• Simply awesome story about a dude with cybernetic arms.
• Nintendo Revolution to play TurboGrafix-16 and Sega Genesis games. Woo!
• Stories that make me wish I was a lot smarter so I could understand Physics and Quantum theory: Scientists create a new superfluid (this Wikipedia entry may help comprehension on the article); other scientists getting closer to artificial gravity.

Overheard Quotes at the Hamilton House That Sound Vaguely Naughty But Really Aren’t

“Honey, after you finish your cereal can we look for my pants?” –Nik

I’ve been waiting a lot lately. Thursday after work I waited for three hours for the train to arrive—in the rain—while they attended to “track work” 45 minutes earlier up the line. Eventually I got sick of being cold and uncomfortable so I called Nik to come pick me up. We had dinner while we waited for the traffic to finish clearing.

Friday we had to be at the hospital for Nik’s surgery at 5:15 am so we hurried over there and the staff there proceeded to separate Nik and I for as long as humanly possible until just before they wheeled her off to another part of the building I was not allowed to go. I shuffled from waiting room to waiting room trading one uncomfortable chair for another, exhausted and wanting sleep but not getting any unless you count my rear end going all numb and pins-and-needles from the “cushions” on the seats.

I tried to keep myself occupied with books and various computing activities such as watching Battlestar Galactica on my laptop but nothing was interesting enough to suffer through the discomfort for very long. Eventually the doctor came and told me Nik had done just fine and I’d be able to see her in a little while which turned out to be an hour and a half.

Fortunately Nik was fine and in good spirits when I came in to see her and it wasn’t very long at all before she was getting up out of bed (albeit slowly and with some understandable effort) walking herself to the bathroom and so on. It was pretty clear by about 1:00 pm that she was doing fine, eating before she was scheduled to, mobile before she was scheduled to and clearheaded before she was expected to be. They had originally said that she would have to stay the night but I was thinking pretty early on that she might as well just go home.

Here’s the thing: I’m no doctor so I don’t know squat. It would certainly be tragic if a patient were rushed out of the hospital before they were ready and had a setback which required them to come screaming back in via ambulance or something shortly after getting home. But generally speaking I think that there needs to be some kind of mechanism in place to evaluate patients based on their indicidual progress. A nurse actively denied Nikki some solid food because she said she didn’t want her to throw up. Anyone who knows Nik knows that she’d rather have performed the surgery on herself minus the anaesthetic than vomit even a little bit so her asking for food was pretty much a 100% guarantee that she was ready for it. Of course when she finally did eat she kept it down fine.

Sometime after dozens of lame TV shows a nurse finally noticed around 6:00 that Nik was doing fine and suggested that they try to talk to the doctor about discharging her early. (Digression: I’m a fan of TiVo, the product. I think people should buy and use TiVo and for the most part I like TiVo the company, too. There are many, many upsides to TiVo but there is one pretty major downside which isn’t expressly obvious at first but gradually becomes clear: Once you get used to watching TV on TiVo, it absolutely positively sucks trying to watch TV without it. I’m not even talking about commercial skipping exclusively here, either, although that is a major appeal to TiVo. I’m also talking about the fact that in the three plus years we’ve had and used TiVo, I can remember maybe one or two at the most times where I’ve felt like watching TV, sat down to watch it and found nothing to watch. If you configure TiVo properly, there should almost always be something you’re interested in waiting for you. Watching the hospital TV with it’s abridged cable channel selection and dodgy remote during peak daytime TV hours was probably the most painful thing Nik had to endure the entire stay. I know it felt like I was getting a lobotomy.)

Of course they couldn’t find the doctor to authorize the discharge so we waited. And waited. Technically visiting hours are over at 8:30 pm. When that came and went I started to wonder how this was to be handled. On one hand the hospital isn’t exactly a hop skip and jump from our apartment or even our home town. We’re talking about a solid thirty to forty minute drive and that’s for a guy who’s working on not much sleep and a long exhausting day of being completely useless. It’s rather amazing how tired literally doing nothing can be. I’d almost have rather worked a whole day truth be told. I’m glad I was able to be there for Nik but my actual value aside from providing Nik reassurance and the occasional display of sympathy (expressed via a complex facial expression that takes literally seconds to fabricate) could have been measured in nanoliters.

At around 10:30 the doctor finally bumbled in (getting out of his last surgery of the day which if you calculate means that he had been cutting people open and toying with their insides for about 17 or 18 hours which is somewhat disconcerting) and looked at Nik and said, “Want to go home?” She nodded. “Okay!” he replied cheerfully. And that was it.

I thought if that was all it took I was pretty sure there had to have been someone that could have done that six or seven hours earlier. But I think Nik was just glad to get to sleep in her own bed. She and I had both been worried up until right before he walked in that I might have to take off without her and leave her overnight regardless of any doctor permission because my ability to safely drive home was rapidly diminishing. Fortunately I had enough left in the tank to push through the discharge procedure and make it home in time to crash and spend the rest of the weekend working.

Fin

If you’ve asked me for help, assistance, contact or have invited me to something, presented me with a project idea or offered me any kind of opportunity in the last three months let me extend my humble apologies to you. I’ve been working two taxing jobs since December one being my day job and the other being a long contract assignment. Well I think I finally finished the contract assignment over the weekend so all those things I’ve procrastinated on might actually get some attention now.

I mean, I’m still a Level 14 Procrastinator so don’t start holding your breath or anything, I’m just saying I don’t have to actively procrastinate something else to procrastinate your deal.

Point Shot With Commentary

• As mentioned above I finished my contract assignment and I think I’m going to take the opportunity Bosslady offered me to go on a contract work hiatus. My new job has been more intense than even my pessimistic initial projections predicted. Because of this trying to balance everything has gotten me pretty wiped. Anyway, my final spoils from this last job should be something pretty nice since I’ve put so much time into it. Having maxed out my old iPod, I was thinking about doing the upgrade thing. It is interesting to me that I was concerned when I first got it that I might not use it enough to warrant the price. I think I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it and probably fivefold. I use it all the time. Incessantly, you might say. The new black 60GB model looks pretty sweet but then today I see this Engadget bit and it just makes me grumpy. To wait or not to wait?
• I know I mentioned Dr. Mac’s blog previously and perhaps in passing let slip that Mrs. Mac also has a blog. I should point out that she updates far more often than he and her refreshingly frank comments about new motherhood are funny and fascinating at the same time. Highly recommended.
• I was griping about not getting sports scores on Netvibes the way I can with My Yahoo! Ryan seems to have made it his mission to correct this oversight and I think he’s found something that will work from Fox Sports.
• After my rant about MMORPGs the other day I ran across one that apparently is not only letting people play for free, but also supports Macs. If anyone out there is interested in playing, I’m willing to give a free game a shot but I’m not going in alone. I’m scared.
• Have you seen this gizmo? It lets you point it up in the sky and get information about what constellation you’re looking at. Spiffy! Not shipping for another couple of months and no indication what they’ll run you when they are available, but pretty cool nonetheless.
• Mark Rosewater is a designer for Magic: The Gathering. I haven’t played Magic in a long time primarily because I can’t afford to stay in the game and I already have an excessively expensive gaming hobby picked out but I still observe the game in a detached yet pseudo-interested way. Mr. Rosewater writes regular columns that are fascinating glimpses of the life of a game designer and he occasionally crosses his observations about design pitfalls with life lessons, as in the link above. Good reading.
• Last up today is a link I’m hestitant to post. First thing you should know is that it’s uproariously funny and had my eyes watering with laughter on several occasions. The close second thing you should know is that the humor found herein can be pretty blue so if you’re a young’un or sensitive to that sort of thing, steer clear. Also, if you don’t like comic books you probably won’t get it or care anyway so you’re off the hook as well. If that doesn’t elminate everyone, the rest can check out this site describing how Superman is really a big jerk.

Things—I presume them to be thoughts—swirl in my brain like two halves of a solution that won’t quite blend. Think of Nestlé Quik and milk: No matter how vigorously you stir, there will always be lumps of chocolate goo. Whether that is a negative or a positive thing is largely subjective. I still submit that it isn’t meant to be so.

I forgot what I was talking about.

Games a-Plenty

My spare thinking time has been devoted quite a lot to gaming lately. The recent convention has some to do with this; the upcoming KublaCon is another factor. Regardless, I’ve been concocting adventures, scenarios and envisioning minutely detailed painting on tiny figures… not to mention the scouring of gaming websites and magazines which tell tales of victorious and varied board games, video games and their ilk.

One thing which struck me as significant in all this is that there is a lot of overlap among gamer geeks (previously I’ve referred to these people as “hardcore gamers,” though the distinction is purely academic) but the focus levels are so diverse and numerous that even with overlap, there is still a lot of splintering among the community. What I mean is that there are loads of people who play games which reach beyond the comfort level of your “average” individual whether in terms of committment, depth of involvement, complexity or social stigmas. Yet among the teeming throngs of people it can be difficult to find consensus about where the line is drawn.

In some cases it can be a money thing. Investing in a tabletop miniatures game like Warhammer takes a lot of time and effort but above even that it can be really pricey; I estimate that my 40K army is worth (note that I did not pay this amount because I got a lot of good deals and recieved significant portions of it as gifts) around $1,000. Video games, too, can be really expensive: At $50 minimum per game and noting that a single game can hold one’s attention for maybe a month if you’re lucky, we’re talking about $600/year and that’s not counting the cost for a console system itself which would bring video gaming up to around that $1,000 mark (more if you’re a PC gamer). Board games cost upwards of $70 each and if you schedule a game night per week you might get away with a single game per month but I’d say it’s more likely to play one game three times unless it’s really great. Point being, most people don’t have the financial resources to focus too heavily on more than one or two aspects of geek gaming as a whole.

I notice this as a problem because what ends up happening is that you have all these potential customers who would be involved in this aspect or that if they weren’t already being consumed by another aspect. Games Workshop, for example, I’m almost positive has had meetings where top brass discuss how to get video gamers to start spending some of that cash they’re burning at EB Games over at the GW store instead. I’m reasonably sure that the existence of Dawn of War is evidence of these meetings since the game (while quite enjoyable—don’t misunderstand me) seems in many ways like a big advertising campaign for the tabletop game. “Did you like this video game? Try the home version!”

The response, aside from some of these sorts of cross-genre experiments, to continual splintering of the marketplace has seemed to be the industries constantly raising the prices citing rising production costs. Head over to any forum dealing with Games Workshop games to see an example of how this sits with most customers (I presume in recommending this course of action that you’re comfortable with 14-year old guys drawing insights such as “that sucks!” and I feel safe in presuming that because, well, you’re here and that’s the sort of insight I typically draw). The problem with hobbies like this is that when it comes down to it you can either accept what the content providers are doing in whole in order to stay with the activity you enjoy or you can discard it entirely: Middle grounds are hard to come by short of dropping into “casual” status.

With all these elements in place what really suffers is the secondary markets: Add-ons and supporting products which should be providing competition but instead suffer from legal issues and limitations that make them rarely necessary and often difficult to implement properly, especially if the original intellectual property owner finds value in offering something put out by a thrid party. Consider the external hard drive for the PS2: It shouldn’t have been a big deal for someone other than Sony to put out a cheap, reliable hard disk with a decent capacity that plugged into the PS2 and offered nearly unlimited storage space for games. And what a return on investment over the $30-40 memory card from Sony which offers a paltry eight MB space. But until Sony released their official hard drive, none that I know of were put forth to consumers. Why not?

Probably the reason why not is that third party accessory developers know that customers have a limited appetite for non-official add-ons because they pay so much just to stay in the hobby to begin with (remember how easy it is to drop $1,000/year on this stuff) that any extra—no matter how useful—are regarded as a vehicle for gouging the customer.

Here’s the point that I’m getting to: There is a very useful program called Army Builder that helps miniature gamers build their army lists. It isn’t specific to any one game system so it covers some of the overlap/splintering among the gamers. But the product costs $40 for a one-year license after which you may continue to use the product although you are no longer eligible for updates and feature enhancements. I’ve heard several gamers on forums grumbling about having to drop even the $10-15 per year for a license “bump.” I understand Wolf Lair’s desire to keep piracy down and their explanation for how they’re doing this makes a certain amount of sense. Yet from a gamer’s perspective I can see how $40 (that’s the price of an elite unit in 40K, like five metal Terminators) plus a yearly $15 fee (the price of a metal HQ unit in a blister pack) could feel like a gyp.

Which leads me to what I was thinking which was, why couldn’t Army Builder be done with PHP or Ruby on Rails and Ajax? The interface is pretty simple and the heavy lifting is pretty much done behind the scenes as part of what I’d call definition files specific to each game and/or army, so essentially the hard part would be setting up a flexible framework and then getting someone with a thorough understanding of each game’s (or army’s) rules to build the def files. My thought process is that if the tool itself were built such that the deliverable medium was a web browser, the need for licensing goes away and with something as useful as this the overhead for a webserver/host could be covered with some unobtrusive ads while the development costs can be covered with a simple login and one-time fee of much less than half the cost of AB. I can even envision a situation where the ads cover the cost of the entire product or you could add special features in for small fees like the ability to save your army lists on the site (rather than to a local file) for access later. I even like the AB trial idea of allowing unlimited use for armies less than x points (AB uses a 500 point threshold).

Anybody out there interested in a joint programming project? Better yet, anyone know of someone else who beat me to the punch?

Indigo Romeo Oscar November Sierra Oscar Alpha Papa

I’m getting better about talking to customers on the phone.

That doesn’t mean I like telephones any better than I used to, only that out of necessity I’ve learned to value their immediacy because when my choices are to deal with one customer ringing up fifteen SLAs in a day due to back-and-forth emails or picking up the phone and resolving it in twenty minutes, my stress level protracted over a day versus a painful twenty minutes is simply not worth it.

The one problem I have is that often I get into that weird situation where I’m having to give explicit instructions to enter a series of commands or I need to verify some spelling or other. When accuracy is important, the limitations of verbal communication as a medium for written (or typed) interfaces becomes clear. As a matter of fact, I think that communication in general suffers most obviously whenever the intended effect is to transpose from one to another. People talk often about how it’s hard to convey tone or mood in an email; this seems strange when you consider that authors have been conveying tone and mood via written words for centuries but the distinction is that emails are intended to be spoken conversations by proxy which is where the breakdown occurs.

Anyway, I hear a lot of other techs around here doing the whole “F as in Frank, B as in Boy” routine and I decided quickly that the problem there is no two people use the same “as in” examples so potential disconnects between speaker and listener still happen, even with all the extra effort. “No! B as in Boy, not T as in Toy!” et cetera.

So I decided I was going to learn the military alphabet. It goes as such (and I’m doing this from memory as an exercise):

Alpha
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
Indigo
Juliet
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Uniform
Victor
Whiskey
X-Ray
Yankee
Zulu

As a means of drilling these into my head I’ve been walking around transposing every sequence of letters I can see into these codes. License plates are good for this: I have a habit already of examining the three-letter sequences in the middle of California licenses for short words or acronyms (like initials of people I know or computer/geek terms… I’ve seen SSH, NES, PNG, DRM and EXE before, each time I feel a secret delight that has no rational source). Now I look at them and repeat mentally, “Sierra, Sierra, Hotel; November, Echo, Sierra; Papa, November, Golf” and so on.

Does that make me weird?

Don’t answer that.

The Horror

A couple of months ago I wandered into the breakroom at work. On the table there sat an innocent-looking sheet of paper. The header said, “Girl Scout Cookies Order Form.” I broke out into a nervous sweat. My addiction to the drug most commonly known by its street name, Samoas has been well chronicled. At the time, though, my health habits had been maintaining a steady, strong pace in the realm of “good” for over a year. One box won’t hurt, a voice in my head whispered, not entirely without menace. I decided the voice was right. I’d been good. I deserved a treat.

Fast forward two months. The new job has me running ragged. I haven’t worked this hard—literally—in over four years. Hey, I worked in government; what do you expect? My days are long and exhausting; I spend my spare time trying to balance sleep and spending some time with my wife. Did I mention I still have outside contract work duties? Needless to say things have had to give and the first to go was my daily gym visit and the second to go was my focus on healthful eating. I suffer as a result, I know this. I feel badly (both in terms of general well-being and guilt-wise), I’m gaining weight and I’m not at my peak in terms of any of the things I need to do. My mood is sketchy; my energy level is limp; my stress in occasionally unmanageable. The time to change is now.

Somehow, the menacing voice in my head knew this would happen. I stare at the box of coconut and caramel bliss on my desk, delivered fresh this morning by a jovial but wicked co-worker to whom I gleefully handed over my lunch money in exchange for his product. “There’s more where these came from,” he offered. I glanced down, shamed, and out of the corner of my eye his face twisted and distorted into a devilishly inhuman grin like those creepy guys from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, “Hush.” When I looked back quickly, it was gone. He was normal. “Enjoy!” he cried and inside I wept.

The voice is back now, harsher and less soothing. It implores me to eat. And eat and eat. The discomfort I’ve felt of late: It is not some silly weakening of resolve and atrophing of muscle tissue. I am not weary from long hours and hectic schedules and pressure from many disparate sources. No, the voice assures me, all I have been missing are these cookies.

I turned the boxes around so the bottoms face me and the tops are pushed against the tan/grey fabric of the cube wall. A printed message on the box bottom reads, “Open Other End.” As I read it, over and over, it comes through in the voice’s now grating rasp. It doesn’t seem like a helpful consumer warning, it reads like a dictum urging me to action. My resolve, already weak, slips like a sweaty finger clinging to edge of a sheer cliff. The voice returns now, given shape and form and it brings its foot down on my clutching grap, cracking fingers beneath a patent leather shoe. I tumble and my final vision is that of the voice’s physical manifestation, wearing a green sash dotted by hand-sewn patches, glaring down with triumphantly burning red eyes.