Jason McIntosh: December 2007 Archives

I didn't eat much today so that I'd have room for lots of party food. This is why I had the shakes when it was time to shave while getting ready for the party, and why my nose is a gory mess now.

Right then, 2008 resolution: Switch to electric. Dammit.

And so 2007, the first year I employed the four-pillars metaphor of organizing my life, draws to a close. The metaphor serves as more of a mnemonic than a scorecard, but let me nonetheless look back and see how well I balanced the year across them.

Dating: Well, yes. The first time I've had a relationship as long as a year, and isn't it just ducky that it happens to line up with the calendar year, too. All is well. (And I don't have much else to say here, because it's not really a bloggy topic.)

Video: It fell short of expectations, though what output I did make was great. The year saw only two Gameshelfs and two Jmac's Arcades. The Arcade receives an update only when I get inspired to spend a day stitching a show together, so its having a pokey pace is fine. But Gameshelf was supposed to see three shows in the first half of the year. However, both episodes we did make were better by a giant leap over the four shows (plus demo reel) that we shot in 2005. The improvement was entirely a matter of better overall planning by the whole crew. It leaves me really looking forward to what we'll do in the coming year, but that's a topic for another post.

Volity: Quite a ride. My relationship with Volity was stone cold through the winter and into spring. I was totally burnt out after throwing my life into it for most of 2006. A cafe conversation with AET re-ignited my interest in leading the web client project myself, and zthen I spent several months completely absorbed in it, culminating in a working pre-Alpha in August. And things haven't exactly stalled there; better to say that we've been caught up in highly devilish detail-work, which was slowed down a lot by my entanglement with personal financial setbacks in the autumn.

Money: Another crazy ride. At the start of the year I figured I'd be working for ITA indefinitely, but by spring I couldn't resist seeing what putting another iron in the fire felt like. So I got an hourly contract job with a remote client, and I liked it, enough so that at the start of the summer I officially started calling myself a software consultant. But I made a mistake in not building up more clients than the one, so when they silently stopped giving me work I was left in the cold. After two months of scrambling, I find myself with several new clients, and looking forward to a new year of self-directed work.

I don't know yet if I want to carry the pillars metaphor into next year. I probably will anyway, out of intertia. It's served me well and my areas of desired focus have not changed much.

2008: Stay the course, except moreso. Unless I don't. I admit to feeling that all my meeples are on the board, if you know what I'm saying. I want to be able to do new kinds of art, too, but I'm so invested that it's hard. We'll see what happens.

Eh. The sets and costumes were great, and the acting fine (esp on Mr. Depp's part) but the direction of most of the musical numbers just wasn't there. And there's a lot of singing, so that's a problem.

There are two numbers where the singing characters are explicitly fantasizing, and here Burton lets the film find itself, engaging in whirling and delightfully macabre visuals. The rest of the time, it's like watching a tennis match. You get a still shot of Character A while they sing a verse, then cut to a still shot of Character B reacting, then return to Character A so they can sing some more. Repeat until out of notes. This gets boring fast, especially when many of the singing actors are so bland.

I shall be kind and call it an entertaining if uneven show. Wait for it to hit video, and then fast-forward until the first scene with Sacha Baron Cohen, because the film doesn't really start to get interesting until Mrs. Lovett's pies do.

Though I haven't played it to the end yet, I highly recommend the 1991 Sega Genesis title Rolling Thunder 2 to all action-game fans. It just became available as an $8.00 download via Wii's Virtual Console. Someone on a Virtual Console message board said that this game is like a 2D Gears of War in the way it forces you to balance attacking with diving for cover. I thought that was great.

Not a straight-up port of the arcade game, it's an effective home-console adaptation, tweaked to encourage longer play sessions. There are lots of hidden power-ups that extend your dude's life bar past its usual amount. Its level design is pleasantly varied; while most of it is pure twitchy action, it pauses now and again to get surprisingly puzzley.

While your character can leap around in a typical video-gamey way, he's quite fragile (usually dying if shot once) and can only fire his gun while standing still. This lets the game present you with situations where the particular terrain forces you to stop and think about the best way to approach an enemy before he gets a chance to blast you, since charging them head-on won't work. (Note this when you're fighting those ridiculous blue bastards who roll bombs Donkey Kong-style down the stairs at you.) For a side-scrolling jump-n-shoot game, this is very good level design.

It's also got a two-player mode, and I have no idea how well that works yet. The single-player game alone is worth the price of admission.

I had never heard of the Washington Wizards basketball team until I chanced across their mention in a Google News headline just now.

I can't be the first person to see their logo...

...and immediately think of another wizardly graphic...

I don't really think anyone intentionally ripped anything. It's just interesting.

Zack & Wiki is the first Wii game on my "I really want to like this" pile. It's a puzzley adventure game, light on the adventure and heavy on the puzzles. (I would call it a "puzzle game" but, annoyingly, that is a loaded term referring to games like Tetris, which this is not.) It has pretty good puzzles, actually, but its attempts to use the Wii controllers makes it clumsier than it ought to be, and then the game further hobbles itself with unfortunate design decisions.

The controls aren't terrible, but they fall short of what they aim to be. Most of the time, the wiimote controls a cursor that you can use to make the hero run around, pick things up (if they're pick-uppble) or examine them (if they're not). The latter activity switches the camera to a static close-up view of the contraption under examination, where you can use the cursor to interact with specific parts of it, such as poking buttons on it.

So far, so good, but it leads into one the game's let-downs. Much of the game's selling point is its claim that discovering how things work means moving the wiimote in gestures that mimic using the items. This is technically true, but there's very little discovery involved in the process. Your character can carry one object at a time, and the option to use any object in any way at all only appears during the zoomed-in detail view of an immobile object. And even then, the held object only becomes interactive if the game has a these-two-objects-interacting animation queued up.

Once it's established that you're in a position to use the item you're holding on something else, the game stops to tell you (with an enormous screen-covering graphic) exactly how you should hold the wiimote in order to perform the object-using gesture. When it hands control back to you, a little animated caricature of the player, holding a little wiimote, shows you the one way to use the item. You either perform that one gesture to let 'er rip, or you hit B to back out.

While making a sawing motion in order to saw a tree down is kind of fun, going through this whole process quickly proves less fun than it would be to walk up to the tree and press a generic action button. Through this cumbersome hand-holding, the game makes itself seem like it would work just as well, perhaps better, with a traditional game controller. Sometimes things are slightly more interactive, such as requiring you to rotate an object before applying it, but it doesn't happen enough, or with enough net Wii-ness, to make it feel worthwhile.

It would have been significantly cooler if, while holding that saw, you could make sawing gestures with the wiimote at any time, and the hero would lay into the nearest target (which would usually be un-sawable and result in a "You can't use a saw on that, you dummy" animation, and that'd be just fine). I would bet a dollar that that was what the designers wanted, but they just couldn't get it to work right, and deadlines were looming, so they punted.

Now, I would willing to play the game through anyway, because the puzzles are cute and the characters are charming, but here we get to another problem: the as adventure games go, it can be cruel, a bit more than it really has any right to be.

Once you're more than a couple of levels in, it becomes pretty easy to either die or put the world into an unwinnable state (dropping a key item into the lava before you get a chance to use it, for example). Now, that's perfectly fine in the world of interactive fiction, where you can typically save the game anywhere you like. In Zack & Wiki, death means either starting the level over or spending some in-game gold to buy another life. That's harsher than letting you just jump back in, but it's not totally unacceptable. However, making the level unwinnable in a way that doesn't kill you always means that you have to start it all over from the beginning.

And that sucks. What you get is a chilling effect that makes you, the player, too timid to try dangerousthings. But you will anyway, because that's how these games work. And when you discover that you once again failed to catch the babel fish, and off it goes flying into the void, then you need to blow about ten minutes setting the level back up to that point again. This is not fun, and I really don't know what the heck they were thinking, especially since the puzzles themselves are often pretty good.

It's bad enough that I wonder if I'm missing something, amid all this game's generally positive reviews. I have to conclude that the reviewers either played only the first few levels, or they love doing the same things over and over again.

I hope the sequel will be better. It has lots of potential, and I love to see true puzzle games, but sadly I cannot recommend this title.

Back home. I felt bad about my previous post, driving back. The jmac.org blog represents a fresh restart of my blogging/journaling existence, and whining like a teenager about my parents and brothers fails to set a good precedent.

All that said, this really might be the last time I do this. Amy and I just talked about it, and we agreed that my maximum family exposure time is a three-hour meal-taking visit of the sort that she and I shared with them during our Maine vacation last October. Seeing me makes them so happy, but staying with them makes me so miserable.

But the thing about Christmas is that it comes but once a year, and that's just enough time for me to forget about the last year's visit and let myself be overcome by the need to make my parents happy, again. Dunno.

Found unexpected unlocked WiFi, accessible only from the corner of my parents' room. As usual, Xmas here is a soup of frustration with cold chunks of grace floating in. The current crisis is Ricky refusing to eat any dinner because he caught dad spooning extra butter into the food before it went in the oven. Dad denied it (while holding the buttery spoon) and then went outside to sulk. When I went upstairs some minutes later to investigate better WiFi spots, mom triumphantly proclaimed to Ricky that his awful behavior had driven me away.

Every day is like this, with them; the only thing that makes Xmas special is that I'm here, too.

This year everyone hates the Chinese. Mom wrote "From China" on all the presents she gave, as a way of grumbling over perceived trade imbalance, and speculating on the gifts' lead content. And this has potential for actual biting humor, but then she goes and rails in all sincerity about how everything is made in China now and how we clearly lost the Cold War and I remind you this is a woman who buys everything in Marden's or Wal-Mart. I am refraining from having any conversation with her on this topic.

But my dad liked Wii Sports bowling so much he wanted to play twice, so that was pretty good. Talked to Peter and Aunt Jan on the phone.

I'll be returning tonight.

I'll be offline for a day or two while I make my annual Christmas visit to my 1960s-tech-level family in Fairfield, Maine. They are like unto a museum exhibit, a living piece of history. This is why I tolerate their ceaseless yet period-appropriate racist and panaphobic speech, which would make any of my bleeding-heart friends' hair turn white upon exposure.

I will attempt to lighten my visit by bringing games. Ricky enjoys playing Memoir 44, but last year's attempt to play it with him ended prematurely and poorly, as he used its theme (WWII) to start ranting about the WoT. So I am steering clear of militaristic subjects this time, and opting to bring Bohnanza, which I haven't played in ages and my family might actually both understand and like. Ricky, if he plays, will play according to however the UFOs tell him to, but the game supports this strategy.

All that said, my Zipcar reservation lasts only 48 hours, so I am guaranteed an out before things get too twitchy. I also made a late-night run to the Harvard Bookstore to pick up the second collection of the Brust saga, so I won't go insane from boredom from lack of internets.

I wish a most Merry Christmas to those who desire one!

I had a good game night at the House of Roses last Tuesday. In a game of Carcassonne against very good gamers I played so aggressively that I surprised myself. I ended up winning, mostly on cities, and half of those I shared or swiped outright from others. By the time the game ended I was so far ahead of the pack that the winner of the field war was still a few points behind me. I always like to see a Carc victory on a non-agrarian basis, and should that winner happen to be me, so be it.

Question to the audience: does starting a game of Carc with the river tiles versus the single starter tile increase the likelihood of there being one enormous motherlode of a field by the end? I want to say it is so, but I have no proof.

Then we played Attika, which is new to me. It's pretty neat. I want to play it again. (Didn't win.)

Saturday night was Doug's solstice party. Learned Cash 'n Guns, which has got to be on The Gameshelf sometime, if only because of its main gimmick: each player denotes who they're attacking each round by pointing a life-sized foam pistol at them. (This was the American edition, so the guns were Day-Glo orange instead of black. This didn't make it less fun.) I managed to win, hooray.

Played one session of Figaro, a fast and cute game that would probably go over best with clever little kids. Discovered while playing that it has game design superstar Reiner Knizia's name on the box (and photograph snuck into the card artwork), but in the manual he's only credited for "Game Idea", with two other guys having done the actual development. Sheesh! He's become the Matt Groening of the tabletop game world. (I wanted to be snarkier and say "The Jim Davis of", except that his games are actually good, so.)

Then came my approximately annual game of The Princes of Florence. I appreciate this game but I don't think I really care for it. It's got a feeling of constant forward motion, and of setting and meeting personal short-term goals, which I always like in games. But I have yet to grok the ultimate goal of, getting more points than everyone else, and my sense of accomplishment sours where I think I'm doing really well until the game ends and I'm not just in last place, but a good 15 points behind the pack.

And yet, I want to play it again, because I have an idea of what I did wrong. Grr!

At any rate, after that brain burner I announced that I wished to play Doug's unopened copy of the Dungeons & Dragons board game, a UK-only release from 2002. It's less stupid than I expected. I think I expected a rehash of the old Dungeon game, but instead it's an honest-to-goodness RPG dungeon crawl, using simplified rules streamlined for the simple joy of invading monsters' lairs and bashing them into jelly. We played the intro adventure and smeared six goblins while taking two casualties on our side. Good times.

An Internet-borne meme from well over a decade ago was this image, reproducing an ad in a scientific journal. Dave Barry made fun of it in a 1993 newspaper column, and I would occasionally run into references to it on the pre-WWW Internet. I was never sure whether or not it was a joke - "Polytron" is a pretty generic name, and that poorly reproduced image didn't look like anything particularly effective.

I was reminded of it today - don't ask why - and realized that Google exists now. And, yes, there really is a Polytron. You can see the very latest models in full color, and they now have web pages proudly describing the machines' bone-and-organ-liquifying prowess.

Gone, though, is the specific word soup-like, which by itself carried the orginal ad from mildly grotesque to completely ridiculous.

I've been working for a long time on a post listing my current podcast subscription list. Every time I find myself enjoying a particularly good podcast episode, I say to myself, "Ah, I really gotta finish that post." But it's taking too long, so instead please enjoy this series of occasional posts where I highlight one podcast per. My "podcasts" tag should bring up the full list, after I've written a few.

So, first one:

He's just released two shows within a month of each other, so I'm prepared to say that Gaming Steve is back on the air, after life forced him to take a good 18 months or so off (not counting a couple of ad-hoc E3 shows he did months ago). His is still my favorite game-related podcast. Basically, Steve Glicker is a long-time producer of digital games, mainly Flash games using licensed characters and properties, and a longer-time fan of digital gaming going all the way back to the first-generation systems of the 1970s. He effectively and entertainingly combines his knowledge, his enthusiasm, and his industry connections to make a good show time after time.

My main gripes are that his interviews with other industry folks tend to lean a little on the Hi Steve, let me recite our latest press releases at you side, and on the other hand when he's alone he often gets a bit too grumblingly cynical about the workings of his business. But the bulk of his show is talking about games and why some work or sell and others don't, and these analyses are always enlightening to me.

Steve has a nice voice and a subtle sense of humor, so I don't mind that his shows usually run longer than an hour. But he needs to edit himself more than he does. He misspeaks a lot, often switching names around, and invariably mangling the German words that come up whenever he talks about board games. (The most recent eposide features him saying 'Spiegel' - let me spell that, S-P-I-E-L, yeah, 'Spiegel'). He knows he does it and sometimes jokes about it, and for all I know he does edit out most of them and I'm only hearing what he doesn't catch. But I don't think that's the case.

At any rate, it's good to hear him regularly again. I really did say "!" with a smile when I had my iPod play its most recent podcasts, and I found myself assaulted with his wonderfully overproduced theme song (quoted in the title of this post). I had missed it!

The Andys and I had a good Volity meeting last night. For the first time, the web client was in a state where it didn't shatter into dust the moment Zarf looked at it. This allowed us to do some fairly deep testing and location of edge cases, all of which I should be able to knock off pretty quickly, the next time I sit down for a WebGamut hacking session.

I now declare that the alpha release will happen sometime around the new year. The demo has to be flawless by then, but more importantly I've got a lot of documentation to create. When the demo is done, I shall do this with joy and vigor, so no worries there.

This beast will get off the ground. I've been living with Volity so long at this point - over four years now - that my relationship with it is like one with a person I've been sharing intimate quarters with. Sometimes everything is beautiful and we work together in concert and I couldn't be happier. Most of the time it's more mellow than that, a subtle appreciation. Once in a while we have an explosive fight that leaves us not speaking to each other for a while. But we always find reason to patch things up and get back together.

I'm sorry for calling you a beast, honey. You know what I meant. Here's to four more years together. I look forward to seeing what the future holds for this project.

Aside - I really like that Zarf has picked his Boodler soundscape-generator project back up. He started it at the beginning of this decade, put tons of work on it, enough to put up a webpage with some demo stuff to play with, then let it cool for a long time. This year he picked it back up again, recasting it as an open-source project, and it's been steaming forward since, with the help of various project contributors. An inspirational case!

I now have two LiveJournal "friends" (friend-ofs, really) who are transparent shills for shady credit card companies. And who delete all comments discussing their shilliness. Both get free links to their phony blogs on my userpage there.

OK, I just went into my LJ preferences and shut off the listing of friend-ofs on my userpage. I am still sad that I had to turn off a feature in order to stop spammers from exploiting it.

This is the sort of thing that would make me grumble and shrug if LJ was my sole blogging option, but now I can point to it and shout with righteous there!-you-see?-ness. Viz this post.

Speaking of spammers exploiting features, I have just shut off the need to moderate anonymous comments here, since my receipt of comment-notification email seems spotty. Grumble... shrug. (And remember that if you have an LJ account, you can use it to sign into this blog for commenting purposes.)

I am now two books into the Brust canon, having finished Yendi last night. It's a good time, and not what I was expecting. (What I was expecting was unfavorably set by the front cover copy on my ancient Jhereg paperback - "A young man bound for adventure needs a faithful reptile companion!" Which makes it sound like a YA quest-type story. Which it isn't. (It might still count as YA, but I am doubtful.) )

Was Jhereg written as a winking reaction to Dungeons and Dragons? The author perhaps challenging himself to write a coherent story set in a world that seems to operate under D&D-like rules?

I mean, here we have a faux-medieval-euro-world where it's no big deal to suffer an untimely death, so long as your friends or family have access to a sufficiently high-level wizard and you don't totally blow your dice rolls on your way back. And characters conduct long-distance psionic communication with not just the ease but the conversational manner of cell phones, asking each other what's for dinner and such.

But it goes beyond simple parody by then starting to follow through with societal implications for this stuff. The main character is an assassin, a job suddenly fraught with unusual complications in a place where death is often non-fatal. Here is a world where, if you want to send a "stay out of the west side" message to someone, you kill them. This is actually hilarious.

And on top of all this, the protagonist and all his friends each have what some of my friends would call a PC glow that basically lets them hew effortlessly through most any physically dangerous situation, particularly fighty ones, but that's as much an artifact of adventure fiction as it is role-playing games.

I found it a fast and goofy read. Yendi I had to struggle with a bit more, since the first act feels like looking over someone's shoulder while they play Fantasy Underworld Tycoon on their computer. Reading a turn-by-turn account of how Vlad acquired new resources and moved his existing ones around the map made me want to play the game too, but it wasn't otherwise all that interesting. It got better once the plot finally kicked in.

Looking forward to starting Teckla soon.

Maybe it's overlooked because of its silly name or its unassuming location, but the Wok N Roll restaurant in Porter Square is my favorite place to get Chinese food right now. Amy and I tend go there at least a couple times a month. As low-price, high-throughput Chinese eateries go, the food is quite yummy and well-prepared.

I just now had their eggplant chicken dish and the eggplant portion was represented by large, even slices that were still vibrant purple on one side, where many other places would have opted for colorless blobs of mush. This is the sort of thing that gets me very excited. And the chicken part was made of succulent and tender strips, not gloopy chunkulets.

You should go eat there. And try the crab rangoon.

The crew and I have been pondering this in email. Everyone likes the idea of my expanding the show's talent pool, and we've been thinking of ways to find (and filter) more good gamer-guests.

Here's a draft of a web-based questionnaire I just threw together. The idea is that I'd post it to the show's website, then place ads on appropriate community forums and such that link to the questionnaire (incidentally advertising the show itself as well). I'd then follow up with the more interesting responses (though maybe not immediately), and take it from there.

Your thoughts are welcome.

Hi! Thanks for your interest in helping with The Gameshelf.

At this time I am looking to expand the pool of people I invite on the show to play games. Prior to this casting effort, this has been limited to folks I already know from gaming and other social circles. I'd like to cast the net a little wider in an effort to get a broader variety of gamers on the show.

Callbacks will be as spotty as The Gameshelf's own production schedule. Perhaps you'll hear from me immediately; perhaps it'll take months. Perhaps you'll bump into me on the street one day and ask me about the time you submitted the application and never heard back, and I'll look all confused. At any rate, all applications will be read, filed, and ruminated upon.

You can leave some fields blank if you'd rather not answer certain questions, but the more complete your form is the better your chances are. All replies will be confidential (I won't go copying your email address onto another webpage, or anything).

Name

Email

Age

Sex

Where do you live? (The Gameshelf is shot in and around the Boston area.)

What is your favorite tabletop (board or card) game? Why?

What is your favorite digital game? Why?

Any other games you love? (Sports? Role-playing? Puzzles? Etc?) Why?

Why do you want to be on this show?

On that note, why would _I_ want you to be on it?

What would you change about The Gameshelf?

Please upload a photograph of yourself. Nothing glamourous, but enough to show me what you look like. If possible, have your photographed self wearing the sort of clothing that you'd expect to wear on camera. Use your own best judgment about that!

Anything else you'd like to say (or ask)?

I have updated my patch for SimplyThreaded. While I spotted the runaway-quote bug last time, I didn't fix it as completely as I thought. Fixed now. This patch requires the URI::Escape Perl module, which you probably already have if you're running MT.

Also added a feature: when you click "Reply" your view drops down to the comment-leaving form, even if you're not logged in (in which case you see the invitation to log in or leave an anonymous comment). Past behavior had the app simply ignore your clicking of "Reply" if you weren't logged in. That isn't good UI response.

I'll let it run a few days and then contact the author. Please let me know if you encounter any comment-leaving anomalies.

I've also activated the comment email notifcication thingy, explaining the new checkbox you see when you leave comments now.

So it turns out that the current version (v1.02) of SimplyThreaded silently fails if you preview your comment before posting it. This made me sad, so I wrote a patch for it, which I just mailed to the plugin's author (and posted on the author's support forum). I also installed it on here, so that should work now, and please let me know if it doesn't.

(The patch also addresses a potential runaway-quote bug in the JavaScript that it generates, if someone's name has an apostrophe in it. I will henceforth call this the O'Reilly Bug.)

That I could do this as rapidly as I did, never having been exposed to MT plugin source before, is fairly awesome, and gives me another reason to love Movable Type.

Remaining LiveJournal-to-MT4 migratory projects:

• Importing all my old LJ entries - "easy" but not trivial. Will involve some Perl-n-XML hackery. And I also have to decide whether I want all those old entries here. (Probably.)


• Making comment subscription work.

Awesome, I totally just smashed this blog's comment facility into tiny bits while trying to add functionality to threading (which, as it turns out, doesn't quite work as advertised - but more on that when I actually have it fixed).

I have a better understanding of why Boing Boing and Making Lights' comments snap in half all the time while the rest of the blog features stay aloft. Movable Type seems to have an odd sort of duality with posts versus comments.

Update: Fixed, I think, with my intended improvement in place. Full nerdly explanation later. There's a bit of open-source lurrrv going on here.

Walked to Davis first thing in the morning yesterday. Deposited a pleasantly prompt client payment into my bank, and then visited the Harvard Vanguard blood lab to get the ol' stick-n-drain. This was the final bit of followup business from my May checkup. It took so long because it required a 12-hour fast but did not require an appointment, making it quite easy to tell myself that I'd do it next week - week after week. My eagerness to hit the bank, and my good spirits resulting from same, moved me to delay my morning coffee and finally deal with it. I'm told that I'll get an analysis in the mail soon. I do not expect bad news.

Things are getting interesting with work. Starting next week, and continuing for the next month or two at least, I'll be working on two high-priority tasks for two clients. I have decided that, so long as the business is just me, two active clients is my maximum. That is, while I'll always seek to grow my client database ever larger, the number of clients who are actively expecting work from me at any given time should not exceed two.

Technically I already had a little experience working with two clients at once this past week, when I did some late-night emergency work for a third client. That was an interesting exercise in stress management and judgment. The problem was an ornery Perl script written by someone who didn't know Perl too good which leaked memory at an alarming rate, so much that it ran any machine into the ground within minutes. It needed to work ASAP because its output was crucial to a presentation the following day.

Printed it out, took it apart, stated to rewrite it. After an hour, it was clear that I wouldn't be able to finish it before midnight. So, with the client's OK, I settled for simply identifying the one thing causing the leak, patching it, testing it, and then handing it back otherwise untouched. Billed two hours, and noted in my report email that I'd be happy to help clean up the program later on, if they'd like. (An excellent habit for an independent contractor, suggesting one's own follow-up tasks to clients.)

Anyway, yeah. My only concern, as always, is leaving room for Volity. Lately I've been working on it whenever I've been hot to do so, which lately has amounted to around two evenings per week, and that's been all right. Found and killed a real forehead-slapper of a design problem on Tuesday night, which I do believe will make all the "random" and "unpredictable" errors that have been delaying the alpha release finally reveal themselves as nothing of the sort, allowing their rapid isolation and eradication. I hope to put a lot of time into the problem this weekend.

Spotlight is now bloody fast. And therefore, it's actually useful now. For the first time, launching an application is best achieved through Spotlight, instead of going through the Finder. I'm impressed.

Willing to concede that at least some of this is due to my now enormous memory capacity, but I believe I heard about this particular Leopard feature before. I'll know for sure after I get around to installing it on my cranky G5 desktop with its laughable 1.2 gigs.

After a quadrupling of its RAM, my laptop can now run the VM and make requests against its Apache server without any noticeable pause for swap. Quite a dramatic improvement from Monday, when any context switch between the real and emulated systems made the poor lappie stagger about the room, clutching its chest and groaning.

I put the memory in yesterday after printing out this guide. As with its author, my first attempt resulted in a laptop that wouldn't start up, since the RAM modules don't seat easily - you have to push them very firmly, a little moreso than is obvious. I appreciated the reassuring observation.

While I was in the mode, decided to go ahead and pay a visit to the local Apple Store for a copy of Leopard, too. So that's running. So far I haven't used any of its new features, other than the feature of its breaking my ancient copy of VoodooPad, which I fixed with a $20 upgrade. (Not that I mind terribly; VP is one of my favorite applications. And, whee, it supports tabbed browsing now.)

On the downside of all this, my laptop appears to consume battery somewhat faster faster now, with my total unplugged lifespan dropping from about three to a little over two hours, if my battery gauge tells true. I dunno how much each factor of the denser RAM, the new OS, and my keeping VMWare running contributes to this. Shucks.

I've canceled the Dec 18th shoot; half my crew had things come up unexpectedly - not surprising for late December - and it wasn't the best date for game-playing talent, either. I'll reschedule for something in January. Watch this space.

While I love those friends who've volunteered to play on the show and always welcome their return, I've also been thinking about casting the net a little wider for talent. I'm unsure what the sanest way to go about this would be. Posting some "Wanna be on the Gameshelf?" info on the show's website would be one thing, and making a post on the davis_square LJ community would be quite another. I would like to mix it up with some new faces, but that means auditioning. I'll try anything once, but it's not terribly clear to me how to audition folks to be good and camera-friendly gamers!

Pushing Daisies joins Battlestar Galactica as an SF show (though we're talking very different flavors of SF) that I avoided because the premise sounded lame, but eventually peeked at from the insistence of friends, and then discovered I loved. I love this show! Amy and I have been watching it via the intertubes and we laugh and cry, it's so good.

It's fun to think of it as another story taking place in the same universe as the film Edward Scissorhands, everything hypercolorful with a macabre sheen. (And there's the same leitmotif of romantic frustration in both stories, stemming from two lovers being unable to touch.)

I'm eagerly awaiting BSG's fourth and final season, accepting whatever delays the WGA strike must add to my wait. Thankful that Razor was able to get done before the picket lines went up, at least.

Finally, Amy's drawn me into watching Jeopardy! again. I used to watch it every day after school in the 1980s, and I can't say I've seen in much since. The dollar values have all doubled but otherwise it's the same show, and even Trebek looks and sounds the same, though he's lost the 'stache. (Which is just as well.) He's also gotten a bit goofier, in a good way. In one recent example, when nobody guessed What is a ferret?, he illustrated it by pantomiming a little animal running up his forearm, saying "meep meep meep!" I had to hit the TiVo's instant-replay button a couple of times to fully appreciate this.

I was shocked to learn that Alex had a heart attack yesterday, but apparently he is OK. And he looks so healthy on TV! There is a lesson in this.

LiveJournal has two nice features with its comments system: email notification for all comment-writers, and threads. Movable Type 4 doesn't support either out of the box, but the MT user community has come through with plugins that implement them, namely Arvind Satyanarayan's Simply Threaded and Robert Synnott's Comment Subscribe.

I have installed both, and activated the former here; you will notice the lovely new "Reply" links next to each comment. I've opted to arrange all comments in strict chronological order, linking threaded comments via hypertext, rather than use LJ-style indented hierarchies (which the plugin also supports). We'll see how well it works, once it starts getting some use.

Sadly, email notification isn't going to work until I can configure this machine to send mail at all. (And this explains why I haven't been getting any mail about new comments on my posts.) I am hopeless about such things, and plan on appealing to wiser friends for help tomorrow.

I have started a task for a new client whose development paradigm involves distributing a VMware file representing a complete FreeBSD system running the client's software. This is interesting, if slightly insane, and I'm willing to roll with it.

Sadly, my MacBook does not feel the same way. It still possesses the mere one gigabyte of RAM that held when it showed up on my doorstep last April, and it's being crushed under the weight of all the stuff happening on the virtual box.

So it came to pass that I placed an order for four phat new gigabytes from my friends at 18004memory.com, which despite its cheesy name has been a fine RAM vendor to me in the past. I had a nice phone chat about compatibility with a clueful CSR named Mike just now, so I'm feeling extra-warm about them. Went ahead and requested priority overnight. Three cheers for business-expense tax write-offs!

Fun fact: a major selling point of the Mac Plus when it launched in 1986 was its inclusion of one full megabyte of RAM. And I remember chuckling when I first read that ten years ago, as I had just upgraded my PowerMac to 16 MB. Sixteen times as much memory capacity, little more than a decade later! O RLY.

I get to learn interesting new Perl stuff for this job, including Catalyst, Moose, and DBIx::Class. I enter the latter with an open if skeptical mind. Looking forward to seeing what happens.

(The title of this post references the name of my creamy white MacBook. I don't know first-hand of anyone else who uses cheese varieties as a machine naming scheme, which surprises me, in retrospect.)

A lot of really nice video games seem to have bubbled up lately, especially for Nintendo systems. There's the obvious new Mario game, and this Zak & Wiki thing for Wii seems to have gotten a lot of praise. The one game I have been playing and enjoying, though, is The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on my DS. (Mostly because it's Amy's copy. Free money!)

The game has pulled one trick particular to the DS hardware that I can't recall seeing a game do before. It's most similar to the meta-parody one finds in the first Metal Gear Solid game, but without the self-consciousness of it, and therefore with a bit more subtlety. It was a delight to see, in a game that's been generally delightful from the start.

One regret I do have is that only after I gave my character a typically sophomoric name did I realize that the best possible player-character name in these sorts of games is "Dammit". This would lead to all sorts of excellent dialog. "Only you can save the kingdom, Dammit!" "Dammit, hit the switches in order!" I'll have to remember for next time.

The first few entries here are probably doomed to be about the blog itself, while I shuffle around knocking things over in my unfamiliar new space.

A friend told me via LJ that when she tried to comment on my previous entry, she was stymied by a registration screen. In response I have activated the ability to log into this blog via any LiveJournal, OpenID, or TypeKey account you might already possess. You can also create a new account here if you want, or comment anonymously.

A little nervous about that latter option, since the last time I ran a Movable Type blog - some of you may recall my shared "media log" from a few years ago - it very quickly became swamped with spam, and before long the effort required to regularly log in and bail out each entry's comments section outweighed any fun to be had from running the blog.

MT4 is much better about spam control (and user control in general) than previous iterations of the software, but we'll see what happens.