Despite my weariness last night, I toughed out most of the Sharks pitiful, painful loss to the Mighty Ducks. Everything they had done right Tuesday night versus the Kings they did the exact opposite versus Anaheim. They skated slow, they left things up to Nabokov, they made low percentage passes, they waited until the last period to make a run for some points. Most telling though, was the chink in the Sharks armor that started to show. It was exactly what I was afriad it was going to be—but up until last night it had failed to manifest itself in any exploitable way—I think the Ducks were the first to catch on and they certainly used it to their advantage.

Here’s how it goes: Joe Thornton shows up and the team starts to play up to their potential. They win some good games and more importantly they start to look good. Or at least look better. Then they run across a team that just has more jump than they do; they’re feeling like they’re scrambling too much, their offense isn’t clicking and they’re overworking their goaltender. So what do they do? Give it to Joe.

When the Sharks are looking good, I don’t have a problem with them deferring to their best player: That’s just good play. But when they struggle I think they start to feel like Joe Thornton is their only hope; that if they just let him take over for a while something magical will happen and they can come out on top. So they start making desperate looking passes in Thornton’s general direction hoping for a miracle. Guess what? It doesn’t. Instead smart opponents (like the Ducks last night) catch on and start circling JT and looking for that inevitable pass and jump all over it. Give Thornton credit for staying with it despite the whole team looking for him to deliver a one-man show, but I think we could have a big problem if the rest of the Sharks don’t realize soon that Thornton’s biggest contribution often comes from the fact that he’s dangerous in so many ways that opposing teams will give him too much attention and leave opportunities open for the rest of the team to shine.

The key is, they have to step up in order to do so.

Meanwhile I’ve heard two Sharks-related rumors this week which bear mention: One is that Evgeni Nabokov may be quietly on the trading block and the other is that Owen Nolan is coming back from knee surgery and when the dust settles between him and the Leafs he’ll probably be a free agent and the upper management in San Jose has expressed some interest in bringing him back to the Sharks.

First let’s talk about Nabokov. Should they trade him? No. Look, Toskala is a decent backup goalie but the guy is simply too much of a flopper to be a day-in-day-out guy. He gets some great saves but a guy with that much freestyle is going to get worked more regularly than a technically sound guy like Nabby. Every goalie has their off days, but Toskala has them as often as Nabokov and he plays about a third or fewer games. Nolan Shaeffer was brilliant in his short stint earlier this season and I certainly would love to see more of him but if you put the burden on Toskala I have a feeling you’d be seeing Shaeffer pretty quick and I’m not certain he’s ready for a full-time starting gig just yet. Now put him behind Nabokov and we’re suddenly talking my language. Which would of course mean that something would have to be done with Toskala. I have an idea: Let’s put a trade together for an offensive blueliner in exchange for Vesa, someone who can actually make a few of those distance shots from the point on power plays. I’m just sayin’.

As for Nolan: Look, I was pretty sorry to see him go three years ago. Nolan was an important part of the San Jose Sharks That Don’t Suck revival and it took awhile to get past his absence… for the whole team. But we’re talking about a time when Patrick Marleau was a wet-behind-the-ears n00b and these days… well, these days he’s the new Owen Nolan. I’m not saying I don’t want him back but remeber why they ditched him in the first place to the Maple Leafs: He cost too much money. Now he didn’t do a whole lot in Toronto and he’s coming off a surgery. I’m sure his asking price has cooled quite a bit but if it came down to keeping Joe Thornton into next season or getting Nolan back to stick to the salary cap? I’ll take big Joe, thanks.

Think I’m stupid? Let me know.

You will, I presume, forgive me if I start to ramble and become incoherent. See, I’ve been up since just before 4:00 am this morning. There were some very reasonable and logical reasons behind this unusual approach to “slumber” but whatever they were they no longer seem very important and I honestly can’t remember what they were anyway.

I’ve been working as an official support person for about four days now. I scarcely recall the days now where I thought, “Man this whole training process is tedious… things will be much better once I start getting down to work.” At this juncture I’m too busy longing for the sweet serenity of those halcyon days to contemplate the bitter irony that lies at the center of those sentiments.

It’s not that my job sucks; hardly. The environment is good, the customers I’m tasked with supporting are overall competent and people are understanding and supportive of my necessarily rough transition. Plus I get paid well and the work is interesting. The problem is that those competent customers are more advanced than I (something they’d find delicious were they to ever know, I’m sure) and when I say “interesting” what I mean is that at some distant point in the future I can imagine this work to continue to be as challenging and rewarding as it may be now, only in my current state of ignorance it feels much more like mind-melting avalanches of foreign data and concepts that my already tiny brain holds in the manner that a thimble holds the ocean. Which is to say—not.

I remember trying to learn about Linux (and Unix in general I suppose). It was frustrating because just when I thought I was getting it I’d get stuck or I’d come across a concept I couldn’t fit into my brain as though it were a piece from a different puzzle entirely and could not be forced in no matter which way it was turned. I have the distinct deja-vu style sensation these days only the extra wrinkle is that in addition to trying to put together some kind of sense of understanding on my own behalf, I’m trying to help others at the same time. Eventually I was able to grasp enough Unix/Linux concepts to where if I had to I might be able to do this job for that but we’re talking about something I’ve been fiddling with for around six years as opposed to something I’ve been exposed to for six whole weeks.

I Can See Through the Windows

Another minor perk of the job is my new work computer. The Dell Inspiron notebook is an impressive business machine: 2 GB RAM, 2.13 GHz processor, a hefty graphics card capable of 1920×1200 resolution (on the built-in screen!) and 80 GB hard drive. Okay, okay, so it’s a Dell which means I’m all Windows-bound. Well, so is the product I’m supporting (for the most part) so I have to deal.

It’s funny though because I’ve used Windows for a very long time but it has been these past few weeks where my usage of any alternative system for anything useful has been relegated to a few sparse hours here and there after hours or on weekends. Now this is Windows XP Professional which, by most accounts, is the best version of Windows you can get. I’ve had to be quite familiar with the special little tweaks of Windows in a hurry. Know what? Heresy though it may be, I really am finding it not that bad. The key of course is that I did not pay the $120 or whatever ridiculous fee they charge for a system that is “meh, not too terrible” but as far as an OS I could live in, I admit that by and large it gets the job done.

Neil Stephenson had an essay called “In the Beginning There Was the Command Line…” in which he used an analogy of cars for operating systems. I’d say an apt description of XP Pro is that it’s like a Ford Taurus: It’s not “cool,” it isn’t really fast, no one thinks it’s special but it gets you from here to there. Eventually if you have it around long enough it’s bound to show some rust, but by then you’re probably thinking about a new one anyway. Which is why I’m more attracted to OS X and *nix, because at least there the polish and attention to detail is more pronounced. Or, in the case of *nix, it looks maybe as bad or worse but will last you until the next Ice Age, provided you don’t run it into a tree or something.

Anyway, abandoning the stretched metaphor, here are a few of my gripes in “un-switching” from being primarily a Mac user to being forced into primarily Windows use.

1. Built-in spellcheck. Look, I can’t type. Literally I have no touch-typing skills so I do a sort of hybrid hunt-and-peck thing which mostly just results in me making about four typographical errors per word entered. Which is why OS X’s nearly universal spelling support is refreshing like stepping outside after a spring rain. Typing these posts, for example, requires me to be extra careful because there is no spelling service for webpages. OS X lets you select “Check spelling on this page” once and forever more that same page will check your spelling as you type. Also, Shift-Command-D when hovering over a word brings up a mini system dictionary entry. Anywhere in the interface. Brilliant. Windows has nothing of the kind.
2. AirPort. I had the DSL router provided by SBC which included a wireless component running my home network for a long time. Two things conspired to make me change this, all stemming from the fact that my first few efforts to get the wireless network working (using encrypted connections) were utter failures. One was that the AirPort Express I got several months ago would periodically drop the stream from iTunes. I had no explanation for it other than that at some point during the signal transfer from the SBC router to the APE, enough of the buffer would be lost to kill the stream. The other was that I couldn’t log into my company’s extranet through an unencrypted wireless connection for security reasons. Knowing the hassle it was to try and do the encryption thing from the DSL router, I opted to simply make the APE the access point for the whole house, figuring the set-up for AirPort had to be easier. I was right. 20 minutes, in and out, had the 128-bit encrypted network up and running with both Macs humming along on it just fine. Of course when I tried to connect the Dell to it something went wrong because Dells aren’t AirPort equipped so they need to have the hex password entered by hand. It took several tries to get it to work once I figured out what was wrong and I once again felt a pang of regret recalling all the things that “Just Work” with Macs.
3. Mail.app. Outlook: Thou art mine worst enemy. Seriously, whoever thought that Control-Q was a good shortcut key for “Mark as Read” needs to be set on fire. Anyone else remember what Control-Q is usually reserved for? Yes, quitting an application. What a great time to break with convention! Just in time to make sure that from now on, any time I’m using a normal email client, I’ll be guaranteed to shut it down half a dozen times from my habit of hitting Control-Q all the time! How wonderful. Also, Mail.app includes a very simple set of rule-making parameters that can be set to do all sorts of interesting things. Ever tried to make Outlook do something fairly simple on a regular basis? Exactly.
4. Terminal/iTerm. One of the joys of OS X is that it has Unix under the hood. So when you need to do something Unix-y, you just launch Terminal.app and rock and roll. Windows has festering piles of human remains under the hood, so if you need to do something Unix-y you’re stuck using third party apps. I admit that PuTTY isn’t too bad as a Windows-based command line tool. But the fact of the matter is that even the oh-so-simple Terminal.app is better than PuTTY (in my expert opinion) and most of the PuTTY replacements are not-free-as-in-beer while OS X has to have nearly as many gratis terminal programs available as Linux. And for the uninitiated, that’s a lot. I think every CS major in the US university system is required to write a free unix-based terminal console in their first year or something.
5. Pretty. I’ll admit something fairly embarrassing: I kinda like the bitmappy fonts used by a lot of the Windows system. I think it’s something like Arial 10pt. with no anti-aliasing. It’s just clear, easy to read and scalable, which is nice. But when it comes to non-system stuff, I prefer to look at something a bit more appealing. Web pages for instance. Anti-aliasing in OS X? Check. Windows? Don’t make me laugh. Want to know 99.8% of the reason that nearly every web page in existence looks better in Safari than MSIE6? Anti-aliased fonts. OS X even anti-aliases Word docs for crying out loud. Windows likes jaggies. Jagged edges are business-like. They command fear and respect. Or they command customers to ask, “Why is Windows so lame?” You know, whichever.
6. The Dock. I know, I know. The Dock has its own set of issues. But you know, given the choice between the Windows taskbar (even the new XP “smart” taskbar) and the Dock? I choose the Dock. I admit that I wish the Dock wasn’t the place where app windows minimized; if you have too many docked application launchers and you minimize a few windows your Dock shrinks until your icons are the size of plankton. But at least the Dock shrinks! It at least gives the impression of trying to help you and stay out of your way. Windows’ taskbar gives you the idiotic option of auto-hiding and tries to slurp similar minimized windows together (which is a bad design decision in my opinion because it adds another level of searching to find the window you want), but the size never changes to adjust to what you have going on. I have my taskbar set to twice the usual height so I can fit enough minimized windows down there without killing the preview (I see people with tiny taskbars flip through dozens of windows at about 1 pixel square trying to decipher the microscopic icons and find what they want… compare and contrast to OS X’s using the screen itself as the preview) and have all my application shortcuts visible (why have them if you can’t get to them?). This wastes lots of screen real estate that could better be used for something else, but my options are limited.

But you know what? I bought Dawn of War the other day and it runs on my computer. A PC game! Who knew?

And for the record: It’s awesome.

Awesome.

Awesomer.

Two events in the last two days have gotten me thinking about courtesy.

One was an IM gaffe: Nik IMed me while I was on a Webex session, sharing my co-worker’s desktop and unable to see her message. By the time I got back to her she was incensed that I had not replied and instead had “rudely changed my status.” In fact my IM client had set me to auto-away after being idle for a period of time but the perception was that I couldn’t be bothered to say, “Now’s not a good time” and had instead switched my status as a means of saying, “Scram.”

The second is this article in Wired about courteously using technology (Warning: Article contains some rough language). You might think I’d be in favor of such an article, and the general sentiment I do agree with, but the overall presentation of the article suggests a rudely overbearing attitude that completely undermines the thrust of the message and misses the mark about the root cause of a lot of these issues.

The point I’m trying to make is really a simple one: Technology is presenting us with a completely new set of social problems that need to be thoughtfully dealt with and—in some cases—reasonably adjusted to. The mistake that is often made is applying practices and prejudices to new methods of communication, work and entertainment that really only apply to established routines.

I’ve spoken on the subject of IM before. Aside from the usual trouble of forcing people to be half decent writers who might not otherwise be so inclined and therefore subject to the pitfalls inherent in the limitations of printed text, the method of connecting to and disconnecting from conversations is atypical enough to become open to serious misunderstanding between people or groups who approach the medium with different mindsets.

In the example from above, I obviously made a mistake in not setting my status to “Away” prior to switching my view away from the running programs. But consider this: Nikki herself is nearly always logged in and online in AIM, yet her status very rarely changes from “Away,” even when she’s actively chatting with someone. Her rationale is something along the lines that she doesn’t want to feel obliged to chat with any ol’ person who pops online just because she’s perhaps available. By the same token, she won’t necessarily answer the phone just because it’s ringing and she could pick it up. Communication, to her, is at her discretion.

From a certain perspective one can understand the sentiment. Modern communication is more invasive than ever, thrusting itself upon us almost ceaselessly. The problem with this as evidenced by our (very minor, for the record) misunderstanding is that at some point there will be competition for our attention. Being connected via technology to a massive number of possible people and places simultaneously (not to mention our regular sphere of influence around our physical selves) means that increasingly we run the risk of having to play conductor to a barrage of competing communiques. We have to learn how to leverage our understanding of this phenomenon with our desire to take advantage of the technology that is simultaneously interrupting our status quo.

The problem I have with a lot of people who whine about cell phone use in public is that if some people had it their way cell phones would never be used except in the privacy of one’s home. Which is just retarded. Where I see these cell phone nazis arguments falling short is that they seem to forget that people can be annoying by having distracted, animated, volumous or emotional conversations face-to-face with someone. I’m sure you’ve sat in a restaurant at a booth next to some couple having a serious relationship crisis or next to some oversized sales buffoon with a voice projection range of 2.4 miles: The point is that people don’t need cell phones to be obnoxious.

But somehow the inability to eavesdrop on both halves of an annoying conversation makes it infuriating to some people. To whom I have to say: Get over it. Irritating people are going to find a way to be irritating with or without cell phones, ringtones, body odor, close talking, halitosis, soup slurping, pretentiousness, dry mouth smacking, IM buzzing, email forwarding or any of a billion little things that could potentially drive you crazy. And you know what? You irritate someone out there, too.

Really the solution to any perceived problems with these technologies is to find some method of determining what an appropriate social inclusion standard for them might be. Like saying “Hello?” when you pick up the phone, determining what page most people ought to be on would help ease some of the growing pains of having these types of situations arise.

There needs to be a bit of give and take on both sides: People embracing technology need to understand that circumstances ought to dictate behavior instead of capability. Just because you can have a conversation with someone in a movie theater, doesn’t mean you should. Some people still haven’t gotten the clue that talking through a movie is rude, so this is always going to be a work in progress. But likewise the detractors that spend more time griping about other people’s use of communication than is truly warranted need to understand that just because something changes the way we co-exist with each other doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t adapt to it.

Here’s what I’m getting to: I’m suggesting a window of opportunity for communication exchanges to establish and a second window to keep them active. Not a technologically-mandated window mind you, but a socially enacted one. Because the primary gripes and problems seem to stem from people competing for each other’s attention, here’s what I’m saying: First of all, use the methods offered by the technology itself to coordinate communication exchanges. Set status messages (note to self); leave voicemails; redirect calls and emails, etc. Secondly, I think a rough one minute or one and a half minute delay time in establishing communications is good enough. Think about a phone call: Most phones don’t ring for five minutes straight, waiting until the callee is ready to answer, they ring a few times and if it isn’t picked up, the communication is never established.

This applies to IM easily enough, if I send someone a message that says, “Yo what up” and I get no reply for a minute or two, it’s fair to say that the recipient is not ready, able or willing to engage me in conversation at the moment. Socially I should take that no worse than I would if I called and got no answer on a regular telephone. Sometimes people just aren’t available. No harm, no foul. But the same can be applied to in-person conversations where some party is otherwise engaged in a communication, such as when a person on their cell phone reaches the front of a check-out line. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the checker to wait for a minute or so and then ask the customer to step out of line until they can attend to their purchases.

The final step is to recognize the end of a communication session without necessarily having received a clear “All done” signal. The delay time there might be a little longer, but interrupted communications will probably be resumed at a later time so I’m actually inclined to say that the window there ought to be shorter. If someone becomes unresponsive for thirty seconds or so, disconnect the communication and re-establish it upon the unresponsive party’s return. Again, the biggest element should be the social acceptability of saying, “I got interrupted when talking to that person, but it’s not a personal affront to me, it’s just a fact of having to deal with interacting with people remotely.”

And of course one’s physical presence and surroundings should always take precedence.

Read Stuff. What Else are You Going to Do?

A couple of interesting things I happened across:

• Here are some screenshots of the Internet Explorer 7 beta. Wow, what a shock: They completely ripped off Firefox. You know what? I bet Firefox suffers for it, too. It’s a shame.
• A curious article describing why the current income tax system is doomed to fail.
• Looks like the new Intel-based Macs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Honestly, I kind of wish that IBM could have done what Apple was looking for with the Gx chips. Somehow having to re-code everything, run stuff in emulation (Rosetta) and all that hooey sounds like a big pain in the neck; plus as long as Macs contained a fairly unique chip I could say to myself, “This is why these machines cost so much more than a similar PC.” Now I have no idea why they’d cost as much except that Apple can get away with charging what they do. At any rate I certainly won’t be getting a MacBook Pro anytime soon despite the fact that I wanted a Powerbook up until last week. Not that it matters; I’m getting a new laptop from work today anyway which puts me over my maximum capacity for personal computers as it is.

In sports, or at least in sports fandom, there is typically a certain dichotomy that involves misery for the sake of entitlement.

The sports fan may find him or herself asked, “Why do you bother with sports when your sorry teams upset you so?” The answer is that we suffer because we feel that we cannot enjoy our victories—rare though they may be—unless we feel that we deserved them. Like John Elway finally winning his Super Bowl, we define our level of vindication by how long we have suffered in tortured agony before the moment of glory arrives. Don’t believe me? Compare the fan reactions of any recent New York Yankees World Series title—or heck, compare them all put together if you like—with the reaction that came with the Red Sox winning just one lone title… in nearly a century of trying.

Once might think that the oft-victorious Yankees might be more apt to claim superiority. After all, they have won and won often in that same 86 year period where the Sox went deeper and deeper into the pit of fan misery so you could reaosnably say the Yankees, overall, are better.

Sports fans don’t think like that. The Yankees win so much that being a Yankee fan is almost like cheating: Ask any baseball fan who doesn’t root for the Bronx Bombers what they think of the Yankees and Yankee fans. Just don’t ask the question around impresionable youngsters. At some point dominating teams are deemed unworthy of loyalty: Championships that come easily are championships unearned. In general we root for crummy teams in order to feel as though we have worked as hard to get the rare moments of glory as the actual players on the fields. Our support is not physical or tactical: It is strictly emotional. In such a case, smugness is tantamount to cheating.

Bay Area fans are masters of the emotional toil. We play home to the Warriors and the Giants. Our other baseball team is the perpetual underdog Athletics. Even when the A’s were good enough to win the ultimate title in baseball, the victory was bitter because they did it against the Giants, proving only that even when good things happen to Bay Area sports teams, they still make the fans suffer.

Since my time as a Bay Area resident and fan, we’ve had only one chance to truly feel like deserving victors: The glory days of the Joe Montana/Dwight Clark/Jerry Rice 49ers in the 80s. It is in fact the one highlight of my entire sports watching, emotionally exerting career and look what remains of those days now: Absolutely nothing. The Niners are the worst team in football and show no signs of improving. Oh, my work is so hard; give me water, I’m thirsty.

For the record, I don’t count the Raiders in any of this. The Raiders are not a Bay Area team. We don’t want them. Even Raiders “fans” don’t really want them. We can tell because they don’t bother to show up for their teams’ games, while the 49ers—who can be virtually counted on to lose all their games in spectacularly embarrassing fashion—outsell the Raiders no matter how bad they are. The Raiders are to Bay Area sports as Oakland is to the rest of the Bay Area: A redheaded stepchild we wish would just go away. When your team is mostly famous for being cheered on by thuggish baboons in comical rubber spikes and shoulder pads and your city is mostly famous for introducing the global punchline for ignorance sometimes referred to as “ebonics” (which surged ahead of the city’s previous claim to fame of being a breeding ground for gangsta rappers) you have capital-I Issues. When I heard the Raiders were coming back to the Bay from LA (which I think was a much better fit, coincedentally), I momentarily hoped they were literally going into the Bay; as in they would fire all the players and dump the Oakland Colisseum and all related Raiders merchandise into the ocean. It was a short lived but very happy moment.

Back from the digression, I watched the Sharks play against the reigning Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning last night and I realized for the first time that the Sharks are building toward what could very well be a contending championship team. I’m not making any predictions here, remember that smugness is cheating and I’m no cheater. No, all I’m saying is that the Sharks have the potential to at least make my misery sublime by losing in the Stanley Cup Finals. I mean, I could see it. When they play the way they did last night it seems hard to believe that they don’t have it in them to push through into the biggest opportunity to choke yet.

Did you see the second period? It looked (and the OLN commentators pointed this out) like the Sharks were on a Power Play. Only they weren’t: It was even strength and they just forechecked and cycled and hustled and peppered Burke with shots. When you see teams play that way you think: They have it clicking; they can score at any moment now. I’m used to seeing the upper eschelon of the league play like that: The Colorado Avalanche used to do that to the Sharks regularly; the Red Wings play like that—well, always. And so on.

I’m sure there will be a key injury down the stretch and someone (probably Cheechoo) will go ice cold after the Olympic break and they might limp into the playoffs and maybe even give a surprising underdog-like surge of hope only to fail at the prime moment to give Bay Area fans their dose of remorse just when they thought they might have to learn to live without, but every once it a while it’s nice to dream without the pipe; to think that maybe—just maybe—this could be the year.

My oh my, that’s the sound of the fans; working on the chain gang. Ooh. Ah.

Bits/Bytes

• On accident, Nik broke my iTrip while we were in the City this past weekend celebrating her stepdad’s 50th birthday. Since I drive the Honda which doesn’t have a better means of playing my iPod through the stereo, I went over to the Apple store on my lunch yesterday and picked up a replacement. The newer model uses a turning knob and a digital display to change the target frequency which is so much better than the old method of playing a small audio file (one for each freq.) and then going back to the playlist. In a weird way, she did me a favor.
• I hate the fact that I carry just about all the music I own around with me but I can’t listen to it while I’m at work. It just sits there, begging to be played. I suppose I could transfer a bunch of mp3/aacs to my work machine but that drives me nuts. Why duplicate effort? So anyway I’m looking for a better solution. Headphones are not an option since I need to be able to hear and talk to my co-workers (plus I’m going to be spending a lot of time on the phone starting next week). I’ve been looking at those docking station/speaker hybrids, but I don’t want something that costs more than a new iPod (my limit is probably around $100 maximum) and I may be saving up for a newer iPod here in the next few months as well (since mine is just about maxed in capacity) so it has to be forward-compatible from both the 5G iPods and my 4G Click Wheel 20GB. Thoughts or suggestions welcome.
• I’ve been doing some work with JavaScript for an eggsites client recently. Every single time I work with that language I end up thinking the same thing: JavaScript is ill-fitting pants and I would rather chew through my own wrist than develop with this sorry excuse for a poorly documented “language.” I wonder why I didn’t get that JavaScript development job a few months ago?

Yes, yes, I turned 29 last Friday. I won’t bore you (more than usual) with in-depth analyses of the weekend and surrounding events, but I will offer snack-sized morsels to give you the gist. Oh, and I should thank those kind souls who sent their electronic well-wishes. Your sentiments were very well received indeed.

• Thursday night Nik, Lister, Whimsy, HB, Gin and I went to see the San Jose Sharks trounce the Columbus Blue Jackets. It was the first game I’d seen live since a playoff contest in (I think) 2000. The score was 6-3 (most of the Blue Jackets’ competitiveness was supplied by the brain dead refs and Vesa Toskala) with Jonathan Cheechoo scoring a hat trick. Since I missed his first hat trick this year die to a TiVo gaff, I like to think he made the repeat performance just for me. Also, Whimsy and Lister arranged to have the light board flash “Happy 29th Birthday Paul Hamilton” between the first and second periods. It was a very happy evening.
• Friday I took the day off of work and spent it attending to a variety of business. After an exhausting day I decided to just relax that night, postponing any celebratory activities until the next night.
• Saturday we went to Red Lobster and HB and Gin bought me a wonderful dinner and followed us back home where HB whipped us all at Settlers of Catan (again).
• Sunday afternoon we met up with Lister and Whimsy for more gaming action, playing Seafarers of Catan, an expanded variant of Settlers plus we got a chance to test out Lister’s Christmas present, Ticket to Ride Europe. Both games were very enjoyable, even to the extent that Nik went and bought the original Ticket to Ride this afternoon. If you like elegant games with light strategy and lots of variation from session to session, I’d strongly recommend either of these titles (and their variants).

Graphics Gap

I was reading an article in Electronic Gaming Monthly earlier where they were interviewing Peter Moore from Microsoft. The primary thrust of much of the article seemed to be “Why are the XBox 360’s graphics so anticlimactic?”

Now I certainly don’t want to be labeled a Microsoft defender but I have to say that coming down on the 360 for lack of jaw-dropping graphical prowess seems to indicate a serious lack of overall clarity in terms of expectations for video games in today’s market.

Lemme ‘splain.

A big “ooohh, buuuurn!” moment in the article was where the interviewer pointed out that the magnitude leap between Playstation 1 and Dreamcast was simply astounding. Where was the similar leap this time round? The comparison was Soul Calibur (PS1) to Soul Calibur II (Dreamcast) and yes, the differences there are astounding.

But what’s missing is the comparison no from one console to another but rather from the newest console to the very best graphics available. And that benchmark has shifted: Back in the NES days, you couldn’t get more impressive graphics than in an arcade. Now arcade games almost lag behind consoles… sometimes last gen consoles. In terms of technology, arcades are maybe third tier. For the last few generations of consoles the top marks have gone to the PC platform (granted, a very expensively endowed PC). What has happened though is that slowly the consoles have begun to shorten their generational timeframes (think about how long the NES or Playstation were tops and compare that to how long this last generation lasted… maybe four years compared to seven or more) and in the process they have started gaining ground, graphically speaking, on the top of the line PC games.

So thinking about it that way, XBox (not 360) games were pretty darn close to PC caliber—excepting maybe a few recent PC games which came out toward the Xbox’s end of cycle like Doom 3 or Half-Life 2. Now, PCs will always have an edge because they aren’t tied to the cycle of dedicated hardware: As soon as something beefier comes out, some manufacturer will ship it because they can and leave it up to the consumers to figure out how to afford it and install it into something that will work for them.

I look at it this way: When you compare Call of Duty 2 on the PC to the XBox 360 version, there is very little difference. CoD2 may not be the most impressive PC game (graphically speaking) but as long as the 360 isn’t slouching on current PC games and its full potential hasn’t been tapped, I think it’s fair to say that buying a next gen console is probably getting you as good as graphics can be right now.

The question should be whether the Playstation 3 will be able to surpass or keep up with the advances of PC graphic cards for longer than the 360. This remains to be seen, but flogging the new ‘Box over some lack of shock and awe is pretty bad form on EGMs part.

I happened across this story following up some previous discussion of online digital music pricing schemes. A fairly light bit of discussion ensued both online and in the office about the prices of music (digital or otherwise). A specific observation jumped out at me from a couple of sources: Music doesn’t really depreciate in value due to age.

This is actually not a novel realization, but rather it bears mentioning because at least from my experience, it is one of the few types of consumer products that does not follow the standard older-is-cheaper cost model. Even other entertainment varieties like movies start off relatively expensive and flow downward into a less and less costly series of plateaus until they occasionally even end up free (in an edited form) on TV. Or at least free for the cost of a few commercials.

Take the Beatles albums I received for Christmas recently. Calculating inflation suggests that the current cost of the CD (roughly $15) means the comparable price in 1969 (when—say—Abbey Road was released) would have been $2.79. I can’t find anywhere that lists what an LP went for back then (and I wasn’t around so I have no first-hand knowledge), but I did find this economic flashback site that suggests milk was about a fourth the amount it is today. If that is roughly equal to the rate of inflation, you’d expect music to cost about $11-12. So in truth, music may have actually increased in price.

Normally you might expect something that has been around for nearly 40 years to have lost some of its marketing potential. In this case however it seems that supply and demand are operating on different-than-usual principles. The question I have is whether more units of Abbey Road could be sold if the price were universally dropped to, say, $4.00. I find it hard to believe that demand has remained constant for 37 years, no matter how good the product may be. Usually when demand slips some on an older piece the answer is to leverage the price to reflect the new, lesser demand but the record companies are leaving them the same (or perhaps increasing the price)… to what end?

I actually think the problem lies in the fact that the best advertising for a song is the song itself. Compare to the way movies are marketed and distributed, where a teaser or trailer and a series of reviews give consumers an idea of what movies they’d like to see. The movie is released in theaters (a relatively expensive way to watch a show), then to pay-per-view, then to home video, then to premium cable TV and perhaps eventually to network/broadcast television. All along the way the movie can make money (assuming there are enough people interested in seeing the film) without having to give away the entire experience gratis. With music the consumable product is commonly considered to be the packaged album itself, but while there is a set of critical avenues consumers can tap into to find out what the “experts” think and social networks operate as well (“Here, check out this CD I just bought…”) the primary industry-approved method of advertising the so-called product is via video play and radio spins.

The underlying problem there is that the consumer gets, for the most part, a consumable portion of the end product without charge. Theoretically they even get the best part of the end product free because the singles are supposed to be the highlights of the record. Motivating factors for album purchase are then relegated to play control and the off chance for added value in terms of additional non-singles tracks that might be worth listening to or some other semi-tangible like album artwork.

If it were up to me (and it isn’t, nor will it ever be) radio stations would hardly ever, if at all, broadcast anything resembling a playlist. Duplicate song broadcasts would be almost non-existent and raido would be more of an exploratory medium centered on the disc jockeys or on-air personalities… like a big collective of podcasters only with the blessing of the recording industry. You’d tune in to hear what Funky-J or Peter Spinz was playing tonight, not to see if you might catch your station playing that new Nickelback song or not. If you hear the song once and like it, you’d better go try and nab yourself a copy of the album because you might not hear it again anytime soon.

New release albums could go ahead and be marked at whatever the industry wanted them marked at. $15-20, whatever. But the sustenance of that price level would be determined solely by demand in terms of units sold in a given period of time. Once the threshold for price dropping had been reached, the albums would all be cut down to a different price level, like $10-12. And so on.

I realize that to a certain extent this already happens (ever seen a $5.00 bargain bin full of Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits and Belinda Carlisle?) but the problem is those bargian bins are usually only stocked with crap that most people don’t want. The demand for a particular album has to stoop to practically zero before something will be discounted to the level of reason for most people. You never see Metallica’s black album or Bob Marley’s Legend in there because those albums still sell decently even years after their release. But the key is that they might sell even more if the price were lower. Who wants to pay $18 for a replacement for your scratched and warped Under the Table and Dreaming?

Other Hits

• The Mystery Spot: Not so much with the voodoo.
• Ford and Dodge have been doing this retro/modern thing with their industrial design lately, specifically with some classic muscle cars. The new Dodge Challenger looks to continue the trend… maybe even more so. Now if only Chevy would get onboard with this concept and create a new Camaro that looks exactly like the ’68 only with, you know, more power.
• Awwww yeah! Man, I love it when USC loses.
• I thought I was the only person who hated MySpace. That may actually be true, I don’t know, but at least I can say Neener neener neeeeener. I’m not going to, of course. But I could.
• There is a really great article (mistakenly being passed around as an example of someone firmware hacking their cochlear implant, but that’s not too important) on Wired about hearing loss, the science of listening to music and bionics. Plus it features one of my favorite pieces of classical music, Boléro prominently. A good lunchtime read.

Dr. Mac follows up with some comments regarding the Netflix blurb I posted yesterday:

So yeah, that whole Netflix thing. I think they must rent video games soon. For the first time ever I’m seriously considering jumping ship. Circuit City has GameznFlix which is about half as much as Netflix, has games, and from my limited searching has a pretty good selection. There were very very few things in my Netflix queue that they didn’t have. Plus switching to them and dropping Netflix and Gamefly would save me $30 a month.

The only problem is that a) I don’t like Circuit City, b) I do like Netflix and have been a long time customer, and c) Netflix adds extra things with the friends, the suggestions, etc. But if Netflix doesn’t get [videogames] on board soon sheer economics will make me try out GnF’s offerings. Over $300 a year can’t be ignored.

Now, I dropped my GameFly subscription sometime last year. I didn’t really want to and perhaps as a result I’ve played a lot less videogames. I’ll let you be the judge on that, but I consider it maybe not a bad thing but at least unfortunate. For me, the price difference is more like $10-11 per month since I only do Netflix (at the $20/month level) but that still means about $120 in savings per year plus the ability to rent videogames through the service.

But dismissing the extras that Netflix has is difficult: On one hand I don’t want to be married to a particular brand or service, but I must admit that I kind of like having a place where I can rate every movie I watch and then go search on those ratings. I’m sure there are other, independent sites that offer the same functionality or possibly even non-service based software suites that do it. But I really only maintain the ratings (which helps Netflix with my recommendations) because I’m already on the site to manage my queue anyway. And not just that but I know a couple of things. One is that Netflix at least for now is in the lead in terms of this type of service. That means that I don’t have to play the emotion-roller-coaster ride the way I typically do by latching onto products that are not market leaders (hello, TiVo and Apple) wondering if they’re going to be able to afford to keep afloat long enough to let me continue being a customer. GnF may be a nice hybrid, but they look the way Netflix did about four years ago: Like a fly-by-night with a chance to make it. I gambled on Netflix and have been happy since (mostly) but I’m not sure I feel like doing it again.

Still, that $120 is hard to ignore and cheaper plus better usually equals decision made. Not sure why this is different, exactly. Maybe I just keep hoping Netflix will wise up and make the decision for me. Maybe I’m just lazy and the prospect of rebuilding a 220+ movie queue is too daunting. Maybe I want to show solidarity and not be one of those people that jumps ship at the first sign of something even marginally better.

Yeah, probably the lazy thing.

I strongly dislike being let down. I assume this is a fairly human condition and in general other people can empathize with this sentiment. And as near as I can figure, there are two ways to deal with it: One, you can try hard to look on the positive side of everything. By seeing even negative events for their shreds of redemptive qualities and working hard to keep that plucky spirit alive and well in the face of adversity, disappointments can be kept at bay. The other option is to lower your expectations to the level where you hope so little for anything that nothing disappoints. How can it? There were no expectations to be met in the first place.

Guess which mechanism I subscribe to. I’ll give you a minute, if you need it.

Here’s how this works for me: Everything becomes an object for scorn or cynicism. A new movie is coming out that looks interesting. I’ll say stuff like, “That might be cool, I should check that out. Of course, it will probably be total poo because it comes from a major Hollywood studio and their crap-to-quality ratio hovers around 98:2. I’m sure I’ll hate it, maybe I should just wait for the Netflix and then give it two stars or less. Heck, I could probably give it one star right now and save myself some time.” This happens constantly.

The upside of this approach is that on the few occasions that something does actually strike me as being useful or cool or worthwhile, it has to work so hard to overcome my negativity that it surges into a revered place within my inner workings. The downside is more subtle: Placing a sheen of unfounded contempt upon the world of unknowns is, in a word, exhausting. Eventually I find that being cynical takes more effort than dealing with a few let downs might. Logically, the whole approach doesn’t compute.

I don’t know what made me start thinking about this. I turn 29 in a few days. I’m fine with that. And I didn’t think I’d have to worry about the whole return of Saturn thing (primarily because astrology is the biggest waste of human thought this side of superstition). I suppose though that while the thought that planetary movement could have some sort of predictable effect on or influence over my life (aside from, you know, the one I’m standing on and how it hurtles me through space), I will concede that one could falsely apply causation to astrological events for otherwise existing independently.

That said, I have been feeling more introspective lately. I could attribute it to the job shake-up situation… but then again I could also attribute it to planetary realignment. Point is, I’m sure you’ll be hearing more existential whinging soon enough. Consider yourself warned.

Some Stuff I Found Around the Web

• Joss Whedon does his thing with the words in a guest TV Guide column describing the future of TV. A quick read, and worth it.
• I like mash-ups. They’re fun and sometimes you can gain a new appreciation for an older song with a bit of a fresh spin. If you’re likewise-minded, check out this list of good mash-ups from last year.
• The Motley Fool thinks Netflix should rent video games, too. My agreement is emphatic.
• Observe a potentially interesting overview of a study rendered useless by the vague, emperically-deprived “fact” listings.