Denver Firefighter's Museum. Which was pretty cool, really. It's not too large, only took an hour and a half or so to visit, but it was also reasonably priced (more so since we got a Groupon coupon for it), so it was a fairly good deal.

I think it was more fascinating for Siobhan because she has less exposure to firefighting and its history than I have. My parents were in the volunteer fire department in various capacities, and so I went to any number of open houses, picnics, firefighter's competitions, and the like, as well as some time hanging out at the fire department (I remember playing Atari 2600 on the (for that time) huge TV they had in the rec room). I even took some first aid, CPR, and babysitting courses there. Looking at plaques with pictures of firefighter training towers isn't as wowing if you've actually climbed up in one, and hearing about how the response system works isn't as amazing if your mom was a dispatcher and you had a CB in the house for years picking up the calls.

Even so, there was a lot for me to learn and be impressed by. Particularly interesting was the early part of the museum which covered the history of the fire alarm process -- from the time when it was someone shouting "Fire!" and everyone running for their buckets, through the installation of dedicated telegraph wires and cog-wheels with coded locations making ticker-tapes in various departments, to the modern computerized systems, and everything in between. There were also some fascinating historical tidbits about Denver's history with firefighting. And no matter how exposed you are to firefighters, you can't help but get a bit moved by some of the accounts of their bravery, sacrifice, and dedication.

Be forewarned, though. While there are a lot of activities for the kids, including a chance to try to get into gear quickly, a model house to practice fire drills in, and a truck you can climb into, there is not a pole you can slide down. There are several poles, of course, but there is no sliding.

The museum's definitely worth the time and money. Even if you don't find the subject matter interesting, I suspect the museum would serve to make it become interesting for you.

Denver

2011-05-06T10:40:00.001-04:00

Over the month's end we spent a week in Denver, because of Siobhan having a work conference there, and extending it a few days. The first couple of days Siobhan was in her conference, and I mostly just goofed off in the hotel room -- I looked into things I could do near the hotel, but none of them were more compelling than just relaxing. I'll do a few blog posts about our adventures in Denver, on various subjects. This one will be overall impressions.

The most striking impression of Denver is that it's flat. You look on the map and you get the idea that, sure, it's in a valley, but it's in a valley in the Rockies, it's a mile up, it's got to be at least hilly, and feeling like there's mountains nearby. But it's not just a valley, it's a huge, huge, huge plateau. You can get in a car and drive for an hour and never once cross a hill of any size, or feel like the mountains are nearby. It feels like you're in Iowa or Kansas. There are distant mountains on the horizon but they are so far away that you can't see them if there's even a single story building in the way, and they don't ever seem to get closer. They feel like they're in another state. For all that you're up high in the mountains you will feel like you're on the plains. Heck, Long Island feels hillier.

I also got the impression in my head that there'd be woods, and Siobhan got that even more. Isn't that how you picture it? But when you're there what it really looks like is a midway point between the scrub-covered deserts of the southwest, and the open prairie of the midwest. It's dry, rocky, and almost entirely devoid of trees. Everywhere.

That's not to say there isn't natural beauty. Once you get out of the city, into the parks and wilderness areas, there's an austere beauty, a combination of the vast (incredible-sized red rocks, huge open vistas) and subtle (the low-key life of the arid almost-desert). It just wasn't the kind I imagined it would be.

People talk about the "Mile High City" altitude effects, and we were even warned to bring some extra painkillers for the headaches, but I never really felt it. It's hard to be sure if there was ever a time I wouldn't've been as out of breath in lower altitude; a few times I did a fairly long hike, including almost three miles to a supermarket for supplies (the second half with a backpack full of heavy stuff), once on a trail in the hills, and I don't think I got more out of breath than I would have back home. Of course, up Pikes Peak, I felt it, but that's a whole other ball game.

Another thing I didn't know about Denver was that it had a sizable Hispanic/Latino population. I suppose I didn't have any preconceptions about its ethnic mix. I didn't give it any thought, but if someone had asked, I would likely have guessed it would have the same kind of mix that most any big city would have. I didn't expect any particular ethnicity to be more prominent than any other. One of the nice things about this particular surprise was a great dinner, but I'll save that for another post.

One particularly odd thing is that, on three separate occasions, we saw rabbits. And not even out in the wilderness, in the city. Once, at our hotel, there was one on the grass who didn't even run away when we pulled up in the car and then walked past him, not more than a few feet away. Another time there was a group of three of them in a tiny patch of grass in between a giant office building and an under-construction Ikea (which of course was far, far bigger). I don't think I ever saw a squirrel, though. I suppose rabbits do fine in dry, treeless climes, but I was still surprised to find them in the city, and so much more fearless than anywhere else I've ever encountered rabbits.

Denver's people were uniformly polite, especially on the roads, where virtually no one ever sped, traffic tended to move in an almost uniform block, and it was quite rare to have trouble changing lanes or making your turn. It occurred to me that the legendary standoffishness of New Yorkers is, in a way, a sort of courtesy. When you live in a massively crowded crush of people, personal space, privacy, and isolation are valuable things, survival necessities. Not making eye contact and not being chummy with strangers, the things people from other parts of the country take as being cold and distant, are a way of respecting other people's space, not intruding. When a city is more sprawly (and good lord but Denver is sprawly, on account of that whole "huge flat area" thing I mentioned), a certain level of cordiality becomes the mark of courtesy, because no one needs to cultivate their isolation, since they can always get some if they want some.

Upcoming posts will talk about the things we did in Denver, the places we went, the travel itself, and of course the food.

Earth

2011-05-02T11:00:00.000-04:00

On a recent flight to Denver, I found that my new tablet was not cutting off sound to its internal speakers when I plugged in headphones, which meant that everyone else on the plane could hear it. So I stopped using it and switched over to the Kindle, where I was about 85% of the way through the lengthy 1990 novel Earth by David Brin. I finished it during that flight.

I've been reading this book a chapter or two at a time for several weeks now. At first, it had that sprawling quality that some of Brin's novels have, where it's hard to keep track of all the different characters while it's not yet clear how they'll relate to one another, or what the central storyline is about. (Not all of Brin's novels are like this; Kiln People has a fairly straightforward narrative, for instance.) This was even more true because Earth tackles the incredibly challenging task of doing a near-future prediction, being set about fifty years into its future, so it spends a lot of time exploring that setting and establishing it. Every chapter, for instance, ends with a little snippet from the world -- a posting to a Net forum, a transcript from a TV show, a news article, etc. Few if any of these are central to advancing the actual plot of the book; some reflect it, but many aren't even related to it, and they all are primarily there as a way for Brin to show us his imagined version of the world. While these are fascinating stuff, early on they tend to further the sense of the story being fragmented and hard to keep track of. (I suspect this would be felt less if I had sat down to read it a hundred pages at a time, instead of a dozen pages every few days.)

It doesn't take long for the storyline to start to coalesce -- that is, for one of the various things going on to rise to prominence as the central plotline. That said, that central plotline starts, by about a quarter of the way through the book, to seem like it's going to go a certain way, and then near the halfway point it seems like it's on its way to resolution, and then it turns out that was just part of what the story was about. That keeps happening until eventually you get to where you're no longer even trying to figure out what, at the end, you'll have said the book's story was about. You're just going along with the narrative, which is more like what real life is like -- you don't exactly look at the events in the newspaper and wonder how the story will end; while one incident might "end" for a while, it's still just part of a larger tapestry of other events that go on, and don't necessarily have an ending lined up.

And yet the story does indeed build to one of the most powerful and compelling finales I can think of in any science-fiction novel ever. And while some out-there stuff happens, it's not like Kiln People, where the end starts feeling like an essay at times, trying to get you to buy into a premise that's so busy being mind-blowing it has no time left to be whapping you in the face with impact. The mind-blowing bit here is quick, and has been set up for so long that it's both surprising and totally out of the blue, and yet perfectly ready for you to accept. And it doesn't slow down the "oh my god" of the surrounding stream of events and twists.

So the book, in the end, has three things going on. First, a really compelling, rich, plausible yet surprising, and insightful vision of a possible future. (Brin gives us a short essay at the end which helps explain some of how challenging this is, and why it ended up the way it did, which only enhances my appreciation of the task and how well he did with it.) Second, a broad spectrunm of interesting characters, situations, and occurrences, some of which end up central to the main storyline, some of which are more incidental, but almost none of which end up going quite where you'd guess. And third, a storyline that builds up so much intensity that by the end it's hard not to end up laughing and crying at almost every page.

The book also is striking in how much of it is really very visual. This is way, way too big to make into a movie. But given a big enough budget -- and it would really need a very big budget -- it would make an incredible three-year TV series. Except of course that there's absolutely nothing in here that would serve as the ending of each episode or season. What I'm imagining is just a sixty-hour-long movie, which I mostly want to see because I would love to see so many of these visuals realized. And because, unlike many novels, very, very little of it is the kind of thing that you have to strain to convert to a visual medium. There's no great need for voiceovers of internal monologue (there's some, but not as much as a lot of books that live and die on it) and not a lot of stuff that you couldn't see (though one long scene set in a pitch-black cave complex would be tough to translate).

Much to my surprise, I find myself asking the question, do I like this better than, the same as, or not as much as Startide Rising? I have loved Brin's work enough to consider him one of my top two or three sci-fi authors, but even while I've loved to bits so many of his books, I didn't expect to see anything threaten Startide Rising. But this might be it. I'm not quite decided, and I probably won't. It's enough to say it's in the same area -- which makes it one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time.

BP Safety Awards

2011-04-30T11:00:00.004-04:00

Sometimes you see a news story that makes you stop and say "wait, am I reading the Onion?" and when you realize you aren't, you figure, "I bet John Stewart's eyes just lit up, he's got material for a week, easy." A recent news story about how BP's safety people got bonuses and recognition for a year with an exceptional safety record was one of those. What a public relations disaster.

I don't know anything about how they came to the conclusion that they had a better-than-ever safety record for the year. It seems quite possible that, as John Stewart ended up saying, they have some kind of skewed rating system in which the entire Gulf oil spill counts as "one incident" and thus the same as someone cutting his finger -- well, maybe not quite that skewed, but certainly an unrealistic rating system.

But I did find myself thinking, hey, it'd be nice if we actually knew their methodology. More than that, I felt bad for the affected people, at least potentially. I don't know what really happened, and I'm sure we never will. But it's entirely possible that, somewhere in the vast expanses of BP's corporate structure, which employs thousands of people all over the world, there's a group of people who actually, really, did spectacular work this year on safety. But all their efforts and successes, and any attempt at recognition for them, will always be tarnished by the fact that some completely different group of people, who they never met and over whom they have no authority, perhaps on the other side of the world, happen to have really fucked up in an amazingly bad and amazingly public way. If that's what happened, wouldn't you have to feel a little bad for them? I mean, what if it were you, who'd busted your ass trying to improve safety and ended up achieving unprecedented success in your division, only to find the whole thing has to be brushed under the carpet because of someone ten thousand miles away who has nothing to do with you other than having the same logo on your letterhead?

Even if that's really what happened, even if the people who got this recognition actually did deserve a pat on the back (and I'm by no means saying that's the case, just that it could be), it was a colossally stupid blunder for BP to let their recognition become a public matter. Then again, the only really safe way to make sure it didn't become the public relations debacle it became is to not do it; anything strictly-internal still can come out. Alternately they could have tried to be explicit about justifying it, but really, would that have had the slightest chance of working? No. So ultimately, their only safe choice would be to deny those people any recognition.

I suppose injustices like this happen all the time. I know that there've been times at my office where, even though we're a small shop and out of the public eye, someone deserved recognition that they couldn't get because of how it would look because of something that someone wholly unrelated had done. In a huge international corporation it seems almost inevitable that it's going to happen more. C'est la vie.

The Shawshank Redemption

2011-04-27T11:00:00.000-04:00

After the last few movies I've watched, the beginning of this classic prison movie had me worried I was in for another round of grim gloom. Certainly things start dark and get darker. But I was hoping that the title's promise of redemption might brighten the tone before the movie was over.

Incidentally, in terms of brightness, I hadn't really realized how dark Taxi Driver was in the cinematographical sense until the sharp contrast. Nearly every scene, even the daytime scenes, in Taxi Driver has a sort of dark and jaundiced quality, because that's the visual style they were going for. (Either that, or I just got a bad rip. But I don't think so.) Even though there was a lot of gloom in The Shawshank Redemption, the imagery was crisp and usually well-lit -- even in the dark you could see stuff.

I don't think there's a single thing about The Shawshank Redemption with which I can find fault. A friend, who'd read the book, said that the pacing in the movie seemed wrong. I can well imagine that it might be different from the book, and therefore wrong in that it conveys a different feel or a different story from the book. But taken on its own, I didn't find any problems with the pacing. Nor with anything else. Well, once or twice it's a little cloying, but in a very minor way.

The movie also managed to pull a switcheroo on me that was surprisingly effective. It was clear something was going to happen, and it was clear that we'd been seeing things that were setting it up, but it was also clear that the movie was telegraphing a direction for the story that it just wasn't going to go. This was a decoy; no one was fooled, but it did distract enough so that the actual way the story went, despite having been visibly set up in front of us all along, was not obvious.

The subject matter does somewhat circumscribe how great I can find the movie, and this is not something I'll ever feel a great draw to return to; but within those bounds, it's a solid, appealing movie.

Only the survivors get to be nostalgic

2011-04-24T11:00:00.002-04:00

Those were the good old days, when people weren't so dumb or weak, back when we were kids. Parents disciplined their kids instead of coddling them, and we were stronger, and we didn't have all this technology in the way of everything, and so on. You know the drill.

It's awfully compelling, tears off into easily digested chunks, makes us all feel better about ourselves and our lives, and that's all on top of the natural endorphin-release of nostalgia. But it's also a load of hooey.

Were we better disciplined? Certainly there are some things that they do these days for kids that seem ridiculous and overwrought. Does that mean that everything that has been figured out in the last forty years is completely wrong-headed? Certainly not. If you're the kind of person who came out okay in that style of child-rearing, and that leaves you well-balanced enough to be able to pontificate nostalgically, that doesn't prove anything. Are you sure that everything about how your generation was raised is perfect? After all, the world you're in right now is the world that was created by the way we were raised. Is the world you live in right now perfect? Is everyone well-adjusted, happy, rational, well-informed, and emotionally balanced? Maybe there was room for improvement after all. The fact is that you only are in a position to make self-righteous statements because you were one of those ones who did well enough to make them -- and that's even assuming you're totally content with yourself, and how everything about your life turned out.

Were we tougher because we weren't coddled? Sure, there's some evidence that some of the ways we protect our kids from exposure to some things might prevent them developing some resistances, and that there's some overprescription of some drugs, and other things like that. But that's a small factor compared to the number of kids in our generation who didn't get a fair break. People with special needs, or people whose health didn't do well because of exposure to things we can avoid now, or people whose illnesses are treated better now. Despite a world where, for largely economic and ecological reasons, disease spreads faster than ever, kids are healthier than ever. Was everything about how we were raised really that ideal, that lacking in room for improvement?

The common theme of all those bits of nostalgia that are just repeated without being thought through, in addition to the white-washing of how wonderful your own life really is, is the fact that you have the luxury of being able to pontificate about it because you did all right. But there's all the other ones who didn't. The real question is whether there's more of them now than then, or less.

Hot tubs

2011-04-21T11:00:00.007-04:00

One of the things we thought about spending some of the frivolous money from the inheritance on was a hot tub to put out on the deck outside the bedroom. Turned out to cost more than we wanted to spend on frivolities, which made us ask, will we ever get one? As Siobhan put it, if we're not going to get one when we come into money, when would we ever?

Well, I was looking at the prices and I figure if we really decided we wanted one, I could start socking away a bit of money and probably get one in a year or two. But I really don't think I'm going to. Not just because it's money that could be put to better use, though. On thinking more about it, even if someone gave us one free, I don't think we'd keep it.

The problem is the ongoing costs to run the thing -- not just in dollars but in environmental impact. Think about it. You've got two choices. Keep the heat running all the time so it'll be hot-tub hot whenever you want to use it, and pay a huge, huge fortune in electricity costs just for the few times you actually get to use it. Or wait until you decide you want to use it, and then turn the heat on, and wait. Depending on the type of hot tub, it either takes a few hours, or a full day, to get to full warmth. When are you going to want to use a hot tub and not mind waiting hours or a day to do it? That kind of takes the fun out of having one.

A hot tub might (might!) make sense to run in a place like a hotel or health club where a lot of different people can benefit from it, so it can be useful for most of the time it's heated up. But there's just no way we could actually use it for more than a tiny fraction of the time we were heating it. Not with just us.

So even if someone handed us the hot tub it wouldn't be worth plugging it in. In fact, even if someone handed us the hot tub and paid our resultingly huge electric bill in perpetuity, I think I couldn't justify having it turned on, just because of the wastefulness of all the energy used for so little benefit.

And that's not even considering the amount of time we'd spend on taking care of it, all the water-cleaning and maintenance. Probably that would add to more time than we would actually spend in it, considering the weather in Vermont. It's just impossible to make it worth having. It'd be nice to have a hot tub available once in a while, on those nights it'd sure be relaxing to sink into one, but there's just no way to make privately owning one work.

Has Morgan Freeman ever made a stinker?

2011-04-19T11:00:00.001-04:00

Michael Caine is a talented, well-respected actor who has done scores of different movies and different types of movies. He's been involved in some great movies, but he's also been in a fair number of stinkers -- movies that aren't just bad, but are almost universally reviled. In his case, it's apparently because of his work ethic; for a while he felt it was his obligation as an actor to take whatever jobs he got.

Sean Connery has a similar career, but not a similar excuse -- at least so far as I know. He just seems to have a knack for taking really bad movies along with really good ones. And his really bad ones are, in some cases, really really bad.

Think of any actor who's been around long enough to do movies of a variety of types, and then try to think of a stinker they've done. In nearly every case, one comes to mind rather quickly. No matter how good an actor is, they all seem to have run across a film that turned out terrible.

While watching The Shawshank Redemption, I found myself thinking that maybe Morgan Freeman is an exception. I haven't really gone over his filmography with a fine-toothed comb, but even giving it a fair amount of thought, nothing stands out. Closest I can come is Evan Almighty, but while it was a disappointment and certainly not a modern classic, it's not exactly a total groaner, it's just not that great. Maybe there's a stinker that I don't know, though. But even if there's an obscure stinker he's done, that still puts him head and shoulders above just about any actor with a career as long and varied as his.

The really tricky thing is to think of other actors about whom you can say the same thing. Who else has managed to avoid the stinker trap?

Taxi Driver

2011-04-16T11:00:00.000-04:00

A lot of the movies that are amongst the best movies of all time, according to this or that authority on such things, make me feel at the end like "okay, so, now what?" Is that the mystery ingredient that makes a movie great -- the failure, at the end, to have any clear sense of a story having been told with a particular point or conclusion?

You might be thinking I disliked Taxi Driver even more than I've disliked a lot of the other "must see" movies on my list, but that's not really true. There was a bit more to like about it than some of the movies I've watched this way recently. There was more suspense, more eagerness to see what would happen next, and the fact that it didn't end the way it seemed inevitable that it would maybe contributes to that.

On the other hand, the way it did end felt entirely unsatisfying. The final twist seems to be nothing more than "it happened that way because the writer says it did" and since the explanation for how it came to happen that way happens off-camera it never has to be justified. Saying it seems implausible doesn't buy much, because we know so little about how it could have happened. But it is implausible; and the fact that this gets hidden behind a big blob of ambiguity only makes the sense of being dissatisfied with the ending that much worse.

You know what else is weird about it? In a way, it almost feels like a Hollywood tacked-on happy ending. Okay, it's not exactly happy ending material in the usual sense. But compared to the tone of everything else in the movie, it's wildly unjustified in how positive it is. Is that, in fact, the point of the movie: that by the end, a fairly miserable and lonely existence can seem like an implausibly positive outcome? If so, it was only achieved by unvarnished trickery.

I also have to admit that I don't see what's the big deal about the famous "You talkin' to me?" scene. Maybe it's just gotten diluted from overexposure. But in the context of the movie, it was just one scene out of dozens with the same tone and feel and content, and I'm not sure why that one, and not one of the others, is the one everyone makes a fuss over.

In the end, the only reason I'll remember the movie is because it's been made such a big deal out of that I felt obligated to pay close attention and remember things, but even given that, I bet most of it melts away in my memory. What is there about it to stick with you? Clearly, something, for a lot of people, but I don't know what. About the only thing that grips is that twist -- and that twist feels entirely like the filmmaker yanking my chain, not the story taking me by surprise, so that's not going to haunt me. Anyone can write a story in which the rules suddenly change near the end, in which there turns out to be a gun on the mantle that we never saw in the first act, but that doesn't make it art.

Maybe it's just one of those movies that is powerful for sending a message that I already got. I don't know if that's enough explanation, though. Plenty of books and movies have felt powerful for me despite me already feeling familiar with their themes or messages. Maybe it's just that there's nothing there but the message, so if you haven't gotten that message before, you feel the impact of the message and then give credit to the whole movie for it, but if the message isn't new to you, the movie turns out to have not much else to offer. Whereas other movies might have a message but also have other stuff going on, so even if the message doesn't take root, the movie can still be an incredible experience.

North by Northwest

2011-04-13T10:49:00.001-04:00

The next in my series of movies I watched because I should was North by Northwest, an Alfred Hitchcock thriller about a case of mistaken identity. In truth, I have seen precious little Hitchcock, so a few more of his movies are on my list.

Given how so many of those "must-see" movies have turned out to be not much fun to watch, as my previous reviews have documented, and given that this was a dip into an older movie than most of those, considering how little I usually enjoy older movies, I wasn't expecting much. So I was pleasantly surprised to find it mostly engaging, one of the few to make me look forward to the next block I could watch. This sounds like an obvious thing in hindsight: Hitchcock is famous for suspense, after all. However, lots of well-respected actors, directors, and producers are famous for lots of things that just don't resonate for me, so I didn't take it at all as a foregone conclusion that his movies would be suspenseful for me.

There were a few things about the movie I felt weren't all that great. A surprisingly large amount of the movie feels a little rambling, in that there's a lot of time spent that doesn't particularly advance the plot, but simply keep whatever current piece of the plot is going on going on. That's not really a cricitism, as all of that stuff does work, but it is an area where one might draw a line between a good movie and a timeless classic.

I can't be too critical about the unnecessarily elaborate schemes that the villains attempt to use to kill off the protagonist, for which there is little or no explanation offered (you can stretch "try to make the murder look like an accident" only so far, nowhere near far enough for some of these schemes), because Hitchcock clearly also noticed the same thing, since he has the protagonist take the time to hang a lampshade on it in one scene -- he asks the villain what the next elaborate murder attempt will be, dipping him in molten steel? (Sorry, Mr. Thornhill, you're no T-1000.) I guess if the movie's going to make fun of itself on that point, I can't really hold it against it.

Some of the innuendo-laced flirtation between the male and female leads seemed to go on far longer than I had a stomach for. This is just one of those things where movies were just done differently back then, and I don't have a taste for it. (That doesn't mean I always prefer everything about how movies are done now. For instance, I prefer having cameras to be steady and cuts to be far fewer than modern filmmakers do it. But ten solid minutes of clumsy-seeming double-entendre makes me say "oh, get on with it!")

I found some of the action sequences a little less believable than I might have liked. The famous (infamous?) cornfield scene confounds not just with the impracticality of the method of assassination but also the coincidences required for its end. The climbing-chase near the end seems wildly unlikely for skilled climbers in proper gear, let alone people in business suits or high heels carrying monkey statues. There were a couple of others, but they were fairly minor.

And I still don't see a good reason for the title. About all I can guess is that the action mostly takes place in the northern part of the country -- some in the northeast (New York), some in the northwest (South Dakota), and some in between. I guess it doesn't have to have any better reason for the title, but I feel like I would have been happier if it did. Maybe I'm just missing it.

And, okay, Cary Grant is a very handsome man, even by today's standards, let alone by those of the time. Even so, the movie treats him like he's Adonis. It's very glib about the idea that every female who sees him immediately lusts for him to such an extent they'd actually take action on the feeling if they could. This is most striking in a very off-hand scene where he's making an escape through, of all things, a hospital room, and the woman in the hospital bed, in the space of a couple of seconds without dialog, makes clear that despite being in a hospital bed presumably because of illness or injury, she wouldn't mind if he lingered a little while and joined her. It seemed affected to me.

All that is fairly minor, though. The meat and potatoes of this movie is the plot, and by and large, the plot does the two things it needs to do: it holds together (in that everything in it, in hindsight, makes sense, but wasn't always obvious beforehand), and it drives the action (making you want to know what's going to happen next). There are exceptions but they are minor (the unnecessarily elaborate methods of murder being the largest one, already mentioned).

There's one thing that I felt was missing, but I'm sure it's intentionally missing. Given the real nature of Mr. Kaplan, there's no good reason I can see why Vandamm's men would have mistaken Mr. Thornhill for him at the start of the movie. Sure, it's plain why later in the movie his actions corroborate their suspicions, against his intentions; but what got the ball rolling? I'm sure to Hitchcock this question was of no more importance than what the MacGuffin is, but I feel that there should have been at least a little hint of some excuse, just because the agency had every reason to ensure that no one would ever seem to be Kaplan, and Thornhill certainly wasn't doing Kaplanesque things, and didn't even fit Kaplan's fake clothes. About the closest thing we get is the chance that he's physically in the hotel Kaplan's supposed to be staying at, but is not staying at that hotel, is simply meeting some people in its lounge, the same as scores of other people are doing that day.

My last observation about the movie is to wonder if, in one scene near the end, Hitchcock is trying to hint-without-saying that Vandamm and Leonard are or were gay lovers. No single one of the things that make me think this is suspicious on its own. Once, Leonard makes a reference that seems out of nowhere to his "female intuition", another time, Vandamm accuses Leonard of being jealous of Vandamm's tryst with Ms. Kendall; and there are a couple of others that are all similarly innocuous enough that they're easily brushed off. However, they all happen in a very short period of time. (And it doesn't hurt that Vandamm was played by James Mason, who can come across a bit effete even when he's being a ringleader.) I find myself thinking, if Hitchcock had it in mind that they had been (or still were) lovers, that's precisely the only way he could have tried to telegraph it to those of us who might notice it, without drawing an unhappy reaction from everyone else (in 1959, even Rock Hudson couldn't be gay on screen). Or am I just reading too much into it?

In all, I enjoyed the film more than most of those in my recent efforts, and I've added a couple more Hitchcock to the list -- though I'll space them out amongst ones I don't expect to enjoy. (Next up -- in fact, I'm about 1/3 of the way through as of this writing -- is Taxi Driver.)

Stick your head out the window!

2011-04-09T21:11:00.001-04:00

Automobiles are very unnatural. Nothing in the evolution of animals really prepares any animal for it, or gives any animal a context in which to make sense of it. Instead, aeons of deep-seated instinct tell every animal that certain sensations, as of motion, mean certain things, and should be responded to in certain ways, because those ways lead to survival. The normal reaction to something as unnatural as an automobile ought to be instinctual reactions that make transporting an animal by automobile a difficult proposition at best.

There is, of course, one exception that is provided for by the nature of automobiles: mankind. It is easy, if one makes an effort of imagination, to conceive of forms of locomotion that mankind might have tried to invent, but which he could not have put up with because they were too disorienting, ran too counter to his survival instincts, and so which he never bothered to invent, or to try to invent. Actually, that's not true: it's not that easy, because we are conditioned not to think of those possibilities. You have to find the preconceptions we don't usually question (such as the fact that we look forward and down, but rarely up) and then question them. But it's certainly possible. The point remains: the methods of locomotion we invent are those which are suited to us, or we wouldn't've invented them.

So when you think about it, isn't it really a handy coincidence that the vast majority of dogs, one of mankind's most domesticated animal companions, not only tolerate but actively enjoy riding in a car? They stick a head out, loll their tongues, and savor the wind blowing through their ears. Very few dogs have any problem with it, and most of them seem to delight in it.

There's nothing about the circumstances of how dogs got to be one of mankind's first and best domesticated animals that really selected for this. Nothing mankind was doing with early dogs had any correlation to the form of locomotion that humans would invent tens of thousands of years later. In fact, most of the other animals that humans domesticated don't like car travel, with reactions ranging from displeasure to an actual need for blinders or sedation, even when their involvement in it is nothing more than sitting on the back seat and not really having to see it happening. Even in those circumstances, where the awareness that the animal even is in a car seems remote, there's enough frisson between instincts and situation to make cats howl, and most animals get at least nervous, if not panicky. But dogs revel in it.

One can't help wonder what odd little juxtaposition of instincts is playing out in their heads. Their simple joy makes you think they're thinking, "I'm running so fast, and I don't even feel tired!" That's a glib and amusing thought, but no animal dumb enough to not be able to tell what running feels like could last very long, particularly one whose primary method of getting food is running it down. It's just too vital a process to be affected by that big a disconnect.

The more you think about it, the more impressive a happy coincidence it is that dogs are comfortable in, and even happy in, cars. Then again, if they weren't, it wouldn't change much. We take our cats to the vet in cars even though they, guided by quite sensible instincts, hate it, and say so repeatedly and volubly. If our dogs disliked it similarly, we could just keep them on short leashes, only take them out when we had to (as we do with cats), use operant condition to train them to tolerate it quietly, and at worst, use a sedative. But every time my dog is loving the heck out of being in the car, I'm glad for her sake that the wild coincidence, that the thing we invented for ourselves also happens in some completely different way to suit them too, just worked out.

Why do we tip waitstaff?

2011-03-31T11:00:00.001-04:00

Okay, I'm not really asking about the history of how we got to where there's a tipping tradition. But it seems just about everyone dislikes it. The waitstaff seem to be far more full of complaints about it than happy about it -- sure, they might get a really good tip sometimes, but they're more likely to get stiffed, and they depend on those tips since they're chronically underpaid. While some people like having the chance to express something with the amount of their tip, most people either resent having to pay them at all, or feel more motivated by wanting the waitstaff to get a fair shake. Who's really happy about it? One might suggest the restaurant management, but what they really think is, they don't want to have to pay the waitstaff more, or raise prices, but they're not really married to the particular way we accomplish those things. They are just, generally, cheap. (I suppose the non-cheap restaurateurs don't last very long, though.)

Consider how almost every restaurant in the world has a policy where parties of more than some particular size (often six) don't get to leave a tip; instead, 15% is added to the bill, and they pay that, no choice in the matter. What if we changed it so that is what we did for any party, any size?

Would the waitstaff hate that change? I'm sure some people tip more than 15% and others less. My guess is the average comes out pretty near 15%, or less. More importantly, I think the waitstaff would probably rather be able to count, somewhat, on their income, than to run the chance of getting a bigger tip. (Of course, their income still depends on how much business the restaurant does, but that's probably less unreliable.)

Would the customers hate it? I bet more people would be glad than upset about the change, if only because they didn't have to worry about it. For my part, assuming I was sure the waitstaff were glad of it, I would be too. I want my waitstaff to be able to count on being able to pay the rent. I virtually never short-tip -- waitstaff have to be really awful for that, and even then I usually tip at least 10% -- but even so, I only let the tip vary because I feel obligated to by social convention. No one expects me to tip the guy at the hardware store based on his level of service, but we still expect them to give good service, and we still have a way to reflect our opinion if they do or don't -- by shopping somewhere else, most notably. There's no particular reason restaurants have to be any different.

So who would actually be put out by simply changing that "six" to a "one"? There must be someone, because if there wasn't, some restaurant would just go ahead and do it. (Restaurants are always ready to buck trends and do something different, and get away with it, in some markets.) Maybe some of them do, but I've never heard of it. So why do we perpetuate this? Must be someone thinks it's a good thing. But who?

Lord of the Rings: the boardgame

2011-03-30T11:00:00.000-04:00

As I wrote recently, I have a bunch of games I've never even played. Recently, we gave one of them a try. It's been sitting on my shelves for years, so long that I forgot now who gave it to us. It wasn't too long after the Peter Jackson movies, so this Lord of the Rings boardgame was based more on them than on the books; you can see this in some of the production factors. On the other hand, it wasn't oblivious to the books; the art on the cards seems more reminiscent of the illustrations in some editions (and certainly not at all reminiscent of the movies), and there's references to things that didn't get into the movies (such as the rather forced option of a fifth hobbit for a fifth player, based on a passing reference in the books).

Like Pandemic or Defenders of the Realm, Lord of the Rings is a cooperative game, which only makes sense; you're playing the various hobbits, so you're working together. Though it follows the general flow of the story, it wildly ignores a lot of sequencing, and never forces the fellowship to separate, instead playing a story where the four hobbits stay together all the way to Mordor. The rest of the fellowship are reduced to cards you can win and then spend, and are no more important than incidental characters. In fact, at the rate that cards get consumed, they barely even get noticed as you collect them.

The game play is exceedingly weird and has a lot of seemingly unnecessary complexity that doesn't appear to add much. In the end, though, most of it comes down to races. You get some cards, then everything that happens takes them away. You try to spend cards to advance on no less than four different tracks at a time in different ways, and you have to advance on all of them, but you barely have enough cards to break even and occasionally advance a little bit. Most of the times you get to make a decision, you have no way to know why you'd choose one way or the other. But fortunately, most of the time, you have little or no choice to make.

It's a really elaborately produced game with lots of pieces, well made, slick and glossy, but it seems like they fell a bit short on the gameplay itself. Which is really a pity. Given how long the game takes, I can't imagine wanting to spend that much time on this instead of something else.

Being a good manager

2011-03-29T11:00:00.002-04:00

The true test of good management skills is when your people are being difficult. It's a lot less challenging and demanding to supervise a group of good, motivated people. It's only when the chips are down, when there are conflicts, resource limits, and similar strain that the real challenges of management come to the fore.

Blah, blah, blah. Everyone who has ever written anything about management has said something like this. And despite the fact that it's been said a million times, there are always people who need it to be said again. And it's all true.

However, while managing a good team might not be the gut-wrenching, talent-straining thing that so few people can do well, like managing a bad team is, it is nevertheless a skill. Yes, most people can be at least okay at it, and there are more people who are good at it, but there is still variation, and some people are excellent at it. What's more, in my experience, someone who's good at the one kind of management is not always good at the other. There are people who are great at dealing with the strain of a team that argues and resists, but who are really not that great at getting the most out of a team of motivated, happy people.

A good manager for a good team may not be great at finding ways to resolve conflicts, or to force people to do what they need to do without them feeling forced. But someone who is good at those things might not be good at finding the best organization of skills and talents to jobs, of fitting people's efforts into one another's like puzzle pieces to minimize gaps and maximize efficiencies, or at understanding the "big picture" without losing the details, enough to be the one that brings all the details together harmoniously.

No one gets much credit for being a good manager of a good team. They maybe shouldn't get as much credit as being a good manager of a bad team, but they should get some. More to the point, as long as we act as if "good manager" is a single thing in both cases, we might be missing the ball, missing a chance to improve how we do things. If you can't find that rarest of jewels, a manager who is great at both, you might be better to find ways to dovetail the talents of two people than to just settle for one. For some teams, you might be better off with a good-team-manager than a bad-team-manager, in fact. And in any case, understanding how to improve management skills needs to be based on understanding what they really are, which means understanding that each of these facets is important in its time.

Hackers

2011-03-28T11:00:00.000-04:00

I wasn't expecting a lot from this old movie, mostly notable for having a bunch of actors you know in it, but before you knew them. I can't decide if I'm surprised pleasantly or unpleasantly.

The thing is, somewhere in this mess, there's a story that is hackneyed and overdone, but actually sort of okay. They did a pretty good job with setting things up for later payoff, and while the conflict is formulaic (and particularly evocative of movies from ten years earlier -- I kept thinking of parallels with bits of the story of Real Genius) it's still serviceable.

But the movie is just trying way too hard, all the time, about everything. The characters might as well be standing around holding up megaphones shouting "I am cool!" at the camera all the time -- and it wouldn't change one bit how cool they are if they did. Pro tip: did you know all hackers are expert roller-skaters?

The movie is doing the same thing, too; worse, it actually has a megaphone and spends a lot of time shouting "I am cool!" at you when it could be doing things like having a story or characters. There's these lengthy visual sequences that are apparently supposed to convey, in an exciting and visual way, what hacking is like -- which is always a problem, since hacking is neither exciting nor visual to watch. So naturally we have to see three-dimensional images representing systems and files which we swoop around, and worse yet, these images on the computer screens of the hackers keep shining out onto their faces so crisply you can make them out in reverse. Often, this also takes the form of a music video, in that there's some kind of throbbing and wholly inappropriate music, and lots of visually corny superposition imagery of the characters spinning through other things for no clear reason.

You have to sympathize. Plenty of other movies have tried and failed at the same challenge. Hacking is just not visually interesting, so the only way to make it visually interesting is to make it something completely other. The only movie that occurs to me off the top of my head to be exciting and compelling, but also realistic, about this subject is Sneakers, and it manages it by keeping the actual hacking as a MacGuffin while focusing the action on the flesh-and-blood world around it. (Though even they fell for the temptation of one visual depiction of program code that was a bit goofy.)

It's not that Hackers is being technically unrealistic. (Okay, they are, wildly so, egregiously so, but that's okay.) It's that they're going to so much heavy-handed effort to tickle those of us who know a thing or two with wink-wink-nudge-nudge demonstrations that they got some real tech consultants. There's a scene which serves no purpose whatsoever during which they recite, with laborious excess, the various "color" books that were once the standard reference library of computer types everywhere, and get them right, as far as I can remember, for no other reason than to say "see, we did our research." There's dozens of things like that, but none of them actually end up informing anything about the actual plot. They're just call-outs by which the movie screams at us, "we, who made this, are one of you! and we're just as cool as you!" Then it promptly gets back to a plot that bears little or no resemblance to anything computers actually are used to do.

One last complaint: the only problem with the villain is that his tiny little mustache is way too small to twirl. But he makes up for it with aplomb. I hope the actor used his paycheck to buy something nice. He certainly won't be able to look back on this movie as a positive experience in any other way I can think of. I suppose there was originally a scene where he strangles a puppy with his bare hands, cackling maniacally, and they had to cut it in order to get that "no animals were harmed" statement, so they told him, "you're just going to have to find ways to be more absurdly over-the-top evil through, you know, that acting stuff you actor-types are always on about."

I think if you took out all the set pieces designed solely to establish how cool the movie is, and then added a few more twists to the plot to make up the lost time, you could have made a pretty good movie out of this. But as it is, the best thing to do about this movie is go watch Real Genius or Sneakers instead. Most of what's good here is better there.

Defenders of the Realm

2011-03-27T11:00:00.000-04:00

We recently attended Spring Meltdown, a game day at the community room of the Isley Library in Middlebury, hosted by Green Mountain Gamers. It was a pretty long drive and we had a few errands to run before it so we didn't get there until after lunch (taking the opportunity to lunch at a fairly ordinary diner in Middlebury, named Rosie's). As I was pretty tired from a week of lost sleep and the exhaustion of moving cubicle panels and furniture on Friday, I only lasted until dinnertime; we went to dinner at a local Indian restaurant (I learned I like lamb shahi khorma) and then home.

In between, we really only ended up playing one game. We arrived just about when a lot of other people had left for lunch, so the only games going on were all already going on. We spent a while waiting for another game to open up, and also set up a game we knew (Ticket to Ride) in case people wanted to accrete around us, but neither happened. We passed some time playing a game of Bananagrams (it's very different with two players -- you do a lot more disassembling and rebuilding your crossword and less adding onto it), and eventually, some friends came back from lunch and joined us. (So we ended up playing in a group of which 4/5 were the people we knew back home, but at least we were playing a game none of us own, so we were still exploring something new.)

The game we ended up playing is Defenders of the Realm, a cooperative game very reminiscent in its mechanics of Pandemic. It seems to be calibrated a bit more in favor of the enemies than Pandemic is; that is, your group will probably win less often. (That could probably be tweaked a bit, but honestly, I'm not sure which is better. In cooperative games, you probably will feel like you had the most fun if you win a fair amount of the time, but you don't want it to be a foregone conclusion or have no challenge. I don't have enough experience with them to know where the "sweet spot" is.)

In Defenders of the Realm you choose characters based on AD&D-like archetypes: sorceress, ranger, dwarf, paladin, wizard, rogue, cleric, or eagle rider. (The analogy to the various job types in Pandemic is clear, with similar kinds of special abilities.) Meanwhile, four Big Baddies -- an orc chieftain, a demon lord, an archlich, and a dragon (or something like that) -- start in various places on the board, along with lots of their minions. (These are entirely analogous to Pandemic's four diseases, except that they have slightly different powers. For instance, orcs are easier to kill but spread faster.)

Then you each take your turns moving around, killing off minions, trying to complete quests to gain special powers, trying to counter various ways the baddies can advance, and building up to congregating on one of the baddie bosses so you can kill him. The players can win only by killing all four of them, but the baddies can win in a jillion ways: by tainting too much of the land, by spreading too many minions, or by advancing to the capital city, each of which can be done by many paths. There are a few mechanics that directly mirror Pandemic things: the way "outbreaks" work (too many minions in one space spreads to adjoining spaces), the way the stakes get raised as you get closer to victory with the spread of the enemies quickening, and how, once you defeat a particular one of the four, you can effortlessly defeat it thenceforth.

Yet there are definitely a few things that don't, like quests, and a lot of other differences in things like special action cards. I think it ends up being a few notches more complex than Pandemic and thus perhaps a little more intimidating, in the sense that it'd be harder to get someone who isn't a dedicated player of modern board games interested in it, without them zoning out as you tried to explain it. I'd probably use simpler games like Ticket To Ride or Carcassone as a "gateway drug" before building towards things like Pandemic and then eventually to Defenders of the Realm.

So we'll probably eventually buy a copy, but at $55, I think we should probably wait until we've actually used the copy of Pandemic we bought months and months ago and have never actually used. Plus, someday, I want to try original-recipe Settlers of Catan, but since everyone else moved on to other games long ago (or at least the eighth expansion of the fourth sequel of Settlers), I'd probably have to buy it myself, and then start it with a bunch of newbies to Eurostyle games. I don't need more games, I need more opportunities to play them.

Which train gets where you're going?

2011-03-26T11:00:00.002-04:00

Turns out the old Mac-versus-PC war is nowadays an iPhone-OS-versus-Android war, taking place both on the smartphone and tablet platforms. You can't really talk about either of them in mixed company without provoking a deep vein of defensiveness and argumentation, no matter how non-partisan you are. Anything you say tends to get taken by one side as a statement of being on the other side.

I recently ran into this when I had to take down a Facebook link about an unimportant bug that showed up on the iPhones with daylight savings time. My purpose in posting it was just to share my amusement, most particularly at one thing: that Apple is normally so very, very good at avoiding those kinds of embarassing gaffes that plague virtually everyone else, so the one time they suffer one, they go all out and make it one that even Windows CE and most VCRs can handle. This is both an embarassment for Apple, and at the same time, a testament to the fact that they do everything else like that so well that they create for themselves a higher standard. It's news when Apple screws up like that, but when Microsoft does, no one even notices.

Is that a partisan statement about which is "better", iPhone or Android? Funnily enough people on either side tend to conclude that, by posting the link, I'm declaring my undying support for the other side, and feel compelled to trot out defenses and arguments.

My smartphone runs neither Android nor iOS, and I have no particular objection to either one -- my limitations are primarily concerned with hardware (and iOS suffers there only because it only comes in one hardware format, which lacks one key feature I need). Some future phone of mine will probably run one or the other -- I'm not looking forward to buying all new software when I make that change, of course, but provided I can do the few things I feel I need, I won't particularly care which one I get.

I happen to have an Android tablet at the moment, but I have no particular loyalty to Android on it. An iPad would have been equally good for my limited purposes, so the Android won on price. Does that mean the iPad isn't "better" enough to warrant the price difference? Every Apple partisan who reads this is currently forming a list in their head of the reasons why it is, or at least reciting a familiar list, but notice that I said "for my limited purposes". The iPad having 10,000 apps doesn't help if I only will use three, all of which are just as good on the Android.

Which is really why the entire Mac-versus-PC and iOS-versus-Android argument has always been moot to me, and should have been moot to 90% of the people who get so intense about it. Most of the people who are choosing a computer are choosing on based not on its OS, but on whether it can do the specific things they need to do. The only sensible decision is to buy the one that does what they need to do, for the best balance between price, reliability, lifespan, etc. And for many many people, there's not much overlap between what one computer or OS or platform can do, and what the other can't. For the vast majority of computer users (admittedly a smaller majority now than in the past, but even so), they don't really have a choice: they need the computer that interacts well with whatever and whoever else they need to interact with, period. To put a fine point on it, for most people, 95% of the things they need to do can be done on either computer (and nearly equally well), but that other 5% means they really have to choose one or the other.

Most of the arguments I see between the partisans of one side or the other come down to arguing about whether the train heading to Chicago is a better train than the one heading to Philadelphia. Sure, there are a few people who just want a nice train ride. But for most people, the destination is the point. It doesn't matter if the train to Philadelphia serves the finest beverages and has sumptuous furnishings; if you're heading to Chicago, you take the train bound for Chicago.

People have long been predicting and advocating various changes in the computing infrastructure which would erode the distinction between OSes, and this is finally happening -- smartphones really started to push the "thin client" world that everyone had talked about and no one had ever really made significant inroads towards, and tablets are building on that. This change is still getting its feet under it, and has a long way to go. But while this change is going to be the first time we really can start to debate which kind of computer to get, because any computer will get us to our destination -- when the analogy is more like cars than trains -- it's also the change that makes the question increasingly irrelevant, because what computer you use won't matter that much if you're just using it to access web-based cloud services.

Just like that river twisting through a dusty land

2011-03-25T11:00:00.002-04:00

When we adopted a pair of cats, brother and sister, we renamed them to Simon and River, in honor of the Tams.

It occurred to me that this isn't the first time I've had a male cat named Simon. Long ago, a friend picked up a stray cat, a girl, and this being 1982 or 1983, I suggested the name Rio, after the album of that name by Duran Duran. Turned out she was pregnant, and had five boy kittens. So there wasn't really any choice: the kittens got named Simon, Nick, John, Roger, and Andy. It seemed quite fitting.

Of course I can't just call the current Simon "Simon"; I have to elaborate. One of the names I've given him, due to what a little upstart troublemaker he can be, is Simón Bolívar, which then gets mutated to Señor Bolívar.

So calling him by a Spanish language name, I naturally considered the idea of calling River by her Spanish equivalent, which is, of course, Río. Which would bring me full circle, to having a pair of related cats with the same names as another pair of related cats.

As insignificant a set of coincidences as can possibly be imagined, but it makes me wonder. The link between the names Simon and River existed before Firefly; is there the slightest chance that Joss did that on purpose?

Naaaaaaah.

Like the back of your hand

2011-03-24T11:00:00.000-04:00

How well, really, do you know the back of your hand? Make sure you can't see it, then try to describe anything about it that wouldn't be precisely the same description as anyone else of your gender and approximate size. Can you say any more about the proportions, the distribution of hair, the location of veins and arteries and tendons, the particular lines and creases around the knuckles, or anything else that distinguishes the back of your own hand from anyone else's?

The phrase really doesn't make much sense if you take it at its word, even more than the one about taking candy from a baby, or talking behind someone's back. But I wonder if that's just because of what we do nowadays. Maybe way back when, when more people spent more time doing physical labor with their hands, labor that was often stultifying (and not even eased by the distraction of Walkman headphones), people tended to get to know the backs of their hands very well. Perhaps the phrase originates in a time when it made sense, and we just lost the sense, but didn't lose the phrase. Is it really just a fossil phrase, not nonsense?

Apocalypse Now

2011-03-23T11:00:00.001-04:00

It took a long time, sliced into 14-minute pieces, but I finally finished watching Apocalypse Now, the next in my series of movies I feel I ought to have seen, as a culturally aware person. For the record, I watched the "Redux" director's cut, so I realize that anything I might say about the pacing is affected by that. But I certainly didn't want to watch both versions, so I thought it better to pick this one. Yes, I'm going to spoil, but this is a thirty year old movie, so this is all the warning you'll get.

I know that, at the time, Martin Sheen was nowhere near the star power of Marlon Brando, so I can kind of understand how Brando got top billing despite being in the movie for about ten minutes out of three hours, while Sheen's face was in front of us for pretty much the entire three hours. But of the various posters and cover art, pretty much all of them either depict no one, or depict just Brando, as in the one I used for this post. And maybe half of Brando's on screen time, you couldn't even see him, he was just a blur in some shadows, or a shaved head. Was Brando's performance extraordinary? I don't know. I didn't feel like we got much from him. When the Captain voice-overs to us that Kurtz wants to die, my reaction was, he does? Where did you see that? Was it just too nuanced for me, or was there really something that rose up out of the soup of madness to suggest that specific conclusion, or was Willard just convincing himself? Obligatory liberal arts major answer: "Maybe you're supposed to be asking yourself that." Well, I appreciate the value of intentional ambiguity, but that doesn't mean every bit of ambiguity is good, or even intentional.

In the end, I'm not sure what I am supposed to feel the movie was for. Unless it was another exploration of "war is hell" only amplified to the extremes of stupidity and chaos we saw there -- pretty much every military installation we saw was mismanaged or unmanaged to an extent that cannot readily be exaggerated. There wasn't really a single example, except perhaps the boat's pilot, of someone who reflected well on the military, not even in the way Radar O'Reilly did. Even the angry French seemed savvy compared to the comically (tragicomically, really) inept Americans.

I suppose that Kurtz and the mission were really the pretext for a journey up the river and all the incidents along the way. It's a road movie as much as it is a war movie. Pretty much every scene on the river could have been cut without changing the overall storyline or significantly affecting any of the other scenes. For instance, the USO show with the Playboy bunnies wouldn't really significant affect any other scene if you cut it out -- not even the successor scene that featured the same bunnies. But as you cut things, you'd be cutting away the mood or tone, so I wonder, is that what the movie was meant to be about? I suppose so, but for me, at least, I find myself thinking, did I really need this whole movie just to get that mood? Is that just a matter of timeliness -- would that have meant more to me in 1979? (But this movie is accorded a timeless classic.)

So many of the characters appear very briefly. It's weird to think that this comes very soon after Harrison Ford was a breakout star in American Graffiti and Star Wars, but he gets about one minute of screen time, none of it really requiring much.

Dennis Hopper's role is also small, but perhaps has the most impact compared to its length; I found myself wondering if Brad Pitt's performance in 12 Monkeys might owe something to it, or if they're just both drawing on the same inspirations, but some of the echoes were striking, including intonation, diction, and physical mannerisms. It's probably easy to use that kind of approach to convey "crazy," particularly compared to how Kurtz is depicted, but I still found it far more effective. Generally speaking, to me the most challenging part of playing crazy is making the craziness seem seductive, like there's something to it and you can really see how the person got there and stays there. I've seen "quiet crazy" done that way, but I didn't really get it from Kurtz. All I got from the photojournalist was a sense of being caught up in a cult of personality, which would work fine, if I saw in Kurtz the kind of personality that could form that cult, but again, I didn't really get it.

So now I've finally seen the famous napalm quote, and now I know that it's always being quoted in a highly abbreviated way -- there's a whole bunch in the middle that's always left out. Curiously, I found the quote less compelling in context than how it's usually quoted. I know it's supposed to be kind of absurd, and it is; but the kind of absurd it is, turns out to be a much less interesting kind than the kind it always came across as.

When all is said and done, I come away with a kind of "blah". For as little as I took away from the movie, it could have been half its length. I don't know if it's fair to say I was dissatisfied because I wasn't really expecting anything. But I suppose while I wasn't expecting anything I was nevertheless expecting something. Some sense that it all came out to mean something. That there was a reason for any of it -- and I don't mean a reason for what Willard or Kurtz or Lance or anyone else did (though there were so, so many times I would have liked one of those, too), but a reason for what Coppola or Sheen or Brando did. I guess there probably is; probably every single instant, every shadow, every whisper, every time some glaring question went unanswered (why didn't the airstrike get called in, for instance), all contributing to something. And that something just doesn't register with me.

There's a hole at the bottom of the sea

2011-03-22T11:00:00.000-04:00

You know the song, don't you? I learned it in elementary school, and my wife, who grew up a thousand miles away, also learned it, so I assume it's pretty widespread. (Apparently, Danny Kaye did a recording of it, and it was performed on Captain Kangaroo, but I bet neither is the original source, which is probably lost in time.) If you don't, it's one of those songs where each repetition it gets a little longer, so you end up memorizing a list of things. There's a hole at the bottom of the sea. There's a log in the hole at the bottom of the sea. There's a bump on the log, and so on.

But I think what exactly there is on the bump on the log tends to vary. I wonder how much. When I told my wife what we sang when I was a kid, she didn't recognize some of the later elements, and instead pointed out that flies don't get pimples. For the record, the penultimate repetition of the version I learned was: "There's an atom on a molecule on a pimple on a fly on a hair on a wart on a frog on a bump on a log in a hole at the bottom of the sea." Her version agreed up to either the fly or the hair (she wasn't sure about the fly).

The version that the artist who drew the pictured shirt learned had a few extra steps. His final version: "There's a smile on the face of the flea on the hair on the wart on the toe on the foot on the leg of the frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea." I like the smile on the face bit, but the toe and foot seem unnecessary -- even by the standards of this song where it's all unnecessary.

I said that the atom on the molecule part was the penultimate repetition of our version, because we learned one last line: "There's a BOOOOM!" and that's it. You didn't go on and repeat the list, it just ends with the biggest, loudest boom the class could make. Why? I certainly didn't know in the first grade. I think I was in about the eighth grade before I thought back on this and realized that, in a sly way, my teacher was alluding to splitting the atom. Talk about a long setup for a joke. I wonder how many of my classmates never put it together.

So how did your version of the song go? My guess is most people learned the same first few repetitions at least, but the farther you get from that log, the more it diverges. Probably some of the later repetitions were made up by a specific teacher or student (like, I'm guessing, the "boom!" verse we learned), and then get repeated and embellished farther, so like a branching tree diagram, the variations on the song get more diverse as you add more verses. Someone probably did a doctoral thesis on this by now.

Narrating for your pets

2011-03-21T11:00:00.000-04:00

Do you ever do the talking for your pets? Say the stuff you think they should be saying? No one admits to it, because it seems really silly when you say it out loud, but just about everyone does it. Heck, my grandmother used to do it, and I can't think of a single silly or frivolous thing she ever did.

If this is a nearly universal experience, I wonder if one could use it as a way to explain roleplaying. Because if you think about it, that's pretty much what you're doing. You take what you know about your pet's personality and fill in the gaps, to create a character out of your pet, and then you roleplay that character's statements in whatever situation the pet is in. It doesn't seem like a comparably complex thing, but it is really a simplified version of the central concepts of roleplaying.

But even if you can get over the differences, I don't think you can really make much use of the similarities, if only because of how people consider it so frivolous that they probably wouldn't admit to doing it. Pity, too. So many people who don't know what roleplaying is, and so can't enjoy it or appreciate it or join the rest of us; and most of them are unwittingly doing it every day, in a very limited form.

Rover v3.0

2011-03-20T11:00:00.001-04:00

Now that I have a nice wall-mounted touchscreen for my home automation system, I need some software that's suited for it. My own product, Rover, is a stripped-down but fully functional client that works in any web browser, and it's almost, but not quite, ideal for it. The only problem is that it's not very fingertip-friendly; it mostly uses links and small icons.

Well, I've been meaning to make a version 3 of it for a long time, so this is finally what's got me working on it. I hadn't done any coding in ASP for a long time, but it came back to me quite quickly, and in just a few hours, I was able to make huge strides towards v3.0. Most notably, changing the software to display big friendly buttons in a grid layout:

One of the design decisions of Rover is that I avoided using Javascript, or even depending on tables. It will run on a copy of Lynx for ancient versions of Unix over a dial-up modem connection quite effectively. However, this required the means of getting from one room to another to either take multiple page loads (slow!), or to use lots of small links (not finger friendly). So for this application, it seemed like I could take a step into very simple Javascript, by making it optional. That row at the bottom replaces a long string of tiny-text links, and depends on Javascript, but is quite finger-friendly. In Android, it pops up a nice big menu, in fact.

That Weather link isn't hard-coded into Rover, but it's something I configured into my copy. All it is go to the NWS page for my area:

The problem with this, of course, is the only way back is using the back button; everything in Rover lets you get around using the links shown. One thing I want to do is make a Home page that has basic at-a-glance info like a big, live clock, a quick summary of current and upcoming weather, and a few of the most necessary home automation controls. It would then have a link into Rover, and vice versa.

The other big improvement I want to see in Rover is something I call "tricks", in the sense of, "you can too teach an old dog new tricks" (Rover, dog, get it?). Right now, Rover lets you see all the devices in a specific location, plus any set of other events or other links you choose to add for that location. But it still means you have to organize your locations either for Rover, or for your main HomeSeer interface, and sometimes you can't make it work for both. A "trick" would be a customized, virtual location, which contained any set of devices, events, and links you choose, arranged in whatever order you wanted. While Rover is free, I might charge a buck or two for the program that lets you make and use tricks. As of this writing, I haven't started on this, beyond general ideas of design.

Once that's done, plus some beta testing, I'm going to release the first new version of Rover in over two years. It's a pretty well-liked program (despite the HomeSeer folks always giving me a hard time about it, due to favoritism towards the maker of a competing product) so it should be interesting to see how many people are still using it.

Home automation touchscreen

2011-03-19T11:00:00.003-04:00

I had 7" touchscreen running Android left over. I'd bought it to experiment with PDFs, but it wasn't that good for that; too small a screen, and not enough processing power for any but the simplest PDFs. I gave it a try as a multimedia player to watch movies when my Archos died, but the old OS didn't support most of the codecs, and very few things could play on it. Eventually, I bought a new 10" tablet with a later version of Android, which works wonderfully for both movies and PDFs. So what to do with the leftover tablet?

This is only a little jury-rigged. The hardest part was running a power cable to it. I already had a hole in the wall, and a wire running down from it to the basement, and I could see both ends of the wire, yet I still couldn't fish the wire through very easily. The wire that was already present (left over from an old thermostat install) is apparently tacked down somewhere, so I can't pull the new cable along using it. I tried a lot of things, and eventually, had to buy a proper wiring fish tape, and even then it was quite a struggle due to the size of the power plug at the end. I ended up mashing it up a bit and having to reshape it with pliers to make it fit.

The brackets are also not quite the right size and ended up looking a little bit jury-rigged, particularly the screws. I might replace them with something more suited if I can find something. But it's not too bad.

I also had to tweak the settings on the tablet a bit. First, disable all power saving features. Second, delete all the email and calendar accounts I had set up -- I don't want it beeping when it happens to see me get an email. (Getting email on this would be cutesy, but not practical; I already get it on my phone.)

The plan is for it to pretty much always run the software I'll use to control my home automation system. But the touch screen software that comes with HomeSeer is pretty lame:

So I guess I'll have to work on Rover to make it better for this application, more suited to fingers.

It would also be nice to be able to run a few other things, like this:

But there's no easy way to switch between that and the home automation system that can be done without having to learn how to do it, and my aim here is something that's so obvious anyone can walk up and just start using it. Maybe I'll just make a "home" web page that looks like this, and flips back to my home automation system quickly.

How is Thunderbird doing?

2011-03-18T11:00:00.000-04:00

I already wrote about how Thunderbird's great win over Agent is its IMAP support, the reason I'm looking to move to it. And I've written about the biggest place where it loses, the way Agent handles mail routing to folders so intelligently. What about everything else? Well, it's a really mixed bag.

I'll give Thunderbird credit for doing HTML rendering far better than Agent. That I can compose HTML emails might be useful, though I don't intend to do more of than than I have to. One thing that Thunderbird wins on is kind of embarassing for Agent: with a simple plugin, it minimizes to the system tray, easy and perfect. Agent could only do that with the addition of third party programs like TrayIt, all of which had one flaw or another. It's embarassing because, given the development system they programmed Agent in, it's about ten lines of code to add minimize-to-tray, and I even emailed them the code. There's no reason for them not to have added it.

Thunderbird apparently wants to make it easy to move from another client to Thunderbird, provided the other client is Eudora. (Though from what I see on forum posts, even that only works half the time.) It's trying so hard to be so smart, that it actually is broken, and seriously, "what the hell were they thinking" broken. First, it won't import any standard mail formats like the most basic of all, the raw email dump defined in RFC822, where email was invented. Not even newer standards like XML. Not even widely-used proprietary formats like .msg files. No, it only wants to read four formats, from four specific programs. Second, it won't let you tell it where the mail is you want to import. It insists on trying to figure that out for itself based on the registry keys that some versions of some other email programs have installed -- but not even all versions of those programs. It can't find the files unless you figure out how to trick it into looking where they are. Third, even if you fake up those registry keys, it can't import them most of the time anyway. It's so dependent on some very specific setup of some particular versions of some particular programs that it can't just import the mail and be done with it. It's too smart for its own good.

I eventually figured out a long, byzantine series of steps involving exporting one folder at a time, closing Thunderbird, dropping the export into a specific filename, reopening Thunderbird, then moving the messages on to their final destination, then repeating the whole thing. In the end I've spent hours on doing what should take seconds. If it just would give me an Open File dialog and then import whatever I say, I'd be done by now.

I don't deny that Agent is still mired in the past, and the loss of development makes it a dead end. I don't deny that IMAP is a necessity. But it's a pity that someone couldn't take the brilliant things Agent was doing, instead of doing the same things everyone else did (like IMAP), and steal those ideas. They really are good ideas. And I wish Thunderbird would stop trying to be smarter than me in areas where it isn't and can't be. Sure, have an Import From Eudora wizard, but don't cripple all your importing with the wizard format. Help or get out of the way, Thunderbird.

Fear of flying and nuclear power

2011-03-17T11:00:00.004-04:00

Everyone knows that the statistics say that flying is far, far safer than driving. And yet almost everyone has at least a tiny hint of fear at flying, more than they do at driving. Why? Because of the sense of helplessness. If you're in a car, you have some control over your fate. Yes, it's entirely possible for a fatal crash to happen you couldn't possibly avoid, and yes, sometimes you're a passenger, and yes, the illusion of control is mostly an illusion, but it's enough. In a plane, if something goes wrong, there's not a thing you can do about it; it won't be your fault, and it won't be something you could have fixed or prevented. And that difference is far more important in people's minds than the actual facts of the matter, the actual threat that logically ought to be the determining factor in levels of fear.

It's way too early to tell how many deaths, injuries, and illnesses will result from the combination of the Japan earthquake and tsunami, and the nuclear power plants affected by it. But you couldn't tell by the level of fear, and that level of fear is going to, inevitably, have a devastating effect on the entire nuclear power industry -- which in turn will further destroy our attempts at environmental recovery and a sensible energy budget.

But while we can't guess how many deaths, injuries, and illnesses there are from any factor, I think I can safely predict this: the number of deaths that results from quake + tsunami + nuclear power will be far, far less than the number of deaths that result from quake + tsunami + bridges. Or quake + tsunami + churches and temples. Or quake + tsunami + gas stations. Or quake + tsunami + factories that manufacture CDs. Or quake + tsunami + almost anything else you can think of, that no one is even beginning to speculate proposing we shouldn't be building.

And of course, it'll all be trivial compared to the number of deaths from the big combinations: quake + tsunami + cars, quake + tsunami + tall buildings, and quake + tsunami + liquid fuel. Those will ultimately be responsible for thousands of times as many deaths as quake + tsunami + nuclear power. The same will hold true for injuries, and for illnesses.

But nuclear power is going to be, is already being, singled out as the only thing people feel we should reappraise. In essence, they're taking an existing fear, that is not based on the actual safety statistics or even an understanding of what nuclear power really is, and using this to amplify it. Because at its root, what they're really afraid of is that, if there's a nuclear power plant disaster, it will be just like that plane crash: totally out of your control. Whereas, if you're in a quake in a tall building, you can at least imagine that you could have done something about it. It's only an illusion of control. It's enough that someone could write a movie about the guy who survived despite being in the building that was falling, whereas, no one could really write a movie about the guy who survived despite being in the path of fallout of a major nuclear accident. Nevermind which one is actually more likely.

I'm not saying that there aren't important lessons to be learned about how the nuclear power plants in Japan were built and prepared for these kinds of emergencies, what kind of backups and redundancies they didn't have but should have, whether they were built in the right place. I don't even mean that nuclear power was necessarily the best solution to Japan's power needs -- I know that I don't know enough to judge that. I just mean that, whatever actually comes out of this will not be informed by any of these logical considerations. It'll be driven almost entirely by the combination of ignorance about nuclear power, and the irrational fear of things based on whether they're out of your hands, not based on what level of threat they really represent.

A few days after I wrote this, xkcd posted this chart, which elaborates on the actual measurements along with some surprising revelations. Note, for instance, that an airplane flight from NY to LA is about 11 times as much exposure as being near the Japan reactor "disaster"; and how the amount you get from living within 50 miles of a reactor for a year is equal to eating a single banana, and a third of what you get living near a coal power plant. Fascinating stuff.

An energy budget

2011-03-16T11:00:00.002-04:00

Rising gasoline prices are pinching the economy just as it's starting to inch towards recovery, and most people don't realize how pervasive that one factor is. The fact is, every product or service you spend money on is directly, and potently, impacted by energy costs. Energy is the most fundamental of all costs in our global economy, even more than labor is now, because even things made by robots are still consuming energy to be made, transported, operated, and disposed of.

When you think about this, if you take a big step back and look at how we, as a country, as a species, as a society, use our energy, it's immediately striking that we are totally and utterly insane about it. There is essentially nothing about what we do and don't spend energy on now that is any different from how we did when it was, in a very real sense, "unlimited" -- that is, there was more of it than the whole human race could expect to use up.

At any given moment, you aren't just using up energy to power a light bulb and a TV (which itself might be seen as kind of frivolous). You've also got a pantry stocked with foods that were grown 5000 miles away, probably by methods that used a lot of energy to manage temperatures and such, and then was packaged and transported to you. That transportation in turn necessitated a whole industry to pave roads, stock gas stations, build and repair vehicles (most of which are vastly underutilized), and keep the roads clear of obstacles and the effects of weather. You aren't just keeping your whole house (including the rooms no one is in) warmer than the manor of a spoiled medieval lordling, you're also filling that house with products manufactured on the other side of the world from materials produced even more thousands of miles away.

Pick any single thing around you right now, and try to add up every way that energy was expended in the process of getting it to where you have it, from the extraction of the raw materials, through manufacturing and distribution, to the packaging it came in, to the costs that will eventually accrue when you throw it away and it has to be carted through the waste disposal infrastructure. Now multiply that by the millions of other things you and everyone around you has. Do you feel like we're using energy in a way that makes sense, for the whole planet, the whole human race? If you could start from a clean slate and design a world with the same number of people and same amount of resources, and try to make it efficient in how energy was used, would this design have even the slighest resemblance to anything we actually have?

If the world had to look at an overall, worldwide energy budget, and treat its total amount of energy the way you (hopefully) treat your gross income, deciding which are the most important ways to spend the energy it has for the most benefit without going over the amount of energy it can gather sustainably, there is essentially nothing in your life that would be even remotely the same as it is now. Instead, we spend energy like a drunk frat boy who stole his mother's credit card. No, that analogy is way too tame; even a drunk frat boy probably realizes that the credit card has a limit, and there will be a reckoning, and even if he doesn't, he probably won't start buying high-end brandy just to lubricate the bar with so the bartender can slide beers down it. But the way we spend energy, worldwide, is even more profligate than that. If there's still a human race in 200 years, they will undoubtedly consider us far, far, far stupider than we consider the doctors who used to bleed patients to death. What's worse is, those doctors didn't really have enough info to realize how wrong they were, but we have no excuse. We're just too used to living like medieval aristocrats to really think about what we're doing. At best, we say "turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater," as if that's really what the world needs.

Missing Agent's mail routing

2011-03-15T11:00:00.004-04:00

The process of trying to move from Forté Agent to an IMAP mail client, Thunderbird specifically, has been a really mixed bag.

The process of setting up Thunderbird to handle my email, replicating my folders, and setting up identities (the equivalent of Agent's personas, though not quite as rich in features) only took an hour or so. And with that, I'm getting my email, and having it synch with my phone just fine.

However, it's really hitting home how limited other clients are at handling some things Agent is brilliant at, and the most painful of these is mail routing. If you haven't used Agent, you probably think that whatever your client does to route mail into folders is perfectly fine -- you're just so used to having to do things that your computer could do better that you don't think about it. I am spoiled rotten, it turns out. And so should everyone be.

I'll use my friend Joe in my example of how Agent handles mail routing. I first met Joe through my roleplaying group, so the first time I ever got an email from him, it was about roleplaying. So I dragged it into my Roleplaying folder. Agent immediately asked me whether I wanted to just move the mail, or remember that mail from Joe goes to the Roleplaying folder in future (which is what I chose), or if all mail from the entire domain should go to that folder. So basically, by doing something I was doing anyway -- dragging a mail into a folder -- I gave Agent a chance to learn how I wanted things done, without me having to think about filters or anything. But wait, that's just the start.

This got associated with Joe's entry (automatically created and populated) in my address book. Agent is now smart enough to know that when I send mail to Joe, it should go into the Roleplaying folder, unless I say otherwise. When Joe changes his email address, I don't have to remember to change it in several places, just in the address book. But wait, it gets better.

Later, Joe was playing in my Uncreated game, for which I have another folder. One day he sent me an email about that. Agent put it in the Roleplaying folder, but I immediately moved it into the Uncreated subfolder. Agent then asked me what to do. Just do the move, or replace the previous routing, or add to it, which is what I chose. Now Agent knows emails from Joe can go into either the Roleplaying or Uncreated folder.

So what does it do when an email comes from Joe? Well, it has previously used Bayesian analysis on the text in all the emails from Joe in both folders, so it knows what words and phrases tend to appear more in one or the other. It analyzes the incoming email the same way. If it finds words that give it a sufficiently high confidence that the mail belongs in one or the other, it puts it there. If not, it puts it in a default. If it guesses wrong, and I move the message, or indeed if I move any message for any reason, it recalculates the analyses. The more emails I get from Joe, the smarter it gets at knowing where to file them automatically. And at no point do I have to do anything to make this happen, or keep it happening as things change, except for occasionally move an email to the folder it should have gone to.

If I poured way too much of my time into making very smart filters, I could never hope to achieve anything comparable to this in Thunderbird. More to the point, why should I be the one spending the time to figure the filters out? Agent is essentially making, updating, adjusting, and reoptimizing its internal filters constantly, saving me tons of time. And it's doing a better job than I could have. That's how software should be. But as long as no one expects their email software to do this, and everyone takes for granted that we all have to make filters and live with their limitations, or just file our own messages, no one's going to do what Agent did again.

The Adjustment Bureau

2011-03-14T11:00:00.001-04:00

Has any other sci-fi author had more of his stories adapted into major motion pictures than Philip K. Dick? Admittedly the adaptations often deviate so hugely that you can barely recognize the premise, but there's sure been plenty of them, and many of them have been great movies. The Adjustment Bureau certainly is no Blade Runner but it's a solid, enjoyable movie. Spoilers follow.

The premise of the movie is easy enough to glimpse the basics of from the trailer: there are people moving around us making small "adjustments" to our fates. But the people who made the trailer did a great job of not giving away too much of what the story is actually about -- enough to lure you in, but not so much that there's not still a lot to learn at the theater. Like who they actually are, and what they actually do, and why.

Another thing that's not obvious from the trailer is that, while there are a few chase sequences and some action, it's not really an action movie. It's a mix of character study (particularly of Matt Damon's character), a romance tale, and good old-fashioned speculative fiction -- exploring a 'what if' without really feeling a need for the answer to always be "things explode".

The romance part might take some people by surprise, but I have to hand it to them, they pull it off without any problem. That thing that everyone calls "chemistry" (and usually gives all the credit to the actors for), whatever it really is, Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have it, in every scene they share. Their romance is absolutely believable on a human level, not larger than life. And this is a good thing, since the movie really depends on this, more than you'd expect.

The actual adjustment bureau are played very nicely, with a really great style. I particularly liked how their hats (which later became a plot point!) and clothes, and the style of their building, seemed to harken from Philip K. Dick's time -- as if they simply haven't been modernized while the rest of the story has. Which is appropriate: if you were a being that lived centuries or millennia or maybe forever, you probably wouldn't update your sense of personal style until you had to, until it finally stood out so much it got in the way of the work. (That's probably also why they use words like 'chairman' and 'bureau,' affecting a sort of corporate or governmental feel; in past times, they probably took on other terminology that let them fit in, and they only change that when they have to.) It not only makes sense, it helped give the film a more atmospheric feel.

My only quibble with the bureau is the unnecessary telekinesis. We see them have this power a few times in the movie, but they don't really need it, and it's kind of boring, the minimal way it's used. We see Harry make David's coffee cup burst on the bus, but this mostly just seems to be there to establish they have this power, it doesn't do anything in the story; it's just placing Chekov's gun. Richardson uses it to trip David as he tries to escape, but that could just as easily have been done by him having placed something there in advance, since he knows -- and makes a point of it, right there in that very scene! -- that David was going to run and need to be tripped just there. And then, in the only time it was necessary, Thompson uses it to make Elise sprain her ankle. That's really it. Their ability to foresee, anticipate, and head off people's decisions is interesting; their means of travel through doors is compelling; but TK just for that is boring. It's putting way too big a power in for way too little use.

It would have been far more compelling if they had done these things through foresight. Harry could have slipped into the coffee shop and switched the cup with a faulty one (or that could have been simply struck from the story). Richardson could have set up a trip bar or other trap where David was sure to run. And Thompson could have previously weakened a spot on the floor, or made a light loose to swing and catch Elise in the eye, or any of a dozen other techniques that depend on knowing what was going to happen before it happened -- and otherwise being mundane. I think that would have been a stronger storytelling device.

One final thought about the movie: in a way, isn't it the same story as It's A Wonderful Life? I'll leave it to you to draw the parallels.

Maybe moving to Thunderbird

2011-03-13T11:00:00.000-04:00

I've been using Forté [sic] Agent since it was in beta back in 1994 or so. Back then, Usenet was more important than email, and Agent was a news reader that had an email client built in. As Usenet faded in importance, and email skyrocketed, Agent got smarter and smarter at email, and now includes a lot of features that no other client supports. But at the same time, it's still tied to some underlying design decisions that made sense back in the days when POP3 was it for email, which makes implementing some features that are now standard in email, like IMAP, harder than they could be. Unfortunately, with email clients typically selling for $0 and Usenet clients all but extinct, Agent isn't really a selling product anymore, so Forté isn't doing more development. They kept it going long past the point it didn't make a lot of sense, but they seem to have hung it up.

IMAP's main claim to fame is that your email and folders live on the server, in addition to (or even instead of) on your client. That way, you can see it with multiple devices and they stay readily in sync. This isn't really done perfectly -- it still uses a nested-folders approach instead of a tags-like approach, for instance -- but it's good enough, and it's now the standard. Just about every email client, including those on smartphones and other portable devices, supports it. Thus, you can do some email management on your phone and have it be reflected when you get home to your computer.

With POP3 the best you can do is have two computers get the email (by using the "read" flag as a cheap way for them to keep in synch), but if you have folders, they are on the client, so you have to have the two computers handle the folders identically. And you can't get to a third client this way. And not all clients even support this kluge.

For a lot of people IMAP was a must-have ten years ago, because they had multiple computers (home and work, or more), and especially because they had portable devices with network access. But I haven't really needed it. Phones with data plans were rare in Vermont, where most of us still have to choose a provider based on which one has signal at our house. And I have been using the same computer at home and work for many years (and if I hadn't, I'd've been using a thumbdrive or SDcard for my email data file anyway -- as I am already doing with my Eee).

But I have a smartphone with a data plan now, and sometimes I get annoyed at forgetting to shut Agent down when I'm away from my computer, and finding my phone can't show my email. And of course I can't delete, file, or do much of anything with email on my phone and have the changes reflected when I get home, like I can when my phone hits my work email. I don't even get copies of my sent messages unless I BCC myself. I've also dabbled in accessing my email from my tablet from time to time, so that's even more clients.

All this is pushing me towards making the move away from Agent. Word is Thunderbird is the client of choice for Agent expatriates. So I'm going to look into how well I can make it work for me.

Arguing about politics

2011-03-12T11:00:00.001-05:00

Lately I have had to do a lot of screening of my participation in, and even exposure to, what passes for rhetoric. It feels like the culture war going on right now is reaching a turning point, where even smart people are falling for the disinformation and manipulation being promulgated by the neocons.

People who normally argue for the importance of the rights of the little guy and support labor are reciting falsehoods about overpaid teachers and the public sector. People who are behind civil rights, balanced budgets, and healthcare one day are advocating extreme liberatarian ideals bordering on anarchism the next. The news is full of unthinkable atrocities: laws that would make a miscarriage manslaughter, strike down hard-earned basic rights for women or minorities or labor, and loony-bin politicians (not just the really obviously wacked-out ones like Palin or Huckabee, but a lot of more insidious ones) spewing the most inanely ignorant things -- and then people who are first in line to criticize them, unknowingly repeating the lies they originated, days later. All while the most telling results about the results of the decades-long campaign by the rich to return us to a time when their tax rates were absurdly low and the gap between rich and poor was at unthinkable levels. What could be more disheartening than seeing the same people who, just two weeks earlier, were calling out Sarah Palin for her latest head-up-ass statement, now roundly condemning fat-cat teachers, and remaining stubborly oblivious to the actual numbers?

Under the best of circumstances, I find these subjects mildly stressful, even slightly sickening. If I really stop to think of how thoroughly hoodwinked we are, how hard our country seems to be working at following in the footsteps of every once-mighty, now-fallen power in history, and what easily-disproven absurdities are getting parroted around, it's really painful.

But the worst of all is trying to argue with people about any of it. There is no correlation, or a negative correlation, between people who understand rhetoric, and people who want to join these arguments. The more ignorant, the more deceivable, the more unwilling to look into the facts, the more likely someone is to pontificate. One particularly damning lie: because you can lie with statistics, ergo, all statistics are lies. Because you can lie with numbers and distort facts, therefore, facts should be dismissed. Because you can reach different opinions, all opinions are equally valid, even those in contradiction of simple fact. This particular folly is like deciding that if you want to be the best baseball player in history, just sneak out onto the diamond in the middle of the night and run around the bases three thousand times. It's the same thing Hank Aaron did, and he took years and years, and didn't even get that many!

Ultimately I find the whole experience to be physically and emotionally stressful. I find myself forced to avoid participating. I just don't get involved in the conversations. When they happen in chat rooms, I just clear the screen. When they happen in Facebook, I resist the temptation to post links to the actual numbers that refute the underlying assumptions, or the Snopes articles which debunk whatever absurd nonsense is going around, because then I'll keep having the frothing folly fill up my notifications bar. It just ends up making me miserable. Sometimes I even get a hollow feeling in my chest, when I've succumbed to the temptation to join in, and then see someone's responded to something.

It's not just me. But a lot of people haven't realized that it's making them miserable, too. They have that ache to correct the lies and mistakes, based on the idea that not responding means you're tacitly agreeing, allowing the record to remain, and so they get sucked in. It's a hard one to resist. But ultimately, joining in really isn't going to change anything other than make you miserable too. When one side has convinced 150 million people to vote for cutting their own rights and undermining their own economies, and to do it with idealistic fervor, a few posts on a forum aren't going to dent that.

Things to do in Denver

2011-03-11T11:00:00.001-05:00

...but not when you're dead.

At the end of April, Siobhan's going to a conference in Denver, and as we did last year in San Diego and in January in New York, we're both going, plus we're staying a few days after the conference. We just finally got approval to book the travel this week, so the trip, which has been on the back burner for a couple of months, is now officially on the schedule.

So we're trying to decide what we want to do while we're there. The city has the usual assortment of museums, theaters, historical sites, and parks. The science museum doesn't look like a good prospect, but we'll probably tour the U.S. Mint, the Firefighter's Museum, and maybe the zoo, botanical gardens, and aquarium. There's also an improv theater we might go to.

If you know Siobhan, you can imagine that she has a list of restaurants longer than the number of days there, and detailed analyses of the pros and cons of each, but I won't try to go into that. When we travel, I tend to take the food as if it were divine providence. Every time it's time for a meal, there's a place she's picked, and either I'll like it or I won't, but there's no point in worrying about it in advance. As long as we don't go to Casa Bonita.

We also intend to get outside the city. At very least, we'll do a day trip up into the mountains, perhaps heading towards Breckenridge, but we haven't picked any specific spots to go to. We might also head down towards Colorado Springs and Pueblo, and visit the Garden of the Gods, if we find other things in the area that seem interesting enough to make the day trip worth it. This is where our plans are fuzziest.

I'll have some time to spend while she's in the conference, but I don't know how much I'll try to get out and do. There probably aren't many attractions that would interest me and not her. One thing I might do is use the bike rental system; it's a very nice system where you can pick up a bike at any of dozens of automated stops, and drop it off at any other, but the rates are better suited to using them to get from place to place, than for touring. Lots of short trips can be done all day for $6, but one longer trip shoots the price up quite a bit. So it'd be more useful as a way to get specific places than just to ride around the parks, and since I don't likely have specific places to get to, it might not be that useful.

Making progress feels good

2011-03-10T11:00:00.003-05:00

I think it was last summer when I first started spending time on a new big project at work in earnest. We have a long-term strategy to eliminate an ancient, legacy system piece by piece, and as we go, replace it not just with state-of-the-art systems, and the associated better business processes, but also with systems that are maintained and programmed by someone else. This is because our staffing cuts and the changing IT industry make it impossible for an organization like ours to keep working with in-house software.

(Incidentally, this is stupid. The amount of money we'll pay out in annual software support fees will easily exceed the entire salary and benefits of the positions we'll have eliminated, and then some. But just like the centralization/decentralization pendulum, the insourcing/outsourcing one seems determined to swing through the sensible balance point only briefly before charging on to the misinformed extremes.)

I started by doing research, talking to vendors, having a number come to demos, and coming up with a plan. The next step would be to write an RFP, which is essentially a lengthy legal document, mostly built from boilerplate verbiage but with a few dozen pages of my own text. The RFP has to be vetted by a large number of people to make sure it serves its purposes: to help vendors determine if they could do the work for us, to help us determine which vendor proposals are good, to become the backbone of the statement of work that will form the resulting contract, and to protect everyone involved from unanticipated (and anticipated) legal problems. But underneath the tons of legalistic parts, there is, at the heart, a statement -- hopefully complete and well-informed -- of what work you want done.

However, there were a large number of other things that were more urgent, because we are still short-staffed, with more to do than ever before and fewer people to do it, plus I have had a lot of staff outages for various reasons during the last few months. I've also had to spend a disproportionate amount of time on administrative issues, about which I cannot freely speak. And there was the holiday season, which is always a strain on any retail operation. Thus, I never got to do that writing. I did go to New York City for a few days to attend the National Retail Federation trade show, as part of my research and preparation, but otherwise, what little time I could spend on this got eaten up by handling the frequent "just touching bases" calls from eager vendors.

In the last few weeks, I've had a domino effect of good progress which has been really encouraging. A few times, notably this week, some of the ugly things that had been getting better have backslid, but notwithstanding that, I've been able to accomplish some things that feel very good -- though at the same time, the fact that I didn't get to do them six months ago is kind of agonizingly, embarassingly awful. Notably, having finally put the new help desk into production, gotten my new cubicle wall systems designed and ordered, and knocked out a few other projects, I finally got to start writing the RFP. And in less than a week, I have the second draft beginning the rounds of reviews. (It'll probably be minimum a month before it gets issued, but at least it's off my desk.)

Of course all the days spent talking to people, reading up, seeing demos, visiting vendors, etc. contributed. But when I finally was able to start writing, it took only a couple of days. So how sad is it that it took me six months to find a couple of days I could just write, without being interrupted, without something more important to intrude? I sometimes think I should work out a deal with my boss where I tell people I'm taking a vacation, but I really just go home and work on things like this, and that way I can get a lot done before anyone catches on.

It's also disheartening to think about how projects like this can't get done due to the overwhelming crush of things that we have to do, and too few people to do them, just to keep the place working day to day. That's because completing projects like this is what will ultimately fix the problem of having too huge a pile of things to do day to day. We spend 99% of our time keeping the old systems and business processes working that are wearing us out and demanding too much for the resources we have available. So we can only spare 1% for the long-term investments that will eventually get us out of this hole.

As much as the idea that it took this long to do this much is sad, I am overall feeling pretty good about making this progress, and feeling like things are moving in a forward direction again. Six months of holding pattern, two weeks of progress. Sure, it's heart-rending that that's the proportion, but when you're in those two weeks, it feels great. Got to savor it while it lasts.

KPPKPPPKKPKPPKPKPPPPK

2011-03-09T11:00:00.002-05:00

The idea of practicing steganography in images has fascinated me since I first heard about it. The idea is that, if you don't know that there's supposed to be some hidden message encoded in something, you could look at it and never suspect; but it's right there, right in front of you. It doesn't even have to be enciphered.

One simple but powerful way to do this is to have two successive frames of video that appear to depict the same image, but there's actually very subtle differences in the color values, too subtle for the human eye to readily detect. However, compare the numerical values of all the pixel color values. Whereever the one in the second image is higher than its partner in the second image, write a 1. Wherever the second is lower, write a 0. Where they're the same, don't write anything. You can hide thousands of bits in a pair of tiny images with no way a human eye could even realize anything was there to find.

Listening to Siobhan talk about how this or that knitting pattern is "knit 1, purl 2, then knit all", it occurred to me that one could probably use a scarf as a form of steganography. Simply encode a message in binary, then start your knitting, doing a knit every time you see a 1 and a purl every time you see a 0. Siobhan assures me that the result would be fairly structurally sound (though if not, you could easily reserve a few stitches and rows at the edges for non-signal structural stitches) and wouldn't look like anything particular -- just a randomly-speckled scarf surface. With 30 stitches per row and several hundred rows, you can store a page or two of information just using 7-bit ASCII; if you use a Huffman encoding with a predetermined dictionary you could easily double that, or even more, if your dictionary didn't just encode letters but also common words or phrases.

Of course knitting is pretty slow, so it's hard to think of applications that wouldn't be impractical, or at least cinematic. I can easily imagine this coming up on the TV show Chuck. Imagine Morgan walking in on Sarah knitting, and being surprised that a kick-ass spy knits, only to find that she's really encoding a message that will be delivered to some underground rebel group in a police state through a dead drop -- it'll simply be put up for sale in one of the street markets. Imagine Doctor Who (the Tom Baker iteration) revealing that he keeps secret plans on that huge scarf of his, so that even if is captured by the Master, the secret won't fall into the wrong hands. Silly, but quite apropos to those shows.

Realistically, though, would there ever be a situation where something like this could be useful? Probably not. There are simpler but equally effective ways that don't require so much time or equipment. Siobhan suggested someone spying on a conversation and recording key facts without arousing suspicion by simply appearing to be knitting, but why not just have a recorder in your pocket? Maybe the best possibility would be using it to store some important information in such a way that, even if someone searches you or your apartment, they won't recognize or confiscate it.

The idea is ultimately too goofy for real life, but compelling enough to use as a plot device in an adventure or story. (Then again, a lot of goofy-seeming spy techniques have been used somewhere in the real world. I wonder if this is one of them.)

Learning fake real guitar

2011-03-08T11:00:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago I tried out the You Rock guitar in Pro mode on Rock Band 3, but I only had an hour or so, just to prove it worked and get a taste. I did one quick lesson and then got right into playing, and didn't do that well.

A few days ago I decided to give it another try, having a few hours to really do lessons. However, try as I might, I couldn't get the guitar into the Rock Band pro mode. In fact, the control panel was totally non-functional. I could change sounds with the plus and minus buttons, and play as a real guitar, but nothing else. I tried everything I could think of but eventually had to submit a trouble ticket. To my surprise, they were able to solve the problem easily: I just had to unclick and reclick the neck. I've had to do this a few times since (seems like something about the MIDI connection and Rock Band Pro mode makes the neck electronics get confused periodically -- hopefully they'll fix this in a future firmware update) but never in the middle of a song.

I went through all the basic lessons. This is definitely a lot more of a learning curve than anything, even drums, has been before in Rock Band. And I already know I've barely started, because I tried playing a song on Medium and there were whole sets of symbols and techniques I haven't even seen yet. Even though I have learned some guitar before (admittely 25 years ago), I had more trouble finding the right string to finger and pluck than I had finding the right fret. But over the course of about an hour, I was able to get through the basic lessons and then play a few songs on Easy mode successfully.

In actually playing songs, the one thing that I find hardest about the Rock Band interface is that, if you're holding your hand at frets 1 to 5, and there's a change coming that needs you to be playing frets 7 to 11, the only warning is when that first 7 comes down at you. This is actually harder than playing normally because your eyes are on the screen, so you can't really glance over at the neck to position your fingers. What would be nice is if, scrolling down the screen, there was a little advance warning when you needed to change your fingering position. This would help make up for the disadvantage of having to look at the screen instead of the guitar. (In fact, that question of where your eyes are is a lot of why I had trouble finding the right string, too. Maybe I need to sit at a right angle to the TV so the neck of the guitar is in the same field of vision as the screen.)

Drums still remain my favorite instrument for Rock Band, and I'm still idly thinking of getting a MIDI drum set (so I can have better response and reliability, particularly with the kick drum, and since my drum kit is starting to have some trouble with the snare drum cover bubbling a little bit). I just wish I had more time so I could do all of it.

Teachers

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

The question of how to make our educational system better, and how good or bad it is, is very complex. There are many factors it's way too easy to ignore or trivialize, like what teachers have to do to balance the needs of many students, how funding is handled, which subjects need attention, the pros and cons of standardized testing, the changes in what skills people need and what life they can expect after leaving school, etc. It's the kind of subject that you can't really speak informedly about unless you spend a lot more time on it than most people who pontificate it even dream of doing. Instead people seize on one aspect, like how American students are uncompetitive in the world market and this is helping to weaken our economy, or how much education costs have risen, and build the entire armchair-quarterbacking argument based on it.

Having worked in education for a few years, I feel I know just barely enough to know for certain that I don't really know much of anything. When people cite the "obvious" arguments on one side or the other of any given point, I can at least suggest what the other side of the coin is, but actually weighing both sides is too much for almost all of us.

But there's one thing that really stands out for me, from my experience in the education sector, and that is the passion of teachers.

If you think about the life of a teacher, it seems really obvious that they ought to be bitter, resentful, unmotivated, and cranky. They get paid very little and invariably are expected to take their work home with them. They get almost no appreciation; their relationship with parents and students is generally either neutral or hostile, and society as a whole doesn't value them or what they do. They have to deal with an incredible range of issues, far larger than the actual subject matter that they're supposed to know. They not only have to deal with kids of varying talents and interest levels and attitudes, they have to deal with them all at once, and without ever showing favor to anyone. They have to pour on even more hours going to recertification and retraining, and many of them put in even more time on extracurricular activities, which spill into evenings and weekends as a matter of course. Heck, many of them go to work every day afraid someone's going to be carrying a knife or gun. And does the public ever adulate them, or even appreciate them? Generally, they're treated like dirt.

I'm sure there are teachers out there who are cynical, jaded, and bored, and are just doing the minimum to cash their paychecks and go home, and who can blame them. But I have never met any of those or even heard of them second-hand. Without exception, every single teacher, administrator, or staff involved in the educational system who had a hand in the mission of teaching kids, was startlingly enthusiastic, driven, positively excited about it. No amount of being dumped on, taken advantage of, or unappreciated ever seemed to dent that. They would spend hours talking about how they could do a better job, and even when they were dispirited by another round of budget cuts or another parent chewing them out for not doing the parent's job for them, they still always had their passion firmly showing for what they were there to do.

I suppose when you mistreat a profession as badly as we mistreat teachers, there's a selection process at work; anyone who wasn't positively obsessively excited about the work would leave in short order. But that doesn't diminish how amazing it is that teachers can still be so upbeat about what they do. It's a miracle we have as many of them as we do.

Is this a turning point?

2011-03-06T11:00:00.000-05:00

Any moment in history, at least in modern history, is full of momentous things. Can you name a year that didn't have something hugely important happen in it, in the last two decades? And I suspect the same would be true if you went back through the last few centuries; but when we look back on the 20th or the 19th century in hindsight, there are the things that people felt were important (and that were important) in each year, but there were also years when a bunch of those things came together into something even bigger, a perfect storm that that changed the world.

The most obvious examples are the world wars. Doesn't virtually every history book start a new chapter somewhere around 1912 or 1913, with its first few pages talking about a series of events that, at the time they were happening, some people recognized as a turning point in history, but others might well have thought were just more of the same kind of stuff that always happens? To put it another way, the people who read in the news about the Sherman Anti-Trust Act might well have realized it would be in history books, but in the months before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, did people reading the news realize that not only would the things happening there be in the history books, but also be on the first page of a new chapter in the history books?

As I look at the news now, I get the feeling that maybe we're in one of those, but it's too soon to be sure. All the revolutions going on in Africa and other places certainly seem like a trend; doesn't it remind you of the chapter in your history book about the late 18th century, the age of revolutions in long-established powers? The culture war in the United States between the rich and poor certainly feels like it's hitting a boiling point, with the forces of the rich suddenly being smug about doing things that seem inconceivable, unabashedly, and publicly (though there are also signs of progress on other fronts). The struggles between oppressor and oppressed characterize a dozen different stories every day. No one wants to use the tired phrase "energy crisis" since we wore that one out in the 1970s, but what's happening to oil prices and how that is poised to cripple economic recovery worldwide in all sectors certainly seems to be setting the stage for a major shift in power.

But I have to caution myself. Had I asked this question in September of 2001, wouldn't we all have concluded that a new chapter was beginning? Certainly what happened then caused many other things, which caused many other things. Wasn't 9/11 a step on the way to the ascendancy of the oppressor in the United States, a turning point in international relations, and sowing the seeds of the economic collapse, amongst other things? And of course, if you go back a bit, many things, like Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, the Reagan administration's actions in the Middle East, and a dozen other things, were setting the stage for 9/11. It's like a continuous tapestry of events influencing one another -- it's like the middle of a chapter. With not even a decade between, we can already see that 9/11 wasn't so much a turning point, just one moment in a string of events before and after. In the history books written a century from now, it won't be the first page of a chapter; it'll be in the middle of a chapter, an important moment in that chapter, but nevertheless, in the middle. Yes, the world changed, and maybe a lot more than on an average Tuesday, but I don't think it turns out it was one of the top 20 most world-changing moments in the last millennium.

If the present is the beginning of a new chapter, I don't think I'm going to like being in the chapter that's about to begin. When I think about the future, most of the time, I end up hoping that the stuff that seems likely to come will just hold off long enough for me to finish out my life. Selfish, I know, and the kind of selfishness that is not available to people with kids, but it's a survival mechanism. I'm doing my part, but when you watch things like what's going on in Wisconsin, or in Libya, or some of the so ridiculous you have to double-check if you're watching real news or parody news stories out there, it's impossible not to conclude that "my part" isn't going to cut it.

The full empty highways

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

Imagine if you brought an alien here, or someone from the past, or any other outsider. And then showed them rush hour traffic on the highways. Imagine trying to defend the way we do things.

Yes, all of these vehicles can carry from four to eight times as much as we're asking them to carry. Yes, we're using one to two tonnes of materials per vehicle, yet almost all of them carry a single person and maybe a briefcase. Yes, we're polluting the air we breathe and the water we drink to do it, and paving so much of the world that we have environmental problems caused by just the heat reflection on the asphalt, to say nothing of the actual mining and paving. Yes, we pour almost half of our total energy output and about the same amount of our industry on making the vehicles and the infrastructure that gives them fuel and repairs and places to be. Yes, many of us spend frustrating hours every day stuck in traffic that can't move because the roads are so full of mostly-empty cars. Yes, the money we spend on this fuels racism, terrorism, and atrocities, many of them committed against us. Yes, our sons are dying in a faraway land to secure rights to keep this going a few more years.

No, of course I can't share a car or take a bus. What if I need to run an errand after work? Really, don't you know what's important?

The industry of Hollywood

2011-03-04T11:00:00.000-05:00

Last night I watched Inception on Blu-ray, and when it was done, watched all the little "featurettes" about how they achieved the effects, particularly those involving Arthur's action sequences in the hotel when gravity was misbehaving. (Those are just as breathtakingly amazing as ever.) The trick to how they did them is simpler than I thought: two identical sets, one built horizontally on rolling gimbals, one built vertically. (I couldn't figure out how they could combine wire-work with the rotating set approach, but two sets makes it all make sense.)

The "how they did it" footage actually shows you the tremendous amount of construction required. In essence, they built an entire hundred-foot-long hotel corridor along with an adjoining room, twice. The first time, on an airplane-sized set of rotating hoops laced with struts and mounted on spinning wheels with a complex set of machinery to ensure it all rotated perfectly. The second time, hanging down the side of a tall support tower. Someone went to great effort to ensure that both of them matched perfectly, down to every detail of the carpeting and wallpaper and lighting. Then they had to add the filming lighting and camera mounting and movement to each, to say nothing of the incredible fight choreography for the action sequences that happened in them.

The other featurettes describe a dozen other similar feats of engineering. The mountain fortress was built in full in Calgary (though out of plywood, not concrete), and then blown up. A 45' tall model of it, and the mountain it was on, was also built in a parking lot, and blown up... twice. An entire locomotive was built on the back of a modified tractor-trailer and then driven down an L.A. street smashing cars. A hotel bar was built on a tilting platform. A set of Penrose stairs was built in a vacant office building, along with special rigs for the camera movement. A Japanese castle was built, then destroyed, then flooded by dozens of air cannons mounted to water tanks. And so on.

And that's just a few scenes from one movie. If you think of all the stuff that Hollywood builds and then tears down or blows up, it's mind-boggling to consider the amount of industry involved. We are astonished at the idea of building the Great Pyramids, but part of that is the technology available. We are also impressed by the skyscrapers and vast bridges and other great works of civil engineering.

Admittedly, what Hollywood builds isn't built to the same standards of durability -- though in many cases, the engineering challenges they face, though very different, are just as impressive. (Making a hotel corridor they can rotate at varying speeds is certainly comparably challenging to making one that is efficient at managing heating and cooling). But when you add up all the challenges involved in one big blockbuster, let alone the dozens Hollywood cranks out in a year, they're clearly exerting an amount of effort and talent that is amazing.

I am a big fan of the movies and thus very glad they do what they do. But I also feel a little bad about how we invest such an incredible amount of energy in structures that will be torn down a month later, while elsewhere, schools, hospitals, shelters, and homes suffer neglect. I wonder, would it be possible for Hollywood to come up with a way to build new buildings and then leave them behind to be put to some use?

And I know the answer is, doing that would cost not just a little more, but tons more, because of all the difficulties of building to code, building things to last, building them on location, and building them to suit two purposes, not just one. So, no, they couldn't really do that. Maybe once in a very rare while they could if the movie's needs happen to align well with something that someone needs in a spot that's convenient for filming, but it would be very rare.

I wish I could see a way that somehow, all that tremendous amount of industry could be tapped into and given a second purpose. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be making movies, or that we shouldn't be building sets we're going to blow up or tear down. But wouldn't it be nice if some more good could come of it?

Catching up with social media

2011-03-03T11:00:00.001-05:00

I remember when we were all moving from Yahoo to AltaVista as a search engine and using it to look up people we used to know, hoping to get caught up with them. It was (and still is) impossible to find the Bill Smiths in your past that way, but some people had nicely unique names. And back then, only a handful of us were online; I was the only person with my first and last name, even as late as the first few years of Google, but nowadays, my relatives take up most of the first page of results, and you need to include my middle initial to find just me. But even if you found someone you knew years ago, what then?

Used to be, you had to try to write an email summarizing what had happened in your life between then and now, and in addition to being a big chore to write and probably not terribly fun to read, it was hard to decide how much detail to go into. You don't want to bore them, but you don't want to make them feel like they aren't important enough to be worth telling your story to. You don't want to feel like one of those old Christmas letters that everyone hates, but you want to accurately reflect the nature of the relationship, whether that's former best friends or just casual acquaintances. All while being entertaining.

Fortunately, the endeavor of finding someone was hard enough that you probably wouldn't try to go through this whole "catching up" process very often anyway. But nowadays, finding people is not nearly as hard as it was. Google is sure better at it than AltaVista ever was, but even Google can't find Bill Smith. However, Facebook probably can, if Bill has chosen to be on it, and by now most people have. Which could mean you have to write more versions of that email, and have some of them even harder to pin down the right level of detail, since you'll be finding friends you know less well or haven't known for longer.

Fortunately, those same social media provide an alternative. If you have updated your profile, and you are fairly active at writing status updates and posting links and even notes and blog posts, then once you friend someone, your wall can be a way for them to catch up on your life. It has a few advantages: they can read as much as they want and skim or skip what they don't, so get a more or less superficial view at their own preference; you don't have to go to extra effort to make it happen; you don't have to try to figure out how much detail one person or another would like to get; and it happens by a more organic, unplanned process. Of course it has disadvantages too: they can have a superficial view of you but they probably can't get a very deep one unless they actively participate by asking questions or drilling through links and reading back posts; things that were important, or that might interest them, might never come up in the scattershot randomness of whatever happens to get mentioned in your posts on any given day; and people could easily conclude you don't care enough to send something personal (a statement which means less than it seems to mean, but which is still going to be cited as revealed truth for generations to come, I'm sure).

All in all, it might mean a lot of people will get only a superficial view of you, but that superficial view is at least the seed by which a deeper view can be made available. Many won't take it up, and that's their choice. It's not a bad thing if one person chooses to read my blog posts and another doesn't; it doesn't mean I'm caring too little about reaching out to them, or they're caring too little about reaching out to me. The fact is, while people may bemoan the intangible, evanescent nature of the "connections" the Internet brings, in most cases, the pre-Internet alternative was no connection at all. It's easy to make fun of how a Facebook-friend isn't the same as a "real friend" like we had them back when I was young and had to walk to school uphill in the snow. But the fact is, for most people, Facebook-friend isn't instead of that other kind of friend, it's in addition to.

Means of communication

2011-03-02T11:00:00.000-05:00

Which is the more efficient means of communication: face-to-face discussion, or email?

Obviously the only right answer is "it depends on what you're trying to communicate", but once we get past that, the discussion always focuses on a few key points. The first is the value of non-verbal communication, all the things in tone of voice and expressions. The second is the interactivity -- you can get a response back to something immediately, respond to it immediately, etc.

Those are important things. They matter. But everyone tends to stop there, and they're barely the tip of the iceberg. One could have a very interesting discussion about comparing the merits of those factors to the big merits of the asynchronous format, merits which everyone seems to dismiss, even though they're also big and important.

Like the ability to compose your thoughts, reorder them, check them over, and make sure they make sense, before you click Send. All those big advantages mentioned earlier can, I think, be weighed up against that one, and I think you'd have to conclude that it's a fair fight, one that could tip either way depending on the specifics of the situation and the people.

Yet no one ever really considers that one; it barely merits a mention, and usually not even that. Because we had face-to-face before we had email, and it's easy to notice what we lose, and harder to realize the value of what we gained. But that chance to put your thoughts in order is huge. Admittedly, more so for people who have fair or good writing skills than for those who aren't good at it; but even those who aren't good at it can still benefit a great deal from this if they tried.

But all this is so much pretty noise. When it comes down to it, all the reasons anyone cites are of trivial consequence, compared to the one, and only one, reason why meetings are more productive than emails. Every other factor tends to cancel out with opposed factors, or vary too much depending on situations. Time and again, meetings are more efficient for one reason no one wants to admit or mention.

When you get someone to a meeting, they actually listen. They pay attention to what you're saying, and more importantly, to what they're saying in return. They aren't doing ten other things. They aren't skimming.

Okay, I know what you're thinking. I don't always pay attention in meetings! Nor do the people I meet with. Well, that's true, but to a much smaller extent than you might realize. And in very small meetings, like two or three people talking face to face, it's almost nil. The important point is to compare it to emails. The problem with emails is not anything about the emails; it's that people skim them, and don't take them seriously, don't invest any time or effort in reading or writing them.

It's really about time investment. If people invested half the amount of time a meeting would take in just reading, really reading, the email, and then really thinking about their response, the same work would get done. And I don't mean the word "half" as an exaggeration for effect. When you think about the amount of overhead involved in trying to schedule meetings, trying to free up a large continuous block of time, matching schedules, travel, and the unproductive chatter that meetings always carry along with the actual talking about the thing the meeting is about,the time factor can really be that big.

But people will invest a tenth as much time in the emails as they would in a face-to-face, and then they complain that email doesn't work as well. It's self-fulfilling. Of course you're not going to put a lot of time and effort into it if it doesn't work... but of course it won't work if you won't put any time and effort into it.

Now, I'm expecting to be argued against, and I would absolutely welcome a real discussion about it, even if I can be proven wrong. But I think most people's reaction will be dismissive -- they won't address the actual point. And they can't, because hardly anyone has actually put this to the test. Everyone remembers the emails that didn't work, but how many people have enough experience with the few people who actually take them seriously enough to prove the point? The conclusion is invariably assumed and then used to justify itself.

But next time someone insists on printing out the email and coming over to ask you what the email said, just imagine how much of their time, not to mention yours, would have been saved if they had just read it. Multiply that over the three or four email exchanges it would have taken to settle something that ends up requiring a 45-minute meeting (plus 30 minutes of setting up the meeting), and see how the math works.

If you assume the quality of the emails will be as bad as the ones you currently get (and probably send), you'll come to the same conclusion everyone else does. But if you assume the quality of the emails is what you could have done if you brought as much attention and focus as the meeting, by its nature, drew out of you, I think you might come to a different conclusion. Enough, at least, to say it's not a foregone conclusion; enough where the place we started, that it could go either way depending on the kind of communication and the kind of people. Enough, perhaps, that we could finally have the discussion.

Cobol Industries

2011-03-01T10:00:00.003-05:00

Cracked's article about dangling plot threads in famous movies has a few really good ones -- like how all the events of The Wizard of Oz come from the threat against Toto which never gets addressed or resolved. But their lead one, about Inception, is bogus. (Warning: spoilers for Inception follow.)

The problem: early in the movie, Cobb is being chased by hit-men sent by an angry Cobol Industries. Then the story gets focused on the actual inception, and then it never comes back to the Cobol threat. Cobb goes home to his family as if Cobol's hit-men, who could find him in Mombasa, couldn't find him at his family home in the USA.

I can see three reasons why this is bogus:

We are already ready to accept that Sato is so powerful he can, with one call, not only end a manhunt on Cobb in the entire United States, but have this fact take effect immediately at all the various law enforcements and customs agencies, so that Cobb can just walk off the plane and it's like nothing ever happened. But we don't imagine he can deal with the Cobol threat, too? Heck, earlier in the movie he bought an entire airline just to book the first class cabin and place a trusted flight attendant. Because it "seemed neater." I have no problem assuming Sato can deal with Cobol. Sure, Cobol's a rival, but that doesn't mean he can't lean on them.
Okay, I know the ending is intentionally ambiguous, and I know some people want to believe that there was a happy ending. But let's face facts. First, what are the odds that Sato really survived, having already been dead once? I don't think a five-minutes-later heart-shock reverses the "dead inside a deeply sedated dream" thing. Second, in the first level of the dream, they never got Cobb out of the van, so there's every reason to believe he drowned in that level of the dream, which again means he didn't make it. Third, I think it goes a bit beyond creative license to have the children, James and Phillipa, be in the same location, in the same approximate positions, at apparently the same age, and in the same clothes, when Cobb gets home, as in that moment he kept reliving in his dreams. There's no way to make that final scene really make sense other than it being Cobb's dying dream. Sorry, but that's just how it is.
And if you don't like those reasons... well, it can't be hard for someone to crash the servers at Cobol Industries. Just feed them some invalid EBCDIC.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

2011-02-28T10:00:00.005-05:00

Reviews of this movie were highly mixed, and given that so much of the video game culture it riffs on is stuff with which I am not very familiar, I wasn't sure if I'd like it. I was afraid I might feel on the outside of a lot of inside jokes. And I bet that there were some -- just reading the trivia on IMDb suggested a couple of allusions I missed. And I was afraid the stylistic elements would just make me feel old. Plus there's the comic books (and I'm sure everyone who read them groaned about how wrong the movie is -- and is currently groaning at me for calling them "comic books").

There were a few bits that felt clunky or off, but by and large, I found it delightful and funny. The movie pulls no punches at all at establishing its goofy style, and I suppose for some it could be off-putting. It might even have been for me if it had caught me in a different mood. But as long as you feel well-disposed to just going with it, it absolutely works.

After it was done, thinking back on it, I realized that it's analogous to a musical. In a musical, the story is going along and suddenly the characters break into song, or dance, or other production numbers; and no one, generally, seems to notice this; it's just part of how the world works. In this movie, instead of breaking into song, the story suddenly breaks into surreal video-game-inspired sequences, often (but not exclusively) fights. And everyone just goes with it; it's just the kind of thing that happens.

There's a lot more in the story than I expected from the trailers. There are characters wending their way through and I'm not really sure until the end where they're going to end up going. There are times I felt like I needed to make a chart to keep track of all the relationships between the various characters in a single scene (all sitting in one room staring at one another). But not in a bad way; I thought the film might be tidily linear given the premise (seven evil exes, in a sequence like a video game building to a Big Boss), but it's actually quite twisty and has a lot more room for characters to develop and go into directions that aren't immediately predictable.

And it ranges from funny to hilarious, as well as managing at times to be touching. Not that it's deep and involves serious acting and themes; it's mostly a light sugary confection. But it's not as much as you'd expect.

I was also surprised at seeing Michael Cera doing so many action sequences. Admittedly they were highly artificial in their choreography, but even so, they were quite physical, and I didn't know he did that sort of thing. I was a little disappointed that at no point did Kim (the disaffected red-headed drummer) get to even punch anyone. I think that would have been great. But most of the characters that should have gotten a moment like that, did get one.

All in all it was just a load of fun and wasn't at all disappointing. Maybe there were a few bits I didn't get but I never felt like I wasn't getting enough of it to be amused. I recommend the movie to anyone who feels like running with it. Don't question the surreal elements, just let them sweep you along.

Should all RPGs have character advancement?

2011-02-27T10:00:00.001-05:00

We all remember how fun it was to "go up a level" but sometimes it feels like every roleplaying game since (except, of course, those oriented towards one-shots and short adventures) has to have a character advancement scheme even when it doesn't make sense.

Has James Bond ever gone up a level? Sure, you can point to ways that he's gained something along the way, but usually, it's more like he's bought off weaknesses or gained advantages, like favors he is owed, or rank and prestige. Have his skills really changed notably? (Disregard how they've evolved with the duration of the time they've been making books and movies -- yes, the original Bond didn't know how to hack computers and the latest incarnations do, but that's changing times, not Bond gaining levels.)

Has Jack Bauer ever gone up a level? If anything, he seems a little more worn out each "day". And since I'm exploring the "J.B."s, how about Jason Bourne? He's bought off weaknesses, but is he a better fighter or spy than he used to be, other than that?

Even outside the modern suspense/action genres, there's not nearly as much of this as you'd think. There's a lot of trading off advantages and disadvantages, but generally, the skills a character starts with are the ones they always have. Does Indiana Jones get gradually better at two-fisted action?

Counterexamples can certainly be pointed out. Consider the Lord of the Rings series -- who in that doesn't go up a level by the end! Well, I'll tell you. More than you'd think. Legolas and Gimli don't really get better at anything by the end, apart from buying off their prejudice weaknesses, for instance. They get more prone to bragging (particularly in the movies) but that's about it.

What about Aragorn? At the start he's a reclusive ranger with a self confidence problem; at the end, he has reunited the tribes of men under his rule. But did he really gain any skills? He certainly bought off that self confidence issue weakness, but even at the start, he had all the swordsman skill, the tracking skill, the lore skill, etc. that he has at the end. His only apparent area of improvement is leadership, but it's arguable that this all amounts to buying off that weakness, letting him use the leadership skill he already had. After all, though we never see it in the books, really, he was a leader amongst the Rangers even before the books start.

Gandalf, surely, you protest. Well, sure, when he came back as Gandalf the White, he clearly went up a level. But I think this is a much bigger change than going up a level. It was a profound transformation. In RPG terms, Gandalf always made more sense as an NPC, but doubly so after he became Gandalf the White (in much the same way River Tam makes a lot more sense as an NPC).

Okay, what about the hobbits? Yes, I concede, they definitely gained levels. And this is where you're most likely to see the level-gaining phenomenon, over and over: when the character starts as a "zero-level", a non-adventurer, and becomes an adventurer during the course of the story. Over and over we see this in all adventure fiction. Usually, when a character starts as an everyman at the start of a story and ends up a respected adventurer, if there are sequels, they fall flat, and we like to forget about them. But usually, when they do work, the character who gained a level in the first story does not gain any more levels in subsequent stories.

Maybe the best counterexample I can think of is Ripley, but even there, she's mostly going through the same arc as Pippin. One can argue about when she makes the transition from zero-level everyman to first-level adventurer, but clearly by the end of the second movie, with her charging into danger with a BFG or working her mecha in "hand"-to-hand combat with a xenomorph, she's an adventurer. Does she really ever gain a level after that? (Perhaps she would have, if the subsequent movies had sucked less.)

I think roleplaying games, particularly those with a cinematic turn, should not be so hidebound on the ideas "you start as a fairly weak grunt" and "you gain levels from there". There's nothing wrong with those ideas, but there's nothing wrong with setting them aside in the many cases where they really don't work. If there must be an advancement system, perhaps it should focus more on things like gaining favors owed, contacts earned, and weaknesses overcome.

Jackie Brown

2011-02-26T10:00:00.001-05:00

My return to watching movies on my "ought to watch" list marks the last of the Tarantino movies. (I know there's also Kill Bill and Grindhouse and maybe others, but this is the last one on my list.)

The best thing the movie had going for it, to me, was suspense. Most of the movie is the playing out of one big scheme in which various people are playing each other, but for the entire movie, you really can't tell what everyone's game is. Every time you are fairly sure you can see what the plan is, it turns out that that doesn't quite add up, and maybe there's more; or something contradicts it. When you think they actually pulled something off, it turns out they don't take the money and run, but there's more to the plan. It kept me interested and eager to see the next scene, but in the end, it felt like it didn't add up to that much. The climax felt anticlimactic.

Another element of suspense was simply who's going to turn out to be important to the movie? Who's going to get killed off? In this, I had the advantage of not knowing who was on the posters; I also didn't recognize Bridget Fonda so I wasn't sure if her character would be minor. From the first appearances of some of the characters I was wondering who was getting killed off -- and I was wrong as often as I was right.

The story is in a lot of ways the most linear and straightforward of Tarantino's movies (at least the ones I saw). This shouldn't be taken as either praise or disparagement: it suits the story, since it doesn't need any other technique to build its suspense. There's enough just from never knowing quite what anyone else is actually planning.

In all, I have to say I didn't like it as much as Inglorious Basterds. However, I'm harder pressed to rank which ones I think are better-made movies. Though I wasn't that fond of it, I think Reservoir Dogs would probably have to win as the best-made of his movies I've seen, but it's a close thing; there are more than a few things in Reservoir Dogs that are a bit clumsy, and the movie on the whole is a bit uneven, but when it's being brilliant, it's being really brilliant. Jackie Brown is more consistent and there's very little in it that makes me think 'that could have been done better,' but it also fails to be as jolting or original, and in the end, it just doesn't rise up quite as far.

Jackie Brown also felt slow at times. When I stop and think about it, most of Tarantino's movies are kind of slow, at least if you count "how many things happen in the course of the movie" (with Inglorious Basterds a notable exception), but in Reservoir Dogs -- and even in Pulp Fiction, my least favorite -- it doesn't seem slow, it never feels like it's dragging. But there were a few times in Jackie Brown where a long quiet scene went past the point of "setting a mood" and into "hey, do we really need all this?" I don't mean he could be cutting them into frenetic Michael Bay flickerfests, but it's possible to go too far the other way.

I wouldn't say it was fun. "Fun" doesn't feel like what Tarantino is going for (though again Inglorious Basterds is often the exception). But it was definitely engaging. In all, I didn't mind it, but I probably won't feel I need to see it again.

Dirty Harry

2011-02-25T10:00:00.001-05:00

The failure of my Archos pretty much put on hold my program of watching movies that I felt I should see, because everyone assumed I would have, or because they'd become part of popular culture. That's all right, I was just about ready for a break anyway. I'll probably go back to it soon. However, even during the break, I did squeeze one movie in, Dirty Harry, just because it happened to get recorded on the DVR instead of downloaded, and Siobhan also wanted to watch it for the same reason.

This is a movie that's hard to gauge because it's hard to put myself into the time when it came out. How much of what seemed kind of obvious or predictable is only so because this movie helped shape our expectations of cop movies, helped define the genre? I don't really know. It seems like a lot of those things must be from even earlier, but I can't really say for sure, because I'm not that familiar with the cop genre.

I can say that I didn't find it that engaging. A lot of it felt scattered, particularly at the beginning, where it seemed like the story kept veering off into unrelated things that didn't end up adding much. Even later, the twists in the Scorpio case started to feel stacked on and disjointed. I can't easily put my finger on why; when I describe it to myself it sounds like lots of other good movies where the exigencies of the situation cause a series of twists and turns, with the two sides each having to deal with what the other one did. Consider the entire final reel of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, in which the ark changes hands over and over and over. If you stop to think about it, it starts to feel piled on, but the movie absolutely works. Doesn't a lot of the cat-and-mouse of Harry and Scorpio in the final reel have a similar, though not as extreme, tone? And yet it doesn't feel like anything more than too much, for no good reason, to me.

Admittedly, Harry pulls off the badass cop pretty well with his signature line. I've seen that line quoted (and misquoted) many times, but I had no idea that the scene I always see quoted is only one of two times the line comes up in the movie. It turns out a lot more powerful in the movie, where the first time is just setting up the second, than in the quote-out-of-context scene I always see (which is the first one). I suppose the reason I watched this turns out to be the opportunity to realize that. Now I better understand, and can better recognize, allusions and references.

But I can't really say that I enjoyed the movie. It was hard at times to keep focused on it. I wonder if I would have felt differently if I'd seen it at the time it came out.

Sharepoint

2011-02-24T10:00:00.000-05:00

Last week I took a class at Panurgy on Sharepoint Server, because we've started using it at work, and I've done a bit of development on it and found it interesting and enjoyable. Unfortunately, when I signed up for this class back in October, it would have been just what I needed, but then it got rescheduled, then cancelled, then rescheduled. By the time I got to it, the material it covered is all stuff I had already had to figure out on my own, the slow way, by trial and error. I learned a few things in the class, but mostly, I was breezing through it, and in a lot of cases teaching things to the other student (there was only one) and even to the teacher. I'm signing up for a full-week class next week that should cover a lot more of what I want (alongside a lot of things I probably can't use, at least not on the server at work, since I am not an actual administrator of that server).

The hardest point for learning Sharepoint for me is getting the answer to the question "What is Sharepoint? What does it do?" to crystallize. The answers to this question are usually mired in lots of very broad, very vague ideas, that must mean a lot to people who already know about this stuff, but not as much to me. For instance, Wikipedia's article about it starts (as of this writing), "Microsoft SharePoint is a family of software products developed by Microsoft for collaboration, file sharing and web publishing." For me, that's not very helpful, because when I first started with Sharepoint, it didn't tell me how it was different from, say, a server with FTP and Apache on it. At the other extreme, I would get mired in too much detail about specific things like workflows, document versioning, or the laundry list of functions you can add to a site (wiki, blog, forum, calendar, etc.). It felt like a big grab bag of everything, but with no particular purpose, and I kept thinking, "Why would I want to use it?" After all, if I wanted a wiki, or a blog, or a calendar, I have lots of easier ways to get those things.

The project that made me actually start using Sharepoint was a help desk system. We were pushed by an auditor's recommendation to setting up for my section a system that tracked the status of all the requests made of us, and since we had to do that, I wanted to make it useful for us too, by serving as a record we could turn to when trying to solve a problem to see what had already been done in the past. We've always had a big shortfall in our uniformity of documenting these things, and our ability to cover for one another. It turns out Sharepoint has a help desk system available right out of the box, and the statewide IT people have a Sharepoint server already up, so we just had to buy a few client licenses -- which we can use for any Sharepoint application, not just this one -- and we've already got a help desk, with trouble ticket tracking and history, a FAQ, and a knowledge base.

And it really is a pretty good help desk, but we found the need for a number of customizations. Fortunately, most of these were quite easy -- or would have been, if I'd been able to take this class a few months ago. Finding them was quite tricky with no help, since there was no documentation at all about the actual help desk template, and precious little about Sharepoint (and most of that bogged down in details of how to configure the server itself, or limited to how to use the predefined calendars and wikis and stuff). But once I learned the basics of navigation and how to make customizations, most of them were incredibly easy. Need to add a new field to a list? It's just a few clicks, and then no need to go back and edit reports or views or queries to accomodate it, that's already done for you. Making new lists is pretty much just as easy. Even customizing the layout of pages themselves is quite simple, though some of the things you add are a bit more complex.

I was able to get the site to a usable state and we've been using it within my section for more than a month, and as of this writing, we're just starting to let users get into it to enter and view their own requests. It's working pretty well so far, and we're starting to build up a knowledge base that is consolidating our scattered notes about how to do things better than we've ever managed before.

Even so I'm running into limits in my ability to make it do things that seem like they should be simple. For instance, every service request is associated with one or more devices. The idea is, we want to be able to see the history of past requests associated with a device, so when a new one comes up, we can tell what has been done in the past, or identify repeated problems. But it's proven surprisingly difficult to do this efficiently. I could easily make a view to do it, but then I'd need hundreds of views, one for each device (and user, and agency). We can do a search on the text, but it occurs in too many places. I think this is probably solvable and I have some ideas, after the class, for ways to solve it, but this is where I'm reaching the limits of my knowledge.

And it'll be far more so when we start talking about using Sharepoint for other projects. And it would be even more so yet if I ever wanted to use Sharepoint in any other capacity than at my present job (for instance, one job I applied for last year, I didn't get, perhaps in part due to a shortage of Sharepoint knowledge). Sharepoint seems like one possible place where I can update my tech skills because I can actually put what I learn to use, and that is the only way I am able to retain it. So I'm excited at the prospect of taking that next class and finally getting to really learn more.

My ambitions as an RPG creator

2011-02-23T10:00:00.000-05:00

In my last post I alluded a bit to the idea of using my reincarnation time travel campaign idea, combined with the improved version of RTC I've been batting around in my head, as a publication that might finally earn some notice. What do I mean by notice?

I don't imagine that anything I ever write could ever make a big splash on the world or get much recognition. I don't even mean that I won't ever be the next Gary Gygax, or Steve Jackson, or even the next Steffan O'Sullivan. Nothing I produce aspires to that kind of success even remotely. The only reason I'm even considering that I might someday sell something I wrote is that, paradoxically, things that people sell tend to get a wider audience than things that are given away free.

What I really want is for something I produce to get a little bit of response from the world. I don't expect a lot. It would be nice if someone in the indie game scene had heard of one of my games, and maybe even said something nice about it. It would be nice if I could run a game at a convention and have people show up. It would be nice if, when I posted questions or ideas about my games, or offered my own thoughts on other people's games, I wasn't pretty much always ignored. I'd like to be a part of the indie game circle. It would be even nicer if there was something positive in some of it, too.

I suppose in the end all of that is silly. The "market", even for indie games, is very small and still oversaturated. I could be spending a lot more time on this than I do, if I really wanted it to succeed (that's a chicken-and-egg problem though). And I generally won't bend as far as I should to making things that other people will like instead of just what I'd like. So it's almost entirely my own fault that everything I throw out into the world falls there in total silence.

Still it makes me feel like, this might be my chance to break into the field, the one time I have an idea that's unusual enough, original enough, and yet still something that might get noticed. I guess that's why it pains me that I don't think I can actually make it happen.

Should I write a non-generic RPG?

2011-02-22T10:00:00.001-05:00

One problem with finding a name for the new version of RTC is that it being a generic game makes it hard to name it.

Another concern I have with writing it is that, I'm doing this only partially to have a better version of RTC out there, but just as much for its use in the reincarnation time travel game that we're hoping to start. That will involve a few extra rules specific to how it's applied to that campaign, which means the clumsiness of having one rules document and another supplement with the exceptions. The obvious solution to that, since I have the source for the game, is to make a second copy that has those exceptions woven right into the document, so I can hand people one set of rules that are all they need, no need to have to cross-reference a rule and its exception.

All this leads me to the idea that maybe what I should be doing is not writing another version of a generic game in the first place. When I look at what is getting some notice in the world of amateur roleplaying games (and professional, for that matter), generic games are out. Maybe what I should do, to finally get a tiny bit of notice (or at least to finally have a chance to get a tiny bit of notice), is to take the two ideas -- the system, and this setting -- and put them together into one document that's written as if they were conceived together. Then the rules amendments will be integral.

Even professional games like the Serenity roleplaying game these days are often done this way: a core "generic" system that the company uses for all their stuff gets customized for each game, and then presented as if it were a new system for that game. The person who buys the game doesn't even need to know that the system isn't entirely unique for it, and doesn't have to juggle basic rules and special cases.

The trouble I have here, though, is that I have three competing visions of the game. First, there's what would be most interesting to me. Second, there's what might be intriguing enough to get some notice (I'll write more about that tomorrow). And third, there's what my group might like, what we'll actually end up running. If I try to write the game either of the first two ways, it'll end up feeling like I'm forcing my group to play something based on what I want, not what they want. But if I write it the third way, then it feels like I'm giving up my idea, and the chance that my idea could finally be something someone else finds worth noticing. And that's not even assuming that the first two versions wouldn't be irreconcilable.

So in the end, while I worry that writing the one unified game approach would finally be my chance to make a mark, as well as a solution to the name conundrum, I think I can't go ahead with it.

A name for RTC's next version

2011-02-21T10:00:00.002-05:00

My rules-light roleplaying game RTC, which was based on my played-in-real-time game RealTime, needs a better name. RTC is a corny little initialism that reflects the game's origin: RTC is the core of RealTime's rules, hence, Real Time Core, hence RTC.

However, thinking about how to adapt it in hopes it can be the right game system for my reincarnation time travel game has led me to a few changes in the system that I think will improve it, make it more generally applicable. It'll be just a tiny bit less light, but still very simple and quick. In essence, it's version 2, but I think it might be best to call it a new start. I will add into the rules a few other things that RTC needed, strip out a few rules that never really worked that well, and since I'm breaking free from the arbitrary limit of "fits on a single page" I can also clarify and expand it. (It'll still fit on two or three sheets of paper.)

I'd like to give this a new name and promote it (to the extent anyone can promote a freeware roleplaying game), but I can't think of a good name. The problem is that it's a very simple and entirely generic game, so there's not much I can say about it that might lead to a catchy but appropriate name. It's a problem all generic games have; the game itself is, by design, bland, so it can fit with anything else you want to use it with, and thus the only good names are either dull acronyms or initialisms, or still something bland like "Unisystem". Or they're something that has nothing to do with the game, which might be the best way to go, but still feels corny.

When I try to think of a "hook" from the game's design to build a name off of, the only things that jump out at me are that the game has several eights in the design (there are eight main skills which run from one to eight); and that the skills are all verbs, to emphasize that the game focuses on action. The latter doesn't seem very promising; I haven't come up with any name ideas that build on it that aren't awful and corny. The former led me to the idea "Octave" but there's a few problems with that: it seems like the game will have to involve music, and people might mix it up with octaNe. (If that name weren't taken, in fact, it might be a good one.) No luck so far thinking of any other names that derive from the number eight.

I actually had a dream about asking people to help me come up with a name, a few nights ago. (Actually, I wasn't addressing people per se, just a formless miasma which didn't answer in any way.) In the dream, I came up with a name I liked, Indigo. On waking, I think of the name and my first reaction is, cool, I like the sound of that; it feels fresh and active. The second is, but it has nothing to do with the game, and is therefore corny. Even so, it still is better than Octave, or anything else I've come up with, except one thing. Apparently, someone else already got it.

I posted on Facebook asking for ideas and got a few interesting suggestions. Photon is nice: it emphasizes it being light and fast and universal. The only problem I see is that people have too many associations with it. In particular I think people will imagine it's suited for science fiction or high tech only. Another suggestion, Spectrum, is only unsuitable because my other roleplaying game, which is a very hefty rules-rich "crunch" system, is named Prism. And in addition to seeming like I'm obsessive about rainbows (I am, but I don't want to seem like it!) it might make it seem like the games are related, which they so aren't. It might even get them mixed up (at least amongst the 4.3 people in the world who've heard of them).

Without a good name, I feel stuck. I don't even know if I want to try to publish or release this (more about that in the next few blog posts) but if I did I would need a name and I don't have a good one. It's hard to brainstorm about names. I don't have any ideas where to start!

Sleepwalk With Me

2011-02-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

I certainly didn't expect to have to think about spoilers when reviewing a comedy book by a stand-up comedian, but it turns out that I have to assure you that the only spoiler in this post is the fact that I have to say this at all, and therefore, that there's things to be spoiled.

If you've watched Mike Birbiglia's comedy acts, you may expect this book to share a lot in common with them. There's only a few actual jokes that you've heard before in his acts that made it into the book, like about Mike's wheelhouse of skills (English muffin pizzas, and not jumping out of trees), part of how his brother gets the nickname Joey Bag Of Donuts, his parents having a porn virus, and a few more. But the vast majority of the book is material that wasn't familiar at least to me, having seen most of his specials.

The biggest commonality is just the tone Mike takes, the kind of humor, and the fact that it's very personal. He cranks up the personalness, in fact, which might seem surprising: his act is mostly him telling stories of his own life, so how could it be more personal? Two ways. First, the stories he's telling in the book are more personal things, and more so as the book progresses. In a way, this is an autobiography; it's a big coming-out about things in his life that he's never told us before. And second, the tone is much more intimate; he's making confession about things that were difficult, even painful or scary, for him.

You might think from that that it's going to be a bummer, but it's really, really not. At no point does he waver from being funny. It's not like how a comedy writer sometimes completely shifts gears to be emotional (like Dave Barry's extremely rare departures into writing about family tragedies). Not that that would be bad, but that's not what Mike does. There's no point where the emotional impact is opposed to, or competing with, the humor. They're entwined.

The book was a quick read, and some of that is because it's kind of light, but some is just because it's surprisingly engaging. You expect a stand-up comedian's book to be something you can dip into and back out of, so it was surprising to find myself gripped with suspense towards the end, eager to see what was coming.

Overall, as you'd expect for a book, the sheer density of laughs-per-minute is lower than a stand-up act. That's unavoidable, and Mike wisely doesn't try to avoid it. The result feels unaffected, uncontrived: it's Mike telling you about his life and being funny all the time doing it just because his thoughts are always funny even when they're also serious. It's really impressive when you think of the craftsmanship especially because while you're reading it you won't be thinking of the craftsmanship; you'll feel like even Mike wasn't thinking about it, either.

Living with kidney stones

2011-02-19T10:00:00.005-05:00

As I wrote yesterday, the nephrologists seem no closer now than they were last autumn to guessing what I can do to avoid kidney stones, apart from not eating anything, and drinking one water tower of distilled water per day. Some of their remedies seem drastic in terms of their impact on my quality of life, but they're very casual about them, because everyone they see -- or at least every fat person -- probably already has hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, and leprosy (okay, maybe not that last one) anyway, so they should all be going on draconian diets for other reasons already. Why not throw in one more reason to avoid everything?

When I asked for the referral last year, I had no idea it would be six months and still not even feeling like we've started on it, nor that the possible solutions would be so grand and drastic. Ultimately, I feel like we're coming to a point where I have to ask a question the doctors all assume isn't even on the table: do I want to treat this at all?

If they'd said "we can prevent kidney stones, but it'll take a costly, invasive, risky surgery," they would take for granted that I'd be trying to decide, is it worth it? Maybe I should just live with it. The same for lots of other treatments for lots of conditions, particularly conditions that have virtually no risk or only intermittent or minor effects (like, for instance, toenail fungus, which doesn't really do anything to you, and the treatments for which can cause liver failure -- that's a no-brainer).

But as long as all they're saying is "make drastic changes in your diet" then the question seems to go off the table. Of course I'd want to give up everything so I can avoid a kidney stone. It's just a matter of which everythings they need to put on the list.

Well, that's not how I feel about it. Sure, those few hours in the hospital were awful. The second one was either the most intense pain I've ever felt, or the second-most (there was this one time I fell off my bike and... you probably don't want to hear the rest of this sentence, you'll be wincing for hours). But one night like that every few years is chump-change compared to the kind of medical issues I used to have to face, with things like diabetes, where you're not talking about discomfort, you're talking about disability and death. And kidney stones have a very, very tiny risk of ever being anything more than a few agonizing hours and a few uncomfortable days.

Maybe I'm being dumb, but I really think the idea of having to go back to measuring and counting every particle of food I eat, having to avoid almost everything that I enjoy, and then having my blood tested and wasting a day in a doctor's office every three months, is just not worth it to avoid that one day of pain. The cure is worse than the condition. I spent way too long having to live that way for much more serious reasons. I got a surgery (and if you think about it, that was deliberately inducing the same kind of pain and discomfort as passing a kidney stone) specifically to avoid the medical concerns (namely diabetes) that led to me having to live my life that way.

No, I'm not saying I want to be dissolute and throw caution to the wind, eat anything I damned well please, and give up exercise. (Okay, actually, I would like that, who wouldn't? But I'm not saying that that's what I'm proposing.) I'm just saying the balance I have between the things I do to take care of myself (the things I don't eat, the exercise I do even when I don't want to, etc.) and the things I do because I like them (like exploring interesting foods, or saving a few minutes a day with convenient foods sometimes), needs to be maintained. I'll go so far to avoid the pain of kidney stones, but if they want me to go five times that far, I'm inclined to go buy some more Pepsi and say to heck with them. I'll just budget a few days off each year or two for passing a kidney stone.

Nephrologistitis

2011-02-18T10:00:00.003-05:00

My second visit to the nephrology department at Fletcher Allen was, somehow, more unsatisfying than the first. In the first, my actual doctor just read some papers and then had another doctor breeze in, having not really read my file, and announce my problems must be not drinking enough and taking in too much salt, because that's everyone else's problems, and then breeze out with some recommendations for more testing and followups. I kind of miss that old curmudgeon.

Today's visit got off the right foot with a wait of more than an hour and a half before we even saw the doctor. Then he was in and out in about two minutes so he could get yet another doctor -- the second doctor from the first visit wasn't in, so we got yet another new doctor. He also managed to complain that my bloodwork for last week never got sent to them. (We called the labs and confirmed it was, then got another copy sent.) Then more waiting.

The results, of course, contradict everything I've been told before this, just as everything before this has contradicted everything before it. My calcium intake, for instance, was stopped, then reinstated, then doubled, then tripled, then dropped back to the original levels, and at one point today the second doctor was talking about raising it again. Having previously been told to increase citrate intake, I was told this time to stop drinking lemonade, even though they're putting me on a citrate prescription supplement. And so on.

I don't know how much of it is because I can't seem to get the same doctor twice, or ever get a doctor that actually read my file beforehand. My urologist seems a lot more consistent and much more willing to listen to me and explain things to me, but even he seems just short of admitting that they just don't really understand what's going to work -- though he blames that on him being a urologist, not a nephrologist. So maybe if I had a nephrologist that stayed on the case, and wasn't always too busy to read my file or talk to me or listen to me or give serious thought to my situation, they'd be able to give me a coherent answer. But then, maybe not. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out they're just shotgunning because they don't really understand what's going on (or because the tests it would take to make a real diagnosis and treatment are more costly than just trying a bunch of things).

Ultimately, what they want me to do is:

Decrease the high-oxalate foods in my diet, like kale (which I never ate), cola (which I already eliminated months ago), nuts (which I've all but stopped eating), and beer (yuck). The only high-oxalate food I still have is chocolate.
Stop drinking lemonade, and drink water instead. Because I need to bring my citrate levels up.
Drink more fluids. I already drink literally twice as much as most people, but when I tell doctors how much, they always give me a stare that means they're thinking "why is he lying to me?" which only convinces them it must be low fluid intake (since that's the problem for so many people). My urine capture happens to have been unusually low, and they don't believe me that previous ones were "unusually" high.
Lose weight. They just throw this one in so the AMA doesn't revoke their license.
Stop ingesting salt. I think my salt intake is probably 'average' and I'll concede that 'average' is probably too high. But I think they think my intake is "eats Swanson Hungry Man and McDonald's every meal" and they want it to be "lives on a moon base and synthesizes nutriets via photosynthesis".
Take a prescription potassium citrate. I'm not Mr. Better Living Through Chemistry, but this is the only thing they said that I think might actually help. Everything I've seen about my citrate and oxalate levels suggests my numbers are way too far from normal for dietary changes to make that big a difference.
Come back in three months so they can reverse everything they've said and waste another four hours of my day. And don't forget more urine and blood tests.

At least I got a copy of my test results this time so I can read it for myself.

I'm really starting to regret getting onto this track, but that's for tomorrow's blog post.

RTC Variant for Reincarnation Time Travel

2011-02-17T10:00:00.007-05:00

I'm reposting from a Facebook note to here because I don't know how long the Facebook note will remain visible, but the blog posts last for a longer time. Plus I might get some response to posting it here. Also, posting here lets me include this delightfully goofy diagram that appears to have been posted in complete earnest by someone who is probably a good friend of the timecube guy.

This is a fleshing out of the ideas I wrote in a recent blog post about a way of making a "richer" version of RTC, still rules-ultralight but maybe just a little less so, for use in Siobhan's time travel via reincarnation campaign. The amended rules should probably have another name, but I don't know what it should be yet.

1) Change to Specializations

In RTC, each skill has a value from 1-6 and a single specialization, fairly broad (for instance, "Brawling" for Fight), which is two points higher. It is assumed that everything in the base skill is known at the skill's level, except the specialization, which is two higher.

In the new system, the base skill level applies only to things that the average person would know or be able to do, though perhaps at different proficiencies. For instance, in a modern world setting:

Drive: drive a car; ride a bike; navigate a public transit system
Fight: handle yourself in a barroom brawl; kick people; fire a pistol
Heal: staunch bleeding; treat a cold; identify a stomach upset; splint a broken bone
Know: your native language; use a library; be aware of current events; understand social conventions
Move: run; climb a tree; play softball
Persuade: ask someone on a date; complain to a customer service representative
Resist: deal with an angry person; get a better price from a car salesman
Use: make a phone call; put a shelf up; hook up a stereo system

However, anything that is not something that anyone would know, you don't know unless you have a specialization saying so. Some examples of specializations:

Drive: airplanes; motorcycles; jet-skis
Fight: gun repair; demolitions; judo; archery
Heal: emergency medicine; diagnostics; acupuncture. veterinary medicine
Know: German; poetry; astrophysics and cosmology
Move: acrobatics; track and field; mountain-climbing
Persuade: seduction; politics; multi-level marketing techniques
Resist: resist interrogation; sleep through anything
Use: car repair; software programming; lockpicking

You can also specialize in things that are also within the general base of knowledge, to reflect having a better mastery of it, if desired.

In each skill, you can have as many specializations as you have points in the skill.

You only have to decide, during initial character creation, some of those specializations. You must choose at least one per skill, but you can leave others blank. Whatever you choose reflects the knowledge of your present-day self. Any you leave blank will be filled in each time you travel into a past life, and reflect the knowledge of your past self.

2) Backstory Tokens

In addition to plot twists, there will be another token, called a backstory token and represented by a different color of chip or bead. These are handed out at the time when each character goes into his past life, and for a typical adventure, ten will given to each character. Like plot twists, these can be spent during the adventure, and when you run out, you run out; but unlike plot twists, they cannot be shared or traded between characters, and when spent, they are taken out of play.

Each backstory token can be spent at any time to add to your character something which can be discovered by revealing something of the character's backstory. They specifically refer to the backstory of the past life, and will generally provide you with a new resource. Generally, you will need to narrate something to explain it, possibly in the form of a flashback, or simply your character suddenly remembering something of their past life that could help. (You cannot contradict anything already known, but you can reveal things that it's feasible your present life didn't know about, and hasn't yet recollected.)

Some examples of the sort of thing backstory tokens can be spent for, and the corresponding costs:

1 token: add one more specialization to a single skill, lasting only the rest of this past life insertion
2 tokens: add one point to a single skill, only for the duration of this past life insertion
1 token: some single item of minimal value that it makes sense for your past life to have is somewhere you can get to it (e.g., a wig of just the same color as the Duchess's hair, if your past life worked in the theater)
2 tokens: as above, but an item of more value (e.g., an emerald earring), or an item that doesn't make as much sense (e.g., that wig, if you were a butcher -- and you still need to make up an explanation), or an item with a very specific application (e.g., the key to the butler's private passage)
3 tokens: as above, but it can be extremely valuable, or both valuable and unexpected
1 token: someone in the area owes you a minor favor, or is a casual acquaintance
2 tokens: an important or powerful person owes you a favor
3 tokens: you have serious leverage on a powerful person

The GM of course always has veto power. Generally speaking, you can't ever use these to simply solve the challenge of the adventure directly. (You can't spend three tokens to make the villain of the piece beholden to you, or one token to add the specialization "knowing just where the sword is buried because I stumbled upon it when I was a child once".)

An annual glurp

2011-02-16T10:00:00.000-05:00

Way back when, I used to have a cassette in my stereo all the time ready to record songs I wanted when they played on the radio. The resulting tapes were a big mess of songs in random order, with their first few seconds cut off, and sometimes with DJs talking on their ends; but often that was the only way I had those songs at all. I started calling those "glurp tapes" because they were just a random assortment of stuff, and for some reason "glurp" seemed to fit that.

Later, when I made what people might call a "mix tape", I adopted that name for the same purpose. The main time I made these would be burning CDs full of MP3s to play on the car stereo. At any given time, we might have about 30 CDs, each full of 100-200 MP3s, in the car. (When a disc is meant to play on a car stereo, on not-so-great speakers and competing with engine and road noise and the heater, high bitrates are kind of a waste. Even 128bps MP3s sound better than FM stereo.)

And yet, it still gets to feeling like we don't have enough choices. Part of that is how half of them we can't ever play. A lot are the complete works of a band, but that's usually too much of any one band for Siobhan to want to hear. Some are for moods that don't come up often. Some are collections of a genre, and those get played more, but even those sometimes feel like too much of a single thing. The two kinds of discs that get played most often are album-discs (which are around 8-12 albums on a disc), and glurp discs.

Usually I make a glurp disc by just using my MP3 software to make a random playlist of songs that both Siobhan and I like, and then burn as much of it as will fit. However, I just recently decided to make a new one and used a different approach. During January, I made a playlist of just the things I had added to my library in 2010. To my surprise, it was almost two CDs worth of MP3s, but that also included too much of a few things (some artists I'd added one or more albums of, while others I'd only added a song or two) so I decided to winnow it down to one disc, removing all but the best few songs from most of the artists, particularly artists of styles that either I didn't think Siobhan would like as much, or that I had too much of. I also did a lot more work hand-massaging the order of tracks: I started with a random order, but then moved things around to create better contrasts and spread out single artists more. I labelled the disc Glurp 2010.

It came out so good, so full of enjoyable music that feels fresh, with such a great variety of stuff, that I've listened to it as a playlist a few times in addition to mostly playing through it in the car, and enjoyed it each time. I wonder if, by 2012, the 2010 disc will be feeling too familiar, and if I'll have enough material for a new Glurp 2011 disc. I have a feeling that I've just started a new annual tradition.

Proverbs that go too far

2011-02-15T10:00:00.000-05:00

A coworker has a sign up in her office that admonishes us to seize life. "Dance like no one is looking," it begins, and concludes, "Live each day as if it were your last."

Taking this literally is of course missing the point. If you knew today were literally your last day, it'd be a pretty joyless day, I bet. And you wouldn't be doing any of the things the person who penned the sign had in mind. But we all know what they really mean.

Almost all the proverbs that give us life advice are like this to varying extents. That is, they are all, all of them, simply wrong. They tell you to behave in a very unbalanced way that would be disastrous or misery-inducing. But they still have "a grain of truth" in them because, in a very simplistic, pithy way, they target one unbalanced way we tend to live, and try to nudge us away from it by citing the opposite, even-more-unbalanced attitude as a virtue.

That's why so many of these aphorisms have equal-but-opposite aphorisms. Look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost. Many hands make light work, but too many cooks spoil the broth. Life is what you make it, but que sera, sera. The pen is mightier than the sword, yet actions speak louder than words. Each one is true because it's intended not to be taken literally, but rather, contrasted to when you're going too far the opposite way.

Ultimately almost every single one of them could be replaced with variations on the bromide "Moderation in all things". If there's a question of how to behave, it's because there's not a single obvious answer (when there is, the question never comes up), and when there's not a single obvious answer, it's because two (or more) extremes need to be struck a balance between. The right answer is always in the middle, yet virtually every proverb points at one end or the other. Because in ten catchy words or fewer, it's hard to point at a vague middle. All you can do is hope that your proverb will be cited at the right time.

Too bad most people don't realize this and cite each of these proverbs as if they actually were intended to be true. Sometimes they have the opposite of the intended effect, being used to justify the imbalanced behavior that their opposites are intended to curb. Just don't think about it too hard. Don't look too closely.

A new Android pad

2011-02-14T10:00:00.010-05:00

It may seem odd that, after having mostly disappointing results with a cheap Android-based tablet, I would buy another Android-based tablet. That tablet turned out to be a little too unreliable, a little too slow, and based on software that's a little too out of date, to do that much. (However, I do have a great idea for a use for it. I'm going to mount it to the wall and run a copy of Rover on it to make it a home automation control panel.)

However, the key thing about this one is, I bought it for one and only one primary purpose: to replace my Archos as a means to watch video on the go. I tried the other tablet but the ancient version of Android on it does not really support video very well. Virtually every file I tried, even transcoded ones, wouldn't play -- it was either audio no video, or video no audio, or garbled noise, or refused to try. However, this new Android pad running a recent version does quite well at video. Everything I've tried works, and it's a great image, smooth video, good sound on the headphones (the built-in speakers suck of course but they're tinny tiny things), and it even has an HDMI output. Heck, it streams YouTube as good as my laptop.

So if it never does anything else worth doing, it's still a better video player than the Archos, at about the same price. Still, I'll probably play with doing other things on it. I've loaded a bunch of free software on it already: some utilities (a good scientific calculator, a stopwatch, and a sticky-note program), a few games, Internet clients for various things (IM, Facebook, MUDs, and Sharepoint), a dice roller, and a Kindle client (but this is way too heavy to replace a Kindle, besides having the wrong kind of screen). I also configured it for email, and synching with my calendar and contacts.

I also loaded Adobe's reader and have used it for the purpose I originally bought that earlier tablet: it's damned good at reading PDFs, and the 10" screen certainly helps as much as the better software. Even so, the monstrously overproduced Dresden books are only passable, not great. Other PDFs like Fiasco look wonderful and have great page turn speed and such. Adobe's Android reader is, I hear, not the best, and one day I might try some of the alternatives to see if I get better page turn speed and features.

Other things I like about it are that it has two MicroSD slots (so I can load 64G of removable stuff on it), two USB ports (so I can use my Matias Folding Keyboard with it, though I do need a stand for it),

There are still a few oddities. The gravity sensor is a little oversensitive sometimes, and if you turn it off, the device ends up stuck in landscape; you can't go to portrait and then turn it off, even if you're reading a PDF that should stay in that ratio. There's a front-facing camera, but no webcam-chat software (and the free Android version of Skype doesn't support the camera), so there's not really any use for it yet. (I suppose there's software out there that would remedy that, which I haven't bothered to get.) And it has GPS and even has an external antenna option, but since it has only WiFi, not 3G, and the only mapping software on it is Google Maps which depends on a wireless connection, it's kind of useless. The screen's size would be fantastic for a GPS computer, but anywhere you could use the GPS function, you would be away from the map data. Maybe someone sells an Android GPS program that doesn't depend on a network connection, but given how most Android devices are 3G, I don't know if anyone does.

But then I'm not intending this to be an iPad killer, even if I may end up using it for a lot of things I would use an iPad for (at half the price). Ultimately it turns out that I really don't have anywhere near enough use for an iPad to make it worth it to carry one, let alone buy one. What little use I do have, this can pretty much do all of that: multimedia player, PDF viewer, web browser, and Swiss-Army-knife computer. Which is pretty cool.

But how's this for a sacrilege: I wish there were an Internet Explorer for it, just because Sharepoint won't use anything else for a browser, and it would be really geekishly cool to be able to use it to get into my Sharepoint site. (Okay, okay, what I really need is for Sharepoint to support other browsers, but let's face it, that's not going to happen either. Pity.)

So once I finish another book or two, it's back onto my plan to watch all those movies I never saw but should have.

The Warlords of Mars

2011-02-13T10:00:00.000-05:00

I know there are more books in the Barsoom series, but the end of the third book, The Warlords of Mars, feels like a pretty solid ending. I have the feeling that later books are going to feel tacked on, the author having been pressured to write them to continue a popular story beyond its range.

As with the earlier books, A Princess of Mars and The Gods of Mars, the story depends almost entirely on two things: that John Carter is a complete idiot who doesn't recognize clues when they fall in his lap, and that Providence tends to arrange the most remarkable coincidences every page to cause clues to fall in his lap.

In this third book, both of these factors started to strain past the point of being endearing and into the point of being annoying. John seems to get dumber every book -- perhaps it's all the blows to the head. Yet Providence, not content ensuring every random turn he makes leads the right way, every random person he meets happens to be of vital importance to the world or a relative, and every random encounter he has happens to be with someone who's just on the first line of a speech full of vital information, now goes to such extremes as to take a part in virtually every paragraph in parts of the book. I feel like Burroughs himself is getting tired of it, since he makes fun of it in character at one point, with Carter himself noting how kind Providence is to him (and how this explains why he doesn't bother to try to make decisions).

I have heard they're making a movie (and apparently that is a process that's been going on since the 1930s, the longest any movie has ever spent in development), and I wonder how they can do it without making such huge rewrites that we don't recognize the story. I can't imagine a modern audience could tolerate a hero so bafflingly thick-headed and idiotic. There's a particular scene, where he fights for a half hour or so thinking someone important to him is behind him despite her voice having been suddenly silenced a while back, and an enemy having been spotted mere moments earlier behind a tapestry, and never does he glance back and notice she's gone. In the middle of that fight someone even comes out and laughs at him about it and he still doesn't think to glance over his shoulder. He's doing things like this all the time.

Despite this, the story that spans the second and third books is surprisingly solid. As I wrote about the second book, the author has found lots more about Barsoom to flesh out without feeling like it's forced, like he's just cramming in stuff that should have been evident in the first book but wasn't. By the end of the third book, however, he has pretty much put himself in that situation. There's still room in Barsoom for a handful more things, hidden places, unknown secrets, previously unmentioned details, but it'll very soon start to feel like the world is crowded, like some of these things should have come up earlier, or like he's just stretching things out too far. So further books will probably start to lose their wonder since there's not really any room for a lot more of Barsoom to discover. But this far, it all fits together.

Unlike Gods of Mars, this book doesn't get too far off onto grandiose epic battles; everything is very personal like it was in the first book even when it's also epic in other ways. In fact, the author stages a big climactic final battle and then contrives to ensure it happens off camera by letting our hero face just two other people while it's happening far away, in a very nicely framed contrast.

Burroughs actually alludes to the possibility that the "heroine" (I hate to call her that, since she spends all her time being a damsel in distress) might pick up a sword and help out at one point, and yet she never manages to so much as slap anyone. The best she manages is to struggle in her chains and thus make a burden of herself to the villains. I know it's a modern sensibility, but I think the book would be improved, without having to sacrifice any of its feel, if just once she'd gotten to be the one to fight someone off, or save John, even if only from one of those acts of Providence. Burroughs sets the idea up but then doesn't act on it.

This book also does a good job of tying up the loose ends. It ends like Burroughs wanted it to be the end, or at least was planning for it. I have decided, therefore, to go read other things for a while. I'll come back and try the fourth book, but if it goes how I imagine it might, I won't feel compelled to finish it. I might just decide that this was the end.

What game system to use?

2011-02-12T10:00:00.004-05:00

We talked a bit about my time travel via reincarnation campaign idea that Siobhan intends to run at the final session of our Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries game, but we didn't settle that many of the pending questions. One of those is the question of what system to use.

Arguably my two roleplaying game systems, RTC and Prism, occupy opposite ends of the spectrum between simple and complex (or what people usually mean when they say those things about RPGs). Probably neither of them is right for this game.

Prism is too cumbersome for a game where you're going to be redefining your skills in some ways every adventure. You could make it work but all that complexity wouldn't be buying you that much. Probably the best way would be to make it so you had some number of development points that were permanently spent for your "present day" character, and then a pool you could spend on top of those every time you started an adventure, for whatever is added by that particular life, but you wouldn't lose anything you already had. I think this could be made to work but it'd be a strain. First, any number of points for your flexible pool would be too much and not enough; it'd be too much since it'd make it too much work to prepare for an adventure, and not enough to reflect all of your past life's skills. Second, even using the character spreadsheet, it'd take too long. And you wouldn't gain enough from this for it to be worth it.

RTC might be too skimpy. It's one thing to use it in a fixed, well-understood setting like the real world, where we can assume that the GM and players will largely be on the same page about how difficult tasks are, or what outcomes to expect from an action, or what a person of a particular skill level would know. In that situation, the ambiguity and vagueness is no obstacle. But even assuming you were able to make some small adjustments between your present-day and past-life characters, the differences wouldn't really tell us what your past life knows about the religion of his native ancient Egypt, how to make barrels, the current state of various noble houses in Florence, which dialects of Demotic he can translate, or how comfortable he is with the Swiss pike. In the end you'd be too much the same each time.

One idea for how to address this is for me to make a tweaked version of RTC with a bit more detail thrown in. First, I'd increase the number of specializations you could have, and some would be redefined in each world. Thus, the amount of work you're doing at the start of each adventure is really nothing more than writing down a list of things your past life knows -- the same thing you'd be doing if you did this free-form, really. Second, I'd come up with some rules for a new flavor of token-spending similar to, but distinct from, plot twists. These tokens would represent as-yet-unspecified past life knowledge or resources; you'd get a bunch at the start of each adventure, and then spend them to "remember" that your character's past life knows something, or has something. Examples would be "Oh, I remember I learned how to tie that kind of knot when I was working for a sailor in the French Navy," or "I think I stashed a spare ingot of copper just like what we need behind the anvil in my forge," or "Actually, I recall the Duke owes me a favor because of that indiscretion of his daughter's that I kept to myself." You could make these up on the spot as you needed them, so they'd be like plot twists, but they'd always take the form of past-life backstory, not a present event; and you'd have a strictly limited number of them. In essence, half the "redefine your character" stuff would be something you'd put off and do in play.

The latter approach seems more promising, and I will probably spend a little time trying to write up those rules. However, it's possible the best approach is to use neither system and instead use one of the countless, and often very good, systems that already exist. I just need some ideas on what it would be -- and then, I'd need Siobhan and me to get familiar enough with it to do the game development and then play it. Anyone have suggestions?

Omnipotence

2011-02-11T10:00:00.000-05:00

Can God make a rock so heavy even He cannot lift it?

There are a lot of paradoxes and problems with the idea of an omnipotent god, but this isn't really one of them. It is an interesting question for various reasons; in particular, it is one way of considering the mathematical questions around the concept of infinity. But it's not really as much of a theological question as it sounds.

Consider this question instead. Could God make it so that nine was one more than five? Sure, God could make it so the word we use for the number one more than five was "nine", that's easy, but could he make it so that the concept we currently call "nine" was actually the number that's one more than five? If the answer is no, is that a limit on the "omni" part of "omnipotence"? Could God make it so if you added one to five you got a spicy cheese soup? Could God make colorless green ideas sleep furiously? Could God transform roundness, a property of objects, into a sofa?

When it comes down to it, the rock question is fundamentally the same as these kinds of paradoxes: the paradox is in the question, not the action. No sensible definition of the word "omnipotence" can ever pass that test if you allow questions that are innate contradictions.

Wearing hats indoors

2011-02-10T10:00:00.000-05:00

If I don't wear a hat, especially (but not exclusively) during the winter, I get headaches. It was mostly a coincidence that let me discover that the periodic headaches I often got went away when I wore a hat. Sometimes, I wonder, of all the people I know who get headaches, how many of them even tried a hat? Did a doctor ever suggest it as a treatment? Maybe there's lots of people with this "odd" circumstance who never find out relief is that easy.

Long ago, wearing a hat was the normal way of things. After all, the world was cold. Houses were typically heated with a single source of heat, a stove or fireplace, and the farther from it you were, the more cold you had to deal with. Clothes were the first and best protection. We lose a fair amount of heat from the head, and so a hat was as essential as any other garment. Yes, people wore hats indoors.

But rich people, the aristocracy, sometimes were able to afford so much luxury that they could heat every room in their houses. As with so many other things rich people did, not wearing a hat was a ridiculously impractical thing that they took up as a means of flaunting their wealth. I'm so rich I can be warm without a hat! Soon everyone else who was rich had to do it, too. Amongst the wealthy, not wearing a hat became a status symbol. But when they went outdoors, it was still cold, so the social protocol became that you wore hats only outdoors.

So many of these dumb bits of intentional impracticality end up filtering down to everyone else by becoming "a matter of courtesy", and not wearing hats indoors is a perfect example. As progress brought us to where everyone could keep their homes heated better and better, more and more people adopted the habits of those wealthier than them, as a status symbol again; and the "don't wear hats indoors" rule became widespread. Ask someone who believes in it why you don't wear hats indoors and they will invariably have no better answer than "just because that's how it's done!" but this is really where it comes from.

For the first time in a thousand years, we are finally in a position to look back on what peasants used to do and ask ourselves, did that make more sense? In particular, we are realizing that even if our industry and standard of living can have us all living literally like princes (the average middle-class American lives far better than a medieval prince did, by almost any standard you choose), our impact on the environment can't sustain it. We don't want to start living the "nasty, brutish, and short" lives of a serf, sure, but we're just starting to also reject some of the more impractical things that we got from the aristocrats. Maybe we should be thinking more about, instead of keeping our houses at 75°F all winter so we can dress like it's summer, maybe we should be letting the house get down to 65°F (still well warmer than the winter temperature of the house of anyone other than a rich person, any time before central heating) and putting on a sweater.

And a hat, maybe. A hat probably will do more than a sweater to make you feel warmer in a chilly house. Maybe it's time we put that rule about hats indoors back into the dustbin of history where it came from.

(But maybe not tophats. Those are just silly.)

Culture's virtuous and vicious circles

2011-02-09T10:00:00.006-05:00

One of my character's jobs in Lusternia is being the Minister of Cultural Affairs for Serenwilde. This is the vaguest of all the ministry positions: there are almost no actually coded things that the minister has authority over, and the largest part of the job is about things that aren't officially supported. We get access to the commands to run our arena, and a command to submit theatrical productions for competition, and that's it. But it's taken as written that the ministry is also in charge of anything else that falls within the rubric of culture: festivals, rituals, contests, treasure hunts, fairs, etc.

These kinds of things are far more demanding and exhausting than people realize, since we have to do them ourselves with essentially no assistance from the code. However, they can be very rewarding. But it's always a challenge to get people interested. Lusternia is brimming over with other things you can be doing with your time, and most of them involve some measurable reward: gold, experience, and credits being the most notable. Plus there's plenty of ways that other people can decide what you're doing with your time -- for instance, by raiding. For most of Lusternia, raiding is an occasional interruption which is exhilirating and thus worth the interruption; however, if you happen to be currently on the bottom of the totem pole, and thus the game's whipping boy, those raids are both frequent and dispiriting.

And Serenwilde has been at the bottom now for two full years, fully 1/3 of the game's history, far longer than anyone else has ever been at the bottom. This has had a lot of effects, but the only one I want to talk about today is how it's eroded cultural activity, and what I think we need to do about it.

In its heyday, Serenwilde, as the leading beacon of culture in the game, had a virtuous circle going on. Every cultural activity tended to reinforce the next one, and in three different ways.

If you are a culture aide planning a festival, you're going to be doing tons more work than anyone realizes, enough to easily burn out your motivation to do more. However, all that gets turned around the moment the festival is a success, the moment people show up and seem to enjoy it. (If someone thinks to say 'thank you', a rare event, that's doubly so.) Every success makes aides more involved, more enthused, more likely to make more events, more interested in participating in the events others set up.
The people of the commune get used to the idea that events can be fun and interesting, and that in part depends on them being attended -- many events only work if there's enough people participating. If they show up and have fun, they are likely to show up to the next one, and tell their friends.
If you're the kind of player who likes this sort of thing, you'll be likely to move your character to Serenwilde, or create one there and then spend time on it, because that's where the good stuff is happening. That means there'll be even more people producing and participating in culture.

For all that, though, once things get worn down you get the opposite, a vicious circle. The key point here is that every time you try to produce something and its participation is very low, or it doesn't happen, this reinforces the things that make it unlikely the next one will work.

The aides who are trying to create events get discouraged very very easily when no one bothers to show up after they poured hours of work and creativity into it. They probably won't try again, and might not even attend other events.
It seems trivial but it's actually huge and pervasive: if people go to an event and find it doesn't end up happening or is dull due to lack of people, they're that much less likely to go to the next one, and they'll spread that attitude to others. This one is slippery because if you ask people about it they don't realize this in their own thoughts. Many people don't think of themselves as the type to be into culture but will still show up and participate and surprise themselves by having fun -- but only if everything's working perfectly. Others don't realize how much of an impact this attitude has on them, and fail to consider how many other things are available for them to spend their time on, and how thoroughly they can become jaded about culture.
The longer Serenwilde is on the bottom, the more people find they're just not having fun, and think about doing something else. Those people who are into culture will end up making another character in some other nation where culture thrives (currently Hallifax), or just stop playing so much, or have their character leave Serenwilde. Thus eroding culture in Serenwilde in a way that is especially hard to recover from.

Those whose experience has been in the virtuous circle phase tend to give very pat and patronizingly simplistic answers to how to get culture moving. Just host more events. Get your aides to work harder. Offer prizes. Ask people what kind of events they want.

These are all good advice (if a bit obvious) when you're in the virtuous circle phase, and since they're all you need, people might get the idea that anyone who's dismissive of that solution is just making things too difficult. But what works when you're in a self-sustaining cycle, to keep that cycle from ebbing, is not going to work when you're in a self-destroying cycle.

Prizes don't work because the kind of person who's motivated by those things will generally find they have a lot of better ways of getting them quicker. Also, many people assume anything with a prize (generally a contest) will have other people who are more likely to win than them, so don't bother to enter.

And if you ask people what would get them to events, the answers you get are essentially useless. If you give people what they say they want, they don't come. I made this mistake for a long time. The simple fact is that the thing most likely to bring someone to a festival is not the festival itself, it's all their friends that are also going to it. Even combat-monsters go to, and enjoy, festivals when all their friends are going. And even culture-mavens don't bother to go if they have the pernicious feeling that it's not going to happen anyway.

So how do you turn the vicious circle virtuous again? I wish I had a definite answer. But I do have a plan, with two main parts.

1) Avoid big events: they just add to the general sense that these things never work out or aren't well attended enough to be fun, so they just do more and more damage. Instead, have lots of very small events which are designed specifically around one key detail: that they should work fine even if only two people participate.

The hope is that, once you run one of these, everyone involved -- even if that's only the organizer and two participants -- comes away feeling very slightly more positive about culture, and very slightly more likely to be part of future events. It's a very fragile advance. Every step forward like this can easily be undone by any failures; a single big event that fails to go off could reverse the progress of a dozen previous small events. We might have to go back to the start a number of times. But it has a chance of slowly, gradually, reversing the vicious circle. If we can pull off two-people events enough to start seeing four-people events, we can set the stage for eight-people events. Like any feedback loop, it starts with tiny gains on tiny amounts, but if you get far enough, exponential growth starts to run away on you.

2) To try to make that process go faster and be less likely to slip backwards, we can take advantage of a peculiar fact of Lusternia (and probably most MUDs): the "celebrity power" of the gods/administrators. People always react with denial to this idea, but it nevertheless is easily observed: if a player announces a treasure hunt, and then a god announces a treasure hunt, the latter will automatically get at least four times as much interest even if nothing else is different.

Why? Some of it is just the assumption that the gods can do what mortals can't do -- make things part of big world-shaking events (the kind of stuff that gets you in the Events posts and thus "famous" if you're involved), that they can make things where there's real coded effects and thus a smoother process, that the rewards could be greater, and many other things. But the biggest part is really just star power. They're exotic and interesting, rarely seen and obviously important. I'm just some shlub that's run a dozen festivals before.

I can't ask for one of the gods to actually create events for me, or even to offer support for an event, by coding something to make it work better. (At times I've tried, and always been denied, even when I bend over backwards to make sure that what I'm asking for will demand as little as possible from those poor overworked gods, and produce as much value as possible for the investment. On the other hand, New Celest is currently getting more support for their festivals than we've ever gotten in all ours put together, including some they didn't even ask for. Astonishgly and unprecedentedly, their most recent festival even got tied into an ongoing game-wide Event, and rolled into the Events post that resulted from it -- something that is causing everyone else, already envious of Celest having three over-active gods when most of us have at best one barely-active one, is practically aching with envy.)

But I can ask a god to offer tiny bits of support that will produce small, but still measurable, amounts of celebrity power. This is not a necessary element of my plan; the appearance of Lord Hoaracle in an event isn't going to make an event out of nothing. What it is is a force multiplier: it makes whatever I'm already doing significantly more impactful. (If he actually ran an event like what Celest had added onto its festival, that'd be a huge multiplier, but even having a cameo role in a small event would be notably helpful, I think.)

So as Serenwilde's culture minister I have documented this plan over the last few weeks, talked to my aides about it, even recruited new aides for it. I also talked to Serenwilde's only active god, Lord Hoaracle, and gotten his support for the celebrity power part of it, despite this running somewhat counter to his personality as a meditative recluse.

Unfortunately, none of it is going to happen. Because despite the fact that I was also talking to the Moonhart Circle, Serenwilde's ruling body, about it all along, while I was setting it up (with their implied consent) they were actually split between those who had very, very different ideas, and those who couldn't care less and still haven't bothered to speak up about any of it. It turns out that the only source I need or could hope to get for support, apart from Hoaracle, either offers no support or active opposition.

The most visible example is a festival plan I was handed in the form of an executive order: implement this. It was a perfect study in what I think we should not be doing: it's like every festival wrapped up in one monolithic overblown mass. It would tank and burn badly. Worse yet, the attitude reflected was that the Minister of Cultural Affairs is not in charge of setting a direction for culture and carrying it out; he is a mere functionary whose job is to do the "trivial" work of actually preparing and executing events. (Similar to those who are always contacting famous authors with ideas for books and expecting to get 50% of the credit and money, as if the idea is the hard part and the mere act of writing the book is comparatively trivial.) This plan was effectively withdrawn immediately, and apologies tendered, but they all missed the point: that this reflects a fundamental difference in what they think my job is, and what job I want to do.

Since I don't want to do the job they are expecting of me, I'm resigning, but with plans to take the job up again after there's been changes in the administration and we're back to a point where they're looking for the same from a Culture Minister as I want to give. To force myself into being what they want now would just burn me out and exhaust me. To waste my energy fighting with them to get them to see what I'm trying to do, and to elicit a reaction from the 2/3 of them that didn't even answer at all, would also drain me.

So my ideas will either be picked up by my successor, or more likely, forgotten until I get to try again. Or maybe if I'm really lucky, forces outside our control will change things and Serenwilde will be alive and vibrant again by time I take the job, and it'll be my turn to be glib about how easy it is to just go out and make events and people will show up.

Sexual orientation as a personal identifier

2011-02-08T10:00:00.001-05:00

Several of my friends are gay, and none of my friends, to the best of my knowledge, has the tiniest smidgen of homophobia (I doubt they'd be friends for long if they did). Like anyone else, I have friends that don't know other friends of mine that well (in spite of all the social networking). Sometimes I find myself giving one friend the bullet-point summary of another friend, and when this happens, I'm never sure whether "gay" should be one of the bullet points.

Generally if I know that someone's gay it's because they are definitely "out" about it. I'm not discerning enough to tell any other way. So the fact that I know means that it's someone who isn't trying to keep it a secret. (Sure, they might not mention it in every job interview, but they don't keep it secret generally.) So it's not a question of giving anything away.

It's just that, suppose I tell my friend Able that my other friend Baker is gay, as part of a short list of basic stats (he's male, about my age, lives on the West Coast, works in healthcare) (note, all this is made up!), am I highlighting it too much? Does it sound like I'm mentioning it because it's a bigger part of defining who Baker is than it ought to be?

After all, there are certainly a lot of ways in which it doesn't matter. I don't expect it to change how Able feels about Baker. And yet it almost seems like saying it is making it out as being important enough to mention, and thus making it out like Able's opinion of Baker ought to be affected by it.

It seems clear to me that fifty years from now, mentioning that Baker is gay will be precisely as ordinary and unladen with importance as mentioning that he's male is now. But I wonder if we're not there yet. If one group is treated badly, we have to go through a period where the pendulum swings the other way before we can get to the proper balance. Bill Cosby once made this point about the kind of roles black actors got. They were always villains or idiots, then for a while, they had to be always good and sympathetic characters, and Bill suggested that equality would be evident when black actors could play the villains again. His point: eventually, it won't matter what color your skin is, what role you play, because black people are just the same as white people in terms of whether you can be a hero or a villain. But to get there, for a while, we had to make up for centuries of insensitivity with a few decades of oversensitivity before we could find the happy medium. So too might it be with gayness: in some ways, in terms of cultural acceptance, being gay is somewhat similar now to where being black was in the 1970s, and it may be a while before being gay is really so much no big deal that we can just toss it off like it's nothing.

As always, I probably am overthinking it. But these kinds of issues are tricky and it's easy to be doing the wrong thing, for the long-term goal, because of not thinking about the tiniest little behaviors.

Burning the wood I cut

2011-02-07T10:00:00.006-05:00

The load of wood I just brought in this week is all wood that I cut. Some of it, in fact, is wood from the first year I was cutting my own, including parts from that incredibly dense tree that killed one chainsaw and almost killed another back in 2008. That tree sat for more than a year before it had dried enough that I could split it, so it's only now finally worked its way up to where I'm burning it.

And boy, was I right, it's some incredible wood. The pieces are so big and dense, one of them burns for hours. But it's dried so long that they aren't even that hard to get started up. What we've been burning this year is mostly rock maple that we bought, and that's good wood, it lasts a good long time, but it's nothing compared to these wedges.

Of course they're also cut a lot more unevenly, at different lengths, not always split as far, and a lot bigger pieces with jagged shapes. They're hard to stack and sometimes hard to fit into the woodstove.

So, like I wrote once before, there's that subtle satisfaction of knowing that the wood that's keeping me warm now is wood I brought in myself. (This particular tree is probably the same age as me, so I'm being kept warm by the same sunlight that has been with me my whole life, too.) But unlike last time I wrote about this, this time, not only is it nice to be burning my own wood on an emotional level, it's also really, really good wood.

Inheritance

2011-02-06T10:00:00.037-05:00

I wasn't sure if I should blog about this. One person suggested it's a security risk, but I doubt that, for reasons that will become clear by the end of the post.

In December, Siobhan's grandfather died at the age of 93. We went down there for the funeral on short notice. We hadn't even given a moment's thought to the idea of an inheritance. First, it didn't occur to me that there would be an estate of any size; most people these days have fairly little, or at most they have the house, which takes a while to sell. Second, and more compellingly, he had three surviving children, so it seemed logical that they'd get whatever there was. I didn't even go through these thoughts in my head, consciously. The idea of an inheritance just never came to my mind.

But it turns out, to our surprise, that there was one. His will stipulated that the estate was to be divided amongst his four children, and if one of them predeceased him, their share would propogate to their children. We've been sitting on this news ever since to make sure it was real, that it wouldn't turn out to be a mistake or nothing or caught up in some legal tangle.

As soon as we heard, before we even knew the amount, mere minutes later, we decided to share some of this windfall. The idea is simple: we weren't expecting it, weren't counting on it. If you find $20 on the sidewalk, if you give $10 to someone else, you are still up $10 you weren't expecting. So why not share?

The other thing you do with found money is, you take a certain amount of it, a small amount, and you set it aside for doing something frivolous and fun. If you try to be responsible with all of it, you either end up unhappy you never get to be whimsical, or more likely, you end up being whimsical with money somewhere else and the amount ends up being more.

So we decided to take the amount and subtract whatever is needed to cover taxes and other administrative costs. What's left we would divide up into our half and everyone else's half. Our half will be mostly used to pay down debts and the mortgage and maybe do some stuff around the house, all responsible things. (Maybe we'll use some to put in some fencing to give Socks more room to run, for instance.)

The other half, we'll be sharing on to give others some windfalls too. Some of our friends who have been there for us are on the top of the list. That includes a few who have had financial troubles in the past, but that's not why -- we're not looking to be a charity. It's just because they're people we're very close with, and with whom we'd like to share our good fortune. It's just like how you've always said, if you won the lottery, of course you'd buy some things for your friends. Well, this isn't exactly a mega-millions, but the logic still applies. And some of it will, in fact, go to charities. We haven't decided which yet, but we're fairly sure the local food shelves will be prominently placed.

So the reason why I don't think posting this is going to make someone decide to rob us is that this money isn't going to be sitting in a box in the bedroom. As soon as it comes in, it's going right back out, to pay off various things and to be given to various people. I was more worried someone might be upset that they're not on our list of recipients. If that's you, it's not that we don't care, it's just that we decided better to give a few people enough to make a big difference (for instance, for one person, it's paying for a surgery he's needed) than to give a lot of people small amounts that would just be a little extra pocket money.

The recycle bin

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

Operating systems were using a Trashcan as the visual metaphor for where deleted documents go for years, since it was the obvious metaphor to use. Even before GUIs the word trash often appeared in the relevant command or directory names. And at first Windows stole the Trashcan from Mac (the same way Mac had stolen it from Xerox) though it wasn't very prominent or integrated. But Windows 95 introduced the Recycle Bin. By now we all take it for granted, but really, that was a brilliantly better metaphor, for several reasons.

First, and maybe only geeks like me would even notice this, it's far more accurate. Stuff that goes into a trash can goes to a landfill is gone. But when you delete a file, every resource that made it up is made available, immediately, for making new files. It really is a lot more like recycling, and perfect recycling at that.

Second, the image of rooting around in the trash to find that thing you just realized you shouldn't've tossed away was always a bit unsavory. Sure, a Mac's trashcan is blessedly free of coffee grounds and rotting banana peels, but while a sterile window of documents is not a negative, it does limit how far they can develop the metaphor without being circumspect to avoid awakening connotations that might be negative and bad marketing. But in the modern workplace, the recycle bin is not only just as ubiquitous, it's far more palatable to imagine digging into. Heck, I've done it plenty of times, but I don't think I've ever needed a discarded document enough to root through an actual trashcan for it.

Finally, imagine how everyone would feel about it if Windows had the trashcan, and had had it for ages, but Apple had the recycle bin. Apple is young, hip, modern, and urbane, and thinks outside the box; Windows is stodgy and old-fashioned. If it were the other way around, the recycle bin would just be another example of how Apple is more in touch with modern sensibilities. But since it ended up the other way around, no one really thinks of it that way. In the end, Microsoft scored a coup there if only by preventing Apple from grabbing that particular marketing-possible image.

This probably all sounds kind of petty. But seemingly trivial differences of imagery like this often prove vital and important beyond their apparent significance in both the fields of marketing, and user interface design. Microsoft never gets credit for the few times they do it right.

Bioshock

2011-02-04T10:00:00.001-05:00

I'm not much of a computer gamer, and I only got a PS3 because it hardly cost more than an ordinary Blu-ray player, and seemed worth the difference just for it being a better Blu-ray player and having multimedia streaming: the game-console aspect was just a free bonus, as far as I was concerned. I've been surprised to enjoy Rock Band as much as I have, but as for other games... there are plenty that, if suddenly I had four hours and nothing else I could fill them with, I feel sure I would be delighted to play them, but those four hours would always have other options I'd enjoy more.

I recently learned of the game Bioshock, which is, of course, old hat for everyone else who plays computer and console games. I downloaded the demo and got all the way through it. My conclusion is simple. I want to see the Bioshock movie, but I don't think I'd want to play the game.

Part of that is that the coordination required to do all the things you have to do at once doesn't come naturally to me. Towards the end of the demo, you're fighting a simple security drone (or actually, a nearly infinite series of them). You need to be able to simultaneously use one joystick to aim, another to move, plus shoot with one button, change weapons with another, and then swing a wrench with a third, in quick succession. With some practice I got to where I could just barely get through this; with more, I am sure I could get it, even get to where it felt almost natural. But I certainly do not intend to put in the amount of time necessary to get to where I am thinking, "okay, switch to the electrical weapon, fire, move in, duck, now close and finish him!" instead of thinking, "press L2, no wait I think it's R2, wait, where did he go? which joystick do I need, okay, now press the left and then the right."

But the real important takeaway is that that particular game, the act of mastering all those controls and using them to get through these combat sequences, doesn't have enough appeal to me. It's not that it has none. It's just that I'd have to get over a fairly hefty learning curve to get to where I'm experiencing the story more than the mechanics of the game, and that's what I really want. If there was a way to experience this same game, doing the same things, where without investing hours into it I could be immediately focused on the story, I'd probably be playing.

That's likely what people who have played a lot of first person shooters experience, in fact. They got acclimated to thinking about controls the way the games need, so well that it is second nature, years ago, playing much simpler games, at a time in their lives when learning that stuff was easier, and when there wasn't much else going on in the games. It's analogous to how I spent time playing games like Crowther's Adventure and Zork, games which seem simplistic now -- so much of the problem-solving is just random trial and error -- so that I can play games that for others might seem like too much learning curve to be worth the rewards.

Of course, the seasoned FPS pros don't want to play a boring straightforward FPS, the kind that used to be de rigeur, because they're over that. Instead, they want one where the mastery of FPS modes of behavior is assumed, so there's a whole complex story layered on top. But I never played those FPSes. For me, Bioshock is being thrown into the deep end having never seen water before. There's not nearly enough time to enjoy the story.

So what I really want is for them to make a movie. What I really found interesting was the complex storyline, the intriguing setting, and the moody, atmospheric visuals. And to my delight, word is that a movie is being made. Though it's hazy whether it'll ever actually happen. Plenty of movies have gotten a lot farther in than this and fallen apart. IMDb has a forecast release date in 2013 but there's precious little information there.

I suppose in a pinch I could buy the game and then find someone who knew it and just sit and watch them play. How silly is that?

The Gods of Mars

2011-02-03T10:00:00.001-05:00

It's been a while since I read A Princess of Mars due to my focus for a while on watching movies I had never seen, but should have. When my Archos died I went back to the Kindle for now, and picked back up with the next book in the Barsoom series, Gods of Mars.

In a lot of ways this book is a better one than the predecessor. It's as if the author is more confident and doesn't need to pull his punches. He also doesn't need to contrive a reason to end the story at the end of the book, since now he's confident he can go on to a third one (a similar phenomenon is often seen in the second movies of a series).

Where sequels like this often fall down is neatly avoided here. Often, the first book is full of a sense of the wonder of discovery, as we learn of a new land, and meet the people, and discover how things work. The first book certainly derived a lot of its magic from that. But often the first book also establishes too much of all this, in the process of ensuring we know everything we need for the story to happen, so there's not much left to discover in the second book.

At the end of the first, I might have guessed this would happen, but Burroughs is able to spend most of the book in parts of Barsoom that were barely hinted at in the first book, yet which do not contradict it, or seem tacked on, since they were hinted at. I don't think he can do this too many more times, though. Another book or two and he'll either be retreading, or stretching things too thin, or making it seem too contrived that there's yet another layer of secrets behind the others on Barsoom. I wouldn't be surprised if the books start to feel flat after another few, or sooner.

As before, he uses remarkable coincidence shamelessly. Our hero never walks blindly into a room without finding precisely what he was looking for, or the one person out of five million with whom he has a relationship, or the sole member of a species who thinks differently from all the others. What's particularly galling about this is that sometimes John Carter explicitly alludes to it -- he casts himself to fate, counting on it to provide something -- but other times he's as dense about it as a committee of rocks. Through about a third of the book, a revelation about another character so obvious I twigged to it literally on the second sentence of the character's appearance kept failing to make an impression on thickie Carter (and fate kept goofing on us by having the character about to say something that would make Carter have to figure it out, only to be interrupted at the last moment).

If I had to criticize the book, I would say that some of the grander scope that Burroughs undertakes gets a little tiresome. In his defense, when he describes a vast war of thousands of airships, he doesn't drag it out nearly as long as many modern authors, let alone older authors. (Jim Butcher would have filled three chapters with one airship battle that Burroughs knocks out in about two pages, particularly if it occurred in his Alera books, where he seems far more prone to that kind of self-indulgent blather than in the Dresden books -- or maybe it just seems that way because of how much more compelling the setting and characters are in the latter than the former.) Even so, sometimes it seemed like we spent too long on the actual war of all these warlike people. The first book had plenty of that, but it was always more personal; we saw it from the perspective of a few people in the middle of it, not a general floating above it, so we focused on the action of being in the thick of it, not the drier tactical stuff. That happens a lot in this book too, but once in a while, it meanders off into more tedious topics.

Overall, though, Burroughs seems to be more confident, and more ready to take what's good in the first book and add more spice to it. More political intrigue (but not enough to bog things down), more world-spanning action, and more message (though he dabbles a bit in heavy-handed pontification against religion and superstition -- a welcome message, but it gets repeated just a little too much).

Delayed openings

2011-02-02T10:00:00.006-05:00

As we watch the snow pile up, keep an eye on the forecast calling for another ton of snow, check the state's road conditions site (all roads are in bad condition), and hear stories of vehicles off the road everywhere, I kept calling the state's weather line. Took an hour to get through. Sure enough, "At this time, weather conditions do not warrant the delayed opening of state offices, or a reduced workforce" as usual, along with the regular reminder that departments can authorize time off if it's taken with actual leave time.

If I were able to edit video, I would want to make a little spoof video about this, but I wouldn't know where to start. Part of it is that the scene I want to use apparently isn't where I thought it was. In the movie The Day After Tomorrow, the main character treks across an apocalyptic snowfall trying to rescue his son; the snowfall has buried entire states, and killed millions. He has a little satellite-phone he carries around. At one point, I thought there was a scene where he's standing on the wasteland of snow making a call on the satellite phone, trying to check on the status of things, and ends up standing there with a stunned look at what he's hearing. I wanted to find this scene and edit it by putting the sound of that recording in so that's what he's hearing. Unfortunately, there's no such scene in the film; I must be mixing things up in my memory.

Oh well, it would only be funny to my coworkers anyway.

Harmony

2011-02-01T10:00:00.001-05:00

I decided on a "for the hell of it" basis to try participating in the Harmony competition this year as well as the Beauty one. That's one of the nine contests that we have once a year, building to the tenth grand finale. I wasn't aiming to win, just hoping to place, for once. Placing means taking one of the top five spots, but I came in sixth... by ten points (946 to 936). Again.

In previous years I have competed a number of times in a number of these contests, usually Justice, Harmony, and Beauty, and almost every time I compete, I take sixth. (It's impossible to say in Justice since it's more of a "playoffs" model; in Justice, I made it to the round where, if you don't get eliminated, you're sure to be in the final five, and then got eliminated. But four other people can say that, too.) It's not even that I want the prize; if I'd taken fifth this time, I would have given the prize to the person I beat into sixth. I just want to finally have won something.

The reason I don't isn't that I am not good at what the competition is in. (Though for Beauty, as I wrote previously, maybe it is.) It's mostly that the competition isn't fair: there is a huge advantage for whoever happens to be part of the nation that can field a lot of people (and other stuff) to harass the opposition and support them.

And that's what's really frustrating. This is supposed to be a competition for influencing (an in-game mechanic about using skills of persuasion on denizens), and my character is excellent at it, and I have prepared for it as well as anyone could. But like so many things in Lusternia it never ends up being about what it's about. Instead it ends up being about combat, because even though this is a no-combat event, combat is allowed. Yes, that's not a typo. "No-PK Event" means that anyone can PK as much as they like, but they're offered no extra bonuses or protection from repurcussions. Which means influencing skill and ability is not the biggest factor; it's necessary but by no means sufficient.

What really decides is, if you're part of the current winning organization, then you have all the advantages for winning even more. Most importantly, that means lots of people. Secondarily it also means all the mechanical advantages that all the previous wins bring: blessings, more power, commodities, and other resources like shrines (which are crazy powerful as weapons rather than being what they should be, primarily an arm of a god's influence). And this is allowed to affect almost everything, even things where it shouldn't, like Harmony. If we had a competition that was what Harmony claims to be, I could have seriously good odds not only to place but to win, but we've never had that contest, and it's a shame because I think it'd be nice to see it. There's so many things where being the combat-monster at the head of the unstoppable juggernaut is supposed to help you, that it would be nice to see what other things are like.

Another problem with the way this turns out is that almost all events in this contest keep going to the same small group of people each year. People who already have a Seal (the ultimate prize for these nine contests), or even those who already are Ascendant (the ultimate prize for the final contest), end up taking most of the winning positions. It'd be nice to exclude them to give everyone else more of a chance, but that would mean once you won a lesser prize you couldn't compete again for the greater one, which wouldn't be that fair either. Unfortunately it means it's always going to be the same people over and over.

Taking sixth is what makes me feel discouraged and not wanting to try again. I'd probably feel better if I'd taken eleventh. But after taking sixth about five or six previous times, taking it again by ten points is agonizing. I can't help but think of how many things I could have done slightly differently to get those ten points. In the end it came down to luck -- if I had run into one more of a particular denizen in the last three minutes, I would have taken fifth, but I didn't.

Oh, well. I have a whole year to decide if I want to try again (and try to find some way to be better next time). And to wish that somehow, they could make Harmony be about what Harmony purports to be about, and let the contests that are supposed to be about the other stuff (like War and Death) be about the other stuff.

Rock Band Pro Guitar with the You Rock

2011-01-31T10:00:00.001-05:00

At long last, I have gotten to use my You Rock guitar to play Rock Band 3 in Pro Guitar mode. I only played one song, twice, before I had to give up the TV, but that was enough to get an idea for how much of an adjustment it will be.

The song was one of the easiest in the game, I Love Rock 'n Roll by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. And it's really surprising how little there is to do. If you think of the song, you probably figure it wouldn't be hard to play -- and I bet it's not -- but on easy mode, you're playing about one note out of every group of chords. The song goes two chords, pause, two chords, pause, one note or chord; then repeat. In all of that, you play three notes, and in most cases, they're open-string notes, so you don't even need to finger a fret.

Even so, it was a bit challenging. Part of that was how I just jumped in with no more training than a single play through the very first lesson. A bigger part was how, after a whole song of playing open strings and fret 2, the solo suddenly threw me to fret 9, and I hadn't even counted out to see where those were. Though on my second try, I didn't do any better -- in fact, I got 87% on my first try and 84% on my second.

Having played guitar before, though never well, I think that's probably pretty good. I would never expect to be able to just pick up a guitar and play even the simplest song without going through it once slowly, at a very minimum. So while it's kind of a letdown not to have at least been strumming both of the two chords that come in pairs (would that have really been much harder?) at the same time it's really amazing, when you think about it, that you can pick up a guitar and do anything even distantly approximating just playing a song, in real time, on the first try.

In a way that shows what a challenge it is for Rock Band to make this an enjoyable experience. It'd be quite easy for them to make it so that it's too challenging to be enjoyable, and to lose the interest of those who just want to dive in and start playing, and for whom the idea of having to practice a song before they can play it well is off-putting. But of course those people can just play non-pro mode. But even for me, will I find it more challenging than enjoyable?

Ultimately of course I am going to focus on drums. But I do want to also try the other instruments in pro mode. I've heard that, on the You Rock, if you plug in to an amp you can hear what you're really playing as you play the game, and that in Expert mode, you get pretty close to actually playing the song. I don't imagine I'll ever have enough time to spend doing that -- I'm only up to Medium on drums as it is, and dabbled in Hard once or twice, and my lack of talent is far more pronounced on guitar than drums, and I've spent a lot more time on them -- but it's nice to at least be able to aim in that direction.

Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries, completed

2011-01-30T10:00:00.004-05:00

It took us four sessions, but we finally completed our expedition in Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries. Along the way, our intrepid heroes dealt with Chinese Tongs, rival academics, Nazis, yetis, a femme fatale, a drunk sherpa, snow leopards, time travel technology, a head cheese sandwich, bureaucracy, and shambling zombie Nazis, before discovering the ultimate secret of Shangrila: that it's really an alien research center, drawing humans via time travel from many times in history for study, and trapping them there with the promise of a paradise that makes one forget everything else.

It was, at times, rocky going. My group includes a number of people who Robin Laws would classify as "casual gamers" who are more there for the social interaction than the game, but games like this really work best if everyone there is really eager to be engaged and involved and proactive. And it was a very different style of playing. Most of the time the biggest thing holding them back was them worrying about being unable to do it -- once they stopped worrying about it, they did great, but they never believed they were going to. In the end I think everyone mostly enjoyed it (so they said) but also found it too demanding, and wouldn't want to do something like that very often. Maybe after a while we might try again (or dabble in another storytelling game), but for now we're going back to other stuff.

The rules say you're supposed to use a timer, and I think if we had, the whole game would have felt really harsh, tense, and un-fun. We felt pressured enough without a timer, and the amount of time they give is so small. It might have been good to have some time element, but not a relentless ticking of a clock with only three minutes on it.

We also had a hard time at times remembering to stay in the premise, where everything is in first person past tense, relating what happened previously, not interacting with the action in present tense. Sometimes we struggled with getting everyone into the action -- everything was about the person whose turn it was, and their Opposition, and the rest of the table was uninvolved. It often felt like we weren't on the same page about the kind of feel we were going for, or the genre tropes we wanted to pursue. Sometimes it felt like one player would set something up and then another player would quash it immediately, or close off possible avenues for the story, leaving those who followed less to work with. And it was really hard to capture the style the book depicts in how everyone talks, the whole grandiose tone. We dabbled with it, but it always felt like a strain.

But I found it really fun to stretch to try to make a story out of all the elements everyone was dropping on the table, and find ways to make it all come out like it was planned. One thing I realized partway through, that I hadn't really seen in playing at LoreCon, was that a common thing to do was to come up with a bit of storyline where you had to have a plan for where it was going to go, what it would turn out to mean, and yet you had to be ready to let it go and turn out to be something totally different. Almost everything you play in the game might turn out to be something different than you intended when another player grabs it, and that's a perfectly good thing. You have to be completely ready to let your ideas get reshaped, and still go to the effort of forming them. That's part of what some people had trouble with, though they may not have realized it. They were hesitant to put too much of an idea onto the table that someone else might have to change it, and hesitant to do anything with other people's ideas for fear they were changing it too much.

In all I consider it a success, slightly qualified, but a success. But we probably won't dive into another storytelling game for a while.

Spam texts

2011-01-29T10:00:00.000-05:00

Another unsolicited text message problem, but unlike the last ones, this isn't just some idiot with a mistake in their address book and a strange unwillingness to consider that possibility. This is a more ordinary problem: spam.

This one is some service which spams people with "inspirational messages" and then charges them for it. In addition to the dime-a-message I pay for texts (and which, infuriatingly, I get charged for receiving them as well as sending them, even though I have to pay extra to block numbers from sending to me) they want to charge me $9.99 a month for the "service". Where they get my number from in the first place is anyone's guess; I certainly did not, as their message suggests, "request" this service, nor did any of the other people I found online who got hit by this spam. The spam promises you can stop it by sending STOP back, but this seems to rarely work and if anything induces more messages.

So now I have to call AT&T which is always an agonizing experience for me -- I hate having to call anyone, let alone a customer service representative with whom I will probably have to argue. I have to try to avoid getting indignant too much despite that I have absolute cause to do so -- why is the burden on me to opt out of unsolicited spam, and then have to pay for the service of doing it?

I wonder how companies like this are allowed to continue to exist. (Just to be clear, I mean the spammers, not AT&T, though one could probably make that case, too.) How can they sign me up for some service (and add their fee to my phone bill) without my consent, let alone my explicit action? That should be against some kind of rule or law somewhere.

Movies on the go

2011-01-28T10:00:00.003-05:00

Two years ago I got an Archos 605 multimedia player, to stream music and movies to via my WiFi from the server. At least that was the idea. It turned out that streaming was never very reliable; plus the model I got first, the 4GB one with SDcard support, was plagued with problems, so I exchanged it for the 80GB model. That did mean I had to keep synchronizing my music library, but thanks to the free SyncToy software, that's not that hard.

Recently, I've been using the Archos during my exercise runs to watch movies, instead of reading books on the Kindle, just to get through a list of movies I felt I should have seen. I've also been using it with my noise-cancelling headphones on airplane flights. I still have about a half-dozen movies on that list, but in the last few days, the Archos has simply died. When I boot it up, it says the hard drive is screwed (it uses the more euphemistic "error code 102" way of saying it) and offering to repair or format the disk, neither of which work. This error can mean a lot of things and there are a lot of fixes for some of them, but if it never comes out, and it never becomes visible to the PC when plugged in via USB, what it seems to mean is that the hard drive failed. Some people have saved Archos units in this situation by reseating the hard drive, but that didn't work for me. One person reported recovering it by hooking the hard drive directly to a PC, but even then, it only delayed the inevitable by a little while.

Replacing the hard drive doesn't seem sensible, when a new unit would cost about the same as finding a drive of just the right size and capacity to work in this unit, and then having to fight with installing it. And while the Archos is a nice unit, modern ones are lighter and have better software and screens.

In fact, I have that cheap Android pad that would be pretty good for this, except that it runs an old version of Android, somewhat hacked together, and I have had little luck getting any video at all to play on it. I have one more thing to try: maybe I can get a better video player through the SlideMe marketplace that'll handle the various AVI and MP4 files I have (without me having to transcode the heck out of everything and waste hours thinking about codecs only to end up with a file that still won't play, or is only audio or only video).

I've tried the same with my cell phone, though its size and form factor are really not that great for watching movies (it's smaller than the Archos). On the other hand, its support for Bluetooth wireless stereo headphones is nice, but on the other other hand, that means it won't work with noise-cancelling headphones. Ultimately, though, it falls into the same trap: no video file I have just works. Maybe if I fiddle with alternate viewers and transcoding and stuff, I can find a solution, but it'd still be a hell of a lot of work.

But it's certainly tempting to simply buy something new. Archos has a very nice 7" Android tablet that is like what my cheap aPad is, only with modern software, some actual support, better capabilities, and a real company behind it, and it's not too expensive (about $150 right now). This would be a good way to explore a tablet for roleplaying as well as a better multimedia player than the Archos dedicated one was. I'm having to hold off the gadget-lust right now and try to make that cheapie pad do the job before I go buying the shiny pretty clever little gadget that keeps telling me "buy me!". I will be strong!

At least until tomorrow. When the aPad fails me, I will probably cave. Oh well!

More credit card fraud

2011-01-27T10:00:00.003-05:00

Geez, you'd think we'd had enough trouble with credit card fraud, but no. Every time we travel, we seem to have a problem.

Okay, that's not fair. The first time, after we went to San Diego, we came back to find that we'd had a fraudulent PayPal transaction; but it had already happened before the trip, and we only found out about it afterwards. And besides, the PayPal account in question had nothing to do with our travel. The second time, after our trip to the UK, the fraud was on the same credit card we'd been using in the UK (our Amazon Chase card), but again, it had happened back in the States before we left, and it was just coincidence we found out after getting home. (And this created a lot of extra problems, since closing and reopening the account cut off my access to the online activity report, which I needed to get all the UK-to-US currency amounts.)

This time, though, the fraud definitely seems to be related to the travel. We went to New York City and again used the Amazon Chase card for most of our expenses (since many of them will be reimbursed by my employer, as it was a business trip). About a week after we got back, I got a call from Ticketmaster asking about the two sets of season tickets I'd apparently purchased on that card. It's very nice that they double check, because the guy who called immediately reversed the transactions. I was suspicious of the call -- wondered if the call itself weren't a scam, trying to get the rest of my card number or something -- but he didn't ask for any more information. Even so, I waited on it, checking online activity, and for a few days, nothing showed up.

This morning the ticket purchases showed up, and the cancellations. They were for teams that a New Yorker might want to see (NJ Nets and Boston Celtics), so it seems likely that someone in New York who took our card wrote everything down and then got my zip code and phone number from other sources to do fraudulent transactions -- or that someone we did business with, in turn, had their systems compromised.

Chase, naturally, tried to blow it off as being just a mistaken key entry of a card number, as they always do. I know that mistaken entries are not that easy -- the sixteenth digit is a "checksum" so if you transpose numbers, or mistype one digit, the odds are very tiny that the resulting number will be valid, and if you make up a random number, there's only a 1 in 10 chance it'll even be a possible number (to say nothing of the odds of it being a real account number). But more than that, whoever did these two purchases also provided enough information to bypass the Visa checks (that includes my zip code at a minimum) and also enough information for Ticketmaster to get my cell phone number (either by giving Ticketmaster my number, or giving them enough information for them to find it themselves). There's no way that can be a simple data entry error.

Even so, the burden is on Chase, not us. If more fraudulent transactions appeared, it'd be their problem. But after talking with them, we decided to go ahead and, once again, close the card and get a new one sent to us.

I wonder if any of the credit card companies offer a service where they create a temporary credit card number and card, and send it to you to use while you travel. The new card would have a different number, but would still go into your usual account like purchases on the main card; the difference is, it would only work during the days of your travel, and would immediately stop working afterwards. This would be good for the traveller: more peace of mind about not having to deal with fraudulent transactions (because even if the cost falls on the credit card provider, it's still a hassle, and what if you end up maxed and can't use credit you need in an emergency until it can be cleared up?). And it would be good for the credit card company (less fraud they're going to end up paying for). And that means it's good for all the customers (since ultimately we end up paying for the fraud in the form of higher rates). I've seen something like this for online transactions (you go to a website and get an account number that'll last for just long enough for your one transaction of a set amount, and won't work after it), but not for a physical card, which you'd need to have for travelling. If no one offers this service, they really should. It'd be a win-win.

I can't name that many movies

2011-01-26T10:00:00.002-05:00

After the demise of the various trivia games in the area, Jen is now running a Name That Movie game weekly. The timing is really inconvenient: Friday at 5pm, which would be pretty good if I worked at the office on Friday, but since I work from home, it cuts the day in half and forces me to get dressed and Siobhan to drive all the way home and then back into town. Plus the timing nudges us towards eating out.

Not very surprisingly, I turn out not to be very good at it. Out of twenty movies, I've gone from a low of being able to name three, to a high of eleven. But in all the times I've gone, there've been only two or three times I knew a movie but no one else did. (Ironically, the two of these I remember, in neither case was it a movie I'd actually seen.) That's even true when there's no one there but Siobhan and me.

It's still moderately fun, more so when other people come so it's a social thing. But it's a lot less so than trivia was. The game is so monolithic: there's only one thing, so either you're good at it or you're not. Trivia encouraged team playing because no one was good at all the categories, but generally, Siobhan alone will be able to get almost all the movies our team gets. Joe, when he comes, does the same, and between them, they're unstoppable. (The one time we had both of them we got a 19 out of 20, blowing away everyone else.) I already liked trivia far better when we had a team than when it was just Siobhan and me, but this factor is even more pronounced at Name That Movie because most of the time I have nothing to do.

I hope that we get a trivia game eventually, or something that affords a bit more spread of subject matter and skill base.

The fandom niche

2011-01-25T10:00:00.004-05:00

Those of us into science fiction or fantasy, and the related culture of geekish pursuits, are used to thinking of ourselves as a niche market, because Hollywood insists on treating us that way and telling us that's what we are. But are we?

Sure, at any given time there's usually one class of TV show that's more popular than our shows. Right now it's procedurals (Law and Order and CSI plus a lot of ancillary shows), though "reality" shows are still huge. So we're not the biggest market they have. But that doesn't mean we're a niche market. If you add things up, our movies and TV shows and books and other products are a market at least as big as any other, and perhaps bigger. This is more noticeable at the movie theater, where almost all the blockbusters are our movies, than on TV, though even there, what was the biggest TV show of the last decade, with the biggest amount of buzz around its finale? Yes, a science fiction show, though one that didn't admit that's what it was for about a whole season.

And that's really where they get away with treating us as a niche market. It has nothing to do with how much size, or power, or money, we have. It has nothing to do with how important we are to keeping Hollywood in business. The reason is much simpler and much more insidious.

Hollywood takes for granted that we're already sold. Whenever they make a comic book movie or a movie involving spaceships, swords, or people blowing each other up, we're going to be there. Maybe for one movie we'll go five times and buy every version of the DVD, while for another, we'll only go once, or just rent it. But we're sold. They don't have to court us, woo us, try to persuade us. To Hollywood, we're the sluts they can always get whenever they want us.

So when it comes to marketing stuff, they typically ignore us, or treat us as a niche market, specifically because they don't need to court us. Instead, they play up their movie or show as being "not just sci-fi" in hopes of luring in all the other people, the people who need courting, many of whom really don't have any particular type of show or movie they like, so they're ripe for convincing. It's simple math. Market a show as sci-fi and you only get the people you probably had anyway. Market it as something more "mainstream" and less "niche" (the way first season Lost was sold) and you'll get us and a bunch of other people.

That's how they almost lost us with Big Bang Theory, now one of the most popular shows on TV but when it started almost a loss. They marketed it so heavily to everyone-but-us that they actually almost lost us, and we are its best fans, its core audience. I remember the early ads made it seem like it was going to be a show about this mainstream girl and her friends, and oh, they also have some wacky geek neighbors to make fun of. That's why I didn't watch the first season until later when a friend told me to give it a try. Judging from the talk on some TV fora I visit, this was a common experience for us fandom geeks.

Of course, sometimes they don't bother to go for the "mainstream" audience because a show is just too unavoidably sci-fi. Once they decide there's no point in going for the other audience, then they pander to us extra hard. Instead of treating the sci-fi elements as if they're embarassed of them, they run them out and focus on them, and on the explosions and gadgets. If we were really the unimportant niche market they like to make us think we are, they wouldn't even make shows like that, but they do. That's because, even if those shows are typically a lot more expensive to make, they still make a profit. Because we are a big, big bunch of people. We're a powerful force in the market. Just look at a list of the top grossing movies of all time and you'll see how much of it is us. We should stop acting like we're the freaks on the fringe. We're one of the most important markets that exists -- maybe the most important, since we're reliable.

Going back to work

2011-01-24T10:00:00.001-05:00

Today's my first day back at work after taking a week off, and before that, I was at the office only one day the previous week due to my business trip to NYC.

I've been keeping pretty close tabs on what's going on at the office, thanks to both my email, and the help desk system we put into place recently, which is working out very well (I think). On the other hand, I'll have two out of three of my employees out, and will also on Tuesday have a kick-off meeting for a big project. So I'm expecting to be buried and swamped, and probably to not get to spend any time working on the RFP I've been wanting to start on for a while.

Despite all the time off I have actually had my blog's buffer erode down to just a few posts, so I hope I have a run of ideas for post topics soon, or else we might return to the time when I don't have a post every day.

Here's hoping my return is more smooth and less tumultuous.

How to ruin sexy

2011-01-23T10:00:00.000-05:00

There are a few ways that a sexy woman can totally ruin the sexiness for me. Most aren't complete showstoppers, just big minuses that cancel out some or all of the sexiness. But they're alarmingly common.

Smoking: This one is a complete showstopper. It's not just that it's so big a minus that it cancels out all the plus anyone can bring to the table; it's irrationally more powerful than that. A woman who smokes automatically has a zero in sexiness no matter what she looks like to me, so there's no positive for the considerable negative to counter.
Piercings: I don't mind ears being pierced no doubt because of the cultural exposure, and I am not too turned off by the less visible piercings. But some of the people I see around make me think, unfairly I realize, that they should be on a poster labelled "Give generously to help the victims of industrial accidents" and that is a real turn-off; a woman would have to be really, really sexy to overcome that. What I see more often lately, and even on soccer moms, is a single little pinhead that looks like an artificial metal pimple near the lip or on the nose. I don't understand those at all. If they had a pimple they'd pay anything to get rid of it, but instead they install a metallic pseudopimple. I don't get it, and it is definitely a minus for me.
Unnatural Hair: I don't mind a woman having dyed or bleached hair that's still a color that is natural for hair. I'll even make a small exception for some artificial red hair colors that are not too wildly unnatural but still not quite real red hair colors. But unnatural hair colors are generally a turn-off. A sexy enough woman can still be sexy enough to overcome it, but it's a minus.
Tattoos: The idea of someone getting a tattoo is very much a turn-off, but the actual result of getting a tattoo not nearly as much. A small, tasteful tattoo is only a small minus, but it is a minus for me.

I suppose the same would apply to men, though I am less prone to noticing if males are attractive or sexy by their appearance.

CMUD versus zMUD

2011-01-22T10:00:00.008-05:00

The process of trying to get the mapper in CMUD working took far too long, and I don't just mean the couple of months when I had to put the project aside and work on other things. I spent a few hours on it yesterday and didn't quite get it working. More importantly, I just got too frustrated with really basic instability issues.

Just to be clear, at this point, I don't have anything near a system set up in CMUD. All I have is a few triggers (manually made there) and the Rainbow Queue system, which is a few triggers and a few aliases. That's it. And yet I still have some troublingly basic instability issues. Notably:

I gave up on importing zMUD settings. Even importing from a very bare-bones zMUD file created for the purpose with nothing in it causes CMUD to lock up, 100% repeatably. What could possibly be unusual about my system to cause this?
Clicking on any of the other tabs on a trigger causes it to lock up. You can't even test if text matches it. This is not 100% but is highly repeatable: it seems any trigger in the form {some text|some other text|a third possibility} stands a good chance of doing it, though if I delete and recreate it sometimes the new one works.
Right now, whenever I try to run CMUD from the Start Menu shortcut, it simply beeps and closes down without any other action. I can see it appear in Task Manager and then vanish. This is true even if I delete and recreate the shortcut. Double-clicking on the actual EXE works, though. Bizarre.

I'm not happy about abandoning CMUD. The promise of working on Windows versions later than XP is a big one to lose. The improvements, small though they are, in the programming language are nice. The chance to use ATCP or GMCP, and the hope of future versions using these for the mapper (and using that XML imported map) are huge. But if, in version 3, after years of people saying "too unstable" and Zugg saying "no, really, I've done a lot of work on stability this time", I can't even get the program to run from a shortcut, or examine a trigger in a bare-bones settings file, the fact that I might be able to work around these and make a usable system is not sufficient. I'd be having to fight with CMUD, instead of work with it, ten times more than I do with zMUD. And that's saying a lot.

Technically I'm not saying "never" because, who knows, CMUD version X.Y might actually be serious about fixing the stability issues. However, at this point, I think I can hope for MUSHclient or Mudlet to take seriously the shortcomings in their mappers faster. So I suppose that means, disappointingly, that I have to stick with zMUD and try to make my Rainbow system in it after all.

So now I'm cranky about all the time I wasted on CMUD. From the fact that months have gone by and I've been able to put in about one week's work on this, you can conclude that time is a significant factor. (Even when I take a whole week off from work, inevitably I get given a lot of chores to do and half of it gets used up before I can start.) I dig into working on Rainbow reluctantly, worried that that effort will all be wasted too, because Mudlet will have gotten usable before I can finish. But I've got to do something. Waiting isn't working either.

Make A Wish

2011-01-21T10:00:00.000-05:00

It seems like the Make A Wish Foundation has started a new advertising campaign. Either that, or it's a coincidence that, right after seeing lots of ads for them in New York City, I saw one on TV. (There are certainly ads for a lot of things in NYC I don't see ads for back home. The USA network in particular was saturating the billboards and buses with ads for their shows, for instance.)

I feel for the kids that Make A Wish is helping, and I certainly don't object to their mission. But I've never chosen to give them a contribution, and I don't intend to. Why? Well, an answer to that runs the risk of the budgeting fallacy. Taken on its own, in isolation, you could easily argue that the Make A Wish Foundation does good work, and therefore, deserves to be funded. But you can't take it on its own, in isolation. Every dollar that goes to the Make A Wish Foundation is a dollar that is taken away from some other charity. (The exception: people who give to Make A Wish money that they would not have given at all otherwise.)

Ultimately, and I know it seems callous to say so, what Make A Wish is doing seems superficial, shallow, and unimportant to me, compared to other charities. That doesn't mean it's meaningless, that it's nothing. But I would much rather see the money and effort spent on something that actually makes the world better in a lasting way.

If someone's wish is to see a celebrity, and the celebrity is amenable, and the whole thing can be arranged through a few people donating some time plus some paltry travel expenses, that's fine. But some of these wishes are elaborate and expensive. Ultimately the Make A Wish Foundation has a large budget and that money is going somewhere. What if you could take half of that money (and thus deprive half of the kids getting wishes of getting their wishes) and use it to buy medicine that would save one tenth of that many kids from dying? Because there's no question that that much money could easily save that many lives if it were directed to one of the many charities that helps people in immediate need for whom solutions already exist but just aren't available -- food, clean water, medicine, shelter, and safety being the main things that can be provided but aren't.

That doesn't mean I think we should gut all other charities in favor of immediate needs. Some of my charity money goes to feed the hungry and bring medical care to the needy, but some of it goes towards longer-term sources of hope, like environmental protection efforts, and developing technology that may take centuries before it can help what I think is humanity's biggest problem (overpopulation). But it's all aimed at making the world better, bringing hope of real improvements. Sometimes this can be very indirect: for instance, money spent on encouraging the arts is also encouraging the kind of intellectual development that leads to the kind of good changes in the world we need, so while buying tubas for schoolkids isn't saving lives, it does contribute to doing so in the long run.

I'm sure one could make some very tenuous and indirect path by which Make A Wish does that, too. But I think it'd be hard to defend that it is making, even in the long term, a difference that even remotely compares to money spent buying watershed land or funding space exploration, let alone sending doctors and antibiotics to Africa. Am I missing something about what the Make A Wish Foundation does, or is it really just putting sentimentality ahead of true benefit to the world, because no one has the heart to say to a dying child, "that's not really a good way to spend our resources"?

Whiskey stones

2011-01-20T10:00:00.002-05:00

One of the things I got for Christmas was a set of whiskey stones. These are simply cut stones, made here in Vermont, of a size similar to an ice cube, and intended for chilling whiskey.

I don't drink whiskey, or alcohol in general, but I thought they'd be useful for the beverages I do drink: mostly things like soda and lemonade. I am perpetually seeking a perfect solution to keeping these cold. I drink a lot, and I like to bring a pretty big glass of whatever to my desk so I'm not up getting refills every twenty minutes. But I like my drinks cold.

Ice cubes are good for making a drink cold, but not for keeping it that way for any length of time. They melt which not only means they aren't helping keep it cold anymore, they're diluting the drink. I used to use glasses that had a layer of ice inside the glass itself, but while that didn't dilute the drink when it melted, it still melted fast, and then wasn't keeping the drink cold anymore. Making ice cubes out of whatever beverage you're drinking is also good for avoiding dilution, but it still doesn't have a very lasting effect, and if you're drinking different things it's a pain to keep ice cubes for all of them handy. At work, since I pretty much only drink lemonade, I just have two cups and at any time one cup is about 1/5 full and in the freezer, forming one huge ice cube, which lasts a lot longer at keeping my drink cold; but even that's not quite as long as I'd like, and it wouldn't work well for soda, even if I drank only one flavor at a time.

So far the whiskey stones are a better solution than any of those for soda, but they're still not ideal. They do hold their coldness longer than ice cubes, though still not as long as I'd like (larger stones might work better for that). One of the things that makes them good for whiskey is that they don't make the drink as cold as ice cubes would, but that isn't as good for soda. I wonder if there's anything that's as cold as ice cubes, but longer lasting, and not anything that would dilute the drink. I wonder if there'd be a significant market for such a thing.