I've switched from Blogger to textpattern. As of this writing, I haven't quite figured out RSS on textpattern yet, so new posts aren't showing up. I do have a fancyish new design. When they do, the feed should be at http://rob.drimmie.net/atom, but I'd double check the main page to be sure.

I was going to talk about how great the new pens our office manager bought, so I searched for them to link to them, and the first result is a free sample page for this exact pen, so woohoo! free pens for me! Well, probably just one. Now I am trying to figure out how to game the system. Get a pen sent to work! Get Jen to get a pen sent to work! I should just go buy a box of these pens.

One thing I really enjoy is cleaning up existing web pages. I like taking something that exists and is liked, but is inefficient and exhibits some bad tendancies, and converting it to something that is clean and maintainable. Web doctoring, cleaning, repair, something like that. I am trying to think of things to do for Miscellanean client work outside of what my brother in law brings my way, and this would be a good one. Steps: Find some existing brochure-type web sites that have bad code and inefficiencies. Steal the code and replace all the images and have a "starter" site, and do before and after examples. This will benefit me in that I will have marketing materials and a before and after section and stuff, I will get to learn and practice good clean HTML making techniques and such. It will also help me predict timelines and figure out a couple of good and practical arguments aside from "standards, yay!" The next step is then figuring out how to sell that service. Do people search for "clean up my existing web site?" I doubt it. To a certain degree cold calling for that sort of thing could be effective. Maybe a couple of volunteer jobs to get the word out. (update: forgot about the stupid date thing again. Blogger really isn't a great tool for drafting and publishing stages.)

Human Resources departments have for the most part, I think, given themselves a bad name. Is there an office-related joke they aren't the butt of? Is there an office-related joke they aren't deservedly the butt of? I think the problem typically stems from the fact that they're aligned with the corporation, which is pretty apparent given the name. At Rob's Dream Company (a notional corporation) the Human Resources Department isn't called that. I don't know what it's called yet, but it isn't "Human Resources". A person is neither a printer nor a softwood tree. They aren't something that can be used nor traded. The terminology, as near as my unreaserching lazy-assed self can determine, arose from project management. When looking at things from a high enough level, a person is just like a printer or a softwood tree, it is a thing that you can plug into a chart and figure out how long until something is deliverable. I'm not entirely opposed to project management and in fact I think it's a pretty important task, but I think that the blurry line between printers and people is harmful. The name reveals that the corporation considers people fungible, which I think is a massive failing. It's giving up before you start. There are certainly fungible people, bodies you can put in a chair and give a task and come back at the end of the day and collect the output from, but there are two ways to look at these fungible people. One is to consider the fact that they're actual individual entities. They have thoughts and feelings and ambitions, and if you can connect with them and encourage them to do what they care about then you can tap into passion, and when people are doing something they're passionate about there's ultimately no stopping them. One responsibility of whatever this HR-like department is called is going to be actively encouraging people to do things they care about. It might ultimately mean helping people achieve goals completely unrelated to what their official job position is, and might ultimately mean helping people leave Rob's Dream Company (a notional corporation) behind, but people who aren't doing something they're passionate about aren't doing whatever it is they're doing to the best of their ability. The other way to look at fungible people is that if you're willing to hire people you consider fungible then you're, to borrow a cliche, sacrificing great for good. It's perfectly possible to run a decent company on fungible people, but I don't think it's possible to run a brilliantly great company with people who either are fungible or are filling fungible roles. I've thought a lot about a Customer Advocate or Ombudsman type position, someone whose responsibility it is to get pissed off at the developers on behalf of the customers. I think this HR position is similar to that, except for employees, but neither Employee Advocate nor Ombusdman really expresses the purpose. A lot of the same sorts of HR tasks like benefits management, payroll, and other things I know nothing about will have to be handled by this department. The real problem is that when you start given a title to someone that deals with and manages people and benefits, it almost always goes south quickly. 'Human Management', 'People Relations', 'Employee Advocate'. Not only does everything I can think of have two words, they all sound boring and almost as plastic as 'Human Resources'. There are some decent alternatives to 'advocate' in a thesaurs. Things like 'champion', 'proponent', 'ambassador', 'proctor', 'agitator', 'evangelist', 'proselytizer'. I'll let this one simmer for a while, maybe something will crop up. (updated: changed the timestamp from Tuesday Afternoon to Wednesday Morning. I've started drafting some posts when an idea hits, and the default timestamp doesn't reflect the published time, it reflects the time when the draft was originally started. I will try in the future to be more diligent about updating the time before posting.)

I've devised a loose schedule so that every day when I get around to cracking open Blogger and trying to write something I don't have an entirely blank screen staring at me, I at least have some sort of focus. Mondays I review the prior week's efforts towards health. Wednesdays I talk about Rob's Dream Company, which really is a prop with which to discuss various business management type issues. Thursdays I talk about The Miscellanean, in part as an effort to help figure out what exactly it is I'm doing. I haven't really figured out things I want to talk about on Tuesdays and Fridays. Video games would be a likely topic, but I don't really have a whole lot to say about them these days. Pointing out problems I have with software is easy enough, if there's anything I'm good at it's bitching, but there's only so much griping that's worthwhile even if it would be nice to have a catalog of "don'ts" and possibly "dos" for developing my own software. I'm interested in learning more about a variety of things that I know very little about, like financial management and python, but I don't really have anything to say about those things right now. I could talk about technology in general and new things I'm playing with like MochiKit or the things I'm learning about better XHTML and CSS and such, but again I don't really have a lot to say about such things. I'm sure there are things that are worth talking about, but I'm not sure that I can think of nice generic topics for the days, and when I think about it, I'm not sure that's something I want to do anyway. One of the reasons I've started trying to post daily is because when I finally got around to adding a stylesheet back to the site I read some of the archives and really enjoyed reading things written by me about me. I am all for the notion of sharing ideas with the world, but since there are maybe, maybe, three people in total who read this site (and I am being generous) I have to realise that the audience to write for is my future self.

It just dawned on me that my habits of talking about Rob's Dream Company (a notional corporation) and The Miscellanean as two separate things may be a little bit confusing. "But Rob," I imagine the non-existant (except for you of course) readers saying, "aren't you Rob, and isn't The Miscellanean your company, and therefore isn't it the same thing?" And, well, here's where I sort of stammer around a bit. Rob's Dream Company (a notional corporation) is more of a thought experiment. It arose from various discussions as a sort of platonic ideal. I see some sort of flaw in a company that I encounter, and recognize that it is a flaw and can therefore define the ideal corporate entity, one that respects its employees and its customers, one that has principles and doesn't comprimise them. Platonic ideals, of course, are a completely separate thing from reality. The Miscellanean is what current reality is. It is far from an ideal, especially since you know, it doesn't make much money. One day something that more closely resembles Rob's Dream Company (a notional corporation) may come from the work I do as The Miscellanean, but it won't be called The Miscellanean. It might be called Rob's Dream Company, without the parenthetical disclaimer, it might be called something entirely different. Maybe I incorporate something and create the entity, maybe I encounter an already existing corporate entity that is nearer to this ideal than I could achieve on my own, I'm not at all sure. Rob's Dream Company (a notional corporation) primarily allows me to consider business management, and perhaps more importantly it helps me recognize that no such ideal can ever exist and that the ways in which reality and the ideal exist are comprimises but aren't necessarily irrational or even faulty. It gives me a framework in which to consider decisions from a different position (ie, "How would I deal with this reality in Rob's Dream Company (a notional corporation)?" and allows me to get outside my disgruntled wage slave mindset on occasion. It's perhaps something to strive towards. A far-reaching incomplete business plan. Working with different scenarios (ie, Wedesday's 17-employee setup) lets me think about what a reasonable goal is. How would I feel as the founder of such a corporation? How about one with 200 or 20,000 employees? Would things change? The Miscellanean is a step towards Rob's Dream Company (a notional corporation), but they are, to me, quite distinct.

I'm trying to make Thursdays The Miscellanean Update Day, but I'm having a bit of a hard time deciding what to write about. In part because, well, there's not much to write about. I went and got myself a GST number, but I think that was the topic of the last business and registration crap post and signing up for government-dictated identifiers isn't exactly what anyone might call entertaining, so I suppose that's all I'll say about that. In case it hasn't already become terribly obvious, it's pretty easy for me to impress myself with doing things, so it should be no suprise that I'm mildly impressed with how well I quoted my current project (a brochure-type website) and that I'm progressing nicely with it. I do sort of wonder how much client work I want to be doing. I view The Miscellanean as a long-term sort of project, and for the most part freelance moonlighting type work, in addition to my regular day job. A means by which to work on interesting projects and the first step in focusing my efforts. The problem is that this particular client work is pretty much anything but interesting work. The client doesn't know what they want, and I'm not experienced enough to draw it out of them. My ideas, the things I want to work on, they're put aside while I ensure deliverables are delivered and things look good and yadda yadda. It's good practice in focussing, it's good practice in doing the boring things to be able to get to the good things, but it also sucks, and The Miscellanean isn't supposed to suck. Things may change when the first payment comes in, and even moreso when the final payment comes in. The money will be a nice thing to have, but then I'm torn on how that money should be used. Ideally the money won't be used. This crap work should go towards freeing me up to do more interesting work, so it should sit in a bank account and some time in a couple of years when I have enough money to pay myself a living wage for a year I can jump ship and then have time to do both crap client work and interesting project work. I read an interesting kuro5hin post yesterday, about improving productivity which includes the interesting concept "Procrastination is the reward for not doing work." While I don't agree with the entire post, this little bit rings true, and my personal lack of long-term vision and lack of willingness to invest in long-term goals sort of shines out. When I talk about using crap work to invest in myself, when I talk about stocking up a bank account until I can jump ship, things start falling into place in my head again. It's true that this particular job is pretty frustrating, but it's also true that I have a bit more control than I have in the past about following standards, about clean markup and stylesheets. It's an investment in a future self and it seems about time for me to start doing that sort of thing. It will be over and done with in another 4 or 5 weeks and I'll come out of it in a position to better work towards meeting personal goals.

I'm going to talk more about office space today. Rob's Dream Company (a notional corporation) today is going to have 17 employees with a variety of responsibilities. Since Rob's Dream Company is a software development company, there will be 9 developer-types performing different sorts of tasks. There will be a graphics person, an office manager and three members of the sales and marketing team. A systems administrator, a QA person and some sort of dedicated customer support person in an obudsman or customer advocate type role. I made up the 17 employees number and assigned roles mostly based on nothing other than trying to identify different sorts of tasks requirements. Add in me, Rob's Dream Company Fascist Overlord and CEO, and there are 18 people with different needs. This started out as a little mind game, but I actually really like this arrangment and configuration of tasks and people and now that I have this configuration I'll likely use it for future examples. So, the big thing first is for everyone to get their own space. That's 18 offices, 18 desks, 18 computers, 18 fancy dotcom chairs and all the other good stuff that people need to actually be able to do their work. The system administrator's office would have to either be larger to accommodate the internal servers, or connected to or just extremely close to, a server room. A dedicated room is desirable as working in a climate controlled room sucks. For a company this size there wouldn't be a lot of physical hardware necessary, but a couple of fileservers, a couple of development servers, a pbx server, and just space to store the varied bits of hardware that sysadmins tend to accumulate around them would be necessary. Any public-facing servers would most likely live at a colocation facility because ideally my sysadmin doesn't wear a pager. The QA person would likely require a slightly larger-than-typical office to be able to maintain a small collection of systems. VMWare and other emulation can make the majority of testing easy, but at least one system outside the network would be necessary, and a few systems with lower resources (including lower bandwidth than is available inside). Additionally, there would be many times the development team or the ombudsman are working on a problem. In fact, this suggests that an actual test lab that is separate from the QA's actual office would be desirable. At least one conference room for client and internal meetings is needed. Comfortable chairs, and a large white board (or other communal writing surface. I'm a fan of chalkboards, but dust is a huge issue) some sort of table and a projector are necessities. I'm thinking that a room with space for eight should be enough. Larger groups can gather in communal areas such as the lunch room. Which brings us to the lunch room! This is probably the key gathering space and should probably be more than just a typical lunch room. I'm in favour of a large communal space with facilities like a ping pong table and a big tv and comfortable couches and games (board and computer) and a counter and bar stools and your typical kitcheny sorts of things, as well as a fairly powerful exhaust vent because other peoples' microwaved food inevitably ends up smelling like ass. This is one of the key components to my idea of a great office, but I haven't quite figured out the best form. See, it's a space that's used to increase and encourage socialisation, for all-hands type meetings, for hanging out, for ad hoc meetings and for small collaboration efforts. I envision things like one developer calling another and saying "hey lets grab a coffee and go over this bug" or whatever. The thing is, for 18 people it's kind of hard to justify the level of decadence necessary for a large room with all sorts of games and stuff. Is the money brought in by the staff better spent on this or on them (ie, increase their salaries)? Maybe with 17 it's more important to just start fostering the idea of the communal area. Maybe a couple of smaller communal areas are better initially. One room that has ping pong and maybe foosball and the couches and stuff, a loungey type space, and another large room with the kitchen and cafe-type things. It's around here that things start getting fuzzy. What's reception like? Can I have that rooftop patio or courtyard or other outdoor communal space that is viable for working in? General location is important to me. Proximity to food (a great burger, great curry and great thai ideally) and public transit and easily commutable to by drivers (because frankly no one's giving up their car) are all important.

What I really want to talk about today is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and how much it sucked, but since people theoretically read this blog and I don't want to spoil anything, I will just continue to fume and say again: sucked. I recognize that a comprimise needs to be made between what is and isn't told, but as far as I'm concerned, the wrong things were comprimised. Admittedly most of what was missing or altered were subplots and not fundamental to the core of the story, which is mostly what made it onto the screen, but it's those subplots that create the richness of Rowling's world. Bah. I am somewhat suprised at how deeply it is bugging me. When (the fact that it isn't an 'if' reveals how large a fanboy I am) I see it again perhaps I will be able to appreciate what the movie did right more.

I suprised myself a little bit by waking up with the alarm this morning and getting up and being all routine and stuff. I had a long weekend, full of a lot of driving and was pretty tired and beat and such. It wasn't my best showing, but it was steady and I added a minute (bringing me to 15) without a problem. It's way to early for any real trend to show up, but integrity and legitimacy of data have never been a strong concern for me. In the prior two weeks Monday's outing was my strongest, and my crash point seems to be Thursday. Gearing up for Thursday's ride is just tough, I'm not sure why, and it is usually slower and more plodding than any other. Fridays I usually pick it back up a bit. One of the nice things about being early in an excercise regimen (and having never been late into one I can't say how this trend continues, but...) is that it's so easy to see improvements in different aspects. The minigoals and such. As part of my warming up I do some stretching. Throughout my childhood and into young adulthood I participated in a number of activies with physical and performing components. Soccer, drum and bugle corps, air cadets, experiments in acting and dancing. As a result I spent a good portion of my life stretching and being somewhat flexible. When I started cycling and stretching I was stiff and couldn't really move, but I'm getting some of my old limberness back. I'm not going to put my leg behind my head or anything any time soon, but when I stretch my legs I actually bend now, instead of just straightening things out and grimacing. My weight last week started at around n+29 and went as low as n+26. This morning I was at n+30, and I don't expect to make too much progress this week in this regard. Driving all weekend meant snacking all weekend on nutritionally subpar foods and restaurant (though we avoided most fast foods) meals. We also went to a decadent chocolatier's shop, so I'll likely be snacking through the week on gourmet sugarstuffs.

I spend a lot of time fantasizing about office space. There are lots of theories about office space, about how people need private space to work in, and about how open spaces enable collaboration, and about how walls are expensive and cubicles are cheap and fuck them, what do we care they're just employees anyway? Rob's Dream Company comes in a variety of sizes (this is one of those things that is nice about make-believe) and each of those sizes features a different sort of office space. Even if I were to only be working for myself, I would want a place to work that is somewhere other than my house. I worked for a year as a telecommuting employee, and even on the rare occasion that I was working on something I enjoyed, it was difficult to ignore the fact that I was at home, and there were movies downstairs and books nearby. Having somewhere to go to work for a few hours seems like a useful thing, even if it's just a friendly coffee shop or some rented space in the basement of a small retailer or other office. The real fun starts when I start thinking about working in a place with other people and the need for a space dedicated for actual work. There are different considerations and modifications for small staffs (less than five say) and large staffs (more than fifty), but my basic premise at this point is that private space is a requirement, but so is communal space. I'm sort of a fan of adhoc gatherings, and I think that to have a decent working environment you need to socialise with your coworkers, or rather, I think that for me to consider my working environment decent, I need to be able to socialise with my coworkers on work time. I hate after hours work activities. There's a tradition of things like Christmas parties and barbecues that I suspect there's a place for, but really I hate them. They're only barely optional, and unless you already enjoy spending time with those people, they're frustrating and awkward and a trial of patience until you can leave. Plus, what the fuck? It's something for work, and you're not getting paid. That's shit. Every imposition on an employee's time for a work-related activity should be paid, especially in a larger company. So, asking employees to gather socially outside of work time is out, but yet I think it's valuable to socialise with coworkers. That means that I have to encourage socialisation during work time. I think that some sort of common area with a wifi connection and couches and ping pong tables and good coffee and other drinks and decent snacks is what's needed. A certain number of paid lunches perhaps (weekly, as opposed to monthly or biannually). As much as I like the idea of socialising with people, there are definitely times when I just want everyone else to fuck off so I can get some shit done, and there are people who would prefer that all the time. I definitely believe that private space, for fucking around without fear of getting caught, or hey, even actually working, whatever, it's important. Private space in the form of an office. It doesn't have to be a magesterial office, but at least 10x10 I would think, and personalisable. With some sort of exterior light ideally, which means offices ringning the outside of an area with a common middle section. A variety of rooms of varying sizes for collaborative projects, and just some tables in the common area. Background noise is just as useful and effective as quiet in many ways.

I occasionally contribute to Hello, Nintendo, which means I end up not talking about Nintendo stuff here much, because I might as well do it where there's a specialised place for it, but two things have happened recently to make me question that. For one, I'm starting to post here regularly again. When this place laid fallow it didn't really mean anything for me to spread bits of myself around, but one of my theses about myself is that I am a generalist, so therefore should I just talk about everything here? It's a topic I will get into further some time in the future and won't make any decisions about, but for now, it's enough to know that I am thinking I need to start keeping everything in one place. Secondly, I lost a post yesterday. Grr fuck. It was a nice post, with links to other places and talking about how Nintendo has a chance to capture the FPS and therefore hardcore gamer market, but being a dumbass I loaded a new page in the Typepad tab, and *poof* what I'd been working on was gone. This isn't a new issue by any means. Blogger was plagued for what felt like ever with lost posts. Even still, despite the "recover post" functionality it's possible for things to go south pretty quickly. Neither service is at fault so much as the fact that editing things in a browser for eventual submission to a remote server can be a tricky proposition. The remote server's state can change at any time, and without asynchronous communication (which despite Web 2.0's hype is far from pervasive) the client can't know until the data is sent to the server where we learn -- oops! -- there's no server any more. Oh yeah, and I've trashed your data. Browsers are getting better about remembering form content in the history, but that raises issues of security and privacy and blah blah blah. I don't know. I just wanted to bitch. Grr fuck, lost post. Turns out bitching about it prompts activity. Caution: Crazy old internet gamer guy rants.

Maybe Tuesday will be "Boring Post Day". I've just written this thing, and my recommendation is just to stop reading it now. Yowza. I've pretty recently gone through the process of registering my business name ("The Miscellanean") for freelance work, as well as acquiring a GST number. I don't really expect to make enough to otherwise warrent a GST number, but since my brother-in-law is a consultant and has to keep track of such things, it makes his life easier to be able to have a GST number to be paying out to. The process for both was terribly simple. Near painless. Both the Ontario and Canadian governments have a couple of different ways to do it. When I registered my GST number, which is a federal registration, I found what I think is probably the best place to take care of all of it: Business Registration On-line is a service provided by the federal government that will help with registering a business name in a number of provinces (including Ontario), and let you register for a GST number. I used this service just for my GST number, but it looks like you can do everything with it, which makes the whole process much smoother I suspect. The first fee I paid was $8 for a name search. This isn't 100% necessary, and for something as curious as "The Miscellanean" I probably could have let it slide, but it's pretty cheap and I figured that it was better to be safe than sorry. The second step, and fee, is paying $60 to register the actual name. Both processes result in a nice little PDF, the first demonstrates that there are no other businesses with this name, and the second that you are officially registered up. I'm sorry, I think I nodded off for a while there. Really, less important than detailing the steps (which are pretty much the same for acquiring a GST number) is to note that it's ridiculously easy. Aside from the money expense, as long as you have a credit card you could have yourself an official business name in 5 minutes. Seriously, 5 minutes. If you don't, the process is still easy. A couple weeks before I did it my brother went to a Small Business Center (which is a bit of a regionalism, but if you search for "[your local] small business center" I bet you're on the right path) and paid in cash. I spent a lot of time thinking that I should incorporate, which is just another excuse to put off making any actually progress. "Oh, I'll incorporate when I have an extra four or five hundred dollars lying around." Technically speaking you don't even need to register a business name, you can do business as yourself no problem. For me though, a business name is a nice focal point.

Hooray for fitness day! Anyway. I increased bike time to 14 minutes this morning, and quite enjoyed it. I definitely felt the increased demand on my body. Last week was pretty decent. My weight started at n + 31 and ended the week at n + 29, which is where it was still this morning. A lot less fluctuation. I didn't drink nearly enough water last week, and while my breakfasts and lunches were pretty good and snacking was kept to a minimum, I splurged at supper pretty much every opportunity that arose, and many did. Last week's dinners included a fresh (and delicious) lasagna with baguette (fusion!), dinner out with Jen (including finishing off her chicken wings and helping with her fries) and other wonderfully decadent feasts. It's not as if I ate any more (or less) than usual, it's just that I ate with pretty much complete lack of regard for the fact that I'm trying to work myself towards a slightly healthier. The lack of hallowe'en treats and resisting the big tub of jujubes at work is accomplishment enough for the week though. I don't know if it was lack of sleep, too much stress, or just a general downcycle, but I sort of crashed towards the end of the week and wasn't too pleased with myself. I did get up at 6am and get on the bike for the requisite amount of time even though I would have much rather rolled over and told the world to fuck off, so there's some accomplishment, and really during the peak period of the cycling (it takes about 6 minutes for the excercising glow to really kick in) I felt pretty great, so I get my fancy little mini goal and the general good feeling of excercising, which I think helped defunk me (in the good sense) a little bit.

Apple's move to Intel processors has everyone and their brother becoming a technology pundit, much like most other Apple moves do. So now it's my turn. A very large piece of me is inexplicably convinced that OS X will be availabe, legitimately, on non-Apple hardware by the end of 2008. As much as I try to argue with myself, it's a pretty deeply ensconced thought, but lets go through everything that I see is going on. Apple's industrial design is tremendous. Through the computer hardware industry nothing compares to it. Every interaction between a person and a computer is considered, from when you first catch sight of it to sitting and working (or playing) for hours on end.

The power of being willing to walk away is rather impressive. Last night I was meeting with my first official Miscellanean clients, and things weren't going well. The initial outline of a design I'd put together for them was all kinds of wrong, but they weren't able to elaborate on what right was. They had no idea what they wanted (and admitted it), and I had no idea how to draw out what they wanted. So I admitted it too. I told them that I felt that I was probably not experienced enough for the job. Technically, no problem, but guiding them through the process of describing what they wanted, I was not at all successful. I knew when I said it that one of two things would happen: 1) I would walk away from the job. I didn't really want to. It's a good job with a lot of potential, but it was also beginning to look suspiciously quagmire-like. It would result in a reassessment of my (currently mostly non-existant) game plan, and delay any sort of establishment, and frankly I want the money. But it would also free up time to work on other projects and not have me answering to clients, which isn't what I want to do ultimately anyway. 2) It would focus the discussion and get them to key in on what they wanted. I didn't really expect this to happen, but we'd been talking in circles for over an hour and a half, and there wasn't anything resembling consensus or shared vision. We would talk about something for five minutes, and then jump off to an example site, or get sucked into a slideshow of sample images, or just start talking about the new pda/cellphone toy or whatever. So I said I was going to remove myself from the project. I said "I'm not experienced enough to help figure out an answer" and they said "well, we don't know what we want" and I said "we keep talking about different things but none of us are on the same page" and my brother-in-law (who I am a subcontractor of for this project) said "so lets write it down". And so we did. I drew a picture of how I thought the front page should look and how it should behave. And they changed a couple of things. And I drew a picture of how the "contact us" page should look, and then all the other pages. And in under half an hour, I was out the door with a project that was 50% larger and immeasurably more focussed than when I walked in. I'm not really interested in capitulating. I don't want any frustrating, uninteresting or uninspired projects. What I am doing as The Miscellanean is moonlighting. It's not a replacement for my fulltime job and won't be for the foreseeable future. It's a way to bring in some extra money and to pick and choose the things I want to work on. I'm still learning what sort of businessperson I'm going to be. I'm full of ideas and thoughts and theories, but this seems like an actual lesson being learned here. In a CRPG, a little number with a plus sign in front of it would have floated above my head. Having the ability to walk away without regret is important. There are always other avenues to success.

I figure it's about time to go (as) public (as this place is). I've long talked about my own company and have made various weak-willed attempts at putting together a website, but have never really pulled the trigger. A couple of weeks ago I registered a business name, "The Miscellanean". Tonight I meet with clients who have money, and if things go well (which I think they will, this is the second meeting), they will eventually give me money, and ideally give me money a few more times as work progesses. My brother-in-law has been fairly key in getting things rolling. He's had his own consulting business for some time and has a number of connections in and around his city, and as people have asked him about web work, he's talked me up some. In addition, my brother is starting a used bookstore, for which I am working on a couple of projects that could be turned into salable services or products, and of course I have the various ideas for things that have been building up in my head for any number of years. My first project for myself is a web presence, which is approaching a point where I can unveil it. I am stretching all kinds of unused design muscles, so it's not going to look great or ideal or the way I want, but actually moving is more important at this point than succeeding. Which, when I phrase it that way, seems pretty weird. The thing is, so many times in the past I've decided that I failed before I even got started. I no longer really trust my judgement in that regard. People who try tend towards a better likelihood of success than people who don't. Strikingly simple, but hard to convince myself of. The short term plan is just to do the work I have on my plate. I don't have anything remotely worth quitting my day job for, but I do have plenty to keep me busy and a number of good prospects. Perhaps in six months things will be different, and perhaps I will still be plugging away. It's like starting to excercise regularly, and it's certainly no coincindence that these things are happening at roughly the same time. I'm tired of failing before I start, so I'm going to try it this way around.

One of the niceties of regular excercise is the ease with which one can set and meet goals. Pretty much every morning after that first, I've sort of looked at the bike and thought "gosh it would be so easy not to do this," but then I get on and do it. Yay, goal! My leg can be a little stiff starting out and then after a minute or two it gets that nice glowy being-worked feeling and the stiffness is gone and faded. Yay, goal! It's pretty easy to feel good about yourself.

This morning for breakfast (I warned you about the banality! Though to be fair this is probably a one-time style of post) I have a fried egg sandwich, which in its current incarnation consists of: 1 egg, fried in a very small amount of butter (for flavour more than anything else). 2 pieces of bread, toasted. Normally we have fancy bakery bread and I cut myself thin slices, this week we got lazy and are having Wonder Whole Wheat Texas Toast. 1 tsp light mayonnaise .75cm of cheddar cheese, thinly sliced. I can't recall the weight, just the approximate size from the packaging when I figured out the calories. It's like, 5 really thin slices that melt real easily when the egg is put on them. lettuce and sliced tomato. This ends up being approximately 375 calories. Probably closer to 400 today because I used thicker slices of crappier bread. This morning I increased the amount of cycling up to 13 minutes. Last week I'd been going about 12 minutes, because that's where I felt like stopping the first day, and it seemed like a good easy amount to start getting myself used to moving around again. Last week I'd been doing a 2-minute sprint in the middle of the time, but I decided over the weekend that that was counter to my goal. I'm not looking to build strength, I'm looking to focus on cardio, which means a consistant heart rate over a prolonged period of time. I haven't done too much reading about it, but that's apparently better for weight loss in general as well. I decided to better track my heart rate, and kept it in neighbourhood of 140BPM for the 13 minutes. According to the chart in the bike's manual, this is the low-end of the desired heart rate range. My first goal is to slowly increase my bike time to 20 minutes, and then I'll start increasing my heart rate into the middle range, or around 150BPM. I plan on taking things slow, which I think is going to increase my chances of success, because I am not in pain through the day and while I'm creaky when I start stretching out each morning, I get a good feeling while cycling and everything is limber and moving well. I'm on the edge of strain, at a point where I am sure I can continue for a very long time, but certainly not so little as to be doing nothing. I feel my workout through the day, but I don't feel in pain from it. This morning when I weighed myself I was at n + 31. Last week I ranged from a high point of n + 32 to a low point of n + 22, which seems drastic but is a pretty typical fluctuation for the combination of me and my scale. I've been told the scale weighs high, and I have to suspect that's because I've affected the coil, which is in part responsible for the fluctuation, but I also think that at the scale of person I am, that sort of fluctuation just sort of happens. Various websites suggest daily weight fluctuations in the neighbourhood of 6 pounds, and being as I'm outside the norm for weight, I figure it makes sense that fluctuation should increase some.

My weight isn't something I typically like to talk about, for the same reason that many people don't like to talk about their weight: It's too much. I'm reasonably used to being overweight, having been so for the vast majority of my life, and for the most part I don't mind being a big guy. Lately though, I've come to realise that I'm not only overweight, but I'm completely out of shape. A lot of people think the two are synonymous, but for a very long time I was active (dancing regularly, walking most places) and had reasonably high levels of endurance and strength. For the past few years though, the readily available ways of easily excercising have been left by the wayside. Instead of walking to school I started commuting to work. Instead of going out two to three nights a week dancing, I got a full time job and needed to get up in the morning. Earlier this year I stopped smoking. I'm not comfortable saying "quit" or that I'm a non-smoker, I sort of subscribe to the AA concept of addiction. I'm a smoker in the same way that I'm Catholic: Still guilty, not taking communion. The positive benefits of dramatically increasing the amount of time between cigarettes haven't been as significant as I expected them to be. When people talk about quitting smoking, they talk about all this energy they have, and how great they feel all the time, how wonderful food is, all sorts of things. I smoked for like, 13 years, so it definitely took it's toll on my body, but I still feel sort of lethargic a lot of the time. I think that normally, people actually you know, do things physically in addition to smoking, so when they stop the smoking the impact it has on regular activity is no longer felt. My problem has been that I don't typically engage in a lot of physical activity. More importantly though, I've given up smoking. I have no intention of going back, and while I still get cravings when I'm hanging out with smokers, I'm able to resist them. I've proven to myself through this and through other expressions of will power that I do have some strength of will, and I've decided many times over that it's time to actually apply that to my biggest vice. Just over a week ago I bought a cheapass excercise bike. Every weekday last week, and this morning, I've invested some time in getting myself into the habit of getting up in the morning and going for a ride. It's not a habit yet, not by any means, but it's still going well. Last week I rode for about 12 minutes per session, which ended up being in the neighbourhood of 4.5km cycled. This morning I bumped it up to 13 minutes. I'm not really sure what the best daily amount is, but I expect I'll let myself plateau around 20 minutes. As I said, I'm not really comfortable discussing my weight, so for the time being I'm going to call it n + 32. n is not a multiple of 100, but it is a multiple of 10 that has some minor degree of significance to me. Whenever I go to tackle a problem, one of the first thoughts I think is "how can I build a system to help me manage this problem?" which ultimately ends up in me dedicating some brainspace to building the system, instead of the real problem. In this case, I've been investing brainspace for ages in building a system whereby I record everything I'm eating, and of course have it all in a database so I can pull out the calories so I can start keeping track and balancing my diet and oh, also how many servings of carbs or protein is that and I will integrate it with the food pyramid and oh man, it's just to big so I'm not going to bother. Thinking big kills my projects almost every time, and ultimately this project is just me talking about what I'm eating for breakfast and therefore the perfect solution exists: A blog. I considered starting a new blog at "thinbythirty.drimmie.net" since I'm about 18 months away from that milestone age, but ultimately I've decided against it. Some time ago I had a discussion with a friend of mine who does start a new blog for every topical interest he feels like talking about, and frankly I can't keep up with them. To a degree that's good, since it keeps his baseball talk separate from his hippie vegan progressive political rants separate from his Pokemon addiction, but for me, my thinking is that everything I am deserves to be discussed here. This leads into a slightly wider issue of things that I've kept from this blog because I'm not sure to what degree I want to play my hand in regards to certain things, but I am starting to think that's stupid too so I will start talking more about starting my own software company as well, but that's getting outside the scope of this particular post. I also don't like "thinbythirty" since to be honest, I don't particularly care about being thin, per se. I'm a big guy, I'm always going to be a big guy, and frankly I don't mind a bit of paunch and fat. In terms of vanity it would be nice to drop a few sizes (get under the magical 40 waist perhaps) but what I'm really concerned with is getting my heart and lungs back up to fighting form. Losing weight is part of that trip, it's an unnecessary strain carrying my bulk around, but it's secondary to getting regular excercise. I have no idea what form posts will take. To start, the easy thing is to publicise my record of activity. Maybe I'll talk about the office jujubes or explore some of my favorite meals. I don't know yet, but I do know that I'm going to start talking more here, which means that you should probably purge your RSS feeds, because baby, here comes the banality.

Over the past couple of weeks I've been working on some projects for which I want to add some greater interactivity on the client side using Ajax-type technologies. There are a couple of libraries being made available that make such things easier, as well as just generally making Javascript development easier by adding a layer of abstraction and handling all the various differences between browsers and versions and blah blah blah. I went with MochiKit because it's small, because it's written by Bob Ippolito and because it takes a lot of its conceptual structure from Twisted (because it's written by Bob Ippolito, which I may have mentioned). The thing is, it is a completely new-to-me library. It's pretty new entirely really -- 1.0 was just released the other day in fact -- but it's the new-to-me that's the issue. Pretty much any library ends up requiring a bit of work to get in to, and while it's fully documented, it's not fully tutorialised. So I started futzing around and kept some notes, and when I reached a point where things were sort of working, I went through the notes and created a fairly rough introduction to MochiKit. It's a rather simple little project, your standard CRUD functionality, but all Ajaxed up. It doesn't look good or have rounded corners or anything, but it works. If you look at it and have any comments, my gmail username is rob.drimmie. I'm pretty sure you can figure the rest out, because you are not an email address finding spam bot. Or are you? *squints suspiciously*

I think it's official: My iPod has finally given up the ghost. For a long time, until around about early 2003, I had it linked up to my iBook's iTunes, the two sang and danced together and it got regular use and then the iBook's hard drive failed completely and the beatiful relationship was severed. The iPod struggled on, alone, as every few weeks I would mournfully attempt to boot the laptop until I finally gave up and let its glowy white light die. For a few months at least, until I had a little bit of discretionary time and money. At that point I bought myself a new 40G laptop hard drive, dug around a bit online and found instructions on how to take apart a laptop. With a new hard drive the iBook, formerly known as roboscrote, was reborn as bonsaiBook. Excitedly, the now-anthropomorphized iPod (portoscrote) waited for me to reconnect the two, which I did. Sadly, bonsaiBook knew nothing about this strange iPod, it's memory of the connection gone with the former hard drive. A trial many iPod owners know well, as once the device is associated with a master iTunes, creating a new link is impossible. I was not worried. iPods are simply hard drives, and there are many applications that have been released onto the web that take advantage of this. Additionally, via the terminal iPods are accessible as a mounted volume and gladly make their secrets known to command line queries. I began copying my old music files off the iPod but to my dismay after transferring some random amount of data the transfer would freeze, locking up both the iPod and the laptop. Playing the music the iPod would work just fine, it could play for hours on end without interuption, but as soon as I tried to transfer data from it to any other device (either my laptop or a windows 2000 machine with a firewire port), it would lock and completely stall the parent. So the iPod sat, mostly unused unless I was going on a long trip and wanted some music. I couldn't get data off it and had no interest in trapping new data onto it. This was the state of things for the better part of 18 months. Jen has a long commute to work. 40-60 minutes daily, and during that time could use a large library of music. Here we were with a mostly functional iPod that wasn't being used to any great degree and a desire for someone to hear music. The problem was that there was no way for her to control the content of it, and while we do share a certain overlap in musical tastes, that particular intersection is much smaller than either set individually, so the library of music available to her on the iPod was minimal. I would occasionally pick at the device and make a weak effort to back the data up on to a separate device, but since everything would lock up within 5 minutes it got very frustrating. Finally, this past weekend, I made the big step. Most of the data on the iPod came from my or Jen's CD collection. Over 95% of it was a legitimate copy of our music, and therefore recreatable. There were various live tracks and a couple of albums I hadn't bothered buying because I'd ended up downloading them, but the biggest barrier was the effort involved. The barrier finally fell though, and I convinced myself that there was no use in having a 10gig storage device sit around being unused. I restored the iPod to factory settings. It went suprisingly quickly, so I guess mostly it just rewrote whatever file allocation table its OS uses and all my data is sitting there as unknown and thought-unallocated random bits. After wiping the pod I copied some mp3 cd's Jen had made from her collection of music at work onto the laptop. A smallish selection of 850 or so songs, which sounds like a lot until you have an iPod, ever hungry for more data. I connected the iPod to iTunes, let iTunes own the portable device (now named 'Atomic Cafe' after the documentary we were watching while I did all this) and sat back while it tried to do its thing. At song 50, it stalled. For about two hours. Jen picked up the iPod and held it to her ear, and mentioned how much it sounded exactly like that bad sound hard drives make when they are expending a lot of effort not actually doing anything resembling reading or writing data. I did the same, and indeed the quiet whistling grindy sort of noise was unlike anything I'd heard the iPod make before, but was certainly familiar with. It's possible there is an avenue for recovery. I haven't run any sort of disk utilities on the drive in months, so maybe given a fresh start it will be able to, I don't know, find and label bad sectors and become usable again for a short while. But to be honest, I doubt it. It just fails at random moments in time. Next time I plug it in maybe it will make it to song 200 before crapping out, and maybe it won't get past song 1. I will try, of course, because that it was I do, but I suspect it's time to move on and take a closer look at those pretty new nanos.

My wife and I were off work last week, for vacation. When we originally scheduled it we discussed going to New York City to meet with some friends who were on a North America Tour, but plans fell through for a variety of reasons, so we decided to simply sit on our asses and relax for 9 days. We did accomplish a little bit. We cleaned and tidied and rearranged a little bit, here and there, but mostly we just enjoyed each other's company and pretended there was no such thing as responsibility. It was very nice. Last week also happened to be the first week of school again, which I conveniently forgot this morning as I followed the patterns of traffic that were valid two weeks ago. The catch? The reasonably large and popular community college at the halfway point on the single road between my home and office. Throughout the summer when there are minimal classes running, the school is mostly a non-issue. There might be a jerkass kid ripping from the right to left turn lanes, or a meandering old person (which translates roughly into "anyone going 1km/hr less than me, regardless of actual age) in the left lane lane anticipating said turn lanes. Neither of which is an actual problem or worth more than an exasperated sigh or maybe a shaken fist. During school months however, traffic changes dramatically as more people drive in this particularly remote part of town, and in turn anticipate the left hand turn onto the campus far in advance causing traffic in the left-hand lane to back up. The left-hand lane is exactly where I plonked myself good and early this morning as immediately after the school's entrance is an overpass/on-ramp over and onto the 401. This now archaic bridge is two lanes, one in each direction, which means merging to the left-hand lane. --- There's just something about returning to an already dull blog post over 30 minutes after you start writing it to make it die a bland and sleep-inducing death.

After some small amount of semi-regular usage, I have become slightly less please with the way iTunes handles podcasts. Within the magic podcast area they are okay, but for the life of me I cannot figure out if it is possible to play more than one podcast in a row without resorting to manually adding them to Party Shuffle. I'm not quite sure why it's such a big burdensome task. At my current job I don't really have a big musical library. I'm not interested in downloading a great selection of songs and I am having frustrating interactions with my iPod so I've sort of moved away from bothering with digital music for the most part, until this recent toe-dipping into the world of podcasts. I have a small selection of casts I enjoy and every so often a new one is automatically downloaded. This is good and happy-making and the strength of the podcasting revelation. Within the magic podcast area it's easy to find and listen to the new ones, but once that has happened, repeating them is burdensome. Maybe I am using them wrong. I am not subscribed to any disposable type news podcasts, because those don't much interest me. I am subscribed to things like Acts of Volition Radio and CBC Radio 3 and such, which are the sort of thing that it's possible to listen to more than once (in fact, more than five minutes) without wanting to drive the fork from yesterday's lunch, crusty bits and all, into your ears. Anyway, I want a way to just listen to my podcasts on random. If I manually add one or more to a playlist and press play, iTunes just stops when the current episode finishes. That doesn't seem right.

So, the curry weekend was this weekend past. Friday night I attempted another couple of curries, but had a serious problem with getting a reasonable gravy. After introducing a blight the likes of which my poor kitchen has never seen (which given my experimental tendancies is saying something), I desperately asked some friends if anyone had a good recipe, and was saved by The Hungry Tiger, whose proprietor lifted a recipe for Lahori Chicken Curry from Indian Home Cooking, a book I really need to buy. The curry turned out really good, and I learned a few fundamentals which helped highlight things I had done wrong and gives me some room to experiment in the future. I doubled the recipe, and in so doing ensured myself an abundance of leftover curry for the future. Four frozen servings sit in the freezer and await my return with heat and a fork. I've thought about them a considerable number of times since late Saturday when they were portioned up, but have yet to revisit my first successful curry. The presence of ready-to-eat curry servings raises something of a quandry for me, being a Monday-to-Friday type office worker. Curry, as my wife and I learned when we returned home Saturday night, has a rather pervasive fragrence, which means that it is a potentially disasterous (and at best impolite) office lunch throughout most of North America. So I brought chili today, but would rather have curry.

I have finally agreed to iTunes' repeated nagging and updated to version 4.9, which as you've no doubt heard, features a podcast directory and subscribing functionality. I immediately signed up for the Quirks and Quarks podcast, as it is one of my favorite CBC shows though I almost never hear it. I've also heard good things about the CBC Radio Three podcast, and was impressed to see it and Q&Q being in the top two and three spots on the iTunes Music Store Podcast list thinger. I'm still a little wary about this whole process. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to get archives of podcasts, which I want as there's an assumed prior history in pretty much every show as, for the most part, there should be. You can't repeat intro information every week or day or whatever. But it's frustrating and hard so far getting archives. Subscribing is no problem, archives are. Navigating the iTunes music store through iTunes hurts. I have a browser, let me use it. Updated 28 July 2005 10:43 AM: So, uh, I just figured out how to get the archives. It's suprisingly easy. I didn't realize that the podcast name in the iTunes list is just the name of the folder-like object. Expand it, and there's a list of all the episodes, featuring a "Get" button beside each one. Yay!

I'd been hoping to do a small mini-series of daily curry-learning updates, but instead I'm going to spend the evening meeting my new niece. Welcome Emma Ann Marie Matz.

A group of friends has taken to getting together on a monthlyish basis (with 5 or so couples it can be kind of tricky to establish a regular schedule) for dinner. Based on tradition my mother and her group of friends have followed for years, we're drawing inspiration for each gathering from the succesive letters of the alphabet. We've done 'A', we've done 'B', and coming up this Saturday is 'C'. I have been nominated to make a curry. This is all fine and well, except for one small thing: I've never made a curry. I've eaten lots of curry. Lots and lots of curry. I have strongish opinions into what makes for a good curry which may or may not be completely wrong (I've never eaten in India or England) but I don't care, because I like them. Curry to me, without qualifier, means a yellow curry gravy. There is certainly all sorts of curries, even discounting the green and red varieties, but to me when I think curry I essentially think turmeric. Over the past couple of months, completely independant of this event, I have been slowly stocking my cupboards with the core curry spices so gathering up cumin and coriander and, of course, turmeric. I'd begun experimenting with each. Coriander I used for the first time a couple of years ago and am actually fairly comfortable with. I went through my cumin period towards the end of this winter past and into summer. I hadn't gotten around to the turmeric. So I'm reasonably well-versed in the core spices. Onions and garlic and ginger are old and dear friends of course, and as I've learned from the odd recipe before knowing about this weekend and in brief preperation, that just about makes for a curry. I've set myself a high bar in the past at gatherings and pot lucks and other occasions featuring edibles, but my dirty little secret is that I've spent years developing most of my other recipes. I didn't just walk up to the stove and mash potatoes that first time, or up to the grill and throw on some ribs, there's been some reasonably serious practice invested into my better recipes. I show them off because I'm confident in them. Well, tonight I made my first ever curry. It was very simple, and very loosely based on the recipes that I'd read, though I didn't have one in front of me. It ended up being a little on the sweet side, I think I used too many red onions (I had one on the go) and instead of tomato paste, which I can't find in a handy tube form anywhere around here, I used ketchup. I think it will be something that is very good with raisins and some other magic ingredient -- I'm thinking okra but am not yet certain it's right. It wasn't hot but it had turmeric so there was something of a kick. It definitely wasn't a gravy, it was a thick pasty substance but would make for a very good nan spread. I only made about half a cup's worth, just throwing some ingredients into the pan to see how they all work together. When Jen got home she remarked at how great something smelled. It was of course the curry, but since it was only a sample size there was none left. Tomorrow night I'll pick up the raisins and maybe some okra if I can find some fresh stuff, and give it a try in earnest for Jen and I to have for dinner.

I had a night of sad, lonely dreams last night. Leaving, and never seeing again. People I didn't know before I dreamed them have left a hole in my heart. Weird. Sad.

So. I finally got around to watching Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. I didn't bother in the theatre, and I didn't rent it, but Jen's out with my sister and it's on the free Video On Demand service, so *shrug* what the hell. Let's see what they've done to it. I like the first movie. Hell, I love the first movie. I own it, I've watched it numerous times, I've watched it with all the included commentaries. I think it's great. I think the actors did a fine job portraying 2-dimensional cartoon characters, I think the story was funny, I think they were true to the cartoon and spirit of the cartoon, moreso than pretty much any movie of late whose original material is an old television show, and to summarize, I liked it. I didn't watch the second one, because seriously, what are the chances of duplicating the magic? I didn't watch the second one because everyone knew it was a stinker. 'It isn't as good as the first' claimed all the people that said they didn't like the first. But that's the thing: It's the same people that didn't like the first that were saying that, and I'm a great big dumbass for listening to them. Because they definitely struck gold from the same vein twice in a row. Now, lets get one thing straight. The movie sucks. I mean, it sucks. It's a hackneyed story with lame physical gags and fart jokes and straight-from-the-boring-book morality lessons. Hell, the formula and pacing is pretty much a direct retread of the first movie. The characters are terrible and flat. But this was all the case for the series, too. From the first episode to whatever the last one was, Scooby Doo followed a strict formula of: Ghost haunts place. Mystery Inc. investigates. Clues are found, Scooby and Shaggy spend 10 minutes running from monsters. Bad guy is unveiled and he or, on occasion she, (all together) would have gotten away with it if it weren't for the lousy kids and their flea-bitten mutt. Rooby rooby roo! And that's what you get from the movie, too. But it's done so well. Now, I have a healthy dose of unbridled lust for Matthew Lillard. It's very rare that he can do wrong in my eyes. I don't know if Cereal Killer imprinted on a young enough geek brain or there's just a very stubborn series of synapses or if he's actually as good an actor as I like to think he is, but dammit, that man can play a Shaggy. I didn't start the movie thinking I'd like it, even given my love for the first and general appreciation for the series and admiration for downright horrible movies. (And oh boy do I love me some downright horrible movies. Don't listen to me, don't watch this movie, it sucks.) Velma voice was wrong and whoosits still isn't the right actor. Lillard Shaggy is weak! Why is Fred not clean shaven and what's with the bad 80s retro cool hair-do, Mr. Prinze? Daphne? Well, Sarah Michelle Whatsit's still a really good Daphne. And hey, she's out front and kicking ass this time around. That's a good fight scene. Heh, Shaggy's funny. Heh, Shaggy's funny. Oh man, a dance scene? Heh, that was a pretty good dance scene. That's a pretty good chase scene. Oh, it's totally that person behind the mask, you could see it from the start. But wait, is it them? It can't be them, it's too obviously them. But it's too obviously them, too? Heh, Shaggy's funny. What? Motorcycle? Yeah, it's definitely them, but what if it isn't? But it has to be! Hey, that's actually just a little bit touching and not in your face saccrine! Oh good, it's them. And them! Yay! Oh dear, a closing dance scene with an American Idol star. Anyway, it's a worthy successor to the first movie, and if you genuinely liked the first one despite it's particular form of suckage, you'll like this second one. I will have to own it. I will have to watch them back-to-back once I own it, because it's been a while and this one might just even be better than the first. (At least it doesn't have that damn song)

BBC Radio 4 has an interview with Steve Meretzky, co-auther and implementor of the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom game. Meretzky's also the author and implementor of a number of other Infocom games, most notable to me being Planetfall. The interview is mostly about working with Douglas Adams, and is pretty good, but the real reason I'm linking is to make note of this:

Douglas always described the structure of the game as "pear shaped" - narrow toward the stem end, then suddenly ballooning wider, and finally coming together at the end.

That seems like a great goal for a game, although the strongly linear part at the beginning of other games can probably be done better than the strongly linear part of H2G2. It's also probably telling that in all my attempts to play through H2G2, I ended up stopping right around getting to the Heart of Good. I really need to try those Infocom games again, because other than Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Wishbringer and Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head nor Tails of It (which was great but barely counts) I don't think I've actually finished most of them.

For most of the time I've been playing WoW, I noticed that going underwater screwed up my display -- everything turned solid blue, except for the interface features -- and I couldn't navigate or anything. I was never certain if it was intentional or not, though I couldn't help but be amazed that Blizzard would both let you go underwater and have nothing there. This weekend I confirmed that some of the (Redridge) quests I needed to do involved actually being underwater, so I read through the list of video options, and turned off the "world glow" or something option, and voila underwater navigation. The water in WoW is pretty great. Swimming is decent, underwater combat doesn't suck, characters are able to hold their breaths for crazy long periods of time. One of the complaints I see semi-frequently about PC games is the required knowledge to configure them. It's one of the reasons I think consoles are so much more popular and that PC games are in a state of decline: Consoles are plug and play in the truest sense, and PCs (and this is inclusive, I'm not talking about any specific OS here) just aren't. I wonder if there's a way to mitigate that frustration but still over the best experience. In-game tutorials seem to be the generally accepted best practice -- teach players how to play in game, progress the story and player skill in one fell swoop, and ultimately dispense with the manual completely or perhaps make it a useful offline command reference. As part of that process, exposing video options in-game (modify your HUD or see an optometrist or something) and helping players tweak them might greatly improve the game experience. I have no idea if where I set my gamma is where the artists have their set. Are things supposed to be as dark as my default, or as washed out as the place I pick where I can see every detail, or should their be some happy ground to get the best of my video cards weak shading techniques? Is my video card pumping out too much red? I don't know what colour balance is, but test patterns are common enough. Some elements of video configuration can be and typically are determined programmatically for best performance: texture size, horizon depth, particle count, but presenting users with a big box of checkboxes and sliders labelled with obtuse and meaningless names for tweaking the rest seems poorly done.

Jen and I spent way too much time playing WoW this weekend, and look forward to doing so again through the week until we burn off the initial new-game shine. Jen's main is a Human Mage, currently level 15, who skins animals and makes leather goods. My main is a Gnome Rogue, currently level 14, who is a tailer and enchanter. We have a lot of fun with the crafting professions, although it took a long time for me to finally decide on what I wanted (having tried mining, engineering and herbalism to get to where I am). Even though neither of us can really make anything for ourselves, we're having a great time making and enchancing things for each other, and have fully embraced the "do these bracers make my wrists look fat?" paperdoll aesthetics of making clothes and armour for each other to wear. I also spend a fair amount of time playing with my cooking skill, as it seems I'm a bit of a foodie in virtual worlds as well as the real one. It was this aspect that got me to thinking about crafting. Crafting in Warcraft relies on recipes. As you improve in skill, you can purchase more and more complicated recipes which require different combinations of reagents to make a final product. This basic principle applies to all the professional and secondary skills that involve crafting (as opposed to those that involve collecting, like mining or fishing), though the terminology differs depending on the profession. What's a "blueprint" to you is a "recipe" to me is a "pattern" to someone else. In real life, when cooking, I pretty much never follow a recipe. I am of the sort that has some general concept of what I want to come out, and I put things into a pot, mix them together, and out comes a result. Most of the time it's even edible. I've gotten pretty decent at it, and rather enjoy the process of discovery when modifying an old standard. To be momentarily distracted, I suppose the existance of old standards is to a certain degree a recipe, so I do follow recipes, but never with exact measurements, just a hodgepodge of known ingredients whose quantities are modified depending on my mood and current preferences. End distraction! In World of Warcraft and Kingdom of Loathing (my only other MMOG-with-crafting experience, one which is very heavily dependant on crafting and recipes) when you mix items together the outcome is heavily predetermined. In both games known-to-the-system recipes of reagents are the only permissible things to combine. The input is always the same and the output is always the same. I'm interested in a system that is more free-flowing. It does need to be deterministic, predictable outcome (each ingredient having specific properties that when combined have specific reactions), but flexible enough to allow me to try to mix a heavily-garlicked alfredo with my chain mail and end up with +1 resistance to vampires or something. Okay, that's probably a little bit excessive, so lets go with a more realistic example. To create a White Linen Shirt in WoW, I need a piece of linen, a bottle of bleach, and some coarse thread, as well as a tailoring skill of some number I don't remember. Say 30, for the sake of this discussion, though it's probably lower. Oh, and most importantly: the recipe. You can't do anything without the recipe. I would rather not have the requirement for the recipe. I'm a reasonably logical person, and I could probably figure out that linen + bleach = white linen. The calculation "Linen (of any colour) + thread = shirt" is probably more difficult to imagine without a recipe, but in the context of the game I know I have a chest -- I've found a number of things that can be worn on it even. So. Hmm. It seems I've talked myself back into the recipes requirement, which gives me a thing or four to ponder. The ultimately goal of this was to get to the point where I can tailor or cook some items others can't, but in such a manner that it lies within the constraints of the system (primarily: limited palette of possiblities because graphics need to be sent to all players). Character customization in WoW is fairly limited. By End-Game I'm sure there's a pretty healthy selection of options, but no one ever complained about having too many ways to differentiate their character from the rest. I'd like a system open enough that I can design special shirts "By Metaltwist" and have the name attached to them be relevant. I get credit for everything I make, but the only current advantage is that Jen may have some minor sentimental attachment until she finds a pair of partialy digested robes in some bear's belly that give higher protection against the next sword swung at her (and I'm not different with the leathers she makes for me -- stats are king in a game such as this). edit:fixed spelling and grammar

One thing Worlds of Warcraft has going for it, far beyond City of Heroes, is quests. In City of Heroes, missions are handed out by appointed contacts, one after the other to a maximum of 3. They are often time related, not just by time limits but in the story themselves. "We've just learned of some goings on! You must be quick!" Most missions, "door missions" in the players' jargon, are instanced and you have to go pretty far (often through two or three zones) to reach them. In Worlds of Warcraft, missions are handed out by almost anyone. The world or universe never seems to be in danger, it's often just a person who has lost something, or your typical CRPG "military leader needs something investigated" quest. And more importantly, you can have a lot of quests at any given time. I think I've seen the number 30, but the most Jen or I have had at one time so far is around 7. I find it really opens up gameplay a lot. You can have your "kill 8 wolves" missions and your "deliver a letter to this person" missions and your "find this thing for me" missions all going on at once, so as you travel from one destination to another you're more inclined to kill things along the way. Well, I am at least. In City of Heroes I'll spend a few minutes picking up missions, almost always instanced door missions, then knock them off one by one, then revisit my contacts and do it again. Because CoH limits you to three, when playing solo or in a small group of friends it's more efficient to focus on instanced missions. The world happens around you, but it's the place you flit through on your way from one repetitive warehouse map to the next. In Worlds of Warcraft, the world around you is where everything takes place, and that strongly contributes to the sense of immersion. When reading the City of Heroes boards I was always nodding my head in time with the people who cried "no ph4t l00t!" Having to collect things and camp for special items and stuff, I can see how that's frustrating and crappy. But you know what else? Loot is fucking fun. Crafting is fucking fun. Finding a better mail vest on that brigand's corpse, or equipping Jen's latest and greatest boots, that's good shit. Finding copper mines to get ore and converting them to bars and making bracers, that's fun. updated, 04-APR-05: fixed open tag, deleted duplicate post

I'm going to be trickling posts in as I think about things. I think it's pretty clear that Cryptic spanked Blizzard when it comes to interface. Blizzard used a lot of holdovers from the standalone Warcraft series to theoretically help people adopt usage quicker, but ultimately I think they failed. The radar doesn't make it nearly clear enough where to go next to get something done. That's one thing CoH has going for it in a big way: Both the tutorial and the waypoint system mean that new users pop in and immediately know what to do next. The tight rails can be mildly frustrating for a small percentage of people, but the game opens up after about 30 minutes of play and you have a much better understanding of how to determine whether or not a mob is too hard for you to fight, how to interact with NPCs, etc. The powerbar, along the bottom of WoW's screen, really kind of sucks. Powers/Attackis go grey after being used and have the stopwatch re-brighten effect Blizzard's used for showing how long a unit takes to build and such. CoH uses simplified, iconic symbols for each power in a circle. When you use the power, the circle not only goes grey, but "recedes into the distance" -- it becomes a very small dot that grows bigger and brighter as recharge time passes. The medieval border cruft around all the interface windows irritates me a bit. WoW's advantage however is that Blizzard has apparently made the interface customisable. I've heard rumour of very useful third party modifications, which is fucking great. People who play games, a small portion of them, want to make the games better, for free. Blizzard's given them the opportunity and embraced the community, while Cryptic (the CoH developers) have made fucking with their client completely and utterly forbidden. So I look forward to seeing what options for interface customisation are out there.

Jen and I bought ourselves copies of World of Warcraft last night. It's a good game. I can't help but compare it to City of Heroes, even though that's almost unfair. WoW is a lot more complex than CoH, it's a full-fledged RPG with skills and trades and such, and that makes it sort of hard to get into. I'm not enthralled by the graphics. My machine's not a renderific device mind you, but I don't mean detail or quality so much as style. We created a pair of Night Elves (me a Rogue, her a Druid) and the huge floppy bunny ears and giant ham fists seem kind of weird. Not bad in any way, but weird. Coming from CoH, the first thing any player is going to notice is character customisation, or as pretty much everyone to compare the two has noted: the lack thereof. Maybe I'm not doing it right -- I was certainly excited to get in and play -- but building my character took about 2 minutes. In CoH it's a good half hour at least. It's hard not to sound whiny as you compare CoH's navbar to WoW's radar, but the waypoint system CoH uses makes it painfully clear where exactly I have to go next. And of course, being a city and mostly grid, it's pretty easy to figure out how to get around whatever obstacle lies between the destination and you. Combat is CoH is a fair bit simpler, which means that it's smoother and easier. With WoW, positioning matters (both Jen and I were caught a number of times facing the wrong direction and exclaiming in frustration) but that also means you can do things like backstab. It's hard to really, fairly compare the two. The only thing they have in common is the basic mechanics of: connect to a remote server and beat up things while other real people are around. City of Heroes started with very basic, very fundamental gameplay and nailed it. Combat is great. The character responsiveness when jumping or turning or whatever, is fantastic. But that's all there is to CoH. Combat. Get youru mission from your contact, do it. Get your next mission, or maybe your next contact. Go do it. Repeat for 50 levels. World of Warcraft seems to be interested in functioning in a virtual world. The whole place isn't a stage for one element. It's a role-playing game in the more traditional sense, which is kind of nice. Looking at stats, and inventory management, and all that stuff, it's fun for me to do. I enjoy it. So which is better? That's a loaded question because they are so different. Also, I've only played WoW for about two hours. I'm at well over the 500 point in CoH between all my characters, and frankly probably well past 600, too. Making any sort of judgement at this point would be pointless because I'd be making it for all the wrong reasons. We've got our free month of WoW, and we'll see how it goes. I definitely like WoW, there's no question. I definitely like CoH, there's no question there either. At this point, 6-month subscriptions to both seems likely.

I just realized, one minute ago, that I haven't thought "gee, I'd really like a cigarette" for a fairly long time now. I no longer remember the last time I thought that. I'd really like a cigarette now though.

I perculating a notion about official web-based discussion boards being not-great for MMOGs, but I'm not confident I have a strong opinion either way. The con would be that it pulls people out of the game to talk, but the pro is that it pulls people out of the game to talk about the game. Metaconversation, "nerfing our powers sucks!" "more artwork please!" etc., does that belong in-game? Probably not. It also provides a central location for all users on all servers to interact, which is a plus. It also provides an easy hook into the game for cubicle jockeys and others who can't play the game from where they are (work, school, on the bus, whatever) but do have web access. So, I guess, it's good that they're available outside the game world, but would there be value in making them accessible in-game? I think so. If for no reason other than getting more people to participate.

I've migrated hosts. This is a simple test post to ensure that everything has smoothly transitioned, yadda yadda. I'm a little bit bored this afternoon. I had eggs and hash browns for breakfast. *yawn*

Jen has entered a stage in her City of Heroes career most affectionally call altitis. She's grown comfortable with the basic gameplay and understands it well enough to experiment with the different character types to find one that actually suits her, rather than just one that I think might possibly be an enjoyable sort of character for her to play. On Friday night I wasn't so much in the mood for playing which I think helped prompt this exploration. She played as Y S A for a short time but controllers are not fun to solo, and I don't think she wanted to get too far ahead of CrossingGuard, and she didn't have a very good grouping experience, though she tried once or twice. She rolled herself a scrapper (katana/dark armour) and between Friday night and Saturday morning (when again I wasn't in the mood to play, having been gifted a new hosting package (which is where sell-out now is) to play with) got the new character up to level 6. When we played together Saturday night I happened to have a broadsword/dark armour scrapper at level 6 to team together for some time. Last night Jen wanted a different character, missing her ranged attacks, so she rolled herself an electricity/fire blaster. I rolled myself an ice/energy melee tanker and realized that I really do strongly prefer the tank/meatshield style of gameplay. When I picked up taunt at level 4, everything was suddenly right with the (game) world (except for that fact that I have no real hit points or defense so was on the verge of death the whole night, but that will come). I think this is a duo that we will enjoy for a little while. I'd really like to get us both to enjoyable level 20 characters to being playing what many of us with post-20s consider the "real game". The game seems to open up and have depth after level 20, in a way that's completely inexplicable. I'm not too worried though. This pair should level very quickly compared to the controllers, and mostly the urge for post-20 content is just about experiencing content I've only seen once instead of, oh, 8 or 9 times now. And more importantly, about doing the Striga Island missions, which I haven't done at all. Loosely related, there's an interesting Terra Nova post about WoW and how choosing player race helps identify unconcious Bartlet-style playertype selection.

In an effort to address my wandering mind, I've found a timer application called TimeLeft which is a bit overpowered for my needs (it has additional features I won't be taking advantage of) but otherwise seems pretty great. Fairly highly customisable, it looks like it takes advantage of WinAmp skins for modifications (I may be misinterpreting) and, always important, has a transparency setting. One beef is that you can only have one timer, and changing the time is a minor hassle, but I think setting it to two minutes and starting it whenever I want to slack will help control things. Also, it might force me to write blog entries in under 120 seconds. Gotta go.

So, I've already grown bored with Nation States. It's a fun enough concept and doesn't require a great investment of time, but there's no bait, there's no reward to keep coming back and dealing with issues. 'Issues' is the in-game terminology for the daily political decision you make, and is the basic gameplay. It's not engaging. I don't understand the games concept of United Nations to invest the time and energy in playing along in thay way which seems to be the actual point of the game, this nation building stuff is just groundwork for the larger community-oriented aspect of political jockeying and such. A lot of it is that I couldn't give a fart about the political issues presented, perhaps. A lot of it is that I think the way to build your nation very slowly through one politically decisive issue per day which affects your rating on a particular scale, doing that is boring and slow. I don't want to spend a month or six building the nation I want to try to see if it's viable or not, I want to start with a particular set of values and maybe tweak as time goes on. I don't agree with some of the basic principles and the way that being a socialist politicially free government means my economy is hyperfragile, but I think that's possibly also just a function of the fact that I've addressed maybe 10 Issues at this point, so my particular political makeup is neither deep nor nuanced. It's an interesting little game, and my presence is going to neither make nor break the game nor the community that's been built up around it. I don't want to sound terribly negative about the game because I think it has a lot of value and a lot going for it. It's a wonderfully simple web game that does what it does extremely well, and I think games like it are fantastic, and that niche games is what makes something with as huge a populace as the Internet so great. It's just not for me is all. I do like that you can set your own currency though. /me rolls around in his heaping pile of naptimes.

At work we use a web application called Webex. It behaves similarly to PCAnywhere and it's ilk, but since it's an ActiveX control doesn't require a lot of installation before hand. We use it to watch our users interact with our software to demonstrate the behaviour we need to fix. My colleague, without fail, brings up the suggestion of starting a session with "Uh, would you like to have a Webex session?" I've taken to opening with "Have you heard of Webex?" which feels somewhat less like "wanna cyber?" to me.

Sometime in the fall or so I read Jennifer Government by Max Barry. It was a solidly written tale in a near-future Earth where private citizens were more closely linked to corporations then they were nations. It's light, enjoyable and recommended. Yesterday, via delicious, I came across Nation States, which is a very simple web game inspired by Jennifer Government, and written by Max Barry. Basically, you run a nation and your political leanings and nation's success are determined by the way you handle the issue per day the game throws at you. It's an extremely simple mechanic, built upon by the introduction of Regions and a United Nations, both of which add layers of complexity (using a very loose definition of complexity) increasing the game's depth. The community surrounding the game is important, and issues like trade and war are apparently role-played in the forums as opposed to being official components of the game. I am still quite green, this being my second day in command of the Most Serene Republic of Drimmie, but I look forward to seeing how things grow and change. Regardless, it's been worth it simply for the following portion of my nation's description (generated by the game, again based on my answers to the simple questions and issues presented thus far):

Elections have been outlawed. Crime is relatively low. Drimmie's national animal is the sloth, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests, and its currency is the naptime.

See? Even babbling about boring City of Heroes shit I end up not keeping up. I made CrossingGuard (the name with a space was already taken). See, Jen ended up picking up a copy of the game, because I've spent a few months slowly planting the seed of us playing the game together in her mind. She's not one for playing the fast-paced high-action sorts of games, and since I'd thought about making a controller, I suggested a pair of controllers. Fire and Ice, the classic combination. I figured it would slow the game down enough that she could take it at her pace. We wouldn't be ripping through enemies, and with the various holds, lockdowns and other control issues they wouldn't be ripping through us, either. I think she likes it. She hasn't completely confirmed by getting me to buy her a subscription, too, but she is generally the one to suggest we play. We just dinged level 13 tonight, after 20 - 30 hours of play (it's been a while since I checked) over the past two weeks or so, so we're making pretty steady progress. I was able to twink us using BlankedSlate's vast influence reserves, so when we hit 12 a few nights ago we stocked up on Dual Origins and I think increased our progress. We're both looking forward to level 14 and Teleport to speed travel up a smidge (we don't need no steenkin' endurance!), and through our teens we should see some nice character-fleshing-out powers coming in. I'm kind of hurting for stamina, but Jen seems to be trucking along nicely. We've both taken one fitness prereq so I figure on getting stamina sometime between 20 and 24, depending on what opens up when. Boring, boring. Habit forming hopefully, but boring boring.

Because of my home cable account I have a subscription to LAUNCHcast (through Rogers Cable and their relationship with Yahoo!). Here at work I'm encouraged to listen to streaming music (just to offer a positive datapoint to contradict/counterbalance the negative datapoint from this morning) and so have actually had a reason to invest time in actually training my stream. I'd put in some effort in the months since I was given access to the service, but because my last job entailed a lot of VPN-hopping to networks with drastically varying levels of security, I fairly quickly fell out of habit using services or software requiring stable network connections. Here's the thing though. With LAUNCHcast (and iTunes, and I suspect WinAmp and any other music player where 'rating' is incorporated) rating a song affects its frequency of play. Generally a good thing, and a reasonably simplistic metric. But I don't necessary like listening to good songs, and I might want to listen to bad songs more frequently than an objective rating would suggest. For example: Smashmouth. Fairly generic mass-market soundtrack punk fluff. Severly lacking in quality but I can't help but love the music. It's bad, anyone with taste is going to tell you its bad and even I recognize that it's derivitive pap distilled through years of market research and post-production editing, but none of that means I don't want to listen to it. There's also lots of great music that I don't want to listen to often. Medeski Martin and Wood, say, put out majestic tunes, superbly performed wonderfully written all-around masterpieces (for the most part) but I just don't want to hear them that often. And when I'm working, where I'll typically be listening to LAUNCHcast I need significantly different music than say when I'm driving. So I've had the minor cognitive dissonance over the past week or so (and as I suggested above, this isn't new, I have the same beef with iTunes at home with my musical collection) where I have to rate good music as bad and bad (or medicore) music as good to properly train my station the frequency with which I want to hear those songs. In an effort towards consonance, I have decided to ignore the button labelled "rate" and mentally reprogram my brain to call it "frequency" or something along those lines. These are not judgements of quality, my happy little songs, they are merely an expression of how often I want to hear you! Update (4:41PM): I don't care how great a song is, I should never hear it twice in a 4-hour period unless I somehow explicitly request it. I will have to dig around the options (outside of Messenger I guess) but I sure hope there's a "never play the same song twice in x hours" option. x will be at least 48 for me.

I dislike the theory of office management that places a higher priority on a clean desk than a productive employee. Yes, this particular grumble was indeed triggered by a Real Life Event, though an admittedly extremely minor one. I had gotten into the habit of leaving a couple of notepads on my desk, and my new boss doesn't like that much, preferring that the office appear to be clean rather than appear to have people working in it. It's a trite complaint (mine I mean) and probably on the very edge of being overly petulant and childish, and I strongly suspect some day I will be on the other side of this complaint, frustrated that some petulant and childish employee of mine is leaving papers out, marring the otherwise beautiful serenity that is our place of work. Maybe. The thing is, at Rob's Dream Company (if I've never used the term here before, RDC is a notional corporation run by yours truly doing magical things with a magical budget and never any need for, you know, productivity or profitability) privacy, independance and personal responsibilty are hallmarks. What that fancily-phrased parenthetically-polluted previous statement means is: Everyone gets their own work space, and everyone gets to keep it in the condition they prefer. I will concede that there are times when it's important to put a presentable face on a work environment, and in my current place of employ (which is small and everyone is fairly exposed due to the mostly communal nature of the space) it is important that things not get out of hand or overly messy. I can even understand that it's important to minimize and make displeasure known about any disruptive behaviour early in a new hire's career, and to that end I actually appreciate being told about what is and isn't acceptable. The problem though is that this demand for conformance to a certain behaviour is typical and symptomatic of a larger underlying problem I have with the way the corporate world works. There just doesn't seem to be any respect given to one's personal life by most employers. It's something that happens outside the office, something that detracts from your presence at the office, and it's in the interests of the corporation to minimize any relationship between the in-office-you and the outside-office-you. I'm not sure where I'm going with this any more, but that disconnect between the persona required to fit in at an office and the real world self outside of it disturbs me. I'm certainly more productive in office environments, and without question recognize that behaviour has to be modified to accomodate different social environments, but I also think that most people are most productive, most happy and most loyal when given a situation in which they're comfortable to be themselves, comfortable to leave papers on their desks, comfortable spending a day slacking because the juices just aren't flowing, comfortable staying at home and churning out work at thier own pace.

The best (or perhaps most-immediately-gratifying, as that whole 'health' thing is really probably the best) thing about quitting smoking is the series of tiny successes one gets to enjoy. Oh, yes, I guess earlier discussions of quitting are quite possibly still on the front page. Well, suffice it to say it didn't work then, but seems to have now. Since this past Sunday at sometime around noon, I haven't had a cigarette. It's been sort of hard sometimes, but something about this particular attempt seems to have clicked. I'm really not going to start smoking again, and the little part of my brain that's grown dependant on nicotene and the various other wonderously poisonous chemicals that were previously delivered on a semi-regular basis has acknowledged the fact. The urges could more appropriately be named laments. "If this was last week, I'd be having a cigarette right now. Sigh. Oh well." I haven't yet experienced the flood of energy some has described as being associated with cigarettes. I haven't packed in the food, though have noticed a slight uptick in my random consumption of whatever's nearby (though let's be honest, it's not like I had the best track record in resisting those particular inclinations either). For me the hardest part of quitting was the reassignment of personal identity from "smoker" to "non-smoker". It's a weird association to make, but there's a division there just as strong as any us social beasts like to make for ourselves. Smokers and non-smokers can be friends, certainly. There's nothing wrong with being a non-smoker, they're just... not... like us, you know? As a smoker, there's always been some immediate defensiveness when placed in a new social situation. While interviewing for a job, is it okay to have a smoke beforehand? Is it okay to hold a newborn after a smoke? When's a good point to duck outside for my next smoke? Will these people despise me because of my addiction? When you're with other smokers, there's an immediate sense of relaxation. You won't be judged, they will sympathize with the craving, smile reluctantly and knowingly as you both toque-up for the snowy outdoors. I had my first cigarette sometime in Grade 7. I didn't inhale, and didn't much care for it, and didn't do it any more. Then in the summer of Grade 8 there was a girl I liked, and she smoked, and she was sort-of dating a guy who smoked, and I wanted to be friends with both of them because they were both pretty cool, but I also wanted to show how manly I was to her, because she was pretty cute, so I tried one of his super extra mega light smokes and made some comment about not getting a buzz and I didn't even smoke and hadn't had a smoke for over a year and even then I didn't inhale. Then I bought a pack of regular light cigarettes, and over the next couple of months trained myself to not hate them. Through high school I was friends with smokers and non-smokers, but my closest friends and I smoked. My mom found out I smoked (or rather, acquired incontrovertible evidence, it didn't take long to know she knew well before then) when she found an old pack of cigarettes, one which had been empty for months, tucked in a corner of a duffle bag. A different group of friends were over that day, the non-smoking pen & paper roleplaying ones who were a much better influence than the non-geeks I hung out with at other times, and my mom was suprisingly cool about it. She called me into where she was doing laundry, asked me if the pack was mine. The image of her holding the duffle bag in one hand and the empty pack in the other is permanently etched in my brain. She asked if they were my cigarettes, and I said yes. She didn't say anything, she let me go back to my friends and finish the day's adventures in whatever fantasy realm we were romping through at the time. Time passed, and smoking at high school taught me how to ritualize the habit, ducking out between classes to rapidly inhale one in the 3 minutes allocated to travel from classroom to classrom. The second day at college, an entirely new school in an entirely new city, standing outside having a cigarette. Some fellow, who ultimately would become one of my closest friends and roommates through college, casually walks up to me, him with a cigarette in hand, and asks me what I thought of the classes so far. First job after college, riding up the elevator with the coworker who would become my girlfriend, then fiance, then wife. Sneaking a quick makeout session to and from cigarette breaks. I've considered myself a smoker since I was around 15 or so. I'm currently 27. For not quite my entire life, but for the vast majority of it that I remember, I've been a smoker. That association is strong. It certainly doesn't define me, but it's an allegiance I've held to that slowly-growing-smaller collection of shivering, coughing outdoorsy people. In a lot of ways I'm going to miss that allegiance. I'm not going to miss the smelly fingers or the pained lungs after a day of excess or the steadily increasing cost slowly but surely draining my wallet, but I will miss the quiet comraderie. Never again will I stand outside some public building and nod knowingly to my colleague in nicotene, standing there with a friend I've had for years in my hand. It's an interesting marker to make, the day I quit smoking. I've thought of that day as being in the future for so long, now that it's in the past I still can't entirely wrap my head around it. I do look forward to the new allegiance though. The one that doesn't see that difference, the one that stays inside where it's warm, the one that doesn't have to detach itself from a social setting for ten minutes to sate that particular urge. I expect I'll wake up one day, another 'some day in the future' and finally realize "hey, I'm a non-smoker!" Until then though, I get to enjoy my little successes, my hourly and daily accomplishments of getting over the latest urge, seeing where the habit has been ritualized and recognizing "Fuck yeah, I can grow, I can change. I decide who I am, and I make that happen."

The other day while flipping through the channels, Jen stumbled across Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter Being of good taste she immediately decided not to watch it, but understanding her horribly demented husband to the bone, knew instantly that I would be interested in watching it. Thanks to the magic of recording television, we preserved this masterpiece while continuing to watch our normal Tuesday night enjoyables, namely Scrubs (the best show on television) and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit This evening Jen is working late, which is without question unfortunate, but the silver lining is that I get to finally experience the wonderousness of this film. The first thing we learn about this movie is that there is Butch Lesbian Vampire. The second thing that we learn is that the events depicted take place in Ottawa. Now, I ask you, is there any possible better plot than "A butch lesbian vampire ravages Ottawa. Only Jesus Christ can stop her." If you think there is, we can't be friends anymore. It's either the copious amounts of cheap whiskey I've been drinkingg, or this movie really is the best thing ever invented. I need to find outt how to acquire a copy on DVD, because Ash? You can kiss my ass. American student who inadvertantly becomes a Werewolf while In London? Suck it. Killer Nerd? A new king's in town, and this vampire-ass-kicking deity is none other than the Son of the Man himself, Jesus H. Christ. Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter is suprisingly well written. The producers were obviously smart enough to entirely emrace la factor fromage and run with it in its entirety. There's lots that is horrible, because I mean fuck it's Jesus Christ hunting vampires in Ottawa of all places, but ... Holy fuck, they just brought in what appears to be a Mexican wrestler to be Jesus' sidekick/spiritual advisor. Seriously, does it get any better than this?

Rumour has it if you do something regularly for 3 weeks or so, it becomes a habit. In that vein, even though it's boring as shit, I'm going to yammer about City of Heroes a little bit more. Sorry. Thought of a new character this morning. "The Crossing Guard" (that name is totally taken, or too long, or something) but "Traffic Cop" or something along those lines is appropriate as well. Fire/Kinetics controller, does whatever that crazy circle fire hold is and cries "RED MEANS STOP!" Does the speed burst thing and cries "GREEN MEANS GO!" Lame, dirivitive, but amusing enough for a 15-minute drive into work. I haven't built the hardcore character I rambled about last time I bothered updating, in part because I've only played for a couple of hours, but mostly because these sorts of characters either take a while to rumble around in my head before I bother getting around to them, or I just don't care. For the sake of inventorying and falsly inflating post length, here are the characters I currently care at least a whit about, all on Guardian in order of creation: Secret Angent: Level 14 Mind/Empathy Controller. Angent's the first character I rolled, back when I thought CoH was actually a roleplaying game and I had friends who played to roleplay with. I made a couple of pretty stupid mistakes, some for character concept and some from ignorance ("I know, if I slot brawl I'll be able to do some damage!"). When I started playing again in November I didn't bother playing him, I just kept the character around for nostalgic reasons. When I first heard about the free respec that would be given out sometime after Issue 3, I got a little bit excited, as given a few months of knowledge I'd be able to respec him into a much stronger character. It took me a couple of weeks, but I finally got around to it this past Saturday morning when I had a half hour to kill. I didn't really play him too much, but for the 10 minutes or so I soloed he felt much stronger. He also got 2 invites without Seek Team on, so I think controllers have gotten a lot more respect since I last played him (sometime in July '04). Blanked Slate: Level 34 Stone/Stone Tank. Slate's the toon I consider my main. I'd rolled a couple of characters between Angent and him but didn't really find anything that clicked. When my free month ran out at the end of July and I held off resubscribing to be able to focus on getting married and buying a house, Slate was the character I wanted to play again, not any of the others. I played Slate exclusively from when I started again in November through to late December, levelling him from 18 to 31 or so before my gaze starting drifting. He's still where I turn to if I'm looking for an hour or two or six of solid, guaranteed fun gaming. I have a great time on teams or solo with him, have completed all my contacts to full trust and expect to continue the trend. Slate's the character that really sucked me into the game. I solo a lot with him, he was built to be able to solo since Angent had such a hard time of it, and so I've followed all the story lines and arcs I've gotten (though I've definitely missed a few) and really enjoyed getting to know the CoH universe through him. As far as I'm concerned in fact, Slate is power-complete. I could play the rest of the game with his current powers (though I do want the coming slots) and enjoy the hell out of myself. Everything after this point is gravy. Clie Shay: Level 7 Fire/Devices Blaster. Shortly before my free month ran out, Fire/Dev was totally FOTM, and they were everywhere. I decided to mock my fellow heroic citizens of Paragon City, and to be frank I wanted in on that hott FTOM action. Her powerset, bio and costume are as stereotypical as I could possibly create. I haven't actually played Clie since starting back up again, I'm not really sure that the blaster archetype appeals to me, but I like her and will probably revisit it sometime soon. I don't really have a character that does ridiculous amounts of damage, so building her up to glass cannon status could be a lot of fun. Fizz Isis: Level 20 Force Field/Radiation Defender. Because I missed Issue 2 I hadn't really seen the Hollows at all except while teleporting to a mission as Slate. As Issue 3 approached, Striga Island was revealed as a new zone geared towards levels 20-30. By the time I learned about it, Slate was 28 or so and I didn't feel like holding off his development for an unknown number of weeks to experience the tail end of a new zone, so I decided to create a new character to play through the Hollows and, eventually, Striga with. I wanted to play a defender. I rather enjoyed the role of Empathy with Angent, but wanted to explore something different. I know Empaths are generally the highest in demand, but as Slate I prefer bubbles over heals (and with a little bit more experience, the other sets even more) as I have a fair amount of damage mitigation, and with bubbles I don't get much. Bubblers, I figured, never get kicked for not being healers because their powers are pretty evident, so finding and keeping a team would be fairly straightforward. And really, with bubblers, once you get your three core primaries (the two small bubbles and the big one) you can focus on your secondary and pretend to be a blaster part of the time. And of course, there was the name, which is what I thought of first (as is often the case). "Fizz Isis", if you say it fast enough and just right, sounds like "Physicist" with a very soft 't'. A bubbler for the Fizz, radiation for the physicist. (the story is that the bubble maker was imperfect, so its waste was routed into an offensive set). Fizz Isis is very much group dependant for the time being and literally just got into Striga Island. She's pretty fun, is in a decent and growing Super Group and can usually find a good team within 20 minutes. However, I definitely need to be in a particular mindset to play her as chances are the first 2 or 3 pickup groups she joins are not going to be great, and soloing her really isn't any fun whatsoever. Jynax: Level 5 Broadsword/Dark Armour Scrapper. (The game doesn't have that 'u', but I do, dammit.) It was pretty much inevitible that I'd end up creating a character named Jynax. I thought up the character (a paladin-like demigod type from the Palladium RPG universe) when I was 15 or 16 or something, and anytime I'm exposed to a character creator, he'll eventually pop up, though never in exactly the same role. This iteration has him having been bestowed a cursed but magical sword that gives him great powers. The curse is that he was swept up for years in a blood rage, killing mercilessly blah blah blah. Finally he overpowered the will of the sword and is looking to do some good for karmic balance. I created him because I had a toon of every archetype except scrapper. I figured I'd want to play one eventually, and with the free respec being given out it made sense to get the character created early and pick him up if/when I felt like revisiting the early levels. Since I've done them so recently with Fizz I doubt I'll pull him off the shelf for a while, but there is something nice and rewarding about dinging a level every half hour or so, so it's likely I'll bring him back. With Fizz I focussed solely on the Hollows missions, ignoring the updates to the regular missions between levels 5 and 15 or so, and since I'm doing it again with the Striga block, it's likely I'll do the same with the 20-30 missions. Jynax coming up behind allows me to revisit that content and ignore the Hollows as much as possible. I have two other characters and a blank slot remaining on Guardian. One of the characters is a gravity controller ("Newtonion") who I should probably play to see if I still like (I have no idea what his secondary is, now that I think about it). The other is an attempt at rerolling Angent ("Sonorous Man") which failed pretty miserably and probably postponed my return to Angent by a number of weeks. If I delete Sonorous Man that will leave me with two empty slots, one for the hardcore character and one for The Crossing Guard, and then (assuming Newtonion's worth keeping, which I'm not convinced of, especially since adding a fire controller will make two controllers, which seems a lot) that will fill up my Guardian server character slots. I also have a "Real MAN" character (a female controller named "Woah MAN") on Justice that didn't get much further than out of Outbreak (the Real MAN concept is to play a character with no superpowers) and an earlier attempt at Fizz Isis (bubbles/dark defender, to play more into the Isis portion of her name) on Virtue when I thought I wanted to roleplay. They're both actually pretty solid character concepts and I might pick them up again, who knows.

Since I haven't mentioned it here before, I will now. I play City of Heroes, a MMOG, and rather enjoy myself while doing so. This morning I had the notion (though I admit it's not the first time) of playing a 'hardcore' character, one who is deleted should they die, and rerolled. Death in City of Heroes is handled somewhat differently than in other MMOGs that I'vve heard of. The character (and villains) never actually die, they're just rendered unconcious and teleported to the hospital or prison, depending on orientation. So in that sense, playing hardcore doesn't really make too much sense, because death never happens. But the in-game terminology used by the players contradicts that Teen rating, as most players talk about killing villains and being killed by villains. As I ponder the notion of a hardcore character, I wonder which sort to play. Blasters are out, as death is practically part of their function. Tankers have significant hit points and hit defenses, and my primary (Blanked Slate on Guardian, should you ever be around) is evidence of that. I've died plenty of times, but it's still a rare occurance and often is the result of stupidity. Controllers are a good choice. Low hit points, but often stay a step outside of battle and with good teams could last long. Defenders are similar in that regard, and have better firepower, but many defender powers don't work onthemselves. Scrappers are the most soloable of archetypes, and are almost as defensive and hit point abundant as tanks, and do almost as much damage as Blasters. Justifying a hardcore character in the game would be an interesting excercise in role playing and character creation I think. A bot-style character with an incrementable numeral would work out okay. Role playing being most friendly on Virtue, that might be the best place to start. Rather than being teleported to the hospital or ressurected by other characters upon death, perhaps its creator teleports it back, dissambles it and uses that knowledge for the next version (thus the incrementals). Hmm, that seems like a reasonably decent core explanation, and fits within the game's universe. Now the only problem is that I already have three characters I enjoy, at varying levels, and with the new job have less playing time than ever.

I squeezed another few hours of RE4 in last night, and thanks to some sage advice from David Jacobs learned how to run. I did read the manual, honest, I swear. I just got stupid or something. Anyway, with one of my 3 major control concerns alleviated (the other being strafing and camera) any beefs I had with the metagame faded into near-nothingness, and I was able to enjoy immersion to a much higher degree. Yup, hook, line and sinker. The mystery is currently being built, tiny layers of intrigue and curiosity being stacked atop one another in that fanciful Resident Evil sort of way. I made it to the end of Chapter 3 before stopping. Playing for long periods of time will be hard, I think. RE4 is straining my eyes more than most games. The font of the numerals in the inventory screen is disappointingly unclear, and the constant searching for !zombie targets requires more focusing than most games it seems. Also, Jen suffers slightly from the overly-tight camera angles and the constantly moving camera, a little bit of FPS-nausea, combined with her proclivity towards migraines makes it approach painful when she watches for a long time. And the important thing to me about the game is that we play through it together. I would have missed any number of barrels and medallions and other secrets without her watchful eyes.

I played Resident Evil 4 for 48 minutes last night (just through the village). It hasn't quite gotten its hooks sunk in, but I am definitely circling the lure thinking to myself "That sure is a tasty morsel. I am going to have to eat that tasty morsel!" While markedly better than any of the other Resident Evils, the gameplay still sucks ass compared to pretty much any other third-person game. Mostly the overly-tight camera bugs me, but would it be so much to sidestep or gosh, I don't know, run? Even for a short burst like the !zombies get? If anything is going to cause me not to pick it back up, it's definitely this paragraph. They aren't bad controls by any stretch, but they definitely leave me wanting more. And, sigh, save points. The holy war continues. My problems with it seem to boil down to the fact that (as is typical with the series) Capcom is using mechanical restrictions (camera, no run or strafe) to add tension and challenge to the game, but they're false tension and false challenge. The immersion should be creating tension and challenge, not the controller. It pulls me out and makes me curse at the game rather than the generic southern european peasentry. Given how little of the story I've been exposed to and how engaging that first 48 minutes was though, I expect to be chewing sharp metal barbs within the week.

Errors with Blogger made an already delicate habit snap like a twig, so here I am trying to goad it back. Gently, gently. Some brief life updates: married, new house, still smoking (but less), new job (1 week old), no kids. We'll see how steady it goes this time 'round.

Something seems curious somewhere, so this is a test post to see if it seems curious here, too.

Something seems curious somewhere, so this is a test post to see if it seems curious here, too.

The Velvet Lounge raises the questions I've recently begun asking regarding Proportional Representation, specifically looking at the NDP (who are it's current biggest national supporters), the problem of lacking local representation, and how PR's supporters address that problem (hint: they don't). From what I understand of NDP policy -- and it should be made abundantly clear that I am not speaking from a position of great knowledge; I've read Layton's latest book and the NDP site but can't be arsed to reference either -- Layton et al are looking to address the drop in local representation associated with PR by increasing the role of municipal governments. A strong theme in Layton's book was that municipal governments need increased, if not complete, independance from the provincial governments. Having to go through the provincial middle-man in dealings between federal and municipal governments tends to bog the process down, and if ever there was a truism it's that an additional layer of governance is bound to complicate any given process. However, Layton and the NDP documentation don't really address the rural vs. urban split that's the real crux of your post. Given PR based on provinces, it seems pretty likely that the big urban centres will be able to forward their agendas without concern for, and probably at the expense of, rural interests. Nationally-based PR makes that even more likely I'd say. Layton at least, and I can't recall the official NDP literature, gives a head nod to rural interests by saying stuff like (not a quote) "this is something that has to apply to rural municipalities too!" but any specific example he provides come from his time as a Toronto city councellor or from any of the other 10 largest cities in the country that have crossed his path. I can't think of (though that doesn't mean they don't exist) any example in his book that deals with a small municipality offering a creative solution to a problem. I'm generally a fan of Proportional Representation, my local concerns aren't as significant an issue to me currently as much as province- and nation-wide programs generally are, but a good friend of mine recently raised this same concern about the lack of local representation in simple language that penetrated my ideological shield of love for PR, and in the two weeks or so since I've begun questioning it a lot more. I don't like the political party structure so much. I understand it, but would rather have 308 people interested in representing what's best for their riding than what's best for the party they represent, and PR doesn't address that issue in the least. It does allow for more political parties to have greater influence, as majority governments will become the exception rather than the norm, and smaller parties will have slightly more influence, but it ties representatives even stronger to those parties. It's far from an easy question, and I doubt such a thing as political reform ever could be, but I'm very much interested in seeing how it plays out nationally. If nothing else, getting people talking about PR is a good thing. Any discussion of changing the way we vote seems likely to make people more interested in voting at all as the whys and wherefores of our current system and any new system are discussed.

In that first hour after a smoke, and especially after returning to my desk after taking the break, it's easy to think "I don't need to ever have another smoke again, this is stupid, why did I bother? I didn't need that smoke, it didn't do anything for me, I'll bet I'll drop down to four smokes today, just because it's that darn easy." That post-smoke Rob is a real asshole, he is, because I think back to his braggadocio and just want to jump back in time and kick him in the ass. After that first hour, the clock watching begins. It starts off innocently enough, a quick glance "oh, it's only been an hour" and then another glance "geez, not even thirty seconds have passed" and then another "WHY IS TIME MOVING BACKWARDS!!!". The interesting thing about the urges is how subtle they are. There isn't some timer going off in my head crying "YOU SMOKE NOW!" while I metaphorically wrestle it into the ground, more accurately it's like this greasy creepy part of my brain sidles up to some less greasy and creepy part and puts a cigarette in front of it. There's no throat-grabbing demand for immediate appeasment (at least, not at this point in the urge cycle, come back when I'm pushing six hours or two days and we'll see what I think), it's just subtle unsuspecting behaviour. I catch myself leaning forward to get out of my chair to go have a smoke, or my eyes drifting down to the computer clock and doing the math until the next time I can have a smoke, and then nothing for fifteen minutes and then I do it all again. I'm still at five smokes a day, have been for just over a week now. This week it feels harder than last was, five dailies is not enough to satiate the half-packer I've been for years, nor is the statis enough for me to feel like I'm actively quitting any more. It's a weird sort of middle ground, between smoker and non (but still mostly smoker) a hazy place where cigarettes are near constantly on my mind, except for that first, lovely, mentally quiet hour after my allocation.

I have had two cigarettes today, soon I will have my third and by the end of the day I will have a total of five. I've maintained this level of nicotene intake since Monday. Thursday, I had my normal twelve or so. Friday, the day Jen suggested we stop putting it off and actually start stopping, a few less. Saturday I had eight I think and Sunday I had six. Five is going to be a good number to maintain for a short period of time while my body adjusts to lower levels of nicotene. Monday I found that it seemed every waking minute was consumed with the thoughts "I want a cigarette" and "it's not time to have a cigarette." Tuesday was similar, but today three hours have passed since that second one and the urge is really only starting to make itself known. The nagging voice of addiction seems to have adapted to the current trend. Jen and I haven't decided yet what the next step is, but we're going to stabilize at five until at least the end of next week, to give our bodies some time to adjust. Maybe on the weekend, we're stronger when we're together, we'll drop down to four, or maybe we'll stay at five and the following weekend just quit completely. Below five seems almost pointless, but there may be justification for a stage of three dailies. Before and after work, and before bed perhaps. Dropping to two or one seems almost useless; if I can last more than 12 hours without a cigarette, I may as well push it to 24, 48, forever. Maybe. No matter what, I'm pretty sure I can stabilize at five for an indeterminate length of time, and thus far that's a pretty amazing victory. If you'd told me a week ago I'd be down to five smokes per day I would have had some serious doubts. I do worry that if I stick with five for too long however, six will creep in. Then seven. Then I'll find an excuse to not count, like when I'm out with some friends who smoke, and then I'll be back up to half a pack daily. So sometime in the near future I have to drop below five, it's just a matter of determining whether that drop will be to a smaller positive integer, or straight to zero.

It's E3 week, one of my most favorite times of the year. Thus far I've only really been paying attention to Nintendo news, the DS has been unveiled and it looks pretty keen though its strengths lay more in the ancillary technology, bluetooth wifi and voice, than in the game technology. Being a strongly connected gaming device is reason enough to love the thing with or without the second screen, and no matter what the second screen will always be useful for additional statistics and maps and other secondary game data, even if it isn't fundamental to gameplay (which it seems many titles are ensuring it will be). The new zelda movie just makes me scream with delight. Take what is arguably the best gaming franchise ever and ram it right up the left nostril of the "Nintendo is for kids" assholes. One of the things that makes the franchise so damn good is the gameplay mechanics, theoretically you could layer countless different graphical styles atop the game and it would still be just as fun and just as compelling to play, but hot diggity it sure is nice to see a Zelda title with a rich, dark atmosphere. The only question left is: when is there going to be one where you actually play Zelda as the lead character?

Got home safe last night/this morning, inside the house at approximately 12:40am. Decent flights home, short stop in Pittsburgh, great flight into Toronto. I was looking out the window the whole time, which is a significant step forward from last Sunday's resolute staring at the seat in front of me. I took pictures, but since it was night and it's a digital camera and the plane was a little shaky ('twas a tiny commuter jet, 3 seats per row, one on one side of the aisle, two on the other), most of them are just blurry streaks and stuff.

Went out for dinner last night with the other guy in my training class. There's a Chili's right beside his hotel, and that was convenient, so I had neither the greek nor the japanese, but a burger and fries. It was good though. We hung out for a couple of hours and had some beer and talked about Samoa (he's in from American Samoa) and Canada, missing our fiances, and other good stuff. I'm pretty tired this morning, and looking forward to being home tomorrow night.

Tonight I treated myself to two of the finer beef burrito(e? they both look weird)s I've had the pleasure of consuming. The little strip mall features cuisine of all sorts. I'm being taken to a place called the Gaslight on Thursday night, so tomorrow's choice will be hard. Do I return to the pad thai (a strong likelihood, though at a significantly reduced grade of spiciness) or do I explore the japanese or greek offerings that tempt me so? All the air traffic around San Diego is very noticable to me. Being the port most troops are shipped out of and being within miles of many armed forces bases means that daily training missions fly overhead, and every few minutes there is another jet fighter or helicopter roaring through the skies. On the one hand it's reassuring that the city is likely extremely well protected, but on the other the constant reminder of war and battle is something I was unprepared for. The other guy in my training course is from Samoa. He's my age (26) and is experiencing a similar degree of culture shock for similar reasons. I don't know to what degree the US has military installations there (I suspect there's at least one naval base) but he's not used to all the air traffic either. It's far from frightening or disturbing really, I'm quite comfortable and feel entirely safe, it's just one of those differences I've noticed, like how eateries around here seem to have a great deal more outdoor seating than indoor. I've often said that American and Canadian cultures are largely similar, but what makes it really interesting is how that great deal of similarity makes the differences stand out that much more. I would certainly feel out of place in a country across either sea, but I would be expecting everything to be different and the similarities would be the source of interest.

Today's lunch was courtesy of the salesguy in charge of our account. He brought me to a food court/strip mall that was just around the corner from my hotel (so I would know where it is), where I had some of the best chicken vindaloo it's been my pleasure to encounter. This evening I strolled over there (after a conversation with Jen, whom I miss dearly already) and picked up a six-pack of a local brewery brand, Karl Strauss Amber Lager, quite pleasant, and some pad thai, which is absolutely amazing. Good thing: They sell Fin du Monde! Unibroue is a fabulous Quebec brewery, and I am heartened to see it here. Bad(dish) thing: I think I may have been overstepping myself a bit getting my pad thai 6/10 on the spiciness scale. Wow!

I'd just like to say than any potential romantic notions of heroically trudging through the desert have officially been excised by the short 20 minutes walk to the training facility from my hotel. It's awfully nice weather but my poor pasty Canadian winter body is rather unprepared for the June-like weather that seems to be the norm here.

Other random things I want to remember: Yummy pretzel in Philly airport. Bread, salt and water make the next leg of a trip gooder. Passengers on flights from Philly to DC aren't allowed out of their seat. I don't know how much these two bottles of Heineken actually are (yay for "charge it to my room, please) but I'll bet it's a lot.

I made it to the hotel in one piece, having learned that Nicorette does a suitable job for some amount of time, but smoking in hotel rooms is fun. I was on two planes, one from Toronto to Philidelphia (just as the Leafs began getting their asses taken to school) then another from Philly to San Diego, where I'll stay until Friday. Not being a great flyer (largely, I think, due to inexperience and the ability to inflate the minorist of events in my head to catastrophic EVENTS) I ended up actually mildly regretting the fact that I didn't get a window seat, and experiencing the best landing ever. The wheels touched on the tarmac with nary a bounce, smoother than me shifting into second. There was a slightly hard brake, but I've certainly done worse in a car. Having my digital camera with me is what made me miss being at the window. Flying over the rockies, some amazing cloud formations and all the other good scenery that goes with being however many thousand feet up we were made me regret not being able to record it for prosperity. I suppose I could've taken a couple of pictures anyway, but the surly gentleman by the window would've ruined everything, and the windows are so small that from the few feet away I was there was just no point. Jarhead is such an amazing fucking book. I miss Jen tremendously.

I'm trying now to figure out why I stopped blogging. I mean, the obvious reasons are, well, obvious. I got bored of it. I became unable to construct what I consider to be good posts (although reading some of the "recent" -- in terms of proximity in archives rather than in time -- posts they're far from terrible). Bloggger, at the time, was pretty nasty. It was flooded with traffic it couldn't handle, it was kind of uncool to be on Blogger (it probably still is, but I don't care about what any of you fucks think any more anyway, and the ones whose opinion I do care about don't care either). I'd just started a new job and was moving and stuff and interested in some change in my web presence. I was focussed on a community site (which I'm still active in and is still where most of the crap I'd otherwise blog about gets posted, count yourself lucky unless you're one of the poor saps there). I wanted to roll my own so I could be all cool and stuff. The software I'd developed for the community site had (and still does, actually) potential to be a useful content management tool and stuff and I thought I'd get off my ass and make it work. I didn't. And won't. I was getting all flustered and horrible at Metafilter, embroiled in a pointless debate and lots of mudslinging. I wanted a name for myself for something more impressive than a boring old blog. I didn't have anything left to say. I flipped through some of my archives again last night, and couldn't help but come back to the popularity thing. If I'd stuck with this thing, even just to point to from posts elsewhere or whatever, I'd have an even bigger web presence, and to be honest I'm pretty full of regret that I missed those two years of investment in myself. Ah well.

I've just recently gotten my 500 MHz iBook up and running again (it required a new hard drive) and I'm remembering how much I love this thing. A large portion of that is certainly the wireless, which is not at all inherent to Macs, but still nice. Being able to be mildly productive, or twice as slothful, by fucking around while watching tv is always fun. Another is the keyboard. I'm used to a Microsoft Natural Keyboard, I've been using them for nigh on 4 years now and until I get my twiddler is probably my keyboard of choice, but this little thing's compressed keyboard works great; I'm repeatedly suprised at how well I can type with it. Fast than with the Natural, though it should be noted that the preceeding half sentence took four or five tries to get through the typos. My fingers move faster, but the delete key gets a lot more excercise. The differences between the OS X and XP environments are starting to rear their ugly head. I'm misusing the CTRL key and underusing the Command key. My biggest beef remains with my perception that keyboard access is dramatically less in OS X than in XP. In XP I can access any menu command with two or three keystrokes, whereas in OS X I need to use the mouse or cursor my way through to the menu, then to the submenu, repeat as necessary until I'm done. The difference in mouse requirement sort of highlights some of the differences between the evolution of each OS. When Microsoft got people to switch to Windows, they couldn't assume users would have a mouse. The assumption of the opposite, that people would have to navigate the graphical environment with their keyboard, ultimately lent greater strength to Windows' accessibility. With the Macintosh, Apple created a device that had a cursor controller by nature, the mouse was a fundamental piece of the architecture. I think part of the reason that Mac is so strong in graphical applications is because of the early inclusion of the mouse. Working with graphic designers at a number of jobs, seeing them mousing with one hand and keystroking with another has been revealing. The assumption with OS X is that one of the user's hands will always be on a mouse, and one will be on a keyboard. This setup is ideal (see reference to twiddler above, the corresponding cursor control in my dreams is courtesy of a wacom table) to me in theory, as with today's interfaces there are significant advantages to being able to use both primary types of input without the hassle (and physical strain) of switching from keyboard to mouse and back. The problem comes with us developer types. Text input with current keyboards requires both hands to be on the keyboard, but OS X requires mouse use to quickly navigate it's menus. As OS X continues to grow as a development platform, and geeks all over the place are loving it, the keyboard support issues will require addressing. The key, and I'm undecided as to whether this is an advantage or disadvantage, is that it's not anything truly inherent in either platform. Windows demanding it in their interface guidelines, but many, many developers neglect to build in hotkey support. There's nothing about the operating system that makes it possible, it's Microsoft's need to acoomodate customers without a mouse that did it. OS X is already getting better, and while I don't think it's a part of Apple's interface guidelines (though I admit to not having checked and talking largely out of my ass), strong hotkey support seems to be more common than it was 10 months ago when last I tried. Part of that may be the highly desirable advent of cross-platform applications. I've only had the laptop up and running for about 4 days now, and have largely installed unix applications and Firefox, all of which come from strong keyboard environments and bring those benefits to OS X. OS X conventions are making their way, through cross-platform applications, into other environments as well, and that's good. So, I've lost track of whatever my original point may have been (the disadvantage of fucking around on a laptop while watching tv I suppose) but ultimately I'm just excited to be working, part of the time at least, in a different environment. Playing in a world built from different assumptions is highly enjoyable to me.

So, what the hell, right? Blogger kept all my archives nice and tidy, and their clean and rather useful new interface made dusting things off and republishing them largely unproblematic. If nothing else, all the raging !brilliance is available for everyone to see again. Lots of things are stale and dusty, especially that links list, but if they actually still exist, they're all good sites. I doubt I'll update it any time soon, but if I get rolling again I probably will. Some creaky old HTML4 code plagues the site, but really other than the prolific use of capital letters in the tags, it's pretty clean.

Brilliant idea for the taking (licensing note: if you get rich, give me lots of money): A dishware service, that for a small fee ($5 per week is the neighborhood I was thinking of that would be worth it to me), you get a plastic tub of 8 place-settings delivered to your door every morning. Every night before bed, you put the plastic tub outside your door. When you wake up, magically the tub is full of clean dishes. Cookware service would be an option also. Every morning there's a small selection of pots and pans (say, a frying pan and 3 pots) for your use.

the new kottke

Continuing in the trend of an uneducated opinion about long-forgotten video games, I played (and finished) Nox (by Westwood Studios) this weekend. Overall the game was thoroughly enjoyable, well worth the $12 it cost me for the "Classics" box from Blockbuster. To say that I finished it is a bit misleading, because I've probably only played about of 60% of the game. Nox, as you probably already know, is strongly reminiscent of Diablo. It's probably the game that took twitch RPG from a game-specific style to a genre. Like Diablo, you can pick a class to play. Unlike Diablo, your class changes the way the 11 chapters of the game are played, and which ones you see. When I played Diablo I played the [mumblemumble]*, and after finishing the game had very little inclination to go back and go through the game again with a different class. Nox affects me differently, and having finished the Warrior path, I intend to start either the Conjurer or Wizard path tonight. Now, I've never been terribly worried about the voice acting or anything in the game, it's not usually something that I notice, it's just there. Unfortunately, Nox is an exception to this rule, as for the most part the voice acting was pretty terrible. The lead character was alright, and I suppose that's the most important thing, and for me the voice acting isn't a key element of the game or my enjoyment of it. The other really noticeable element of the game was how different it actually was from Diablo. At it's core they're the same, you run around and kill beasties and baddies collecting and selling and buying items and keys and getting new skills. The key difference for me though is the battle strategy. Maybe it's because I was playing as a [mumblemumble]* in Diablo, but the way I played the game was to run around clicking my mouse button frantically, cutting a swatch of blood and gore in my path. While playing Nox, I explored slowly and steadily, I timed my blows so I'd dodge my opponents counter, and I made abundant use of the save feature (which was buried in a menu and mildly annoying to get at because there wasn't a hotkey bound by default, dunno if it's possible to change) developing a battle plan to clear a room. There are two key elements of level design that stick in my head prominently. Conveniently, one pro and one con. One of the levels is a swamp exploration board, with very gloomy lighting and ominous music. But the gloomy lighting is important. There's a baddie on this level that's a pod of poisonous gas. By using a long-range weapon I was able to pop the baddies, and because of the particle effects of the gas clouds that result, the board was lit up and I was able to see what was up ahead. It doesn't sound like an especially tremendous effect, but it helped immensly when planning strategy and knowing where was safe to walk, and just really hit home as great design in a way I'm not able to explain. Damn this lacking vocabulary. The other element of game play was a puzzle in the tenth chapter. The puzzles up until this point had largely been find the lever and unlock the gate to find the key to unlock the door to find another lever. Pretty standard stuff, nothing unusual or complicated. I reached a point where I was stuck, there was a door that was locked by some sort of mechanism, the source of which I couldn't find. I know there was a floor panel that was making a clicking sound, but I had no indication where the clicking sound was coming from, and since all the floor panels that had effects (the ones that triggered traps, say) made the same clicking sound, I had no idea what to do. It was a simple puzzle, I just needed to leave something of weight on the tile to continue on, but because it was such an anomolous puzzle and because there was no visual indicators (have the door swing open when the pressure is applied, then slam shut as soon as it's off, say) it took much longer to figure out than it should've. Either that or I shouldn't play video games precaffeinated at 8 o'clock on weekends. Anyway, like I said, it's been a great game so far. I'm expecting some reasonably high replay value, and am especially keen on seeing how the different classes change the battle strategies. * I can't remember. Some fighter-type class. Barbarian maybe?

What the fuck is with the US Women's Hockey Team putting the Canadian flag on the floor of their changeroom? I mean, seriously, what the fuck? You wouldn't treat your worst enemy's flag with that level of disrespect, it would cause a massive national outcry if anyone did that to your flag, and yet a good honest rivalry between two great hockey teams prompts that kind of ignorant behaviour? This isn't directed against every American, just the 20 or 30 members and staff of that team. What the fuck?

Buried in the rant below is a truly awesome link I need to point out. Who Built the Pyramids? at NOVA Online is an awesome interview with Mark Lehner (Archaeologist, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and Harvard Semitic Museum) and Zahi Hawass (Director General of Giza).

Okay, I would post this to bareSquare proper, but I'm at work and I can't remember my login information, so I'll post my response to this ignorant claptrap here. The author (I feel I should point out that it isn't Jon) states that carbon dating is BS, and doesn't want to get into the boring details. I like boring details, and carbon-14 dating isn't BS, so here goes. Yes, as any decent scientist will tell you, there are definite, unquestionable flaws with carbon-14 dating. Primarily, it's only accurate up to, oh, somewhere about the 60,000 year range. So it can't be used to prove dinosaurs were around millenia ago, suggesting that it can is to falsly represent the process. Hey, I can falsely represent your creationist god if I wanted to to be able to knock him down by saying something as simple as "Any real deity would strike me down for suggesting he can't", but that's what we call a straw man argument. I present an impossible, even by your definition, event or criteria, and since it's impossible, I am proven right. So how does carbon-14 work? Carbon-14 is a naturally occuring isotope, caused from cosmic rays. The big shiny thing in the sky in the daytime, the sun (you may have heard of it), shoots it into our atmosphere, where it gets all mixed up with regular ol' oxygen to form Carbon Dioxide. Plants use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during photosynthesis to produce energy and nutrients to help them grow. Some animals eat plants, some animals eat other animals that ate plants and some animals eat those animals. If you paid attention in grade 4, you know how that works. Now, carbon-14, as I said in passing earlier, is an isotope. It's not the most common form of carbon, it's a carbon atom with 14 electrons orbiting it. Regular normal every day carbon is Carbon-12; it has 12 electrons orbiting it. Throughout most of the planet, there's an constant ratio of Carbon-14 to Carbon-12. Carbon-14 is always decaying. It's rate of decay, or it's half-life, is somewhere around 5700 years or so. This means that the nucleus of the Carbon-14 atom in your body will decay to half it's original energy level in 5700 years. 5700 years after that, the level of energy will halve again, so in 11,400 years the atom will be at a quarter of it's energy now. Since it only decays by half every time, it doesn't really disappear completely, but current scientific methods aren't good enough to detect and measure it after around 60,000 years. Okay, so while we're alive we're eating and by eating we're replacing the carbon-14 energy that's decayed with fresh stuff from our food. The ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 is a constant, as I said. It's somewhere around 1 part carbon-14 to 1 trillion parts carbon-12. Got all that so far? None of it is new or controversial, except for the ratio and the rate at which we absorb it, nothing behaves any differently than any other element, all of which have measurable halflives. So, how is this used to date things? Well, when you die, you stop eating. When you stop eating, you stop getting the carbon-14. Because carbon-12 is present in the atmosphere, you're still exposed to it at a constant rate, so it doesn't change. Carbon-14 dating is measured by taking the amount of Carbon-14 in your body and comparing it to the amount of Carbon-12. You have to do some math here, but it's pretty simple and boils down to: [log( % of carbon-14 in your body) / (0.693)] x 5700 years. So why do people claim that Carbon-14 dating is BS? Well, you know all those times in the above explanation I said "mostly" and "pretty much"? Well, different parts of the Earth have slightly different levels of Carbon-14. The poles, for instance, don't get nearly the amount of sunlight as the equator, and therefore living organisms there are going to have a significantly lower amount of Carbon-14 in them. The Earth isn't a completely closed environment, either, so extra atoms can be trapped underground creating a falsely high level of Carbon-14. Additionally, and of great importance, is the fact that anything that dies after 1940 cannot be accurately dated using Carbon-14 because us humans have been seriously, seriously mucking around with the atmosphere and the balance of energy on our planet by testing nuclear weapons. We sent massive bursts of energy into the atmosphere that changes the levels of everything. But that's not all, there's reasonable evidence that the Earth's been ravaged by nuclear energy that would throw off Carbon-14 dating many, many times in it's past. A theory about the creation of the moon is that a big-ass asteroid went bouncing off the planet and got caught in the gravitational pull. That explosion would wipe out life down to the single-celled organism level. Something happened that decimated the dinosaurs, and a common theory is a meteor storm or asteroid crashed into the planet, causing a massive explusion of energy and dust which clouded out the sun killing most plant life and in turn starving out most animal life. So like I said above, no scientist using Carbon-14 professionally is going to deny that it's flawed, but to dismiss it outright as BS just because it doesn't fit into your creationist world-view is simply putting on the blinders and accepting what other people tell you as fact. Do some research, show some numbers. It's only one of many tools being used to figure out the universe, and can only properly be used when all the conditions are taken into consideration. Many of the details and numbers of this point were taken from the nifty site How Stuff Works. There were three more points to the bareSquare post, "Evolution is BS", "Civilization has not slowly progressed from animalistic cavemen to the intelligent people we are now.", and "There was a worldwide flood as described in the Bible." I may address these points later today, sometime tomorrow, or I may forget about them completely. We'll see.

Thursday of last week, Valentine's Day, a good thing happened. My very good friend Dave got engaged to a wonderful woman. The two of them will be happy together, and that's the best thing you can ask for in life. Congratulations you two.

Free idea: Ear bud headphones that detect when they are removed from the ear and pause music automagically, so I don't forget to it and put them back in half a CD later. Likewise, they would detect ear insertion and resume a paused CD. Or other media type. But they wouldn't act as a play button, they would only unpause music, not start it. That is all.

So I've figured out what I want from my dream company, you know, the one I'm starting after I win the lottery I never buy tickets for. The key element, I think, is that I want to hire people who have personal projects they want to invest time in. I want it to be a requirement. Two hours of your daily time is spent on a project of your choosing and your invention. See, I figure I'll be starting a company that's just me. Eventually I'd theoretically have enough money to hire a lackey, but I don't want just any Joe Lackey off the street, I want a Joe Lackey that's going to make me money and be a productive employee. So I figure, what's holding me back from churning out fifty billion pages of content every day? Well, primarily, lack of interest. I mean, developing web pages is a joke. It's the same thing over and over again. Create a table, a stored proc to update the table and one to retrieve data from the table, and then toss it all into a page. There's various bits and pieces of interest associated with it, but fundamentally there's very little difference technology-wise between what's being done here, and at Everything Is Connected and in any of my work projects. It's just moving data around. The reason I like working on this stuff is because it's all from me, it's something I started and therefore I have personal interest in it. The stuff I do for work, well, meh. It's the exact same thing, but without the piece of me in it. So if I can find people like myself to hire, 'cause that's what I'd want to do because then I might be able to beat them at office Counterstrike, I have to keep them interested in what's going on. That's probably not ever going to happen when they're working on my projects, so if I make them work on their own projects for two hours a day until it's in a state where it can be released at a level of minimal functionality for a proof-of-concept type thing, in return I get a little bit more interest in the projects that I want them to do. Then when I hire a third person, they work for two hours a day on their project, but by this point my first personal project is released and semi-stable, so additions to it are less regular and it's no longer a full time project, so hire #3 does shit maintenance work for my project, a little bit of new functionality and shit work for project #2, and designs their own project. The ultimate goal is to spin project #2 off into it's own company or something and propogate the idea, so employee #2 is now their own boss and completely in charge of their project, and working on other things. Dunno how well any of that sort of thing would work, but

Thought: I wonder if in MovieLand future, when we've all got the virtual reality and the brain implants and stuff, if it would be cool during work hours to hang out in a virtual clubhouse with friends. That'd be neat, hanging out in a Swiss Family Robinson-esque paradise and just tasking into a different avatar now and then. Would scripts be available that make your work avatar look like it's moving file cabinets or pulling up keyboards and typing with glowy fingers, or whatever it is work avatars will do? When you alt-tab out of the treehouse on the beach, will your avatar go grey and slump its shoulders, or will you just get a vacant stare on or what? Mostly I just want to sleep in.

Any system that cannot change ownership of e-mail accounts without deleting the account in the process is a poorly setup system. My ISP has a horrifically setup system. If you've sent me an e-mail since, oh, Saturday, it just got deleted, without me being warned that this would happen. Stupid piece of shit idiot customer service reps. Whatever happened to the days of an ISP meaning smart, knowledgeable service? Oh, that's right, mine's run by a cable provider. I should know better. Grumble mumble too much working not enough sleep bitch whine whine.

Overheard: COWORKER A [jokingly]: Coworker B, what's it like having the sexiest voice on the planet? Unsaid: ROB [jokingly]: Exactly the opposite of having the brownest nose.

Hrm. It's been an awfully busy week, so let's see if I can't be delivering some low down. Last Tuesday I received a call in the morning from M., the project lead at [Company]. We talked for a bit, a twenty-minute or so phone interview. When it ended, he let me know I should be expecting a call from [Company]'s HR department, either later in the day or the next day. That afternoon, M. called back and invited me to come in the following afternoon for an interview, and invite I gladly accepted. He told me to budget at least 45 minutes for each portion of the interview, first with him then with a representative of the HR department. When I came in M. and I ended up talking for about an hour and a half, when he then passed me off to D., the HR Admin at [Company]. D. and I talked for about an hour, a conversation that was thoroughly enjoyable, and quite probably the best interview I'd ever been part of. Late Thursday afternoon, M. called me to ask me to come in Friday afternoon to write a small portion of a web page, the login section of an existing page with some minor modifications. This would allow him to determine whether I just talked a good game, or if I could indeed do the things I said I could do. Apparently I don't just talk a good game, after about an hour I'd finished up and added in a couple of minor bells and whistles, and M. let me know I'd landed the job. Yay employment! Now, roll back the clock to Wednesday. Jen came into town with me and hung out with my brother for a few hours while I was being interviewed. After I finished up, we went to dinner with a couple of good friends, then began heading home. Sometime around 10:30 or so, we realised that I may have a job on Monday, Jen was nannying from Wednesday until Sunday, the month was done the Thursday after that, and we had to be out of our townhouse. In short, we realised that we had to move the coming weekend. (Just to help your timeline, that was this weekend just past.) So we spent Thursday and what we could Friday packing. We'd already done a bunch, being off work and dedicating an hour a day or so when we thought of it gave us a major head start. Jen's dad arranged a rental van for us - just a regular panel van because it would fit in our parking garage which connected to the basement of our apartment - and I enlisted (read: begged desperately for) the aid of my good friend Cris and his wife Melissa. Saturday rolled around, and after hours of lugging and only a little bit of cursing - and no blood! - we had moved everything that required two people to carry, plus a number of boxes and other paraphernalia. Saturday dawned bright and late, and I returned to the townhouse to prepare the final couple of loads, which Jen's father helped me with. Thursday night, one of the other websites I maintain decided to go to shit, so my computer is now hosting it (shh, don't tell my ISP!) which means it's still sitting on the floor of my old basement, serving up files slowly and painfully. I've been working good and solidly for two days now, enjoying myself thoroughly. My initial contract is for 6 months, the web is a mildly new avenue for [Company], but if work still exists (All Signs Point to Yes, the 8-ball would say) I'll likely be given a permanent full-time position. The best part about it is that I'm working in Waterloo now, my home town and where I've been longing to be again for a number of years. We're living in Jen's parents' basement for the time being, but once I have a strong indication that we won't suddenly be destitute again come the end of July, we'll start looking for a place here. Also, a job in this geographic vicinity that is perfect for Jen has apparently recently opened up, so good things could start happening all over. Whee! Anyway, hectic life. Oh, and the answer to the afore-mentioned 40k/year question? Pure luck.

So, here's the 40k/year question. How exactly do you find small development houses, say 5-10 employees most of which are programmers, that are keen on highering a fairly generalised geek who becomes competant in a given environment after about a week of good solid learning, and proficient and knowledgeable and goooood after like a month? There's just no way of finding such companies. Bitch bitch, whine whine.

One of the first things I dispose of when unemployed, or otherwise released from a major form of responsibility for great lengths of time, is personal hygeine. Not having to impress (or worry about repulsing) anyone other than my simlilarily unemployed girlfriend is one of the greatest shower deterrants I've yet encountered. For instance, things have been this way for so long now that when, this afternoon, I decided to take a shower and get dressed, my dog immediately got bouncy and excited, expecting to be taken for a car trip. We've conditioned her to think "After the humans enter the mysterious water-sound room and lose all their good juicy odours, I get to go in the car! THE CAR! THE CAR!" Pet trainning through slack. Wee-haw.

I saw Lord of the Rings last night. What a great movie. Primarily because it really pieced everything from the book together for me. Seeing things in chronological order was great, and the visuals created a whole lot more depth to the story for me, helping me pick up many of the subtleties I hadn't previously connected together. Though I noticed many story elements that were missing from the movies, the fact that the elements were missing wasn't really a big deal as the rest of the story remained quite cohesive.. As just a movie it's probably still damn impressive, but as a complimentary companion to the books, it fleshed out Middle-Earth and all the people in it almost perfectly. I think the only way they could have done it better would be to break the movie into 6 pieces, one for each of the sub-books (ie, Fellowship is actually book 1 and book 2 of the series), but I don't think asking the paying public to go to 6 movies to get the full story would've been an intelligent business move. Perhaps in ten years or so we'll see a TV mini-series or something that's truer to the story, and Tom Bombadil can get his recognition.

A minor note of personal achievement: A few months ago, I stopped biting my fingernails. I'm not sure why, I just stopped one day and started playing around with Jen's nailfile, which is a method of nail maintenance that is far more beneficial in regards to personal hygeine, and equally as distracting as nail biting. Since it's now been a few months and I've only bitten my nails a few times (generally when they start getting long and annoying again, and I haven't played with the nail file for a while) I'm pretty confident in saying the habit's been kicked. Kicking one of my many bad habits, even one as relatively minor as nail biting, makes me happy.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 is good good fun, though my thumb hurts something fierce. Games like Zelda and Pikmin, which don't require fierce button jamming combos have slowly allowed my thumb calluses to fade away. Now my thumb is weak. Stupid weak thumb. I'm inclined to blame the PS2 for the initial damage, because my thumb was hurting Tuesday night when I played it on the PS2 at Jen's brother's place, and hasn't significantly worsened, but that's probably just my wanting to make the GameCube better, for some reason. The game itself, graphically, load times, moves, all that jazz is identical, near as I can tell, on both systems. This is heartening for a number of reasons: 1) it lends credence to my theory that this generation of consoles will be the most heavily ported generation ever, which means I can get my grubby little paws on some games that last generation would have only been for the PS2. Yay for low barrier media! 2) it means that despite the tiny size of the Luigi's Mansion and Pikmin maps, larger-scale games can indeed be made for the platform. I tried to figure out how full the minidiscs the NGC uses are, but they appear to all be either burned full or of a quality or format that doesn't reveal used capacity to the naked eye. Oh, and a minor update to the Tarzan Untamed review: Turns out it really is only good for a total of about six hours of gameplay. Going back and redoing the levels to get all the bits and pieces you're supposed to pick up, and beating the time and trick trials and stuff just repeatedly beats into your brain how stale the adventure's gotten. It loses a point for both rental and purchases, making it a 5 rental and slightly less worthy (unless you're just looking for four hours of entertainment) and a 2 as a purchase. Although it probably deserves slightly more than a two for technical prowess, the concept of spending eighty bucks for four hours of good entertainment and two hours of mind-numbing "why am I doing this again?" repetition makes me mildly angry-like.

Last night on our way home, around 10pm or so, Jen and I decided to rent a new game with which to entertain ourselves until the new year comes. So we rented Tarzan Untamed, since it was either that or Batman (which will be rented sometime in the next couple of weeks, most likely) or a sports game*. It's a pretty fun game, very pretty, although the characters themselves were a little too blocky (or triangly, I suppose) to rank as notable graphical achievements. The water's quite swank in the game as well, though not nearl the derail level of Pikmin's water. The controls for the regular "Jungle Exploration" levels come close to sucking. They're inexact and don't play too nice with the fixed camera position (another minor strike - I kept wanting to swoop the camera around) though since there isn't a whole lot of control that needs to be done outside of creative A-button pushing, they weren't terrible. Tarzan needs to learn how to run though, the man is a slow-ass beast. There are four types of gameplay, the afore-mentioned jungle exploration where Tarzan is on foot, rapids-surfing on a piece of wood, water-skiing behind a vulture and bunjee jumping. The controls in the other three gameplays areas are great. One of the pretty features is the "special move" Tarzan can do at certain times - while sliding down branches he can stand on his head, or slide backwards, while water-skiing and surfing he can do front flips off ramps and he can rail grind along fallen trees in the water. The only problems is that there aren't nearly enough - only two or three for each gameplay section except the bunjee jumping, which is just falling while moving the joystick around. My biggest beef, again (I hope this isn't a continuing problem, but like Luigi and Pikmin it probably won't be as apparent when I'm actually spending my days at a job rather than on a couch) is the length. Shortly after 2 am I decided it would be a good idea to go to bed when I finished the level I was on. When I finished the level, it turns out I'd finished the game. Unlike Luigi's Mansion, Tarzan is going to have some good replay value. There's lots of film canisters (aka, generic plot device of object collection) I missed, and that will probably affect the end-game movie, and you can replay levels to beat high scores and there appears to be some sort of mini-game collection I have yet to explore. As a rental, this game scores somewhere around 6 - you'll be able to finish it, it's good for a number of hours of entertainment and it's an actual platform game for the NGC, which there aren't many of right now. As a purchase, the game scores somewhere around 3. It's technically sound, but the controls bug me and I would be extremely pissed to finish something I spent eighty bucks on in four hours. * I am not a fan of most sports games with the exception of EA's NHLxx in a room of intoxicated players