How to Take over the World: Google Native Client

"Christian Stefansen, Google's product manager on NaCl, explained which kinds of applications work well with NaCl. These include, he said, hardware accelerated games, photo editing, 3D modeling, video training software, and computer-aided design. "Anything that you would classify as heavy numbers crunching is a good fit," he said."
http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-57340015-12/native-client-turns-chrome-into-high-end-gaming-platform/

Besides the obvious win for gaming, I believe this will actually have huge implications for OS and software in general... imagine using "Google Photoshop" inside your chrome browser with performance as good as a desktop app, without ever having to install anything.  Your files/assets synched everywhere no matter if you work on your tablet/laptop/phone/desktop... with real time collaboration in everything.

Is Google basically setting themselves up to not only subversively overtake the OS market (by infiltrating and hijacking any OS with chrome), but also to take over the ENTIRE production/development software industry?  You can already can see it with Google Apps vs. MS Office... seems like a logical next step.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I for one welcome our new Google overlords.

A Sad Parent on the Closure of LEGO Universe

In a recent Facebook thread between former members of the LEGO Universe team, someone commented that losing LEGO Universe felt like losing a child.  My response to that was it only takes two people about 9 months (give or take with some crunch time) to make a baby.  Creating LEGO Universe involved over 250 people and over 5 years of development effort.

Hyperbole aside, those of us in the craft of entertainment creation tend to become very emotionally attached to our work.  It is anguishing to see a project fail; it is absolutely devastating to see a project that in almost every respect was succeeding suddenly get killed.

As close as a developer can be emotionally to a game, we often forget that the players that enjoy them can have just as intense of a connection to our brain children. This note from a parent of a child who played LEGO Universe makes me as sad as it does happy... happy to have created something that had such a positive effect on someone out there.

"for all of you at LEGO universe, know that you have been an inspiration to my son and he wishes on a star every night that perhaps it will be saved."

I've heard and read this sentiment many times over in person and on the internet, especially in the LEGO forums.  I will never understand why LEGO Universe is being shuttered.

I want to say thanks to all the parents, kids and players of the game who have expressed what the game meant to them over the last year.  Although it makes me extremely sad to think of the game closing and all the resulting broken hearts, it's really good to know that for it's blink of existence, it made a brighter day for a lot of people.

That's what I live for; my LEGO Universe team created some wonderful lasting memories in a few million brains that will resonate for the rest of the players' lives.  That feels like some small success to me, even if LEGO states the game cannot be a financial one--which I probably also will never understand why.

Great Moments In Daddying

Last night, I sat down for a quick game of Chutes and Ladders with Brody.  We were neck and neck until about half way and I hit a streak of chutes.  I kept getting sent lower and lower, until eventually I lamented, "Aw man, I'll never be able to catch up with you now."
To which, Brody reached for the spinner, gave me a sideways glance and reminded me, "Not with that attitude, Dad!"
So proud of my boy!

How to Defend Your Kids From Sex Abuse: Parents Please Read

This is a touchy subject (and a long post) but one worth spreading information on. With the 5 years of parent & kid research we did on my recent experience working on LEGO Universe, I've realized how important it is to spread accurate information about child safety and dispel myths that can be a dead end waste of concern for parents, or worse cause parents to not pay attention to a real risk. What better time then back to school to share this.

A few months ago I went to a little workshop on sex abuse and kids at Bal Swan, run by Feather Burkower. I have to admit right up front, I really didn't want to go. For one thing it was three hours long. I was expecting it to be a bunch of horribly slow paced cliche warnings and anecdotes that would remind me of going to church as a kid. Tangent: funny how church is so easily associated with this topic, but I digress.

Anyway, the session was actually really good and I came away feeling glad about going. While the pacing was slow, I saw a lot of parents needed to be eased into the topic at hand, there were certainly some emotional points for many there who hadn't had to confront the issue before. Getting past that, I thought Feather's approach was really sound. Her main thesis is that you can't prevent your kids from being in situations where an abuser will have access to them. Her quoted statistics say it is just too likely, something like 

1 in 3 girls are victims of some kind of sex abuse before age 18, and 1 in 7 boys in first world countries. 

Staggering stuff.

However what you can do is empower your kids with the confidence and language necessary to get out of the situation and make any would-be offender back off.

Here are the high level bullet points that I felt were really valuable to me as a dad, separated into techniques and factoids. A few of these I was definitely not doing, or falling into common parenting traps and assumptions that actually can enable an offender much more. Some of the examples are harsh, but important to understand. It may not be comfortable to think about, but its our job as parents to be strong and protect our kids. Take a deep breath and read on:

Factoids:

1. ~93% of  sex abuse happens from a person the child knows and trusts, NOT strangers, factoring in estimates from unreported.
2. As many as 47% of abuse cases are from family or extended family.
3. ~50% of abuse happens from an offender who is also under 18.
4. Estimated 88% of sex abuses are never reported to authorities.
5. Offenders can be family, neighbors, babysitters, religious leaders, teachers, coaches, or anyone else who has close contact with children. 
   1. NOTE: this does NOT mean that all of the people you interact with are going to abuse your child, the vast majority of people in the world are mentally healthy.  The point is simply that you can never predict where an offender will come from and you can't assume that because someone is in a certain category that they won't be an offender.
6. Offenders seek out children that are alienated.  They look for kids whose parents are too embarrassed to talk about sex with them.  They look for kids who need more positive attention from the loved ones in their lives.  Primarily, they look for kids whose parents just don't communicate openly with them.

A Few Techniques 

(these are geared towards younger kids as that's where my family is currently, but for older kids check out the links below):

1. Use anatomically correct language for genitals and all body parts.  Example of why this is important: little Alice tells her teacher one day, "My uncle ate my cookie last night."  Suppose Alice hasn't been taught the word vagina and Uncle has taught her this cute little metaphor.  Now the teacher may actually reinforce abuse by naively saying something like "I hope it was yummy."  Alice now thinks this is acceptable in the eyes of another trusted adult, and the offender has secured another hold on the child.
2. Practice Body Safety Rules and respect personal boundaries.  This means your kids understand every individual in the world has the right to be the boss of their own body.   Great example: Allow your kids to not give grandma a kiss or hug if they don't want to, and instead provide an alternate form of acknowledgment such as waving or just saying hi.  This lets them know it's OK to not be comfortable doing certain physical contacts, and they are in charge of their own comfort level and boundary, not anyone else.  Body Safety Rules can be summed up simply, and they go both ways-for your child and everyone else:
• Touching and physical play are healthy and important developmentally, BUT... we don't touch other people's private parts, and they don't touch ours.  With a few rare exceptions, such as we're at the doctor together and the doctor needs to examine or give medicine. Or if the child is young enough, when mom or dad has to clean them during a bath or diaper change, but only to get clean.
• We don't ever physically harm other people.  Straightforward.
• Practice giving and asking for privacy when appropriate (going to the bathroom, changing clothes, sleeping, etc.)
• We ALWAYS play with our clothes on.  At friends' houses or when we have friends or family at our house, playing naked with other people at a young age is not appropriate and opens the door for abusers.
• We don't take pictures or make movies or drawings of other people's private parts, and it's not OK for someone else to do any of those things with ours.
3. Give your child an out for authority figures, so they know it's OK to say "No" if their safety is being compromised.  This one I used to do all the time.  Example: "OK, the babysitter is in charge, so be good and do what she says."  You've just told your kid that good behavior is whatever the babysitter says, even if it's for example, to touch private parts.  Always let your kids know they can say no to any grown up or person in charge if they are being put in danger or if their body safety rules are being broken.
4. Don't keep secrets.  This one should be obvious but the language used is key.  Differentiate between secrets and surprises.  Secrets make you feel lonely and sad and nervous.  Surprises make you feel happy and bring you together with other people. Most importantly everyone knows about surprises and there is nothing to hide after the surprise happens.
5. Understand age appropriate sexual behavior.  Way too much depth to cover here, see the linkage below.
6. Listen to your kids.  Really listen.  When you converse, it's easy to dismiss your child's seemingly random comments, especially when they are younger.  Try to practice always asking probing questions in conversation with your children, get them to elicit more detail in every conversation you have.  The more they are comfortable explaining their lives to you, the more confident they'll be to approach you if something happens.

Let all the caregivers for your child know all the above and how much you communicate to your children.  

stopitnow.org is a pretty good website with a ton of more detailed information on the subject and actual references on statistics, etc.  

parentingsafechildren.com is Feather Burkower's site, where you can learn more about her background and her workshops.

If you are a parent, guardian, or care provider of children of any age, there is no reason not to be versed in these best practices.  It's never too late or too early to start empowering our kids to keep themselves safe and break the cycles of abuse.  I hope you get motivated to learn more about this subject and share with other parents, so all our kids will be as confident and empowered as possible should the unthinkable ever chance to happen.

Norway + Videogames = Sexual Predation + Religion?

Norway has had a terrible tragedy. The person behind it was clearly insane. The predictable nonsense of sensationalist mass media attempting to attach his affiliation with video games didn't take more than a day or two.

To illustrate the ridiculous nature of associating hobbies with psychosis: why doesn't "Bible Addiction" get the same scrutiny in how many child molestation cases every year? Or on a more equivalent level, remember the east coast sniper a few years back? He openly and directly attributed that motivation to scripture. Statistically speaking in fact, we should be a hell of a lot more worried about dogmatic believers of any given religion than all gamers combined, given actual crimes committed in human history, by orders of magnitude.

Maybe video games are threatening the dinosaur businesses of TV & Print? I don't know, just a thought. Got to have one conspiracy theory in here somewhere.

Back to the point: Ted Bundy was an avid snow skier. Ted Kaczynski loved camping and swore off technology. Unfortunately, broken people do many things besides commit atrocities. Some of them are going to play games, some are going to preach religion, some are going to be astronauts. Does that mean everyone else that does any of the things that the bad person did are also bad? How about we look a little deeper into this man's past and recent history and see if we can't uncover a few more lurking issues besides whatever he used as a distraction leading up to his breakdown.

Perhaps it is just part of being human that we have to constantly search for reason and pattern and connection, that we jump to such ridiculous conclusions and associations. Sometimes, maybe it's just a plain confluence of chaos. I suspect that idea is far more unsettling to many people than being able to point at something and say "yep, that's what it was, that's the reason."

On the bright side, this is the first time in my life I've actually seen several quotes from high ranking officials involved immediately dismissing the notion of video game "addiction" having any relevant part of this man's tragic story. Perhaps we finally have some rational thought creeping into global consciousness? I'd like to remain optimistic, but I'm just waiting for someone with authority and a microphone to point at Chat Roulette or maybe Spotify or whatever else is out there that is new and scary and hard to comprehend.

(ps: addiction should really be reserved as a clinical term as it applies to physical brain chemistry changes which are literally inescapable, unlike psychological compulsions which have proven to be conditionable)

How To Stop Skype Mood Messages

Do you get a chat channel appearing and notifying you there is new content called "Mood Messages" in Skype?  This has been driving me insane for like 6 months because I'll usually stop what I'm doing to look at new skype messages, since I use it for work.  So you disrupt your work flow to look at the new message to find so and so has been idle for 30 minutes.  Great.

Every time I've attempted to solve it, I'd get more frustrated as apparently there's no option for it.  I would leave conversation, hide conversation, rename it, add it as a contact and delete it... it would seem to go away for a while, and so I'd forget.  But like a bad horror movie, IT WOULD ALWAYS COME BACK!

But I finally figured it out.  Once again, Mac is to blame. ;)

On Mac only, there is an easy setting to find under Preferences->General to disable mood messages as chat.  This is the most common solution you'll find if you go googling for it.  Not much help for PC users who are seeing this problem though, right?  Because there is no such option you can find anywhere in the PC options menus.  Yet it still happened.

So here's what was happening to me: I use Skype on both PC and Mac, but it's only occasionally active on the Mac.  Like a naive pre-1990 goose, I assumed that my PC options would control my PC experience.  However, when the Mac was on and Skype was running, it had the default setting for mood messages enabled, thus creating a chat channel and faithfully broadcasting all annoying mood updates to it.  This would in turn notify the PC client I had a new chat channel, and it would download the mirror of the chat being broadcast on the Mac client.  Disabling this option on the Mac client seems to have killed it.

I hope this little nugget of info is useful.  If I can reduce just one person's urge to kill, then it was worth it!

Attention Dogs! Don't Stick your Nose Where It Doesn't Belong

Apparently there is something nasty lurking in the rocks in our backyard.  Furgie has been investigating and today she paid the price.  Not sure if it was yellow jackets or spiders, but something nailed her hard this morning.  She had 2 huge swell ups in the last couple of days on her nose and her jowels, but they went away after a few hours.

This on the other hand... I have never seen anything like this.   Apparently the vet hadn't either because he walked in and exclaimed "OH MY GOD!!!" upon seeing her face.  It was a little bit scary as she was having trouble breathing from the swelling but she got some shots and is passing out now.

Check the pics and video below for the horror.

What Furgie looks like on a normal day...

Furgie at Breakfast time today... not too bad, just looked like she took a left hook.

2 hours later at the vet, her eyes were completely shut and her head was literally 3x its normal size. 

Every dog's worst nightmare... The Cone of Shame.

Taking a picture of a black dog who is freaking out and trying to scratch her face off was kind of difficult, the pics don't really do this justice.  I made a quick video which you can see a little more clearly how F'd up this is.

She's doing ok now, passed out from the shots the vet gave her.  However, I just spent an hour combing through every rock in our backyard and couldn't find a thing.  So whatever did this to her is still out there, and I'm sure like a good lab she'll learn her lesson and go right back to it again. :\

Toot! Toot! Goes My Own Horn

Yours truly just ranked the #5 most influential person in MMOGs for 2010.  Sure it's just a scam to get 20 more people to buy the magazine, but let's ask the important question here. How many people on that list are also ranked top 5 in any Dance Central song? Answer: Just me, baby, just me.

As the beloved MacCoy would say in his adorable nordic/german-ish accent, "All ya'll haters better recognize!"  Actually I'm pretty sure the only reason I ranked in this list is because of the headshot I gave them:

PS- Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, don't feel bad about being ranked so much lower than me. I know your companies are struggling, so I'm happy to give you guys advice on social gaming, marketing, business or like, whatever.

;)

Link: Will we ever get out of debt?

Great blog post by my buddy Mr. Hermann Peterscheck, amateur economist and opera singer.  Excerpt:

We tend to concentrate on the total debt (which has pretty much always gone up), but we rarely look at the debt as a percentage of GDP, which in my opinion is much more interesting. Just like your credit cards and student loans, how much debt you have is relative to your wealth and income.

Too bad American government isn't powered by rational thought.

Read his whole post at http://lifegame.typepad.com/lifegame/2011/02/will-we-ever-get-out-of-debt.html

Now I know what a Creative Director looks like

Thanks facebook ad.  I've been doing it all wrong all these years with my jeans and t-shirts.  Apparently to be creative you have to look like Jonny Depp in a 3D movie.  I wonder how many pieces of flair is the bare minimum at this ad agency?

Consumer Disconnect and your Big Company

I just spent 5 minutes surfing around T-mobile.com looking for a way to report two simple bugs on the website.  It won't recognize my consulting email address of @glhf.biz, which is the way I pay for my phone service there.  Secondly, their easy pay sign up isn't working, and hasn't been for me for the last 3 months.  After trolling around, and getting constantly redirected into phone FAQs and then the forums (where I have to create an additional account on top of my already logged in account?!?), I gave up on trying to let this company know they had a problem in their software.

I mean seriously, t-mobile has no way that I could find to just shoot off a quick message "Hey this webpage is busted just FYI".  Think about the value that is lost in that fact.

Now I can imagine a business analyst or perhaps a consultant sitting somewhere in the pretzel and beer decorated hallways of T-mobile corporate sitting down and looking at conversion rates on their Easy Pay (automated payment) system.  Perhaps they are drawing conclusions that consumers just don't like automated bill paying.  Perhaps this further reduces resources for that system and team due to an analyst decision, thereby moving support away from something the consumer really does want.  Perhaps this is one of many factors that leads to overall customer dissatisfaction with a brand.

I don't know, but I know I wanted to help and I gave up trying so I could make this blog post and rant about it and hopefully make another penny on my google ads traffic!

So, companies playing in any service-oriented space, especially the big boys and I guess I'm looking at you T-mobile, ask yourself this:

1. How easy are you making it for your consumers to express what they like and don't like about your product?  What percent of your consumer population will bother to call or take the trouble to register and post on a forum for issues large or small?
2. How many barriers of entry before a consumer can access a touchpoint at your organization and have a voice?  Why not allow effortless fire-and-forget commenting at any time from your customers to your CS staff?  
3. Why in the hell would you ask your customer to create and manage multiple sign ins to aspects of your service?
4. How many problems are you failing to address, and more importantly how many opportunities are you missing everytime a casual consumer voice isn't heard?

But hey, the myTouch 4G is still pretty sweet.

Have you thanked your favorite teacher lately?

It's been almost 20 years since my 10th grade English class.  As I had a moment to reflect tonight, my tenth grade teacher left an unmistakable mark on my entire life and career in those 20 years.  I remember her not being a favorite at the time, but as the years have flown by, she stands out above so many forgotten names.  

So I just found her on facebook and wrote her a letter.  I thought sharing it here might inspire a few of you other yokels to do the same for one of your favorite teachers.  

(By the way, any of you RHS Raiders in that class remember those weird ass drawings posted on the wall?  "Da Lizard King likes Da Blue Bus" etc.?)

Dear Mrs. Hayes-

I am so happy to find you on Facebook!  I've thought of you often over the years and the difference you made in my life.

I'm not sure if you remember me, I was a student of yours at Rangeview back in the early 90s.  I just attended a parent info night at a local charter school, Westgate, as I consider where to enroll my oldest son in first grade next year.  The director was a passionate educator, with a philosophy of discovering gifts and talents in as many kids as possible.  She related several anecdotes from her experience, and discussed the many types of gifted children she came across.

Some of the classifications she noted included "underachiever" and "underground" kids.  This reminded me of you, as I recall you talking about smart kids sometimes.  You would point out how some kids would hide their smarts from the system so as to avoid insane expectations and stress, avoid getting additional work and avoid being labeled in uncomfortable ways in peer groups.

It was my senior year and I was no longer in your class.  I started in AP English that year but dropped it within a few weeks.  I don't really remember the exact reason except for a vague memory of not getting along with the AP teacher on some fundamental level.   I remember you hunting me down at my locker and refusing to let me snooze by in regular english class.  You wouldn't take no for an answer until I agreed to do an independent study research paper with you.

I agreed, but just to ruffle your feathers (because I knew you led a bible study group at the school), I picked the topic for my paper to be "Legalize Drugs".  Although I didn't know this at the time myself, I think this was a challenge from me to you to see how fair and committed you would really be.  May I say that you were all class, and objectively reviewed and edited my paper based on the facts and structures I proposed, without taking me to task for the opposite political stance I staked out.  I still have a copy of that paper today, I go back and read it once in a while.

Unfortunately, you created a monster that semester.  I now have an insatiable appetite for looking past the surface issues of any topic and a passion for researching everything.  I also have this incredibly annoying habit to push myself beyond what I think is just good enough.  This creates significant annoyance to my wife, colleagues and friends… that is, until I find something better than the easy/obvious choice of whatever topic is at hand.

So thank you Mrs. Hayes.  Thank you for never giving up on me even though you had no obligation to be my teacher that year.  Thank you for pushing me to do more than the educational system ever bothered to ask of me.  Thank you for igniting a fire in me that will never die.  I can only hope my three boys come across a teacher as unflinching and passionate as you were at some point in their life.

My sincerest wishes that you are happy in life and I hope you know what an impact you've had on certainly countless others like me.

Love,
-Ryan Seabury

Ps- I made cheat sheets for all your Word Wealth quizzes.  Funny thing is… by making the cheat sheets I pretty much learned all the vocabulary!  I have a feeling you knew this!

An Open Letter to Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa

Finally someone on the national stage has picked up on the issue of transparency and 501c tax-exemption for churches, as the article "God Knows, but the IRS doesn't" written in The Economist reported.

I wrote a letter to Senator Grassley just now expressing my support.  If you're like me and expect honesty and transparency from anyone calling themselves a "church", and maybe see a few billion dollars of unaccounted money do some work for the American public in dire times, contact Senator Grassley and back him up.

Dear Senator Grassley-
I just read a small blurb in The Economist on your efforts to require more transparency and accountability to the public for 501c organizations classified as churches.  This has long been a very high point of frustration for me, and I am thrilled to see someone tackling this very obvious issue, especially in the current economic climate. 

Although I am not a constituent of yours, I want to applaud this effort and signal my support on a national level.  I do not understand why any organization which is subsidized by our public funds (effectively via tax exemption) is allowed to keep their books private.  

As a business owner and operator myself, having created hundreds of jobs in the state of Colorado, I see far too many examples of churches large and small operating very much like businesses, developing significant land holdings and commercial venture investments.  Without having to pay taxes, private sector businesses like mine that are playing by the rules are left at an economic disadvantage. 

While the aim of the majority of churches is undoubtedly humanitarian, not having transparency and public accountability in finances opens the door for corrupted and opportunistic individuals to seize control and abuse the system.
The financial reserves of our country's largest religious institutions are not insignificant.  

I personally believe a greater degree of transparency would motivate these organizations to do more for the people who really need it, and expose those organizations that are using this system for dishonest purposes counter to the public welfare. 

It raises serious concerns to me as a private business owner and a taxpaying citizen that tax-free churches may be uncomfortable with the public (and their own members) knowing how they spend their money. 

After all, if you are a legitimate church with humanitarian goals, what do you have to hide about how you spend your money?  

Again , thank you for spearheading this initiative and count this citizen behind you. 

Sincerely, 

Ryan Seabury

Core Knowledge charter schools vs. Colorado public schools

We're trying to figure out where to send Brody to school.  He's super smart and gifted and we want to make sure he's being challenged and learning to think critically.  So we've been looking into some different charter schools around, including some Core Knowledge options.

Core Knowledge is pitched officially as a liberal (politically speaking) idea, and it seems to have some logical thinking behind it.  Why then are there so many religious schools attaching to it?  And why is it when I do any kind of research on it, I tend to end up hearing rumors of religious involvement, or land in various websites of institutes whose goal is to "bring the gospel to the youth through informative instruction" or the like?

Is Core Knowledge the Intelligent Design of this decade?  Or is the Intelligent Design crowd in process of  hijacking a legitimate educational alternative?  Or am I up too late again?  Why isn't the right way to educate children obvious by now?!

Side note: Apparently this topic is keeping Sully awake at night too... ><

The Shadow Scholar - How to make money helping college kids cheat

Just ran across this article, it's a few months old but fascinating and I guess a little terrifying.  I suppose the scale of operations is what's so astounding

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

Here's an excerpt:

I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists.

I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments. 

It's a lengthy read but very thought provoking.  If you have any interest or opinions on the modern educational system in the U.S., definitely check it out.  As far as I'm concerned as an employer, just another reason to not really give a damn about the paper a person waves, and instead look for character and passion.

NetDevil Memories: June 13, 2007: Death of a Printer

This is one of my favorite memories from NetDevil.  When we moved into our new space in 2007, we had two printers from the old office that never quite worked.  As in "PC Load Letter?  What the f*&#! does that mean?!"  So once we got all moved in with some new printers, we took the old ones out back, and went all Office Space on them.

Everybody got a chance to take a couple of whacks at those infernal machines with an assortment of weapons.  Choices ranged from a Black Magic softball bat, a golf club, a hockey stick, and as you can see here Ivan resourcefully brought his Razor scooter into the mix. (pssst Sherland! Untuck your shirt you knob!)

Kedhrin and Brizown tried to hold me back, but the nerd rage could not be contained.  Not to mention all the frustration of playing baseball for 12 years and still absolutely sucking at it...

Satisfying, to say the least.  Although I'm sure the offices behind us got a little uncomfortable seeing this on their new neighbor's first day in the hood.  Tee hee hee!

Darrin has taken the unspeakable challenge

A very impressive rendition of my new favorite little guy from Ry'leh, by Darrin Klein.  Thanks D!

Hey Artist Friends... I Dare you to Draw This!

This thing cannot be described, but it is sometimes called "the chartreuse, velvety spawn of the stars", with "flabby paws" and an "offal quad-head with writhing feathers".  One of the runts of the species of the Elder Ones, Xxggghhr'thulhu stands (well, it's unclear if he/she/it is standing or sitting ever) a mere 15 feet tall and weighs in at only half a metric ton.  Obviously, this puts Xxggghhr'thulhu pretty low on the social totem pole of ancient demonic aliens.  Perhaps that's why Xxggghhr'thulhu has turned into a devout Pastafarian.  One thing is for sure... it's hungry.  It's always hungry.

80% of your wine comes from 20% of your grapes

Heard this great little anecdote from a friend over coffee today.  He said he read somewhere (maybe in a book called "The 4 hour work week"?) that it's a well known fact of life in wine making that 80% of your output comes from 20% of your grapes.  So the real trick is figuring out where those 20% are sitting in your vineyard, prioritizing their fertilization, and keeping them watered above the rest of the crop.  Every year is different so you never know reliably where the 20% is going to be.

So are people and work just like grapes and wine?  I know that I like grapes, and people whine about work, so that lends some plausibility to the idea.

And whatever happened to the California Raisins?  I want to see the E! Inside Story.

Learninating bout Distributating

Today I spent all day trying to get my head around distributed version control.  I've been so entrenched in traditional perforce/svn approaches for a decade I never thought to look around for other solutions.  Thanks to Jake for pointing me at Mercurial/TortoiseHg (via Bitbucket).  For the interested, see http://hginit.com/

I still don't know if it will ultimately be a good jump for dev'ing games on but it got me out of my knowledge comfort zone today and I learned a thing or two.  I can see the potential of solving some serious headaches that are inevitable if you are in the business of software as a service, for example the classic how do we cleanly branch live production builds for bug fixing while at the same time not stomping new development builds and vice versa.   Hey LEGO Universe engineering team, I'm looking your way. :)

Anyway, I love tinkering with new ways of doing things and so I guess it was a good day.

I just want to show random photos with random music

Why is it that still nobody (and I'm looking at the big media boys, MS, Apple, Google) has figured out that all I want to do on my tv and sound system is cycle through the photos of my choice (as in randomly through 10s of thousands) while playing the music of my choice.  Apple TV can kind of do it, but is clunky in prioritizing either the music list or photo set (can't really do both at the same time easily even with iPad remote).  Google TV, at least the logitech revue, pretty much sucks for this.  MS with xbox and media center has been a stagnant cesspool of clunky UI for years (wtf? Windows Home Server doesn't integrate well with media center OR DLNA? what do you think people are using this for MS?).

BTW, thanks Comcast and Motorola and probably the MPAA for HDCP on my DVR that prevents more than 2 downstream HDMI connections from working with the TV signal.  i.e. my logitech revue has to be hooked up on a separate HDMI input straight to the TV with audio on SPDIF, kind of defeating the purpose of a unifying technology when I now have to switch inputs on my TV to go from anything else.  What the hell is the logic in that anyway?  If I really want to copy the HD signal, won't I just plug it in directly to my capture setup if I have to?

Before any net nerds start telling me about their favorite home brew shit, can it.  I'm over 30, have 3 kids and a career, I don't have time to muck around with any linuxy opensourcey bullshit in my free time.  I want a giant corporation to soothe my soul with their seamless execution of the 21st century family vacation slideshow in a tiny little box that makes comforting beeps when I point at it.

Ahhhh.... now that's what blogging is for!  Useless ranting to the great void of the internet who could care less, but you know... I feel a little bit better!