Lab Journal

The blog is dead - long live the new blog.

2010-01-05T20:36:00.000-06:00

And thus I bid a fond farewell to Blogger.

The new blog is live over at http://kevinmatheny.com/wordpress. It's prettier than this one. No offense intended, Blogger. Thanks for introducing me to blogging, and for making the process easy and painless. And for being so darn well-indexed by Google, which while unsurprising was nonetheless welcome.

See you over there.

Upgrading my web presence.

2009-12-19T12:14:00.000-06:00

Yes, I registered kevinmatheny.com, yay for personal branding on the Internet.

I'm working on the blog. I am not entirely sure that I need a new blog, and I still have it in the lunarpages equivalent of the basement workshop, trying to figure out how to get it configured the way I want. But I am liking Wordpress, and things look promising - a lot more control than Blogger offers, with concomitant risk of b0rking your install and having to start over.

Once I get it presentable, I need to move all of my historical posts over there. Assuming I don't break it again and have to start over.

But the work is underway.

Also to come: some kind of home page. And a wiki, ideally Confluence - 10-user licenses are $10.

Comment spam sucks

2009-12-01T06:51:00.000-06:00

I guess I should take it as some kind of sign that I've arrived. I got a wave of comment spam rich with names of and links to gaming sites. That's gaming as in the computer type, which is at least on-topic for me, if not for the post they were attached to.

So I've turned on Captcha and enabled comment moderation. Sign of the times, I guess.

Moving (back) to Mac

2009-09-22T18:09:00.002-05:00

So my work laptop died. It wasn't a particularly surprising death - the signs were there if you chose to look for them, and I've reached the stage in life where I've dealt with this before, so the grieving process is familiar now. Did I say grieving? I think I meant backing up re-installing.

I did decide to make it significantly more complicated this time, as I'm changing platforms. After 10 years away, I'm going back to using a Mac as my work machine. I took a hard look at my options, and decided that I want to be compatible with the development teams I'm working with, and the best tools for doing the kind of work I am doing (e-business architecture) are Mac tools - Omnifocus and Omnigraffle are on my short list.

Also, it seems that while I have been away the maddening process of managing extensions has been done away with, what with the switch to Unix under the hood.

I'm a bit apprehensive - I'll be learning new UI conventions, figuring out which open source software is the best, and lugging around a much heavier laptop.

I'm also excited - I love learning new things, and I'm really looking forward to getting back to Mac.

Wish me luck.

Design patterns that do not exist, but should: Let The Wookiee Win

2009-05-26T22:41:00.002-05:00

I like design patterns. They're an interesting and useful way to store a fairly large set of information about how to do something in a few words. Mike Nygard, in Release It!, uses patterns and anti-patterns to talk about things to do and to watch out for, and I found it to be an excellent way to remember what to do and not do.

Playing around with language is something I enjoy, and I have a talent for remembering movie quotes. For whatever reason, some movie quotes strike me as capturing design or problem-solving patterns. Thus I begin what may turn out to be a series of posts, about Design Patterns That Do Not Exist, But Should.

Let The Wookiee Win
I can't find a link for this on Youtube - guess Lucasfilm's legal staff is earning their keep. In the original Star Wars, R2D2 is playing a chess-like game with Chewbacca. Chewie doesn't like one of R2's moves, leading to this exchange:
C3P0: He made a fair move. Screaming about it won't help you.
Han: Let him have it. It's not wise to upset a Wookiee.
C3PO: But sir, nobody worries about upsetting a droid.
Han: That's 'cause droids don't pull people's arms out of their sockets when they lose. Wookiees are known to do that.
C3PO: I see your point, sir. I suggest a new strategy, Artoo. Let the Wookiee win.

Let The Wookiee Win is not about conceding the game, it's about redefining victory conditions for yourself in light of new information. The point of using it as a design pattern is that you should be alert to information that changes the nature of the game; there's not much point in winning the battle if you lose the war.

You should Let The Wookiee Win when you come into possession of new information that changes your understanding of the consequences of achieving your current goal. Play the meta-game, not the game at hand.

- Kevin

I am become Twitter, destroyer of long-form blogging

2009-05-24T09:27:00.003-05:00

Twitter is pretty darn cool. The ability to publish brief updates to anyone who cares to receive them is a neat thing. I've been using it for months now, and am learning to use it as a kind of zeitgeist tool - I follow enough people that I can pick up on stories and trends via twitter rather than through other means.

But I'm finding that it just destroys blogging as a communications form for me. I'm an infrequent blogger anyway, for a variety of reasons, and giving me an outlet that forces me to be pithy and is expressly interpersonal and transient just encourages that.

Blog posts, for me, are something I craft. When I write anything longer than a couple of sentences, I revise and rethink, going over the sequence of things to make sure that it flows and is readable. I don't do that with Twitter (at least, I don't do it much) because there just isn't enough space to worry about it.

I don't think this affects everyone; I suspect it hits those who are primarily social bloggers much more than those who are journalists or creative writers.

- Kevin

Okay, so what is an API?

2009-01-29T18:40:00.004-06:00

This is an excellent question, and one I get asked a fair amount. The not-very-useful answer is "it's an Application Programming Interface," which tells you what it's an acronym for but not what that means. If you're not familiar with the term, the words are just a different kind of meaningless noise.

If you want to read the Wikipedia entry on APIs, knock yourself out. You might also find the entry on Web Services interesting. I'll wait here.

Done? Okay, welcome back. There's a lot of really dense information over there, and I find it useful to fasten on two key concepts: One, an API is a way for computers to talk to one another, and two, a web service is (kind of) a web site with the skin taken off.

Remix, for example (hey, what other example am I going to use?), replicates pretty much what you can get from BestBuy.com on the "product detail page" for a given item. Here's an Insignia TV at BestBuy.com:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8632875&type=product&id=1194052042360

And here's the same TV in the Remix API:

http://api.remix.bestbuy.com/v1/products/8632875.xml?apiKey=fqbvt96fpczdv4wesx4s62sd

Notice that pretty much all of the information that is in the pretty BestBuy.com version is also in the texty Remix version? That's because Remix is more or less just BestBuy.com with the skin off.

So why do you care? What's the point of taking the skin off a web site? Well, when you do that, it becomes possible to put a different skin on. For example, in the sidebar of this blog is a list of games, showing names, images and prices. All of that information is coming from Remix; I just put the list of SKU IDs into a control panel and it created a chunk of javascript that does the work.

So what you're seeing is information from BestBuy.com, but not at BestBuy.com. When prices change on BestBuy.com, they'll change in that sidebar gadget.

What do we hope to get out of this? Something cool that we can't imagine. Yellow Tag Productions, our internal video production team, did a great video that summarizes the thinking behind this and the potential we see, called "Open for Business." It's worth 4:50 of your day, I think. Of course, I would, since I'm in it. Give it a try.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whzN-7uCiZw

Affiliating myself

2009-01-22T19:36:00.002-06:00

Had an excellent meeting at work early this week and discovered Things From Another World (www.tfaw.com), which looks like a most excellent place to buy some of things I find fascinating. Yeah, I'm talking about comic books.

Turns out they have an affiliate program, which is nice. I am not sure if they are targeting the long tail, which is where this tiny little self-indulgence belongs. Their process seems to assume that I own the domain where my site is located. Since I'm on Blogger, that is very much not the case.

They do offer me an alternative method of demonstrating my ownership of this blog, though. I cam put this into a post:

Confirmation Code: GNDFMCN16321763

There you go, guys. Sign me up!

Bridges to the Future

2009-01-10T14:33:00.003-06:00

Hey, my article is live, and I didn't blog about it. Never has the subtitle of my blog been so eerily accurate.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/dec2008/db20081228_586132.htm

It's aimed at non-technical people working in businesses that use technology, in particular those that are dependent on technology for their success. If you're working for a company that needs to do technology projects, it's worth reading. And then printing out and showing to your senior management. :)

Serendipity

2008-12-13T12:45:00.002-06:00

Sometimes you just get lucky, I guess. Case in point: I've been invited to write an article for Business Week. This is utterly relevant to what I am doing right now, and yet is completely random. One of my friends at work (Erik Olson, @EAEO) twittered that he recommended following @johnabyrne, Editor-in-Chief of BusinessWeek. I did so. Turns out I was John's 2,500th Twitter follower, and as a result, he offered to let me write the article as a reward.

It's such an amazing coincidence. My project (Best Buy Remix, http://remix.bestbuy.com) is gathering momentum inside Best Buy and we are working on getting out the word externally. We just brought on a community manager to help us reach out to external development communities and take care of the folks using our portal. We've been talking to PR and Marketing about how to reach out. And then this opportunity drops into my lap.

Sometimes you just get lucky, indeed.

- Kevin

Getting Outlook calendar onto your iPhone without violating corporate policies

2008-12-02T18:17:00.002-06:00

At work (Best Buy), we don't allow non-company-owned devices on the network. This means that I can't sync my (personal) iPhone with my work calendar. Since my work-provided phone is dead as a doornail right now, this is kind of a problem. But I'm a resourceful guy, and I'm pretty good with the Google.

So I found a way to do it, mostly courtesy of this post from Ian Fernando. Basically, you need to do 4 things:

Use Google Calendar Sync to get your Outlook calendar into Google Calendar
Sign up for a (free) account with www.nuevasync.com (beta service, will probably go pay or go away some day, but for now it works and is free)
Give Nuevasync access to your Google calendar (not your account, and not your password, just access to the calendar)
Add a calendar sync on the iPhone to the MS Exchange server that Nuevasync provides (detailed directions at Nuevasync site)

It's a pretty simple process, and the results are hard to argue with: I have my calendar on my phone.

In which I take the Wall Street Journal to task for their "analysis" of the impact of the Beatles appearing in Rock Band

2008-10-30T16:12:00.004-05:00

So the Beatles at long last are going to have some kind of digital distribution, and it will be in the Rock Band series. The WSJ's article on it is fairly good, written as it is for a general audience, but it contains two paragraphs that made me wince.

The first is an observation about the relative sales performance of the two games. It follows earlier portions that have made it clear that the two games are competing, and that the Beatles deal represents a big win for Rock Band. This is apparently offset by:

DFC estimates that Guitar Hero and its sequels have generated more than $1.5 billion in cumulative revenue so far, three times as much as Rock Band. However, the two games are competing neck-and-neck so far this year, with MTV's launch of Rock Band 2 and Activision's latest, Guitar Hero World Tour, this past Sunday. Guitar Hero has issued seven titles to date, while Rock Band -- distributed by Electronic Arts Inc. -- has put out just two titles.

The implication is that Rock Band is the upstart, coming from behind; that GH is more successful than Rock Band. But, since there are no sales figures for the period since Rock Band's release, or across the last two releases or really anything that gives you an apples-to-apples comparison, it's what we call a "factoid." That is, "fact-" meaning "fact," and "oid" meaning "something like." It's an ornament, but not particularly useful in helping you figure out which game is winning.

Look, if you want to compare the two games, compare them in a meaningful way. When one game has a two-year head start, lifetime sales figures aren't a very good yardstick. And since the creative team (Harmonix) that is making Rock Band was responsible for developing the first 3 Guitar Hero releases (GH, GH II and GH:Rocks the 80s), perhaps those should be counted on the Rock Band side.

The second maddening paragraph is the very next one in the article:

Beatles songs available on a Rock Band game are likely to be popular, but analysts point out that the challenge will be in reaching out to Beatles fans, many of whom are in their 50s and 60s, and marketing the game in a way that will persuade them to buy a videogame console and try the game.

The "analysts" mentioned are no doubt glad they are anonymous, because this is a dipshit statement, on multiple levels. First, it assumes that Beatles fans are mostly over 50. Hello? They're the BEST ROCK AND ROLL BAND EVER. Their appeal transcends age. Yes, lots of people over 50 like the Beatles. So do lots of people who are under 50.

Second, it assumes that you have to be a Beatles fan to be interested in their music. I'm not a Jimmy Buffet fan, but I bought the 3-song Buffet set for Rock Band. Iconic, distinctive music has general appeal. The music of the Beatles will appeal even to non-Beatles fans.

Third and most annoying, it assumes that Harmonix and MTV are interested in trying to drive console sales. They don't make consoles. They make software and peripherals, and trying to drive sales of those things is their primary concern. Adding the Beatles to their product line (especially if they do a standalone Beatles game) drives software sales to people who already own consoles.

It's one of those superficially smart-sounding observations that falls apart under scrutiny. It shouldn't have made it past the editors at the WSJ.

Pondering on the VP debate

2008-10-03T07:22:00.002-05:00

I still haven't watched it, but I have been following the blogospheric coverage, especially through www.fivethirtyeight.com. One thing that was being theorized coming into the debate was that the format, especially the lack of direct interaction, was going to favor Palin. Another was that Biden needed to be careful and not attack too much, not come across as being mean to her.

Is it possible that the format, by depriving Biden of the opportunity to interact directly, wound up helping him more than her? Not sure if it's possible to tell after the fact, but the coverage I am reading is indicating that he came off as more sympathetic and human than she did, in addition to being more qualified.

Then again, I'm not reading everything (unlike Governor Palin, who apparently reads "all of" the newspapers and magazines), so this may just be an artifact of small sample size.

AP, IP and baffling business decisions

2008-10-02T08:24:00.002-05:00

Okay, I'm kind of cheating here. I originally wrote this for my internal blog at Best Buy, but I really like it, so I'm reposting it out here in the wild.

=============================
Original date: 6/20/2008

I've read a number of blog posts recently about AP's decision to try to impose very strict rules on use of their content. In essence, they're claiming that quoting more than 5 words from an AP article (in a public context such as a blog) constitutes infringing use of their intellectual property and they should be paid for it.

That strikes me (and many others) as an untenable legal position -- fair use seems to me (a non-lawyer) as granting greater ability to re-use than a 5-word limit will allow. It seems to me that AP is following in the footsteps of SCO or the RIAA; unable to grow their business in the fashion they were, they're suing customers (or potential customers) to create a revenue stream or safeguard the existing one.

Whether downloading music without paying for it is legal or not (probably not), whether it hurts sales or not (also probably not, in my opinion), it's a logical and inevitable consequence of technological change. Trying to hold back the Internet by suing potential customers is not likely to succeed, and a waste of time and energy that could be put into finding ways to actually grow your business.

There's an excellent article on the AP decision over at Greg Costikyan's Play This Thing blog. He points out that AP (and Reuters) had the opportunity to own news online but have missed the boat. To illustrate the futility of their approach, he wanted to find a story to quote (more than 5 words) from, but couldn't find one:

"... I searched on "videogame," and brought up...

Nothing.

Not a single story.

Now, the search was constrained to the last seven days, and I suppose it's vaguely possible that AP has not run a single story in the last week that contained the word "videogame" or dealt with them in any fashion -- but I doubt that. What's more likely, I suspect, is that search is on keywords, not fulltext, and that "videogame" isn't a keyword they use."

The full post is worth reading, but does contain a couple of swear words. Fair warning. :)

http://playthisthing.com/i-wish-violate-aps-ip-aps-gormlessness-prevents-me

Netflix goes open, and I uncloak

2008-10-02T01:00:00.006-05:00

So Netflix has opened up their data via an API. They're also using Mashery, which lead to me discovering something that probably should have been obvious: My Remix account works over at Netflix as well, since it's not really a Remix account but a Mashery account.

In retrospect, duh. It tells you that on the login screen. I just hadn't connected the dots.

In other news, I changed my Twitter handle to my real name. I figured that would be easier for people to keep straight. I'm keeping this blog, though, and I'm still Brainiac4 lots of places. I'm just being more open about who Brainiac4 is.

Remix Best Buy

2008-09-24T17:32:00.004-05:00

Ever say to yourself "Man, Best Buy's web site sucks. I could build a better one!"

I'm calling your bluff. Best Buy Remix is live. We've taken the BBY product catalog and turned it into an open API. Swing by remix.bestbuy.com, check out the documentation, sign up for an API key and do something with our data.

I dare you.

:)

You'll see me in the forums there under my real name: Kevin Matheny. Say hi.

Sarah Palin? Seriously?

2008-08-29T16:04:00.002-05:00

I guess the McCain campaign is going for Palin as an antidote to the age factor? Except that already came off the table to some degree with the choice of Biden, who is in his 60s. It does give McCain/Palin the opportunity to appeal to women, but I don't see that many women who were on the fence going for McCain/Palin just because she's a woman. I could be wrong, I guess.

The thing that immediately struck me, though, is that this is now the all-under-investigation ticket. McCain's history (Keating 5) combined with Palin's current struggles (under investigation by the Republican-controlled state legislature) makes for an easy line of attack.

Most of all, though, she just does not seem presidential. And she's one 72-year-old-four-time-cancer-survivor-heartbeat away from the presidency if McCain wins.

2008-07-27T18:44:00.001-05:00

Trying out ping.fm...

Man, am I chatty all of a sudden

2008-07-06T16:08:00.003-05:00

I think my previous high for posts in a day was two. I also think I set it earlier today. Now here I go breaking new ground. I ran across Wordle a while back, linked from Mike Nygard's blog. It's a neat app that takes a set of words and creates a visualization of them. I tried it out with my del.icio.us tag cloud, and it does a nice job of letting you know what I find interesting.

Technorati, finally

2008-07-06T14:34:00.001-05:00

I guess it's time to grow up.

Here's my Technorati Profile.

Switches and dials, thresholds and evaluations

2008-07-06T12:37:00.004-05:00

I spend a fair amount of time playing games, of various sorts -- a lot of computer games, mostly of the RPG genre, as well as card games (Magic and traditional) and some board games. One thing that strikes me is the similarity between the design decisions made when building games and those made when constructing other sorts of UIs, such as web sites or applications. When you are dealing with the interface between humans abstracted into an interface layer of some sort, whether it's a set of rules you read, the instructions on a card or the placement and nature of buttons on the screen, you're dealing with variations on a theme: how does one person understand what they can and cannot do to interact with the context they are in to produce results?

When I am thinking about the controls available to users, I conceptualize them using a framework I call "switches and dials". Switches are on/off states -- something is in play or not, available or not, alive or dead, and so on. In a website or application context, these are things like whether or not you offer search, or the ability for users to save a constructed navigational state. At the most basic level, a switch is a threshold -- you are on one side or the other. In World of Warcraft, for example, you must have purchased the skill that allows you to use a given weapon before you can equip it.

Dials are indicators of degree -- things that may occur in increments, such as points of health, chance to dodge and so on. Often, they're linked to switches -- in World of Warcraft, once you have purchased the ability to equip a given weapon, you still have to build up your skill rating with it.

This leads me to framing user decisions about whether to like a given component or system in terms of threshold and evaluation considerations -- which features or functions will make or break a user's decision to use a web site or application at all, and which will influence it.

There is, of course, a pretty big difference between switch/dial in game, site or app design and threshold/evalution in user preference, but there's enough similarity in concept for me to link them in my mind -- and isn't my mind what blogging is all about? :)

An example may help. For me, the ability to see screenshots of a piece of software is make-or-break; even if downloading it is free, I still want to know what the thing looks like, After all, I am going to have to uninstall if I don't like it, and that represents an investment. So no screenshots is a threshold for me. Once we get past that, then I'm looking at the content in the screenshots, and we're in evaluation territory.

From the other side of the equation, deciding whether or not to put screenshots on the web site is a switch.

Okay, what's the reason for all of this? When making decisions about what to put into or leave out of your game (site, application, etc) consider what part of the decision-making process it occupies for your end-user, in addition to thinking about what it means to your design intent.

Twitter - should I stay or should I go?

2008-07-05T09:58:00.005-05:00

I'm finding myself starting to really like Twitter. My original use of it was somewhat minimal, kind of like my approach to blogging (although I'm handicapped a bit by blogging twice -- here and at work -- so some of the time and ideas I have are being used in a closed system). I posted a few tweets (twitts? I prefer tweets, I think), subscribed to a couple of interesting people, but was treating it more like a mini-RSS feed than a communication mechanism. Over the last week or two, though, I've used it for direct and indirect communication, including a really entertaining instance of connecting to someone (Chris Thiessen, creator of www.zoomii.com, which is fascinating) through Twitter before I had the chance to connect via email.

At the same time, I'm starting to understand the frustration felt by Twitter users at the downtime for the service. Direct messages have taken up to 10 hours to get through, and some of the website's functions have failed to work or generated baffling error messages. Reading about Twitter on techcrunch, I'm concerned about the long-term viability of the service.

So I find myself at a bit of a crossroads. Do I keep investing time and energy in building my social graph on Twitter, hoping it will become stable and usable, or do I seek out alternatives?

I'm reminded of the adoption of instant messaging in the mid-90s. I started with AIM and built a modest network of friends, then somehow lost my account in the Netscape/AOL transition. I built another network on Yahoo Messenger, another on Microsoft Messenger, tried Trillian to hook them up, but found it didn't work on my work computer. Now Google and Facebook and everyone else wants to provide instant messaging infrastructure.

I'm tired of setting up new accounts and rebuilding my social graph. I want a way to hook up all of the ones I already have, and to be honest, I'm willing to pay for that.

Visual Bookshelf, again

2008-01-27T21:14:00.001-06:00

Visual Bookshelf 2.0 has been released, and I'm liking the upgrades. Given that it has to fit within the facebook column structure, the design works really well. The images also look better, although they're still smaller than I want them to be.

Hey, VB team - keep up the good work on facebook, but if you have some spare time to work out a full-page design that you can host on your own pages, I think you might get some usage there as well, and more space to do things like advertise.

Just a thought. :)

Stumbling

2008-01-13T19:59:00.000-06:00

Next up on my Web 2.0 tour is StumbleUpon. It's a(nother) collaborative filtering mechanism for the Internet. I think the killer app for for the Web is something along these lines -- the problem with the fact that anyone can publish is that it's hard to find the good stuff. As Ted Sturgeon so aptly pointed out, 90% of everything is crap. I think with the lowered barriers to entry of the modern Internet, the percentage of crap may well be higher.

But there is some really, truly great stuff out there. The problem is finding it. Blogs help a bit, when they aren't being part of the problem -- boingboing, for example, is a great way to find out about interesting stuff. But some of what they cover doesn't interest me, and some (a lot, really) of what I find interesting is stuff they don't cover. So I build an aggregate of streams via RSS, which helps, but there's not necessarily that feeling of discovering something. I think in part it's because reading a blurb about something and then seeing it takes a bit of the impact out of the process.

StumbleUpon, on the other hand, just presents the potentially interesting thing in my browser window with no explanation. I get to determine for myself what this thing is and what I think of it. So far it's pretty good -- over the course of several days and about 50 or 60 Stumbles, I've only seen two or three dogs.

Setup is painless -- set up a username/password, minor toolbar install, click on a few items out of the list of possible topics, and you're off. Any time I am looking at something I can Like it or Dislike it, and that (apparently) gets saved to my profile to improve results.

Coolest thing today was this list of the 100 oldest currently-registered dot-com domains. Geeky fun.

Now I think I'll go do some housecleaning in iTunes.

Visual Bookshelf

2008-01-08T19:24:00.000-06:00

I like VB. But as noted below, I'm finding the UI a bit clunky. I did get feedback from Tim at Visual Bookshelf (perhaps Tim O'Shaughnessy from Hungry Machine?), who gently pointed out that I could choose larger images. He was even good-natured about my expressed desire that the team have their phalanges smashed. :) I'm not able to make the change work for me, though, which is a bit frustrating. The screenshot on the VB page at Facebook (linked in the title of this post) shows a somewhat different UI than I get. Not sure if that's something to do with FireFox, or if the screenshot was a mockup or earlier version that's different from the current code.

I just wish I could use all of this 22" monitor, I guess. :)

More fun with new web stuff

2008-01-07T19:20:00.001-06:00

Facebook is interesting. I find the vast majority of the apps to be completely uninteresting -- my desire to "poke" on Facebook is very, very low -- but there is some really neat stuff going on with information-sharing apps like Visual Bookshelf.

Although the people who designed the UI for Visual Bookshelf should have their fingers broken. Okay, that's a bit harsh. They should, however, have it explained to them that HTML resizing of images is a really bad idea, and that book covers, which have words on them, should not be resized down into unreadability.

I also stumbled upon (or rather was sent a link to) Plaxo, which I am liking a bit more than FB. I have been a LinkedIn user for a couple of years now, and Plaxo is closer to that, with a more profesionally designed UI. Plaxo also lets me separate my profile between personal, family and professional segments, which lets me give my relatives my home address and phone number without sharing it will all of my business contacts.

Oh wow, Facebook.

2007-12-27T22:08:00.000-06:00

So I'm trying out Facebook now. I have a new assignment at work -- I get to spend the next 60 days working on Web 2.0, which is pretty exciting. It does mean I need to actually try out Facebook.

Wish me luck.

Victory!

2007-11-07T07:22:00.000-06:00

Election results for Maplewood City Council are in. The good guys won decisively. We're still going to have divided, acrimonious council meetings, but at least we can start cleaning up the mess that the Longrie cabal has inflicted on the city.

Back to Paragon City

2007-10-06T15:01:00.000-05:00

Okay, I cancelled the WoW account. Too much travel time, not enough actual game-playing. It was fun, but not fun enough to keep paying for, and I just didn't feel emotionally invested in any of the characters I was playing.

I think part of the problem is that it's a stuff-based game. The rewards are in new and better stuff for your character, delivered on a relatively regular basis as you level up. The problem I have with that is that getting stuff for the most part doesn't give me new things to do. City of Heroes, in contrast, delivers a lot of character improvement early on, with the rate of improvement slowing over time as leveling gets slower. This means it's easier and more fun to create alts and have meaningful differences between them, as the various power sets play differently. Also, you get to choose a custom look right away, as opposed to the WoW problem of every Night Elf going through the "green bike shorts, leather vest and Boy Scout neckerchief" look at level 6. Seriously, ever single one of them looks identical except for the hairstyle and hair color. That's not enough variation for me, I'm afraid.

So it's back to City of Heroes, where the Invention System delivers new ways to customize characters.

World of Warcraft sucks...

2007-03-01T08:37:00.000-06:00

...you in. I've started playing, partly because I'm playing with Nihilix, and partly because, well, I just wanted to see what it was like these days.

I've played a lot of City of Heroes the past couple of years, and I was pining for a fantasy setting that I could play cooperatively. Oblivion is neat, and I will get back to playing it when the expansion ships (at least, I think I will), but what I want is Diablo III. Since that's not happening right now (although the Median 2008 mod is really tempting me to re-install one of the 4 or 5 copies of D2 that I own), I'm trying out WoW.

It really does suck you in. There's the character progression, of course, but the big thing is the acquisition of stuff, including crafting, and the player-driven economy. My wife points out that the character creation is incredibly disappointing after getting used to the costume generator in CoH, and the wide variety of power options across the archetypes, so it doesn't start off with much of a feeling of engagement. I feel less invested in your character, since all I've done is make a small number of choices (faction, race, class, and a couple of options for face. hairstyle, hair color and the like). And then, of course, the early look is the same for all characters, since it's governed by the items you are finding, and the initial drop tables are pretty limited. The early quest rewards are the best items you get, so everyone is wearing them, and they look... disappointing. Night Elves that can wear leather armor all wind up wearing some kind of green bike shorts and little red capes about level 4, so it's like a huge Boy Scout convention. Early armor choices for warriors look like capri pants and muscle shirts.

Part of the problem, of course, is that they're spending so much graphics horsepower on the world, and aiming for a high frame rate. Characters can't be high-detail or your computer would choke on it. The result is a world that is consistent, with reasonable performance and almost no zoning, but you get invested in the world, not so much in your character as yours. The character is defined by the stuff, not the character itself. There's nothing wrong with this model, of course -- it's worked well for years with a wide variety of games. I'm just kind of disappointed that in the MMO genre we're not seeing more games follow the lead of CoH or Second Life and allowing customization of the look and presentation of your avatar that isn't driven purely by the stuff you have.

The other problem with looks based on stuff is that, if I can see it on the enemy, I want to be able to pick it up. Morrowind and Oblivion did this really well -- that guy over there with the glowing sword? Take him down and you'll get the sword. Of course, he's going to use it on you, but that's the breaks. WoW doesn't do this -- I get the stuff from the drop table, not the equipment being used against me. This does give nice variation, which is more fair for various character types, but moves away from the immersion that I'd like to feel.

Also, the skill progression in WoW feels like an afterthought. For tradeskills, it works relatively well -- you need to have a skill of a certain level in order to be able to do some things, and you increase skill by using it. Fair enough. But the model was also extended to weapons, in kind of a half-assed fashion. Weapons don't require a skill number to use, they require you to be a certain level. If Blizzard implemented a skill-based (instead of level-based) method for limiting weapon use, it would increase the power of racial weapon advantages and give meaning to weapon skill. As it is, if you want to pick up a new weapon type past about level 12, it's a trivial cost to enable the skill and then you simply need to spend some time in low-level areas grinding to build up your skill number so your to-hit percentage doesn't suffer. That doesn't do much for immersion or fun, does it? There's no trade-off you are making, deciding to use one weapon type over another, and (apart from a relatively small amount of time and money) no real cost to switching.
What does it all mean? I'm liking WoW for the most part -- I enjoy getting to play with my friends (my wife is playing as well, but since we were already playing CoH together, it's not a new thing), I enjoy the fantasy setting, I'm liking the feeling of learning and building stuff, but it's not perfect.

Then again, what game is?

A tale of two restaurants

2006-12-16T12:09:00.000-06:00

I like dualities, I guess.

Last night, my wife and I went out to dinner at Zander Cafe in St. Paul. The night before, we and our kids had been to Sunsets in Woodbury. It's probably not fair to compare the two experiences, because aside from us paying for a meal they weren't very similar (small vs. large, couple vs. family, and so on), but then again fairness is looked for more often than it is found.

The upshot of the two experiences was that we took Sunsets off our list of restaurants to visit, and reminded ourselves that we need to go to Zander more often.

The best part of the meal at Sunsets was the dessert (creme brulee, which it is possible to screw up). The second best was our daughter's chicken fingers. The third... well, my wife's suggestion was "my Diet Coke wasn't bad...". Definitely the worst part of the dinner was her filet mignon. When you put filet mignon on your menu, you should definitely hire cooks who know how to prepare it.

The meal at Zander, on the other hand, was excellent -- I had a pork loin filet that was excellent, accompanied by a butternut squash that I ate every bit of. My wife had "the" jambalaya, which she pronounced "pretty good" and then when pressed clarified to "I mean excellent." She has a habit of understatement at times.

Apart from the entertainment value of making fun of last nigh's disastrous dinner, this got us thinking about restaurants and our tastes. I'm of the opinion that our tastes and expectations have changed (we have higher expectations now) even as the overall quality of food has fallen at chain restaurants.

The key problem, I think, is the economics of running a chain. When you have the opportunity to pursue volume discounts, you start making decisions based on having as many options as possible with your stuff, and not based on making the best stuff you can. TGI Friday's, for example, has in effect a menu matrix. You choose some kind of meat, some kind of sauce or topping, some kind of side, and so on. They're almost doing Garanimals with food. This approach works relatively well for cafeteria-style food, but I don't want to eat at a cafeteria when I am paying restaurant prices.

I need to remember to eat out more at smaller restaurants. It costs a bit more, but the quality is better, and I like voting with my daily behavior. Food isn't a commodity, and treating it like one is a disservice to ourselves.

This Internet thing could be big.

2006-12-01T10:55:00.000-06:00

So the post preceding this one was an attempt by me to help the Internet work. I had a problem with my iPod, and spent many hours trying to resolve it before finally finding the (simple) solution.
Why did it take so long? Basically, because the way I was describing the symptoms was different from the way that Jeff Bryan over at the 5G iPod forums at Apple described the underlying problem. I was looking for something having to do with ipodservice.exe taking up 100% of CPU, while he was describing a problem with drive letters. Fortunately for me, I found his post and guessed the issue he was talking about might be related to the one I was experiencing.

Then I figured that I'd try to make the internet better by putting the information I had gathered in someplace where it could be found, so that others might benefit. Thus far, 3 people have left comments indicating that this was a good idea. I'm pretty happy with that.

This kind of highlights the problem with the web, though. Almost all of the information you want is somewhere out there in the long tail, but finding it, weeding out the useful thing from all the other crap, is a nigh-insurmountable task. Without a deliberate attempt by humans to wrest order from chaos, the internet isn't going to live up to its potential as a transformative mechanism for humanity.

Most attempts to create order from internet chaos have been top-down. Yahoo was my first exposure to someone attempting to categorize all the stuff on the 'net, and even early on, it was pretty obvious that the amount and variety of stuff was growing faster than the ability of people to come up with categories. I think the future of order-from-chaos lies in tagging and folksonomies. Yes, they introduce a lot of crap data, and have the potential for abuse, but I believe the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Especially because we can build mechanisms for determining who to trust based on behavior, as Google has done with their ranking mechanisms for sites.

iPod 100% CPU utilization - problem solved

2006-11-05T16:37:00.000-06:00

I finally gave in an got an iPod. I was a relatively early adopter of digital music playback, as I've had an Iriver IHP-120 (also known as the H120) for a couple of years. It died on a flight back from Boston a couple of weeks ago, and I had a whole day before my next flight, so I bit the bullet and picked up an iPod.

Things went okay for the first week or so, but then I started to have a problem where I could not eject it -- iTunes would lock up hard when I tried to eject the iPod. Then I developed a new problem, where connecting the iPod would cause ipodservice.exe to activate, and my machine would go to 100% CPU and stay there.

I tried a lot of things to fix the problem, none of which worked (until the last one, of course). Over the space of two days...

- I uninstalled iTunes and reinstalled it, which did nothing
- I uninstalled iTunes and Quicktime, and then could not reinstall Quicktime until I (finally) found the quicktime files in /WINDOWS/System32/
- I deleted dozens of quicktime and itunes references from my registry
- I uninstalled and reinstalled again

And of course, I rebooted dozens of times.

The problem, as it turned out, is all about drive letters. It seems that iPods do not like to share their drive letter with other devices, even if said devices are not connected.

If you're having this problem, try what worked for me:

With the iPod connected (and CPU at 100%, of course)

Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management

Select the iPod and choose a different letter. I picked "I" since it's high enough I should not get another drive up there. You'll get a warning that changing drive letters may make software not work. This is only true if you are running applications from your iPod, so I felt safe ignoring it.

This fixed the problem immediately.

Scoreboard updates

2006-09-19T19:12:00.000-05:00

Things are looking up. The Twins are 4 games up in the wild card, a game and a half behind the Tigers for the Central, and leading the BoSox 6-nothing as I type this. Odds of making the postseason are up to 95%, saith Baseball Prospectus.

And the race for the Senate is looking up. Latest polls have a 50-50 split, and with the way the wind is blowing, I am hoping for a change.

Scoreboard-watching, in two ways.

2006-09-09T16:27:00.000-05:00

It's the time of year when I watch the scoreboards, in two ways. Why do I think in twos? Dunno.

The first kind of scoreboard-watching is baseball. My Twins are currently embroiled in a fight for the postseason. As I write this, they're a half-game ahead in the wild card race and four back in the division race. The statheads (my peeps) at Baseball Prospectus have them at a 65% chance of making the postseason. So I'm watching the scoreboard, not just to see how well they do, but also the other teams they're competing against.

The second kind is electoral. The Votemaster has returned, and www.electoral-vote.com is back in action. As an unabashed Democrat, I'd really like it if we could get control of the Senate away from the Reptiles. Sadly, his projections for control of the Senate are not as rosy as the Twins' chances of making the postseason.

City Clowncil. Yay.

2006-07-29T15:42:00.000-05:00

Apparently, my City Council is composed almost entirely of 12-year-olds. Entertaining (from a schadenfreude kind of perspective) can be found here.

A tale of two demos

2006-06-30T10:49:00.000-05:00

I play a lot of games. I buy even more games, although not as many as I used to. See my earlier post on the economics of MMOs -- I am still playing City of Heroes after two years, which reduces my interest in other games. But that's not why I'm motivated to post. No, I wanted to talk to my future self about why demos are important.

The first demo I want to talk about is a failure, in my opinion. I've been interested in Titan Quest for a while. I loved Diablo II, and TQ looks like a good D2 clone, with high-quality graphics. So when the demo became available, I promptly downloaded it, only to find out that the damn thing won't install on my machine. The demo installed was created and tested on machines that have Windows installed to the C: drive, and relies on that. In my case, my primary HD is G: (it's SATA, and I have no IDE hard drives), so the installer bombs. There is a fix, of course. All I need to do is go out and buy an IDE hard drive and reinstall Windows, and then I can install the demo. Or I could install it on another computer, copy the install over and edit my registry. Neither of those is a realistic scenario.

In my mind, this makes the Titan Quest demo a failure. The point of a demo is to get me enough of the game experience to make me want more, so I buy the full game.

One demo that worked really well is Armadillo Run. I got an email from an online acquaintance with the link to the site and a recommendation. It's somewhere between The Incredible Machine and Lemmings, but simpler and somehow more engaging. At heart, it's a puzzle game, but one with many possible solutions for each puzzle. You're presented with a simple scenario -- get the armadillo (which strongly resembles a basketball) safely to a target area. To accomplish this, you use simple construction materials to build a route it will roll along. The materials have physical properties and obey basic physical principles -- things fall if unsupported, heavy things will break under their own weight, and so on.

The demo installed fine, so the first barrier was passed. I played through the simple tutorial and the six demo puzzles in about half an hour. While I was doing this, my wife saw the game up and asked me to forward her the link. About 15 minutes later I bought the full game.

What's the lesson? It's simple -- If I can't see your demo, I can't tell how good it is.

Which, of course, leads right back to switches and dials.

Okay, I suck at this

2006-06-24T21:58:00.000-05:00

It would seem that I suck at blogging. I'm not finding the time to devote to my own projects. I need to regain some balance.

So, is this a commitment to trying again, or an admission of failure? Good question. I don't like giving up.

I do want to write up my thoughts on switches and dials, and the importance of applying interaction design principles to game UI design (which ought to be obvious, and yet is not). So the chance I will do so is pretty good.

It would seem I must link. Increasing the connectivity of the Internet is a good thing.

I found this recently, and it caught my interest. I'm familiar with Tog as an influential member of the UI design community, and have read his stuff before.

First Principles on UI Design

A brief intermission

2005-08-13T13:17:00.000-05:00

But before I get back to talking about games, a brief blogroll for my brother. He's blogging his trip to Europe with his pipe band, and it's great fun to read about.

Annoyingly enough, even with all the typos, it's fairly obvious which of us is the better writer. :)

The Road Less Traveled

The sleeper wakes

2005-08-12T08:05:00.000-05:00

Long dormant, I rise from my slumber...

Not really. I've just been busy doing various things other than blogging. Although I must say I've been better at this than at any diary I've ever kept. I think I work better with a keyboard than with paper. Plus, being able to get to it from anywhere helps.

The main problem is that I have either nothing to write about, or far too much. I'm not interesting in creating an E/N livejournal sort of thing, so blogging about the various events in my life holds no interest for me.

So I need a topic... and it's games. The theory and design of them, and what makes for goodness in gaming. I'm going to try to get out some of my own thoughts, and then work on reacting to some of the things I am reading on game design.

Next up: switches and dials.

A flurry of activity, although not here

2005-02-09T17:35:00.000-06:00

I've been more active than usual of late on the SDMB. I'm not entirely sure why. I've actually been choosing to read and post there over playing City of Heroes, which is surprising. I think my CoH addiction may have peaked. I'm still addicted and still playing, mind you, but I think I may be past the most obsessive, must-play-all-the-time point.

Only time will tell, of course. I seem to recall going through the same kind of cycle with Diablo II, where I got away from playing it at times, only to be drawn back in by the endless cycle of leveling and acquiring new cool stuff. CoH lacks stuff, though, which makes it a bit less compelling. But it offers more skill/power choices than D2, and it's superheroes, which are the stuff of my boyhood fantasies. So it's got that going for it.

I've been doing some more actual working at work, as well. That is, more time spent doing the things I really should be doing, like longer-term strategy, instead of short-term reactive stuff. It's a nice feeling, but hard to sustain. I need uninterrupted time to focus on what I am doing, and that doesn't come easily. Now that I have my team handling most of the issues, it's starting to happen, though.

In fact, what am I doing posting here when I should be either working or going home?

As long as I'm here... the economics of MMOs (from the consumer side)

2005-01-13T17:54:00.000-06:00

Been rather a while. I need to set a regular time for this or something.

City of Heroes is now well past 6 months and shows no signs of abating. My "main" (the character I play most often), Thermocline, is now level 40, with just under 500 hours of playtime (I think, might be just under 400, I was tired when I was checking).

I basically have a part-time job worth of play in this game. It works out really well from a cost-per-hour perspective. For $15 a month, I get a hundred hours or so of playtime -- that's about 15 cents an hour. Compare with $8.00 for a two-hour movie, or $2.25 for a comic book that lasts perhaps 10 minutes.

Of course, to enable that low cost, I do need to have an internet connection, which has a cost. And a computer. But I used those things for other purposes. Besides, the real comparison I wanted to make was with other games. I'm getting really good value for my money comparing CoH with, say, Half-Life 2. HL2 is a great game, and will probably take me 40 hours to finish. So it'll have cost me about a buck an hour. If I replay it, or play it online, that'll be extended... but for every half-life, there is a Pirates of the Caribbean (cost, $40, actual playtime, about an hour, total time including install and reading manual maybe 90 minutes, time spent enjoying it 0 minutes). That was an expensive one.

So the point is... MMOs are a great value for the consumer, if you play them. If you don't play them, of course, then you should stop paying for them.

Firefox autocomplete

2005-01-13T17:52:00.000-06:00

Shamelessly stolen (from someone who himself shameless stole it):

Memo to myself:

To turn on inline autocomplete in Firefox…

1. Enter about:config in the URL field
2. Right-click on the page and create a new Boolean value
3. Enter browser.urlbar.autoFill as the preference name (note, case-sensitive: ‘F’, not ‘f’)
4. Set the value to true

Another use for blogging

2004-09-04T01:23:00.000-05:00

Since it's not likely anyone but me reads this (at least at this point, ha ha), I can use this space for notes. Apparently Neil Gaiman does this, so I'm in good company.

Watching anime previews and kind of not paying attention, had an idea. Magical Girl anime plotline: somewhere in the world are five 9-year-old girls that are about to awaken and realize they are princesses with magical powers. Good and bad agencies are working to find the girls and either guide or control them, depending on how you look at it.

Probably been done already -- I don't really know magical girl style that well.

More notes to myself -- based on previews (often a bad idea, but hey), I should pick up Neo Tokyo and consider Chrono Cross. The latter will sell well, as it appeals to the baser instincts of the anime fan. It looks pretty formulaic, but well done formulaic.

Oh, and Dead Leaves is anything but formulaic, but it's f***ing fantastic. I want more.

Going back to school.

2004-08-20T09:34:00.000-05:00

No, not me. My wife is going back to school, though, and so is my best friend. Both of them, it seems, have reached the point in life where one asks "what do I want to do with my life?" and both of them answered "not what I'm doing now, at any rate."

So my wife is headed back to school to be an accountant, instead of a network administrator and process analyst. I think she'll be a lot happier as an accountant, and I think she's going to enjoy school. It'll also fit with the way she wants work to fit into her life -- she doesn't really want to work 40 hours a week all year, she likes the idea of working part-time in some seasons. I think it's a great idea.

My buddy John, on the other hand, is headed back to school to add a Ph. D. on top of his MA. He's been struggling to define himself a bit for the last few years, and I think this will be really good for him. He's really cut out for academic life, and should do well. He may move away to go to school, which would make me very sad, but we'll burn that bridge when we get to it. :)

I'm not going through the crisis point yet myself, I think largely because I'm pretty interested in what I am doing now. Work has gotten interesting again, at least partly. There's still far more of the corporate BS about how to convince people who do not understand what I do that it needs to be funded, but I have enough senior folks who get it that I don't have to fight most of those battles.

Super-grouping is lovely.

2004-07-28T09:46:00.000-05:00

My obsession with City of Heroes continues. I've been playing almost daily for a couple of months now, and have my main character up to almost level 23. I have an alt at 15 as well, and some lower-level characters that I will come back to eventually.

I'm enjoying the game in multiple ways. First, of course, it's fun to play a superhero. I just plain enjoy flying around the city and beating up bad guys. Second, the costume tool is great fun -- the addition of a tailor and additional costume slots in the first content update was a terrific idea, since it lets you go back and change your look or create an all-new one, instead of being stuck with your original look forever. Third, the storylines of the game are rather entertaining -- you're saving the city from various menaces, or stopping bad guys, and what initially seems quite simple turns out to be more complex. I can't say much more without spoiling some of the fun, but I will say that the Clockwork automatons are not quite so purely technological as they seem. And that's just one example.

The main enjoyment I'm getting out of it, though, is the interaction with others. First of all, my wife is playing. It's been a while since we played together, and I really like it. We used to play a fair amount of Diablo II together, but since I played more than she did, we rarely had characters at the same level, which made it hard to team up effectively. City of Heroes solves that with Sidekicking, which is a great idea -- one player can "mentor" another, and as long as the two are close together, the sidekick plays as though they are just one level below the mentor. Hit points, damage, defense -- everything increases.

Second, I'm in a supergroup that's active and full of people I like chatting with and playing with. It's loosely based on the Straight Dope Message Board, so it's full of adults. It's like a small community, and I really like that feeling.

Third, I've been meeting some cool people. Not only the incidental meetings with heroes on the street, but teaming up with people who are no longer strangers to me. My wife and I have been playing with another couple, from a different superteam, who turn out to live not far from us at all -- they're in Stillwater MN, which is about half an hour from where we live in Maplewood. Small world. We wound up in a team with the other couple (Mordil and SunViolet), another married couple (Purple.Passion and Crushing Blow) and a seventh member, a woman whose husband didn't have any characters in the right level range. We were a sidekick away from having an all-married-couple team.

Been a while.

2004-06-23T20:27:00.000-05:00

I've been playing a lot of City of Heroes, as part of the C.E.C.I.L. superteam. It's a bunch of Straight Dope Message Board folks (and one or two others), and we have a fairly active forum and picture site. It's strange -- I feel like I'm finally becoming an active Internet denizen, after years of helping to make it happen in the background.

I'm starting to think about making a public blog -- that is, one linked to my name rather than my alias. I'd have to treat it a bit differently, since my work places some restrictions on what I can say. Gee, that sounds bad. It's not that my employer limits me -- rather, it's that I feel a sense of professional responsibility for what I say, if that makes sense. I am aware of my responsibility as an employee of the company (and a manager, and a stockholder) to separate my personal life from my professional life.

Things would probably be easier if I was a consultant. And I might make more money. But then I'd have to find work and bill people, and I hate doing both of those things. So I think I'll stay where I am.

More later...

City of Heroes beta ended last night.

2004-04-23T16:12:00.000-05:00

The finale was a big invasion by the Rikti, the alien bad guys whose initial invasion created the current state of the CoH world (that is, super-bad guys all over).

It was pretty cool. There were some hiccups -- a bug prevented some of the Rikti from fighting, and there were more players (I think 60,000) than the devs could handle -- but it was fun to stand with the other heroes of the city and wait for the aliens to come.

There were some very cool suggestions on some of the fora for improvements next time. One in particular that I agreed with was a change in the location of the event. The way it went was that the aliens spawned from portals around the center points of each of the zones where they invaded. This is pretty sensible. However, the suggest I rather liked was that the aliens start in some entrance point -- like coming out of the train terminals or through the gates between sections of the city or from portals located at the peripherals -- and make for the center point. That would have been fun, trying to defend areas of the city against invaders moving over the ground instead of jumping on the spawns as they came out.

I'm excited about playing for real. I'll have to see if I can find a group to hook up with. My two best superhero buddies are not playing, so I don't have built-in pals. At least, they're not playing yet. :)

Update on the MMORPG front.

2004-04-04T12:48:00.000-05:00

World of Warcraft is quite addictive. It's similar to Diablo II, in that there is almost always something that you're doing that has an imminent reward. It also combines social interaction -- grouping is very helpful and fun -- and limited safe areas.

All in all, not a game you can play for five minutes or have in the background when you're doing something like folding laundry.

I've been playing with the Lounging Lurkers, a guild formed from the Lurker Lounge web site. It's a D2 analysis site, which appeals to me as both a D2 fan and a rules geek. So there's a degree of minor legend status associated with the folks in the guild, and it's quite fun to play with them.

On the other hand we have City of Heroes, the superhero MMORPG. I've been anticipating this for some time now, and since I pre-ordered, I'm guaranteed an invite to the beta by April 7th. So I'll want to be playing that.

And I can't keep up with one MMO, let alone two, what with the fulltime job and the kids and all.

Gee, nice problem to have -- which cool free game do I want to play? Of course, COH stops being free in a couple of weeks when it ships, but the first month is a sunk cost at this point.

Ars Technica.

2004-03-25T16:17:00.000-06:00

Okay, signed up for Ars Technica. It's kind of interesting that I've decided to subscribe to a couple of boards. I think I'll be committing more time to them as a result.

I also checked and found that the Morrowind4Kids site is up. I feel rather proud, although my part in making it happen was rather small -- I just contributed the setup fee for the hosting. I like the feeling of having supported a cool project, though.

In case you're wondering what MW4K is, it's a mod for Morrowind, which is one of my alltime favorite games.

Hmmm, feeling rather rambly today, so I think I'll take a stab at a list of my alltime favorite game, or at least those I can remember off the top of my head.

Not in order, because that would take too long...

Sam & Max: Freelance Police - Hit the Road
Fallout
Baldur's Gate
Diablo II
The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind
The Elder Scrolls: Arena
Doom
Quake
Quake II
System Shock
System Shock 2

2004-03-23T12:45:00.000-06:00

Still feeling chatty, apparently.

I signed up for a subscription to the Straight Dope message boards. It's all of $4.95 for a year, and is something that I enjoy. I've been lurking there since 2000, so I guess it was time to get active.

I find the amount of agonizing over the decision to charge a subscription fee to be pretty amazing. There's a fair amount of "the Internet is supposed to be free!" nonsense, which I find tiring. Regardless of your take on whether information itself is or should be free, or whether you're interested in sharing your opinions in a free forum, the simple fact is that the act of hosting a forum costs money. And when that forum gets a lot of traffic, it costs a lot of money. You (or the Chicago Reader, in this instance) need to decide whether you want to continue losing money or not. And if you decide not to lose money, then you need to either shut it down or find a way to generate revenue.

This simple process seems to elude a fair number of people, though.

Ah well.

It occurs to me that the only external link to this blog is in my signature on SDMB, so there's a significant possibility of circular reference.

So, I'm off to add my blog link to other signatures. And to give some money to Ars Technica while I'm at it, as long as I'm giving money to web sites I frequent.

2004-03-22T19:30:00.000-06:00

Wow, two updates in less than a month. I must be feeling chatty.

Today's obsession is World of Warcraft. MMORPG goodness. Highly relevant newspost and cartoon at Penny Arcade.

My short take:

Dang, this is addictive fun. As can be expected from the fine folks at Blizzard, it's very very well done. Look for it to be a major smash in late fall or so.

2004-03-17T13:59:00.000-06:00

Been a while since I updated.

Latest news in the Lab is the Iriver IHP-120. Man, this is a neat toy. It's a 20GB hard drive, USB-capable, which can play back MP3, OGG, WMA and WAV files. Yeah, it's an MP3 player, but it's a lot more than that.

I was trying to decide between this and the Ipod. I went with the Iriver for the battery life and the compatibility with WMA. I'm very happy with the choice.

Battery life has been outstanding. Yesterday I started at 8am with full charge, and spent the whole day with it on. Active listening was about 4 or 5 hours, including an hour in the car (Belkin Tunecast II transmitter turns the jukebox into a car accessory!). I went to about 50% charge at the end of the day -- somewhere around 9pm. I did have it off for a couple of hours over dinner, but still -- I got a good 8 hours of active time on half the battery (assuming the display is semi-accurate).

And it has a nice remote with LCD display and good controls.

I'm a happy guy.

I have about 9 gig of music loaded. That's somewhere around 100 albums, mostly in the best quality WMA files I can create.

In other news, check out MusicPlasma: http://www.musicplasma.com/

2003-01-22T11:51:00.000-06:00

Hm. Wonder how this works?

This is just an initial post to see what it looks like.

Might as well include a link.

Homestar Runner is back up!