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How infant products relate to my family
Jul. 17th, 2008 | 02:23 am
20 Baby Products Great For Traumatizing Infants
Some of those products remind me of watching my niece grow up, and the different approaches to childrearing members of my family have adopted.
The Mother (Numbers 20, 15, 10, 9): This poor woman, my sister, is doing her best to raise a child who will grow up to be just like her, but still love her. She has to balance being nice to the child with making sure the little girl knows that there are boundaries that shouldn't be crossed, authority figures that should be obeyed, and strange objects lying in the dirt that should not be chewed upon. She pays attention to all the childrearing advice she hears and buys any product that claims it will make her child smarter. The Mother has no pride left, a condition that seems common to most mothers. On the upside, raising a child appears to have made her impervious to modern diseases (the only explanation I can come up with for how she can handle any liquid or solid that comes out of the child’s orifices with such good grace and without any protection, yet not be struck down by plague).
The Grandmother (Numbers 16, 13, 8, 5): This poor woman, my mother, is doing her best to make sure the child does not turn out like her mother. The Grandmother remembers what The Mother was like as a teenager, after all. Unfortunately The Grandmother is convinced that the problem was that she wasn't nice enough when she was the mother, so she gives the child everything she wants. I remember from my own childhood that grandmothers were like that back then too, so this must be a constant from generation to generation. Grandmothers are filled with guilt and armed with a lot of candy.
The Aunt (Numbers 19, 11, 4, 3, 2, 1): My other sister, who lives with The Mother and the child. She treats the child like an equal, from when they started living together (when the kid was about 1 year old) to now (when she's a bit over three). They take care of each other. Sometimes when we call their house, the child answers in her sweet cheerful voice, and when she's asked who’s babysitting for her she explains that The Aunt is passed out on the couch, and it's fine because she figured out how to open the fridge herself to get pudding. Lots of pudding.
The Uncle (Numbers 17, 12, 6): That would be me. Children terrify me. Sure, when they're kin they're cute and you want to care for them, but they also have sticky and/or greasy fingers, they drool, their noses leak, and they aren't overly concerned with where they're sitting when they pee. So when my niece asks me to do something, I meekly do it in the hopes that she will spare me. So long as I'm playing games like "Be the doctor while I'm the mommy with a sick baby but your office is closed no wait I'm the doctor but I’m asleep and you don't want to wake me because the baby will cry so you have to sneak by but SAY you’re sneaking so I know you haven’t run away to play on your computer," she isn't touching me, and I'm good with that. Whatever she wants to do as part of that game that doesn't involve various toddler excretions, I will cheerfully do because it means that I won't have to deal with any tantrums. "No" is not in my vocabulary around her, just skillfully worded attempts at compromise. A real, honest-to-god-I-did-this example: "You want to play with the power drill? Well, let me take the bit out...Oh, you say it needs a bit in there. I know, I can put a screwdriver bit in there backwards. Perfect!" My accommodating nature means that I'm the first person she looks for when she comes in the door. It's very sweet, but it also means that she'll make demands like, "I want Uncle to wipe me." When I hear those requests I get a very frightened look on my face and start shouting for the nearest real adult.
The Grandmother's OCD Boyfriend (Numbers 18, 14, 7): You know what I said about how Uncle doesn't like baby's sliminess? Yeah, well, Grandmother's OCD Boyfriend hates it a lot more than me. He rarely manages to eat a full meal when the child is over for dinner because at some point she'll spit some food out, or shove it up a nostril, and that will pretty much be the end of his ability to put any consumables in his mouth without it being followed by immediate regurgitation. Which makes him a lot like the child, now that I think about it. Boyfriend loves the child and is extremely protective of her, so while Grandmother is digging through the cupboard looking for those Gummi Bears she bought, and I'm arranging antique milk bottles at the child’s direction so she can throw coins at them, he's rearranging furniture to keep sharp corners away from her bobbling head and steering her away from plowing into the china cabinet with the flimsy legs that he's absolutely convinced will topple over and kill her the moment he takes his eyes off her. He just has to corral her very carefully, because while if I touch the child I feel dirty until I've washed my hands, if he touches her he'll feel defiled until he's amputated the soiled limb.
So, er...my point, I think, is that I can see the sense in some of those products. The more swaddled/armored/leashed the child is, the better her protection against members of her own family. The only one on the list that I know my niece has had is a pair of pink plastic high-heeled shoes. She would immediately put her “princess shoes” on whenever she came over, and then prance around in them on the tile floor in the kitchen. It would sound like, “Clop clop clop clop--clopclopclopclop *bang!* Waaaaaah!” This is because she always insisted on running in her heels, and that never ended well. Fortunately the shoes disappeared mysteriously before she could reach that “one crash too many” point. She still asks after them.
She’s also occasionally shown up at our house sporting a temporary tattoo. I never ask where she gets them. I’m too afraid of the answer.
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I get upset with Apple
Jun. 30th, 2008 | 05:34 pm
As some may know, my desktop Mac (a Powermac G5, dual 2.5 GHz processors) died a while back. The power supply went kaput. It wasn't something I was likely to replace myself (I looked at it, it's no standard computer power supply), I'd have to at least get the part through an Apple service center, and given how tightly they designed the case, it would probably be worth it to pay them to do the installation too.
"No problem," I thought, "I'll take it in when I can afford it, since I still have my laptop, and I can game on my PC." Well, recently I decided that time had come.
Difficulty the first: I loaded the desktop into the car and headed to the nearest Apple store. Of course, when I say "desktop" I mean "tower that weighs approximately 50 pounds, I am not exaggerating, that's what this bitch weighs." I am not a fit person, so lugging that thing around in 90 degree weather is no picnic. One might imagine my distress, then, after lugging it through a crowded mall parking lot into the Apple Store, when told that no, they can't do anything with the machine that day because I failed to make an appointment.
That's right. To bring an old machine in for service these days you need to make an appointment or no one at the "Genius Bar" will have time for you. Even if it's a matter of knowing exactly what the problem is and expecting they'll have to order the part anyway. They wouldn't hold the machine for me overnight either, that would be against policy. Only recourse, make an appointment for the next day, and carry the machine back to the car. The last time I'd gone to an Apple Store for service was four years ago, but back then you could just get on a waiting list. Dammit.
(To give an idea of how unfit I am, how hot it is, and how annoyed I was, I stopped to give blood a couple hours later and my diastolic was high and my pulse rate was in the 90s. And to give an idea of what a really crappy day that was, I'll also mention that at said visit, which was forced upon me because my mother wanted the $10 Wal-Mart gift card that came with the donation, the jerk phlebotomist [hey, Firefox on Windows doesn't know the word phlebotomist!] missed my vein on the first try, tried to fix it, wound up bruising me, and apparently screwed it up so badly I started to go into shock after a few minutes, feeling nauseous and shaky. At least I got that damned gift card, even if they didn't manage to draw enough blood. And yes, I've donated frequently with no problems, so that guy was pretty darned bad.)
Difficulty the second: The next day I returned to the Apple Store, computer in tow. Once more I staggered in with my shiny titanium albatross around my neck, but this time with an appointment. One employee who saw me come in asked if I had an appointment, and when I proudly said yes, he asked for my name and said he would check me in. After I got to the back and turned around, I saw that the fellow in question had instead wandered over to play with an iPod and chat with another employee. I flagged someone else down and had her check me in instead. Checking me in put me on a waiting list.
While I waited I listened to a hapless "Genius" (that's what they call the tech guys there) try to instruct a woman who apparently had an appointment before me in how to actually use a computer. I guess that explains the need to make an appointment, if the same guys who see you for service are also there to spend an hour giving introductory computer use lessons. Meanwhile another store employee, whose apparent purpose was overseeing the crowd by the "Genius Bar" to make sure we didn't get too rowdy, confessed to someone that she wasn't really sure how to use her iPod touch, she just poked things on the screen until it finally got to what she wanted to play.
At last, my turn in the queue came up, and I lugged my machine on over to a portly gentleman in an Apple t-shirt. I explained the issue to him, and he checked to make sure that the problem still existed (I do not begrudge him the test, but if it had suddenly turned on when he tried it I would have snapped and killed everyone there using only an iPod Shuffle armband). Then he cracked open the case to look inside, and looked nervous. "Um, I'll be right back," he said, then scurried behind a door labeled "Employees Only". He returned a couple minutes later with another employee in tow (I swear there were as many employees as there were customers, and that was a crowded store), and they peered into the case and conferred. At last the other employee shook his head and disappeared behind the door again. The original "Genius" turned to me and said, "We can't service this."
You see, my friends (and my not-friends, I don't want to make too many assumptions about you), I have an addition to my Powermac G5 case: The Wiebetech G5 Jam. This is an aluminum air baffle that replaces Apple's original plastic baffle, providing mounting space for additional hard drives as well as improved heat sinking ability to allow for said hard drives. The G5 Jam won a "Best of Show" award at the January 2004 MacWorld Expo, so it wasn't exactly an unknown product when I bought it later that year.
One might imagine my surprise, then, when the "Genius" explained that the replacement baffle and the two hard drives attached to it disrupted the air flow in the case, causing the power supply in my machine to overheat. Therefore they could not service the Powermac because they couldn't guarantee the same thing wouldn't happen again.
Three points are now relevant: Point the first, this machine is not remotely in warranty. I bought this machine in 2004, so of course it's not in warranty. I wasn't looking for warranty repair, I was looking for a replacement part for one that was decidedly non-functional. Point the second: I bought the G5 Jam in 2004 as well. For nearly four years the Powermac G5 has operated with that baffle and those hard drives without any problem. So I am comfortable with the risk inherent in replacing the power supply under the machine's current conditions.
Most important is point the third: The baffle is easily removable. Really, it nestles in the machine right behind the case door. You just pull it out, no tools necessary. Unplug the hard drives attached to it, and magically the machine becomes G5 Jam-less. It's easy! It does not take a genius to work this out.
Alas, this "Genius" did not see things my way. They could not service the machine because I had had the audacity to alter the airflow in the machine, once upon a time, so I could not pay them to get a new part and replace it. He offered me a card for someone who does Apple service independently. "He used to be a Genius here." At that point I asked him to stop using the word "Genius" to refer to the store's employees. He looked hurt.
And so, there it stands. After going to great lengths to offer Apple money to repair my machine, they refused because they'd been baffled by my baffle. And I will be damned if I will let this pass quietly. I have been using Macs for twenty-four years now. It is my platform. I have supported the platform through some bad times, I have supported their users, and I have encouraged people to buy from them. Over the years I have converted dozens of people, and I am not about to let these filthy iPod-pushers make me regret doing so. I do not think this new breed of headphone-wearing bobbleheads knows what it means to wake the ire of an old-school Mac Evangelist, but they will know.
I took action. I called customer service.
I now await a call from the store manager. The customer service rep assured me that he will call. If he does not call, he will be found.
Oh yes! Tremble in fear at my roused wrath!
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Four years
Apr. 26th, 2008 | 08:28 pm
I still miss her. I still go over the night I left in my mind, thinking of all that I could have said, or looked for, or may have missed. I still flash back to the terrifying moment I walked into the house that night four years ago to see her suicide note on the counter, and inhuman cries of denial still echo in my ears. I feel the grief as fresh as I did when her body was found days later. I feel the guilt that I felt when I had to call her parents in the middle of the night, to wake them from peaceful slumber with the news that their daughter was lost to them forever, that I had let them down.
In our time together, one thing Barbara did for me was to give me some reasons to be proud of myself. It’s a bit egotistical, I suppose, but that was one way she made me feel good - I got to be a little bit of the hero I always wanted to be.
She once told me that one thing that impressed her about me, early in our relationship, was the way I acted on a school field trip to a state park. While we were outside, waiting for some exhibit or other, there was a rattling sound near the group. It was a snake, and it was probably a black racer (they vibrate their tail when startled, and if it’s in some dried leaves it can sound like a rattlesnake), but we still kept an eye on it while the group moved past. What impressed her, and what I don’t even remember doing, was that I immediately stepped between her and the snake when I heard it. As I said, I didn’t even realize I did it. That was years later that she told me about it, so it did make an impression. And that felt really good, however small a gesture it was - knowing that she remembered something like that for so long, and knowing that I did it without even thinking. It made me feel like I was the kind of person I want to be, selfless, and it felt good.
There were smaller things too - like the way I didn’t hesitate to give her my jacket when we were at Busch Gardens for Homecoming, since she was cold. I didn’t think much of it, but she did. It’s flattering, is all.
Of course, that leads my poor tortured brain back to how I let her down. That I was so pleased by her remembering things like that shows that I took protecting her seriously, and that I felt good doing it. I didn’t protect her in the end. I tried, for so long, but then one day I slipped up. I was playing a game, I suppose, and was too distracted by it to see the warnings and take them seriously.
You see, a game called City of Heroes was in its “early access” weekend four years ago. That was a couple days when the beta testers could get a head start on everyone else, leveling characters up. I was having fun with friends in the game, and she was sleeping the day away. Around 9pm was when I decided I needed to leave (I had an hour and a half drive to get to the apartment I stayed in during the week, closer to work). I wanted to get a bit more playing in when I got home, though, so I was eager to leave. I woke her, worried enough to get her to agree that we would make up for the time she slept away when I visited next weekend, and that was that.
I suspected it. I really did. I knew she was sleeping so much because she was depressed, but because I wanted to play a game, I took her answer, and her sleepy smile, as enough reassurance. I didn’t look deeper. I should have. She could still be alive today if I had. If I’d stayed longer, if I’d pressed harder, if I’d talked more. Instead I slipped up, and the mistake was fatal.
Consciously, I can reassure myself. There were no warning signs she was planning suicide. She was still ordering things and making plans. She had been depressed before, and hadn’t done anything drastic. It had been more than a decade since she had so much as cut herself. So there were reasons why I might feel complacent. And she was taking a drug at the time that I later learned could exacerbate suicidal tendencies - I didn’t know that at the time, there was no way I could have known that risk existed.
But still. To my guilt-ridden subconscious, that doesn’t matter. There are so many excuses, including the perfectly rational excuse that it was her life to take, that I believe she had the right to make that choice for herself. The regret that she didn’t talk to me first is there, of course, but more than that is that conviction that I could have done more, that I could have paid more attention. I could have been selfless, I could have been her protector, and I failed. I was too distracted playing superheroes in an online game to be a hero in real life.
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Does WoT get any better?
Apr. 26th, 2008 | 02:39 pm
I ask because now that Jordan has passed away the publisher has brought in another author to finish the series with one more book, using Jordan’s notes. I wouldn’t mind seeing how things end, especially if there’s a chance a better author is the one to wrap it all up.
The following rant contains minor, general spoilers - no specifics.
I get that there’s supposed to be a clear contrast between the sexes in this fantasy world of his, I really do. The first book starts out in a village with a “Village Council” for men and a “Women’s Circle” for women. In short order it’s explained that the fundamental force of this universe is separated into male and female halves. So sure, there should be some rivalry going on there. But Jordan goes that extra step and makes all of his female characters devolve eventually into one of two types:
A) Evil and manipulative
B) Fawning and manipulative
While some women manage to be somewhat interesting when they’re introduced, these unifying characteristics eventually take over and overshadow their individual traits (or the ones that manage to stay somewhat aloof from it all get killed off). All the woman are convinced they know what’s best for everyone else, treat men like children, and obsess about their clothes. They also turn into mooning schoolgirls whenever they’re alone with whatever man it is who catches their fancy - and of course, all these women end up with a man they fawn over if they aren’t evil. The men are portrayed as hapless victims of these women, never coming close to understanding them. It’s like Jordan copied all his women from the title characters in the movie Mean Girls.
During the chapters that focus on male characters the romances are often treated as distractions from what the protagonists are trying to accomplish. During the chapters written from the perspective of female characters, the romances take center stage, while the plot goals feel secondary. It’s maddening.
Again, I like the main plotlines in the books, I like the world the author created, and I like what few conflicts are actually portrayed. I just don’t like the way all the women are characterized as manipulative, petty bitches. It’s too distracting. I like strong female characters, I don’t like it when the supposedly strong female characters are actually cut-and-paste versions of each other who are dominated by negative characteristics. Reading the books, I kept hoping that some new, believable woman would be introduced who would look at the others and ask, “Am I the only one who can’t stand those harpies?”
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Tommy Kirk Stole My Boombox
Mar. 21st, 2008 | 12:30 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZuagKG8
The song is excellent, of course, but on the second page of the comments on YouTube is a great exchange with a guy accusing Tommy Kirk of stealing his boombox off a bus in 1986. The image of Tommy Kirk and "his gang of toughs" terrorizing a Billy Ocean fan is just fantastic. To my twisted mind, anyway.
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I like my Cybook
Mar. 1st, 2008 | 05:51 am
I have a Bookeen Cybook Gen3 e-book reader now. Summary review: I really like it, despite its flaws. When I'm using it I don't miss anything about paper books, which is a good step up from reading e-books on my Treo. Reading is very comfortable on the Cybook, and if the price were lower I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to my technophobe bibliophile mother.
First, the bad: The interface is buggy, and the menu to browse books on the device is limited and unintuitive. While it's good that it supports PDFs (among other formats), the PDF handling has been the cause of most of its crashes, and the only scaling options for PDFs are fit to page, height, and width - no other zoom choices for that format. I've also read numerous complaints about Bookeen's support - it sounds like they've been overwhelmed by the demand, and possibly by defects in the units (thankfully I haven't had to test their support personally). Finally, the directional button that handles page turns could be more responsive and better positioned.
Next, the good: Holy crap, the e-ink display is the most awesomest thing ever. I could write a whole post and then some singing its praises, but I'll just say this: When this display's costs get down to a mass production level, it will be everywhere. It looks fantastic, is very easy on the eyes (fonts are smooth, with no visible pixels), and consumes less than minimal battery power (listed duration of a full battery charge is 8,000 page turns). It's readable in all lighting conditions I've tested it in (it's not backlit, but works fine with a standard booklight). The device is thin and lightweight and is comfortable to hold in one hand when reading. If you put a dictionary on the device you can use a built-in lookup feature to get the definition of a word on a page you're currently reading (very handy). You can install your own TrueType fonts and can change the font size and family for any non-PDF book, making it easy to avoid eyestrain.
And the neutral: It can play MP3s, a feature I'll never use (why kill its insane battery life playing music when I have an iPod?). The firmware is upgradeable, so features can be added later (the developers suck at communication and there's no word on just when we'll see the first update; from poking around I've found that among the first modifications will be folder support for the book list and additional scaling options for PDF files, which would take care of two of my biggest complaints). Along with PDF, the e-book formats the Cybook supports are plaintext, HTML, PalmDoc, and MobiPocket (it supports DRM only for the MobiPocket format, and I had no problem getting the books I'd previously bought from Fictionwise.com for my Treo onto the Cybook via Mobi's PC reader software). The device (and a memory card, if inserted) will mount as a drive when connected to a PC or Mac via USB so you can copy books, MP3s, and images onto the device (you can also use the aforementioned Mobi desktop software under Windows to manage the books).
On the competition, you get more features from Amazon's Kindle, but the Kindle is more ungainly and is primarily a storefront for their DRMed e-books. The Sony Reader is similar in function and slightly cheaper, but is also primarily a means of selling DRMed e-books from Sony's online store. The iRex iLiad is the other reader I know of that uses the same display technology, but it costs twice as much as the Cybook (it includes wi-fi and a touch screen, so it's worth the price - those just weren't features I wanted).
Again, I'm quite fond of the Cybook. Very comfortable and very convenient. I consider it money well-spent, despite the high price compared to just buying a paper book. When they're offered e-books tend to be cheaper than paper books, and there are some great free ones out there as well. Not only are there public domain classics to be downloaded (and scanned pirated books for the unscrupulous), but several libraries are offering electronic versions of their books for checkout (in Mobi format, so the Cybook supports them). There are also freely downloadable books from some authors (like Cory Doctorow) and some publishers (like Baen Books). So I can rationalize the cost of the reader so long as I don't think about the fact that e-books are to impulse book buying what iTunes is to impulse music buying...
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Downsized
Nov. 30th, 2007 | 05:04 pm
If anyone needs a WebSphere Application Server administrator, let me know. Well, or a Unix admin, but I've been out of practice at that compared to the WebSphere stuff. I'll get a new job before too long, I trust.
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E-book readers
Nov. 21st, 2007 | 08:33 pm
That doesn't mean, however, that I'm not tempted by the e-ink devices out now. Sure, they're not backlit, but they look great. They're also quite expensive (you can get a cheap Palm or PocketPC device that supports more formats and has a smaller screen for much less). Still, being as easily seduced by technology as I am, I poked around the current offerings and then, being as prone to write about such things as I am, wound up with a blog post.
Before I mention the devices, the technology: E-ink is a type of display that can look like paper (easily readable in sunlight, high resolution, and viewable from any angle), but can't be backlit (because it's opaque - people usually use book lights with such devices in the dark). When text has been drawn the e-ink display doesn't require any additional power to keep the text visible. The result is a device that's as readable as a book with very long battery life (7000 to 8000 page turns) and a slim form factor. Since it's a new technology, however, the devices that use it aren't as inexpensive as they could be.
Curiously, almost all devices support MP3 playback. I guess it's a cheap extra they were able to throw in, but to me it defeats the purpose of the low battery consumption of e-ink. Once you start playing audio files you pretty much drop the battery life from weeks to a few hours.
The device that spurred my most recent research was the newly-announced Amazon Kindle. At $399 it's cheaper than many first-generation e-ink devices, but has a curious set of features. Its built-in networking capability is 3G (a cell phone network), which allows it to connect to Amazon's store (run by Mobi, a company owned by Amazon) from anyplace within Sprint's cellular network. From what I've read their store includes newer and older titles, and the prices for each are pretty much the same. Their offerings are cheaper than usual for newer books but more expensive than picking up an older book at a used bookstore. The casing for the Kindle appears to be cheaper plastic than most devices and has an odd, bulky shape to it. That's a drawback, but it also allows the Kindle to include a full keyboard that can be used to enter searches in their online store and on Wikipedia, as well as add annotations to text (features usually limited to PDA readers). The online features (Wikipedia access, direct access to their store, and the ability to download newspapers, magazines, and blogs) are what set the Kindle apart from the other available e-readers. The format support is the device's current real weak point: No PDF or RTF support without conversion on a PC, and curiously for the company that owns Mobi, they support the MobiReader format only for unsecured Mobi content (it can't, then, read secured MobiReader content purchased from the normal Mobi store or from another site like Fictionwise.com).
The device that generated the most buzz before the Kindle came out is the Sony Reader. This used to be a rather expensive device, but they appear to have recently dropped the price to $299. The form factor is attractive, and the newer model uses the same type of e-ink as the Kindle (which refreshes faster, but still nowhere near instantly). Compared to the Kindle it supports the PDF format, but instead of using Amazon's store it uses Sony's e-book store. It doesn't have any networking support built in, instead relying on a PC to download books and other content and then transfer it to the Reader, making it less convenient in that regard.
There are a number of other readers out there from smaller companies, but the ones I've paid the most attention to are the iRex iLiad and the Bookeen Cybook. Both have Linux at their core and, more importantly, aren't designed primarily to push people to their respective companies' online stores to get books. They support a wide variety of formats and their software can be updated in the future to support more. The iLiad is a first-generation e-ink device, however, which means it uses a slower-refreshing version of the technology and it costs more ($699 right now), but it does include wi-fi capability to get to the Internet directly. The Cybook uses the newer e-ink technology but no wireless networking, coming in at $350. The Cybook has the curious ability to view secure Mobi documents with the right software installed, something the aforementioned Kindle can't do.
One interesting note about the Cybook is a blog entry I came across that describes a sort of buyers' club effort which started on a Baen Books forum. The organizer of the effort had tried to get Jim Baen (a big proponent of DRM-free e-books) to put out an e-reader of his own, since the main readers at the time were just vessels for their creators' online stores (and all the DRM associated with them). Instead of working on such a device Mr. Baen made a forum available for the effort to come up with one, and in the end they decided on the Cybook as the device that would meet that need (and that they could get a bulk discount on).
The point of all this? E-readers have come a long way. The new technology allows them to be as readable as books (with the bonus of being able to resize/change fonts based on the reader's preferences, excluding books in PDF format). They're very expensive considering they're just supposed to be a means of reading books that you'd usually need to purchase in addition to the device, but price reductions should come in time. Amazon pushing a device of their own should go a fair way toward that goal if they improve the device a bit (adding PDF support to the Kindle would be a big step forward, considering a lot of whitepapers are released in that format, and you can get free e-books in that format from sites like wowio.com).
As an aside, I'll admit that I'll likely be a bit wary of Amazon's effort for a time because they abandoned their first attempt at digital books so abruptly. The first e-books they'd offered used Adobe's secure PDF format. When Amazon decided to stop selling them they not only stopped supporting the people who'd bought them, but all copies of the books vanished from their site (so purchased books couldn't be re-downloaded).
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Marvel Comics Online
Nov. 14th, 2007 | 08:09 am
http://www.marvel.com/digitalcomics/
It's $10 a month if you bill monthly or $5 a month if you pay for a year. You can go to the site and view 250 comics free right now to check the service out (though after a few pages it makes you go through a free site registration to keep reading). It's...slow right now. Really freakin' slow. I'm guessing either their sysadmins were idiots or management had too much of a say in designing their network, because it clearly can't handle their launch traffic.
Still, the price is quite nice for the amount of content they have, so it seems like it will be a good service once they get it to where you can actually access it with any kind of speed. Access is online-only, no downloading or printing, in a flash-based reader that's platform-independent. The reader isn't bad, and the "smart panels" mode does a good job of letting you zoom in and browse from panel to panel.
The highlights of the collection are more famous issues of long-running comics (first appearance of Wolverine, memorable storylines, etc.), as well as archives of the earliest issues of their A-list titles. The site is too slow for me to easily browse the titles list, but while some included titles are really old, others do say they include the current issue. Some titles list a total number of issues for their time period that makes it clear that they have select issues in the archive, not the entire run. They have announced plans to add new titles and issues over time, presumably as they can get scanned into this format. Along with the big names I see some titles from the "Golden Age" of comics (superhero titles as well as romance and other genres), and newer titles that had short runs like 1602 (a great alternate universe-style title that was written by Neil Gaiman).
Unlike the DVD-ROM archives previously released the online comics don't include any of the original ads or letters pages - just the front cover and the comics panels. This is good, in that it doesn't distract from the story, but the old ads could be pretty amusing at times.
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Hellgate: London
Nov. 13th, 2007 | 02:16 am
The love: This game is a lot of fun. The combat is very satisfying, and if you liked Diablo 2 you'll like Hellgate. You get the pack-rat/OCD fun of killing things like crazy and picking up a ton of stuff they dropped (why they were carrying it in the first place is never explained). The story is pretty mundane but the text is well-written (especially if you use the hard-to-find question mark button in the quest log that gets an NPC's embellishment of the plot for each part of the storyline quests). There are amusing pop culture references and plenty of side quests (some quite entertaining of themselves). And Lucious and Techsmith 314 are now my favorite questgivers of any game, ever. Some of the classes could use better balancing or build variety, but the gear is extremely varied and the stats get tight enough at higher levels that there's a lot of strategy that can go into what kind of gear you focus on using. That, to me, is fun.
The hate: Jumping Jebus on a pogo stick, there are a lot of bugs in this game. I'm hoping the devs are hard at work fixing them, because the game should absolutely never have been released in this state. Memory leaks abound on some systems, plenty of crashes, it's hard to stay grouped with anyone because levels bug out, the items that drop with the highest rating (5 stars) are currently bugged so they have no stats at all, certain quests require workarounds found only via intense experimentation or scrutinizing the forums, and so on. The interface is also rather crude - no inventory autosort, the chat window is on or off (and is large and not resizeable) and turns off at random times making it hard to notice when you get a tell from a friend, the cursor isn't very responsive, there are few customization options, only one hotbar for skills...Ugh. And to top that off, no auction house or other means of organizing item trades outside of a trade channel or forums (not even in-game mail - you have to meet the buyer or seller by grouping and agreeing on a meeting place).
They have subscriptions to offer more content at a later date (you can access all the current content for just the price of the game, which is a good amount of content - 6 classes and 50 levels). For now a subscription gets a person more bank space, more character slots, and an extra character mode (hardcore, where one death means your character can't adventure anymore). It also gets access to themed events (more on that later). According to the developers it will one day mean player and guild housing, extra content for subscribers, new character classes, and other perks. These same developers also plan to add an auction house to the game, a mail system, a new chat interface, player versus player combat, and hopefully fixes for all the blasted bugs. In other words, the game is going to be unstable for a long time, since they have a lot of features they still want to add even after they work out the kinks in the ones they already have.
So briefly, I don't regret buying the game. It's a lot of fun, when it works (and most of the time, at least, the bugs don't cause too much heartache). I did, however, get a subscription, and I regret that. Eventually the subscription will be worth it but their first subscriber-only event, for Guy Fawkes Day, was a miserable failure with only one silver lining. Describing that event's problems was the main reason I felt like posting about it - I couldn't believe any company pushed this out specifically for people who had already paid extra money for their brand new game (people whose goodwill they'd theoretically want to maintain so they might continue to subscribe, or encourage friends to do so).
The salespitch: The Guy Fawkes Day event would run for a week starting on, well, Guy Fawkes Day (Bonfire Night, November 5). There would be special items for participants, as well as recipes for making food with neat buffs, and special quests and level types (bonfire levels, like regular levels but on fire). It sounded neat, and when I read about it I approved - it got a lot of Americans asking who Guy Fawkes was, and I'm for anything that gets people interested in history.
The reality: I read after the release that the developers had intended the Guy Fawkes Day event to be a test of how quickly they could roll out content for the game. I'm hoping the determination they made is that they can deploy content faster than they should be allowed to. It was clear that this event was given only rudimentary testing, if any at all. It actually made subscribers regret subscribing. Seriously.
It starts out innocently enough: Get a quest to go kill some demon. No problem, that's old hat by now. You run off to the specified location and go looking for said demon. You kill him and lots of stuff drops per usual, but mixed in with the usual guns and armor are...potatoes and apples. And recipes for Demon Blood Pudding and Zombie Steak and Kidney Pie. Well, okay, that's kind of amusing, I guess...You scamper back to the questgiver and are told to find a clue to the plot the demons are hatching.
You decipher this plot using a recipe the questgiver gives you. The recipe takes, and I am not making this up, a pennyloaf of bread, a farthing of cheese, and a pint of beer. Okay guys, you might be taking the "recipe" thing a little too far now...But hey, let's go looking for the three demons who drop these foodstuffs. You get no hint as to where to look, but browsing the forums reveals that people have found them in the special "burning" levels, and more browsing indicates which locations are the ones that are now burning. Alas, you also learn that the demons in question aren't always in the burning levels - they simply have a chance to be in the burning levels. And which demon turns up is random too.
In the end, completing this quest for me meant finding a couple "burning" locations near each other, running into them, racing around to see if a demon I needed was around, then logging out of the game and logging back in to reset the level and start over again. By the time I got my pint of beer I had 3 farthings of cheese and 6 pennyloaves, and had farmed the same locations for several hours. I was bored, but at least I'd finished the damned quest and received...a recipe. This time for a "Fawkes Force Five" device. Fortunately most of the ingredients had been given to me from the previous quest or had dropped during farming so I could make the device right away. When used, the device makes my character shimmer red. That, so far as I can tell, is all it does. I'm fairly certain it does more, I just can't tell what - I didn't notice an obvious change to any character stats, and the buff icon says nothing when you mouseover it (most games which display buff icons will tell you what the buffs do when you mouseover them). But hey, at least the shimmering redness looks kind of cool.
Of course, I left out the bug in the quest. When you finally get to that part of the quest where you turn in your manufactured clue to receive the device recipe, you must manually move it from the reward window into your inventory. If you click the button to automatically pick up said items, they vanish forever and you can only get the device recipe by starting a new character, leveling it up to where it can do the quest, and trying it all over again. Lucky for me I'd already heard people complaining about the bug by the time I did the quest, since I put off that heavy farming until the last day of the event, hoping I'd just find the ingredients in the normal course of play. That also means that the bug, which was found fairly early on, was not corrected for the entire length of the event, leaving a lot of annoyed subscribers who'd been gypped out of their Fawkes Force Five.
That wasn't all there was to the event, but that was the part that flabbergasted me. This isn't just a matter of a game that's been released and paid for, it's a game that's trying to also get people to pay extra for optional extra content - and the first optional extra content was dull and buggy, granting some indeterminate buff.
Of course, as infuriating as that was for some people, it wasn't actually why most subscribers regretted subscribing for the event. It was the recipes that dropped off random enemies for various foods that were supposed to offer buffs. You see...for some foods, more recipes dropped than ingredients, while for others, more ingredients dropped than recipes. Potatoes and apples were very easy to come by, and as you spammed your loot key to pick up the oodles of loot on the ground after a fierce melee, you'd wind up with a whole lot of potatoes and apples. The Baked potato recipe rarely dropped, however, so you'd wind up with...a lot of potatoes. The recipes that used apples dropped often, but they usually required treacle - and treacle almost never dropped. Then there were recipes for pudding and pie and cakes that required meats and demon blood that I never saw drop all week, and I played every day of the event. To make matters worse, these recipes didn't stack, and ingredients stacked only in small quantities, which meant that a lot of precious inventory space would get taken up by these drops. The only way to get rid of most of them was to right click on the item to get a radial menu, then select "trash", then move over to click the "confirm" button.
So subscribers found themselves flooded with unwanted items they couldn't do anything with but which took up a lot of inventory space and took a fair amount of time to get rid of (since you had to trash each item individually). The food, at least, you could eat, but there was no indication of what benefit you'd receive from them. Some would show up on a character sheet so you could figure it out, while others were complete mysteries. There were rare recipes you could save up ingredients for, but since there was never any indication of what the food would actually do there was no point in waiting to make it.
Another frustrating problem for subscribers was the fire on the "burning" levels. It looked very pretty, granted, but it absolutely killed even high-end CPUs. Framerates dropped to single digits as flames flickered beautifully behind the swarm of enemies rushing in to kill you. There were no settings in the graphical options that would tone down the flames in any way. So along with the ridiculously unbalanced recipe/ingredient drops that bogged subscribers down, their framerates got shot to hell when they reached those bonus level types they were promised.
The one silver lining was a pair of gloves that could randomly drop on "burning" levels. They are nice gloves, and they have a cool burning effect on them (alas, the same one that kills framerates when displayed in large quantities). Unfortunately their drop rate was incredibly random. In the week of the event, I found only one pair of gloves (and that was just during my farming in the final hours for that last pint of beer). Some people reported that they found six of them. Some people reacted by giving away extra pairs to subscribers who'd never found any, others tried to capitalize on it by selling them. Others, I'm sure, are sitting on them until auction houses are implemented.
So yeah, there ends my rant about a game with incredible potential but complete morons controlling the features and releases of the game. Even minimal testing should have caught the skewed drop rates of ingredients and recipes, the scarcity of the quest bosses, the framerate-murdering flames, the bugged quest reward at the end, and the excessive number of event-only drops. Many problems in the game as a whole were there during the beta, and were reported numerous times (for example, a key feature of the engineer class, the ability for their drones to wield weapons, was bugged in beta and not fixed until the first patch after release).
I guess we'll see how it does in the long run. It's fun enough now that I decided to gamble on it and hope the bugs are fixed...someday. If anyone else decides to play after my ringing endorsement, I'm mostly on my guardian Kore for now. I also started a guild for me and a few friends, so if anyone wants in on that just for the sake of having people who aren't complete idiots to group with, give me a character name and I'll send an invite.
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Content-based image resizing
Nov. 5th, 2007 | 01:43 pm
Redimensionnement intelligent d'images
You can download a GIMP plug-in and there's a Photoshop plug-in available as well. Seems the guys who wrote the paper on this work for Adobe now.
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Libraries Digitizing Books
Oct. 29th, 2007 | 05:43 pm
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/1
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Second look at the car
Oct. 13th, 2007 | 08:08 pm
I'm still puzzled by the circumstances. The way the paint is scratched it's clear the other vehicle swiped it from the front. Since my car was parked on the side of a wide road, facing with traffic, it means someone was either very drunk or very stupid to pull it off. The side mirror was folded toward the car but not damaged, so it was a pretty low-velocity swipe.
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Car fun
Oct. 13th, 2007 | 09:02 am
The downside:
- No A/C (the fan has a really loud rattle to boot)
- Speedometer doesn't work
- The brake pads are so worn that it makes a nice grinding sound when you brake
- The owner doesn't have the title, so I get to wait for him to replace it - and he's in Georgia now, so I can't just drag him into a title office
- The current plate expired May 2007
- Several bulbs need to be replaced (most notably the license plate illumination and one of the brake lights)
The upside:
- Only 135k miles (for that car, it means it has a lot of life left in it)
- The engine sounds fantastic
- The interior is clean and comfortable
- He only charged me $300 (long story short, he was just trying to get rid of the car since he'd moved already)
So yeah...It's a fixer-upper, but with the engine running as well as it is, I can certainly live with paying $300 and then getting work done by a mechanic friend. And like I said, I love the model, even though I can afford something better - I don't drive around here that often anyway, since when I do leave the house for work it's to go to the airport, not to drive to the office. The fact of the purchase isn't the point of this post, though. It's the exposition.
See, when I went to look at the car and then bought it (through a friend of the seller, who's handling the sale for him), I decided not to drive the car away right then. The bad brakes meant that I'd want to shoot for an early morning/late evening drive, which would mean fewer stops due to traffic, and I wanted to see if I could get a temporary tag for the car so I could legally drive it to boot. We left it on the side of the road, figuring we'd come back for it as soon as we could and hope it wouldn't get towed in the meantime.
Well, it didn't get towed. I went to move it this morning. The car was still there, but someone had sideswiped it. There's a nice scrapey dent along the driver's side, pushing the back door in (though it still opens), along with a large black mark from either paint or a tire. It was hard to tell in the morning light. On top of that, the back door had more than the dent from the collision - there was a section that was gouged outward and sparkled with the silver glow of newly-gashed metal. Someone had come in after the dent had been made and tried to pry the back door open, maybe with a crowbar. I guess they thought that the collision had knocked the lock loose or something (they didn't get in). Maybe it was the person who hit the car, maybe someone from the neighborhood.
I just know that it's a perfect illustration of how my luck consistently works. It had been sitting there for weeks without a problem until right after I bought it (though yes, I know the sale isn't official until the title is transferred). The worst I thought would happen before I moved it was that it would be towed, instead it got sideswiped and vandalized. It makes me want to keep the car more than ever. It's like we belong together!
One very comforting thought is that whoever hit my car, it's almost guaranteed that their vehicle was worth more than mine. I'm rooting for a really expensive repair bill for them, since they couldn't even be bothered to leave an apologetic note, let alone their name and number.
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Hellgate: London
Oct. 10th, 2007 | 11:49 am
I've been playing around in the beta for Hellgate: London, and it's looking like it'll be a lot of fun. It's put together by most of the same people that did Diablo 2, and it really shows. It's a sci-fi demons invading the world apocalyptic sort of game, but it boils down to Diablo with guns. If you enjoyed Diablo 2, odds are good you'll have fun in Hellgate (it releases at the end of October). There are a few differences, but gameplay-wise the main one is that you'll be in over-the-shoulder or first-person view instead of the overhead isometric view of your character that we got in Diablo 2.
One unusual feature of Hellgate is that it will feature a subscription option, but it's just an option. You get a lot of game with the purchase, so without the subscription you have access to six classes and a lot of content to run through and kill stuff in. If you subscribe you'll get extra content (they've promised new stuff every month), additional classes (three extra ones are rumored at release), raid content, guilds, player housing, extras like that. They haven't released all the details, so it remains to be seen whether the extras from a subscription ($9.99 a month) will be worth it. Pre-orders get the option of a $150 "lifetime subscription" to the game.
The multiplayer takes place on their servers, with players accessing mission hubs where they can mingle with the rest of the unwashed masses who are playing. When they want to go kill stuff they (and their party, if they want to play with others) pop into an instance that's all their own. Loot drops are specific to players, so no working out looting between the group - you see it, it's yours. As in Diablo items are of varying degrees of quality and have random enhancements attached to them. Weapons can also have slots for mods to increase their effectiveness. At a guess it'll have the kind of long-term OCD appeal Diablo had (trying to get a character to an insane level with the perfect skill allocation, farming bosses over and over for super rare drops), while being really easy for people with lives to just hop into for a casual game every now and then. The instances vary in size, the enemies inside appear to scale to your level, and you can leave them pretty much anytime you like. There are storyline quests that open up new areas and there are side quests attached to non-story instances as well, but any instance you've earned access to through the storyline can be revisited for violent fun.
The classes and item restrictions are broken down into three factions - the Templars, the Hunters, and the Cabalists. Templars are the holy warriors, with lots of melee skills - charging into the fray, going crazy with swords, and built to take a lot of damage. Hunters are the ranged attackers, focusing on guns and keeping their distance. Cabalists are arcane power users, throwing bolts of nastiness around and summoning minions to fight for them. In the beta right now there are two classes per faction, and they tend to be variants of each other, sharing some skills. For example, the Hunter faction includes the Marksman, with a lot of damage abilities and debuffs for enemies, while the Engineer has a subset of the Marksman's damage abilities, supplementing them with the ability to build bots and drones to help fight enemies. The Templar classes are the Blademaster, emphasis on slicing enemies up, and the Guardian, emphasis on staying power and being a general pest to foes. The Cabalist classes are the Evoker with his plethora of elemental damage spells, and the Summoner who relies on his minions to do most of the damage.
The combat is nice and frantic. There's definitely a good deal of satisfaction in unleashing an enraged minion on a pack of demons, or charging into them with a blade in each hand, a whirling dervish of devastation. Item drops are plentiful and good. There's also a minimal crafting system in place to allow you to break unwanted items down into salvage components (and you can do it in the field, eliminating the need to warp back and sell), then use those components to upgrade the level of favored items so they continue to be useful as you grow more powerful.
Unfortunately the beta started pretty close to their planned release date so I don't think all the kinks will be worked out at release. I don't have many problems in instances (indeed, when soloing I rarely have an issue with lag even when I know my latency is bad), but the interface feels awkward and unfinished at times. There's no autosort option for the inventory, for example (which uses Diablo's boxes-on-a-grid approach), and the game doesn't feel as responsive as it should when manipulating items or opening chests. I also haven't seen a means of trading items other than advertising in a chat channel - a real throwback approach, since most games have used auction houses and in-game bulletin board approaches for a while now to good effect (I worry that they might finally implement an auction system, then make it available to subscribers only).
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Amazon MP3s
Sep. 26th, 2007 | 06:48 pm
Amazon has its new music store up, and it's not bad. I've been using iTunes like crazy (I have a Mac and an iPod, so it's a no-brainer), but after reading a review I figured I'd try the Amazon store out. My take so far...
Pros
- All songs are unencrypted 256k bit rate MP3s. That means they work with any player, and there are no restrictions on what you do with them or how many computers you copy them too. They trust us! That's a very good thing. The sound quality at that bit rate is great too.
- Songs and albums are cheaper than iTunes, for the most part. Where iTunes has a flat 99 cents for songs (or $1.29 for non-DRM [Digital Rights Management] songs), Amazon charges $0.89 and up for theirs. Most songs seem to be $0.99, but I did see a couple 11- and 12-minute songs listed at $1.94 on one album (even though the full album cost only $7.99). Album prices are mostly $8.99, where Apple is mostly $9.99. Apple's been doing better at cutting prices on some albums and at offering DRM-free albums for less, but Amazon still undercut on the albums I looked at by one or two dollars; more in some cases. The Smashing Pumpkins' "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness", a double album, is $19.99 for the DRM-free version on iTunes, but just $8.99 on Amazon.
- They have some songs and albums that iTunes doesn't.
Cons
- They're missing a lot of what iTunes has, since they only have two music publishers on board right now.
- I like the iTunes store browser better. You get the same basic info from a search on both services (Amazon in your browser, iTunes in iTunes), but the presentation in iTunes is less cluttered and easier to browse.
- The lack of DRM is just on their music. The TV show side of things on Amazon is still Windows-bound and afflicted with worse DRM than what iTunes uses for videos.
I think I'll be trying Amazon out more for downloadable music for the lack of DRM restrictions and lower price. For the "total package" iTunes still wins out, in terms of access to TV shows and movies and a nicer browsing interface. Still, the Amazon interface isn't a bad one, so when I'm just looking for music it'll be worth looking there first.
Amazon uses a helper application to launch the downloader. On the Mac, your only configuration options are whether the song gets added to iTunes, where it downloads to, and whether it should automatically check for program updates. It's simple, but it gets the job done. I assume you'd have more options in terms of what program to open music with on Windows. You can test it out with a free song download on their site (and it's worth downloading the app just for that - it's from The Apples in Stereo's latest album, excellent band).
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San Diego Mayor and his Conscience
Sep. 26th, 2007 | 05:37 pm
Republican Mayor Jerry Sanders of San Diego gave a statement last week about the change in his stance on gay marriage. He had campaigned on civil unions for homosexuals instead of marriage, and when the city council passed a resolution supporting gay marriage, he had said he would veto it. According to his statement, at the last moment - when the resolution landed on his desk - he had a change of heart. The statement he gives is emotional and clearly from the heart.
http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/polit
I confess, I was a bit ambivalent about civil unions versus marriages, but the points he makes in his statement have me firmly convinced that allowing gay marriage is the only reasonable approach this country can take:
- Separate but equal is not an acceptable approach to social issues in this country.
- He said he could not look his gay daughter or staffers in the eye and tell them that their relationships were any less meaningful than the one he shared with his wife.
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Psychonauts review
Sep. 24th, 2007 | 03:43 pm
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/article
Even if you're not much for video games, the review is worth watching. Funny stuff.
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Tracking Library Books
Sep. 11th, 2007 | 06:54 pm
A really neat, simple application that I've forgotten to post about (but which is, alas, Mac-only) is called Library Books. It puts an icon in your menu bar that displays the number of items you've checked out of the library, and will turn red and warn you when you have items due. Clicking the icon gives a menu where you can see what you have checked out, list your holds, and access parts of the library's website (renews, holds, and the catalog).
It lists a slew of supported libraries and includes some generic entries that you can use to try to get to an unsupported library. I worked out how to use it with the Hillsborough County system through trial-and-error and sent the info to the author, and he incorporated it into the program right away. Responsive is good. So is the fact that it's free software, though he does have a link asking for donations on his website.
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38 Ways to Win an Argument
Sep. 6th, 2007 | 05:24 pm
The Teaching Company posted an essay by the philosopher Schopenhauer titled "38 ways to win an argument". It's incredibly cynical, most of it is underhanded, and all of it should be familiar to anyone who's watched talking heads on television attack people with differing viewpoints. It's a good read if you want to be able to recognize specious argument tactics when they're used, or if you want to be able to use them yourself (hey, sometimes cheating in an argument when you know you're right is the easiest way to get it over with). I find it hard to tell whether he was seriously offering the tactics to be used, or if he was sarcastically offering readers the tactics so they'll know how to recognize and refute them. Some examples:
1. Carry your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits; exaggerate it. The more general your opponent's statement becomes, the more objections you can find against it. The more restricted and narrow your own propositions remain, the easier they are to defend.
12. If the argument turns upon general ideas with no particular names, you must use language or a metaphor that is favorable to your proposition.
Example: What an impartial person would call "public worship" or a "system of religion" is described by an adherent as "piety" or "godliness" and by an opponent as "bigotry" or "superstition." In other words, inset what you intend to prove into the definition of the idea.
21. When your opponent uses an argument that is superficial and you see the falsehood, you can refute it by setting forth its superficial character. But it is better to meet the opponent with a counter-argument that is just as superficial, and so dispose of him. For it is with victory that you are concerned, not with truth.
Example: If the opponent appeals to prejudice or emotion, or attacks you personally, return the attack in the same manner.