I watched the Super Bowl this year with a handful of friends and a peculiar contented certainty that it was costing me $5.

There are a lot of sports fans at my work. They decided to have an office Super Bowl pool whose mechanics were fairly interesting (at least to me, since I’d never heard of it before—apparently it’s pretty common since everyone else seemed to have heard of it). The way it worked was there were 100 squares on a 10×10 grid. It cost $5 for a square and once the grid was full of names, they randomly assigned numbers from 0-9 to each column and row. The columns were assigned to one team and the rows to the other.

At the end of each quarter in the game, the scores would have the tens digit removed and if the numbers matched the resulting scores, the person with the intersecting square would win $100. There was also a $100 reward for the final score, separate from the 4th Quarter result.

At first my inclination was to pass on it. But two things convinced me to go for it: One was that 1:100 odds at a 20x return are pretty decent odds. But since I don’t put much stock in trying to play odds (1:100 is still only 1%) what really convinced me was that the guy who started the pool needed just a few more squares filled to make it happen and was running out of candidates so rather than be That Guy Who Ruined the Pool By Being a Total Stick-In-The-Mud, I decided to chip in. Losing $5 wasn’t going to kill me, at least not outright.

When the randomized numbers came back I had Seattle: 0 and Pittsburgh: 1 which wasn’t as bad as my cube-mates 2 and 5 (2s are really tough to come by since it takes unusual scoring like four field goals or at least one missed extra point and fives are even worse… 35 points is the best hope for a 5 match and that’s pretty high scoring for a Super Bowl), but still wasn’t like 3-7 or 7-4. I decided my only hope would be 21-10 Pittsburgh, which sounded like a 3rd quarter score to me and a fairly unlikely one at that.

So I went to watch the game at HB‘s place fully convinced that I wasn’t going to win.

Now if you watched the game and remember the final score, you know how this is going to end. But what happened was that I kept waiting for my chance to pass: You know, for Seattle to score that third time or for Pittsburgh to break it wide open and pass over the three-TD mark. The game kept going and I stayed in it.

As it came down to the fourth quarter I finally started to let my self hope… just a tiny bit. Most of my efforts to quell it came from the innate knowledge bourne of thousands of “Instant Win” games and hundreds of mocking jokes at the expense of beleaugered Lotto players that no one turns $5 into $200 doing nothing and does it with 1:100 odds. No one.

When the score finally got to my winning point (Steelers 21, Seahawks 10), there were nearly seven minutes left in the game. My hopes sank almost all the way. Surely someone was going to score at least something in that time. But the Steelers plugged away at the ground, killing the clock. They didn’t break free to seal the deal, they didn’t try anything tricky and pass it around, they just wasted time. Then the Seahawks got the ball and I tried not to care whether they scored or not. Of course they were going to score… at least once.

When the pass to the two yard line was caught I threw up my hands in resignation. That was it; a brief moment of hope for glory gone the way of every other chance to win something—anything—my whole life. It was fine. It was comfortable.

Then the flag landed. Penalty. Play called back. I kind of stopped watching the game for a few minutes after that—I just sort of phased out. I wasn’t refilled with hope sprung anew or anything, it was like my brain couldn’t handle that not being the expected crush of inevitable letdown. How could this still be a possibility?

I vaguely caught the Seahawks bumbling their clock management; it wasn’t until the Steelers got the ball back with three seconds left that I tuned back in and it kind of struck me that it had actually come down my way. I instantly decided that I must have misread the grid sheet and I actually had Seahawks at 1 and the Steelers at 0. It was a coping mechanism.

But in the end I was right and when I got to work Monday morning I got a bunch of good-natured envy and an envelope stuffed with bills. $195 profit. I went CD shopping yesterday; no other reason than that I had money I didn’t plan on having and hardly ever let myself go nuts like that. Eight used CDs later and a bit of cash bookmarked for a forthcoming release I still have half the money left.

What’s funny about the whole thing is that I had just days ago offered to give my bi-weekly discretionary fund ($100) to Nikki since she used hers all up. It wasn’t a big thing, I didn’t really think about it. I heard her saying she was having trouble deciding what to do since she didn’t really want to spend all her money and have none left over, so I offered to give her mine. I didn’t have anything special planned for it, she had uses for it so I told her she could have it. As I regarded the folded stack of $20s in my wallet exactly equalling the amount I had given up I wondered about balance. Perhaps there was some universal truth hidden here. Maybe there was something to learn.

Or maybe I should send the extra $100 to the Seattle Seahawks. Thanks for being such a bunch of losers, chumps!

I’ve learned nothing.

There are roughly three people who read this site. I know this because that’s how many people will occasionally email me regarding entries I slap up here. Tonight’s edition lets me empty the ol’ mailbag (of its meager, pathetic contents) and revisit a couple of recent topics a bit. Here goes.

First up Dr. Mac writes in response to my hook:

The fatal flaw in your music hook idea is this simple problem… most people have crap for taste.

You: “So, uh, what kind of music do you like?”
Simpleton: “Oh, whatever. Ashley Simpson, Maroon 5, R. Kelly…”
You: “…”
Simpleton: “So, uh what do you like?”
You: “Er… no hablo Engles.”

Granted this is arrogant and dismissive of other’s musical tastes. But let’s face facts: most people’s tastes suck. That’s why radio by and large is horrible. That’s why people buy entire albums and only listen to the single that they heard on MTV. That’s why there are 10,000 cookie cutter bands out there that get famous for 15 minutes and do their take on the same basic pop/rock song that 9,999 bands have done before them, and yet people buy it.

And yes I have contributed to this madness. I bought Candlebox. I liked Silverchair. I’m not proud (but I am clearly dated). But my point is that until people see the light, talking about music is fairly pointless. And by that I don’t mean they have to like the same music I like, or even like “underground” or “indie” music, I just mean that they have to have a decent opinion. If someone really, truly feels that Nelly is the most brilliant artist of our times I’d love to know why. But most people just listen to whatever’s on, whatever’s popular, and don’t know why.

The man speaks the truth, and this does represent a fairly obvious issue with my hook. But I think about it like this: Musical taste is something that comes from a variety of places. For example, I like some of the bands or even just songs that I do because I have actively searched for music of a particular style and discarded potential options that didn’t quite cut the mustard and finally found things that I like, developing reasoned opinions on based on originality, style, execution, melody, lyrics, etc, etc. This is by and large my current modus operandi. In fact a lot of the music I gravitate toward these days is stuff that one needs to give several detailed listens to before the real point—often musically but sometimes lyrically—becomes evident. Witness Broken Social Scene as an example where I didn’t like it (or perhaps more aptly didn’t get it) upon the first several listens but eventually was able to find the in fact rather brilliant melodies and themes running throughout until eventually I came to like them very much. But some stuff I have listened to came from very different places: I have an old White Zombie disc that I listen to occasionally because it was in heavy rotation during a specific period of my high school days that I recall fondly; putting it in the rotation brings back some of that experience and while the music may be nothing especially noteworthy, I like it anyway.

I’ll let you in on a quasi-embarassing secret that I have ABBA’s greatest hits album and I listen to tracks from it now and then because my parents had an old ABBA cassette tape when my brother and I were kids. We used to listen to it all the time. ABBA reminds me of innocence and being a carefree kid… in a lot of ways the music mirrors that so while it is actually somewhat terrible music, I can’t help but like it still. I have stuff in my library (my stuff mind you, not the albums and tracks that I can blame on Nikki) that I sometimes wonder why I have: Duncan Sheik, Michelle Branch, Journey and Kylie Minogue spring to mind. But the fact is that for various reasons I like the songs or albums or whatever. Sometimes I think it’s okay to say, “You know what, I listened to Boyz II Men back in the day and I didn’t think they were that bad.”

Not that I’m saying that or anything, I’m just making a point. Ahem.

Anyway, I guess I think the hook idea is still valid because even if I met someone (or many someones) that had a flighty, unspecific “taste” in music, as I mentioned before I think part of the beauty of the hook is that it gives an insight to a person’s psyche: Even if that insight is that they are shallow and vapid. If I were to meet someone who claimed that their favorite singer was Ashlee Simpson because they “Really liked her MTV show” or something, my hook is still successful because I don’t have to carry on several conversations to learn that they are a big dull dud, I have gleaned that information with one question and a single reply which is, if nothing else, economical.

Secondly, my dad replies to the pronunciation discussion thusly:

I have exactly the same problem with Vahr-Char and its cousin phrase just plain “Char.” Can’t help it, there is no way I can bring myself to say it that way so I tend to use tedious phrases like “…so is that defined as variable character or just character?” To which the response is invariably in SQL-ese “It’s VarChar…” At that point I just cringe and go on. A recent revelation was that xxx.gif files are not pronounced with a hard “g” as if they were the beginning of Frank Gifford’s last name but (and a book I was reading used this analogy) Jif like the peanut butter. Once again we could surmise that the “g” is related to something about graphics making jif an even stranger pronunciation. Why not GUI as “Jewey”? I give up.

Interestingly I’ve heard “gif” as in the image format pronounced both ways by knowledgeable people. I happen to prefer the hard “g” sound as in “Gifford” which is what I use because I figure in the interest of clarity if it is pronounced that way there can be very little chance of being misunderstood (the only possible way to spell that spoken word is G-I-F while the soft “g” sound could make people think of the letter “J” which is more easily identifiable with “jpeg” (jay-peg) which, perhaps in a very convoluted and twisted fashion, seems confusing to me). There do seem to be some regional preferences with “gif” or maybe social is more what I mean: Most management types or non-graphic artists I’ve encountered use “jif” while a higher number of Photoshop-user-types stick with hard “g” “gif.”

And since he brought it up, I just thought I’d point out that I loathe the pronunciation of “GUI” as “gooey.” It just sounds to inane to me, sitting around having a serious discussion about user interaction and usability while grown men are tossing around a word I most commonly associate with children’s snack food. I tend to speak each letter when I say it (“Gee You Eye”) but lots of people have given me funny looks for that, though no one has yet to speak up and tell me I’m a moron.

I got the new Franz Ferdinand album for my birthday. I’ve only listened to it maybe four times even though my 29th year is down by one month. The reason for this isn’t necessarily the quality of that album but is almost solely due to the fact that it is a “Dual Disc” (I originally mistyped that as “Duel Disc,” which is probably more appropriate—as you’ll see in a minute).

Minus the marketese, what that means is that the disc is a CD on one side and a DVD on the other which allows it to include both a 5.1 surround mix of the album plus some bonus video footage. It’s a nice idea, I readily grant you that. In fact the album comes in a traditional CD-only format and when I saw that the gift was the more feature-rich version I was pretty amped. That would be a short-lived reaction.

The CD plays just fine in Nikki’s car, which is where I heard it a few times on a fairly lengthy car drive. She had left it (wrapped) on the front seat for me. When I got home I did what I always do first thing when I get a new CD: I went to rip it to iTunes.

There are two reasons to rip all CDs I have. One is that I love digital music. The flexibility of it to have every song in one big list or mix it up with themes or clever correlations; the portability with iPods (and iPod-style devices) and the fact that you can burn mp3-only discs which lots of new CD players can interpret which gives you roughly 80 songs per disc and so on. The other reason is that—having iTunes, AirPort Express and a smallish apartment—I hardly ever never listen to CDs at home anymore. But I do listen to them at work and in the car (listening to the iPod in the car is a sort of adventure… potentially its own post so I’ll spare you today) yet transporting CDs is a risky game. I’ve ruined several CDs; some of my longtime favorites have had to be replaced several times over the years. With digital tunes I can burn copies of CDs and carry around cheap, replaceable discs without worrying about it.

Of course when I put the new Franz Ferdinand disc in, it acted goofy. Specifically, it acted like it wasn’t sure what to do with the disc. This was odd because, being a disc drive, that’s pretty much its only function. After several minutes of whirring and chirping and clicking away, the disc slid out as if the system were saying, “Ew.” I tried in vain for quite some time to get it to work, trying to trick the system or the disc into working together, for the betterment of my music library. Alas, failure eventually overtook me.

My next thought was actually rather enticing: For once, I had a legitimate use for Peer-to-Peer software! Here I had a perfectly legitimate copy of a CD which simply wasn’t working the way I wanted in terms of getting a digital backup. There was no legal problem with me downloading the songs from Bittorrent or whatever because it was an honest backup being downloaded. Even if the FBI kicked in my door and witnessed the download in progress they could do nothing: I had every right to download that album. Brilliant.

Of course despite the album being only a few months old it was remarkably difficult to find a full and compete copy of it online. The fact remains that most people who download stuff do so either illegally or quasi-legally (at best), depending on who you talk to. So in order to avoid trouble there is a cartoonish game going on at all times between the content owners who want to catch the downloaders and the downloaders who want to keep doing what they’re doing without consequence. It reminds me of those scenes in Looney Tunes where Bugs Bunny runs into and out of several (seemingly) unconnected rooms while being pursued by another character who can never quite seem to get the combination of doors and rooms and staircases quite right. The side effect of this is that people who are sort of outside the game (like me) have to futz around to an excessive degree to get what they want.

Eventually I found two torrents that theoretically had what I was looking for: One had an “Advance” copy in mp3 format, the other was a regular ripped version in FLAC, an obscure mp3 alternative that iTunes doesn’t understand (and whose file size is a bit large for my tastes). Unfortunately the “Advance” copy had a lot of seeds and downloaded quickly; but the files themselves were either corrupt or something else had been done to them because my tests revealed that they played only the sounds of silence. The FLAC version had no seeds, only two peers and took me almost three days to finish downloading. When I finally got it I found out that iTunes can’t cope with FLAC so I went about trying to convert them to mp3s.

The process of going from FLAC to mp3 on OS X may be as simple as the click of one button. But that’s not what I did. Instead I downloaded three seperate utilities, converted the files into at least four intermediary formats (three of which ended up being useless conversions) and was only finally able to get the results I wanted by downloading an application that had a 30-track or 30-day decoding/encoding limit, of which I used twice as many as I should have because my first attempt failed miserably. Of course.

Most frustrating about the whole thing is that I’m fairly confident that there was something screwy about the original CD. I’ve put all kinds of wacked CDs and DVDs into the Mac drive and never had a problem with it not recognizing the media as being what it is. The forced necessity of going online to find a copy of a CD that should have just been ripped in five minutes got me to thinking about all the problems people have had with Windows and purchased CDs that have included copy protection schemes and DRM insanity (which are conveniently ignored for the most part by Macs, but that could easily be a short-lived luxury) and I realized that this is why the music industry is so reviled online. I want to buy my music legitimately; I want to support the artists that I like monetarily; I want to have acceptable options for digital distribution and consumption (iTunes is pretty close, but it has no real competition and its DRM scheme is pretty good, but still potentially annoying). I want what the recording industry wants me to want, and yet they still manage to stymie my efforts to simply enjoy my music the way I’d like.

After all this, it better be album of the year.

So after whining about staying up late to watch the Sharks game the other night I found out it was a TiVo special which had actually been played the night before meaning that my midnight-pushing determination to see how things panned out was… misguided at best and downright stupid from most perspectives that don’t involve me not really caring to think of myself as an absolute nincompoop.

And of course after suffering through three straight miserable games, the one that wasn’t televised last night turned out to be a goal-scorin’ rip-snorter with a pleasant outcome. Figures. Stupid sports.

My Hook

I was thinking the other night that I need a hook: A thing that I can use to engage other humans when the need arises because the fact is that I don’t do conversation very well. You may not be able to tell by the fact that I could write a 10,000 word essay on toothpaste, but comfort with a keyboard (and a non-interactive “audience”) and comfort face-to-face with another homo sapien are two very different things.

I admit that part of it is that I don’t care for nor appreciate small talk. It is one thing when I talk to my parents on the phone and they tell me what kind of weather they’re having. They live a thousand miles away in a location that has a very different climate than what I experience every day. To a certain extent those discussions of the weather are interesting. But talking about the weather with people who are standing in the same room… I dunno, it just doesn’t compute for me. I feel like the same result could be accomplished by us turning slightly and looking out the window. There, conversation over.

So what I need is something to get me started or—more specifically—something to get other people started that can lead into a reasonably engaging conversation but that doesn’t necessarily have to delve into deep and potentially dangerous or uncomfortable subject matters. For example, I could walk up to relative strangers and say, “So what are your views on the Death Penalty?” That’s a conversation I’d be interested in having perhaps, but most people are more likely to gaze at me as though I had just sprouted a second head and back away slowly, being careful not to show any fear or break eye contact.

The line between “trivial and dull” and “uncomfortable yet engaging” can be fairly thin I’m afraid.

My thought is that I should talk to people about music. My theory is multi-layered: Almost everyone listens to music. Even people who don’t think they listen to music probably listen to something, even if it’s just some carols at Christmas time or a few oldies in the car. Since it’s nearly universal that makes it a lot easier to ask people about it; I could hold some interesting conversations about the latest Mac news or Settlers of Catan, but the odds of any given person being informed (or interested) enough in those subjects is too remote to qualify as a “hook.” The other part of my theory is that you can tell a lot about someone by what they listen to. Sometimes this is easy like when someone likes Contemporary Christian music (“Religious”) or The Grateful Dead (“Tone Deaf”); other times it isn’t quite as clear (“I like Mozart, Coltrane and Eminem”) but that can make it even more interesting.

And as a third layer and the real benefit (aside from the whole being more social thing) is that there’s the chance I could get some good tips on new music to try out. I might even find someone I have a lot in common with who could serve as my surrogate hipster fellow in place of Dr. Mac who has very similar musical tastes as I do, but lives on the other side of the stupid country and therefore is frequently unavailable to attend awesome shows that no one else I know wants to see or, really, would be caught dead at. I’m referring to shows such as the recent Decemberists’ concert, last fall’s missed Modest Mouse/Killers/Arcade Fire show (missing that was—no hyperbole—tragic) and the forthcoming Belle & Sebastian/New Pornographers venue.

Plus when I think about it most of the great music I’ve discovered has had very little to do with my hunting skills and has almost universally been because a friend turned me on to it. Some of my favorite bands are Radiohead, Interpol, The Shins, A.C. Newman, The Wrens and Arcade Fire: All of which were originally Dr. Mac recommendations. Cajun Blue introduced me to Big Head Todd and the Monsters; a friend of Fast-Track revealed Concrete Blonde; HB is responsible for my fascination with As I Lay Dying and The Casket Lottery; Gin‘s influence can be seen in some of the more girly stuff I find sneaking into playlists like Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann; Nikki has probably turned me on to more bands than I could even count and so on. The point is, there can be an ulterior motive at play here that is happily benign but potentially bountiful.

I’m telling you, this could be a great hook.

Just Because You’re Paranoid…

People tell me sometimes that I’m paranoid. I think paranoia is sometimes just a side effect of cynicism: The more often you think people are inclined to be scum the more likely you are to assume that everyone is up to no good and eventually that nefaroiousness could be targeting you. It’s just a logical progression.

However sometimes paranoia can be a good thing, such as when it motivates action to prevent these schemes and manifestations which admittedly may or may not exist from coming to fruition. Even if something was just a remote possibility, that’s not necessarily a reason not to fight against it. That said, read and be afraid.

I had a discussion—not really heated just sort of warmish—with a co-worker a few months ago over the correct pronunciation of the common Unix directory name “var.”

According to him, and he is a long time Unix admin who has worked with a lot of other Unix admins and has been around the whole scene probably three to four times longer than I have, the correct pronunciation rhymes with “bar.” For the sake of the argument I’ll spell that particular pronunciation as “vahr.”

My point in the discussion was that it was stupid to pronounce it vahr because no one pronounces the extention of that obviously abbreviated word “vahr-iable,” they say “variable” where the “var” in that word rhymes with “fair” (spelled out as “vair” here). My logic extended that the correct pronunciation of the directory should be “vair.”

My co-discusser then fell back on the weak argument that it didn’t matter what made more sense, only that he had never heard it pronounced “vair” by anyone other than me so if I wanted to avoid looking a fool I needed to start pronouncing it correctly, where correct in this case was equivalent to popular.

Later I came up with an alternate extention to the “var” abbreviation where it could actually stand for “variety” (the var/ directory often holds a slew of assorted junk) in which case vahr would be a more appropriate pronunciation. But today in class I noted during a discussion of database data types that the instructor used a variation of the “var” pronunciation in relation to the “VARCHAR” type.

To me, that has always been pronounced “vair-care” since it clearly stood for “variable characters.” Our instructor was pronouncing it “vahr-char” as in the supposed correct pronunciation for the Unix directory and the verb meaning “to burn the surface of; scorch.” Even if we did the same variable/variety swap for the “var” in this instance, there is no way anyone pronounces is “Char-acter” with the heavy “ch” sound like in “chop.” So why would you pronounce it that way in abbreviated form? But no one seemed to bat an eye at his choice of pronunciation so I’m now wondering if that’s just the way everyone else says it.

The whole thing started me thinking about pronunciations based on written-word exposure because the reason most of this came up was that I learned about all these things from reading online documentation and not from being taught in a lecture/classroom environment so whatever pronunciation came out in my head as I first learned of these things is how it “ought” to sound. It’s like Gin who saw a street sign for Carnegie and read “Cahrn-ee-edge” which sounds very similar to “Carnage” rather than the correct pronunciation which is “Cahrn-ih-ge.” Now, even though she knows how it “ought” to be she still thinks “Cahrn-ee-edge” in her head.

Computer terms I think are most commonly introduced to people with those text-to-mind pronunciations which may be why I find these discrepancies in vocalizations in that field more often. In fact I’ve started to see some software or technology websites that include pronounced acronyms or new nomenclature references to help people sound out their product or technology names to avoid confusion later. For example I haven’t seen it in a while but there used to be a lot of sites that described how to pronounce “Linux” (lih-nucks) after it became apparent that tons of people were misreading it as “line-icks,” probably because it was invented by Linus Torvalds and people just assumed.

Linky Linky

• There is a sweet OS X Terminal app floating around that mimics old 70s glass terminals with screen warp, amber text and brightness glitches and everything. Pretty cool even for a relative n00b like myself who didn’t ever have to use any of that hooey. I did use the old Apple IIs though and they had those nasty green screens with the wicked burn in. Mmm… fifth grade computer class.
• Here’s a pretty fascinating article comparing Last.fm to a competitor. I never used the other site mentioned, but the article is interesting anyway.
• Also, if you’re into the whole Linux thing you should check out this site that lets you build a custom Linux ISO from several distributions. I’ve heard the Ubuntu installer is about as foolproof as Linux has ever been, but it does look nice for getting Debian rockin’. Then again, I’ll grant you that I haven’t even used that in several versions because I’ve been all “FreeBSD this, OS X that” for a couple years. Still, the installer back in the day was bellbottom pants, so unless it got an absurd amount of attention this has to be an improvement.

Bah

Dumb Sharks. I stayed up stupid late last night watching the nailbiter against the Stars, and they had the Stars pretty much reeling in Overtime (where they absolutely had to win it because if it came to a shootout they were toast) only to watch them blow it with like 30 seconds left. Then I had to go to bed all grumpy. I hate that.

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.

Duck to avoid the forthcoming braindump: I have no sense of cohesion today, so things could get squirrely.

• Doza read yesterday’s comments about my gaming projects. I think that may have been the first time he realized the full extent of my nerdness. Doza may work in IT, but he’s one of those atypical computer workers who manages to maintain a healthy distance from the typical trappings of geek life: SF, role-playing/war/video games, excessive hardware lust, gadget envy, anime attraction, etc. I may have frightened him a little. I’m not sure how one could miss that I’m at least as much of a geek as—say—Ryan, but somehow he seemed to either gloss it over or ignore the warning signs. In any case he suggested that I am a closet geek, which I don’t think is exactly true (ask any of my friends) but I suppose I do avoid going out of my way to broadcast my particular proclivities right off the bat.
• Of course ironSoap readers ought to have no such delusions. I’ve been geeking out here for almost five years now. Some of you have even suffered through just about all of it. Hey, thanks for that.
• Regarding yesterday’s post: A follow-up. It seems that Strahd’s attendence at the con is dubious at best so the Blood Bowl tournament is more likely to be a few scattered games, if anything. Also Lister and I decided that there would be no RTT-ing so the focus will be on a small force of 40K (maybe 1,000 points) for some Space Hulk-style business and extra effort put forth into Warmaster. You can scoot back from the edge of your seat now.
• Also on the agenda for DunDraCon is the Shadowrun game, which I think will be a simple one-shot and not part of the larger campaign (mostly so I get a chance to run a 4th edition session without having to maintain any kind of consistency). Interestingly enough I ran across a link today that shows William “Neuromancer” Gibson dissing Shadowrun. I’ll be honest for a minute here and say that while this has nothing to do with his opinion on Shadowrun, I don’t really see where Gibson is some amazingly gifted person. Other than Neuromancer which was pretty good, nothing else of his that I’ve picked up has caught my attention enough to even finish. I saw “No Maps For These Territories” and I though the film was good but Gibson’s perspectives didn’t exactly blow me away. At best I think he was a decently talented writer who had the right idea at the right time (don’t tell me it was some stretch to combine distopian future visions with ubiquitous computing). Anyway, the point is that his whole sense of ownership for the cyberpunk thing feels a lot like someone who’s been told they’re important for so long that they actually start to believe it. I think at this point enough other people have put their two cents into cyberpunk as a genre that he doesn’t get to declare what is or is not worthy any longer. And excuse me, but I personally think that the blend of fantasy (derisively dismissed with a pompous “*elves*” comment) and cyberpunk is quite remarkable and in fact the primary reason to play Shadowrun. Let’s face it, the game mechanics have never been phenomenal. The setting is the game, in my opinion.
• I’m tired. I have a hojillion things going on and the more I try to put them together and make some sense of them all, the less I feel like I’m in control. It’s frustrating because I really just want to settle into a comfortable winter routine like I usually do, but I’m confounded at every turn by a fresh injection of new chaos. I’m trying not to complain about it, because the things that are happening represent positive forward steps, but it’s like I was telling Nik the other day when we were discussing the future. All I really want is a lot of money and a lot of free time. Too much to ask? Anyone?
• My iPod freaked out yesterday. People have discussed the oddness bourne from doing a lot of randomized shuffling but I had a playlist of roughly 700 songs which included one album’s worth of Johnny Cash—maybe 16 songs. Out of the first seven songs I listened to, five of them were The Man in Black. I have nothing against some Cash, but that seemed excessive.
• Scott’s been griping lately about not having the sort of access he used to have to the server on eFaithFarm. On one hand I want to tell him I don’t care because the current method of doing things means less worry for me. On the other hand, I totally sympathize because I miss some stuff about the old server, too. Of course now the old server is so old that it is in danger of requiring hospice care and desperately needs an OS upgrade, a full house cleaning and some additional security measures set up, but I’ve been daydreaming lately about perhaps moving back were I to do something like that.
• By the by, Ryan offered up this remarkably useful extention for Firefox that does all sorts of nifty developer-y things. Useful for troubleshooting browser issues, too.
• Traffic this week has been excellent: My average drive time is 30 minutes both ways. It’s almost a little annoying because I know that starting next week it will be miserable, and it is like a cloud hanging over my scarcely-braking automobile as I drive carefree through the hills that separate the Central Valley from the Bay Area.
• We were going to make stew last night—or at least chop and prep the ingredients so they could be dumped into the crock pot this morning for a tasty treat when we got home. We got all set to do it and then Nik checked the package on the stew meat. It expired Tuesday.