Rob Stevens' Personal Blog - Fortress of Solitude

Help Rob Get to Costa Rica!

2009-06-02T15:40:00.000-07:00

Update 2: I need to raise $390 by June 15th to cover airfare and expenses. Your $10 donation will make a serious difference!

Ron and Tammy McLaughlin, the missionaries we are travelling to help, are very excited that we're coming down there. I'm still petrified about the trip, but I've already come too far to bail out now.

Update: I'm just past the halfway point now. With fundraisers, donations, and my personal contributions, I'm at about $860 raised towards the trip, and I also bought the Kodak Zi6 video camera and ordered my passport.

Won't you help out with a $10 donation, and get a DVD of the work and adventures in Costa Rica?

The past year has been a great one for me. Normally, I'd be afraid of change (and I am), but accepting that change was going to happen whether I wanted it to or not has helped me get over that fear and move on with my life. My friends have been a tremendous source of support for me, where I normally wouldn't trust people enough to put my well-being in someone else's hands.

So for my New Year's Resolution this year, I decided to try to get over some of my other fears. Most of them are completely irrational (fear of heights, flying, strange places, etc.) and I'm way too old now to still be worrying about stupid things like that. I've never been anywhere outside the country (except for Canada), or anywhere that I don't speak the native language (except for Los Angeles). My fears have kept me from going places I'd really like to go.

The opportunity arose to go on a mission trip to Costa Rica with my church (Canyon Creek Church in Mill Creek, WA) and while it wasn't on my list of places I'd ever have wanted to go, I thought it would be a great opportunity to get over some of those fears. There is a church in Puerto Viejo that needs some work done (we'll be building a Sunday School and a basketball court), and the missionaries that work for the church desperately need a roof over their home.

I prayed about it, and heard God tell me to go, so I started making plans. I've never had a passport, so I filled out an application. I requested the time off from work. I started telling people I was going, so if I chickened-out, I'd be accountable to people.

Rachel and I were going to make the trip together, which was comforting. However, since she just got a new job at World Vision (a passion of hers), she can't get the time off to go. She feels like she was called to that job more than the Costa Rica trip, and while that's wonderful for her, it's scary for me. I prayed about it more, and felt I was being tested. Would I still make this leap of faith without the comfort of having my loving girlfriend there with me?

The answer is, terrifyingly ... yes. I'm going to go. And that's where you get to help.

One of my fears is not knowing how I'm going to pay for the trip. The cost is $1600, plus the passport fees (since I've never had one) and a small web-ready video camera (the Kodak Zi6, which is relatively inexpensive) would bring the cost closer to $2000. While I could probably come up with half of that if I stretched myself, I'm taking a leap of faith and relying on God and my friends and family to make up the difference.

I've got about 200 friends on Facebook, and countless more on the internets. If just those two hundred donated $5, the cost of one latte at Starbucks, that would make up the rest of the money I need to go. I'm going to put my trust and faith in all of you to make this happen.

As a thank you for your generosity, everyone that donates at least $10 and includes their address will get a DVD copy of the video that I'll be documenting while I'm there. I'm going to try to capture everything I can, and the least I can do is share it with everyone who helped send me there. Also, please note that your donations are tax deductible as long as you include the information I need to have the church send you a receipt, and any overage will be donated to the church to send others on the mission.

I'm going way outside of my comfort zone for this one. I'm not going to have my cell phone, or a laptop, so I can focus on doing God's work while I'm away. (Admittedly, the camera will be a bit of a technology security blanket.) I'm hoping that you will also go a bit outside of your comfort zone and help bless me with the money I need to go.

Should Windows 7 Be Free?

2008-12-03T13:13:00.001-08:00

Despite being what I would consider to be a reasonably strong OS*, the market has soundly rejected Windows Vista, and Microsoft is desperate to get those sales (and market share, which just dipped below 90%) back up. They've launched PR campaigns, including "The Mojave Experiment," an attempt to prove that most people didn't really have any information about Vista to base those feelings on.

The Mojave Experiement basically showed people Microsoft's next operating system, which was later revealed to them (after recording their favorable reactions) to be Windows Vista.

While an impending Service Pack update for Windows Vista is slated for April '09, Microsoft is still planning to release Windows 7 in July. That's only half a year away, and Vista has pretty much no shot of gaining any traction right now, especially with a very wide beta of Windows 7 planned for January, which I expect will be in even wider circulation than Microsoft plans.

I purchased Windows Vista Ultimate on release. It was supposed to be the "ultimate" version of Windows (natch), and everyone knows what a huge debacle that turned into. The promised "Ultimate Extras" were incredibly weak, making the OS overpriced as a result, and the promised "unique publications" and "innovative services" never materialized. What did we get? Animated wallpaper, a handful of games, and some sound packs ... plus a bunch of languages that shouldn't have been "extra" to begin with.

Wouldn't the ultimate extra be getting the next version for free? If Windows 7 is everything Microsoft is claiming it will be, it would go a long way towards repairing the reputation of the company by offering this as a free upgrade to at least Windows Vista Ultimate users.

But I think they should take it a step further. I think they should offer it to anyone that has a license for Windows Vista, and even more, start marketing Windows Vista as including the free upgrade to Windows 7. First, it would surely boost Vista sales now, not to mention get people used to an OS that visually, isn't going to change all that much going into Windows 7. Second, if Microsoft's Mojave Experiment is to be believed, most people would think Vista really is Windows 7 anyway, since it won't be that much of a visual departure.

In short, Windows 7 should be rolled out over Windows Update if at all possible. And they should really get rid of all this multiple editions, nonsense. Release ONE version of the OS, and make downloadable configuration files available if businesses or home users want to restrict or remove features. Either that, or just allow them to select the features they want the same way they already do if you don't use a product key during installation. Take the confusion out of the marketplace, and make sure that no matter what a user thinks they want (or think they want to pay for), they get what they actually need.

But most importantly, they should support the people that bought Vista and complained about it, bitterly and loudly, by giving them the operating system they thought they were getting in the first place. At a bear minimum, the people that purchased the premium SKU should get the new OS as their mea culpa for failing to deliver on the promise of the Ultimate Extras.

*Unlike many reports from other users, I have had no problems that I couldn't trace back to immature drivers, which isn't Microsoft's fault.

The REAL NyQuil is Back!

2008-11-14T14:45:00.001-08:00

There are a lot of people out there that have read and/or responded to my blog post about the change in the trusty NyQuil formula to something far less trusty.

I'm pleased to say that the original NyQuil formula is back, under the name NyQuil D. Yes, since it contains pseudoephedrine, you'll have to get it behind the counter. But for those of you (like my sweet girlfriend) currently suffering from a case of the flu, I'm sure this news can't come soon enough.

Only took about three years ... I wonder what the impact of selling a product that didn't work was to their bottom line? Sorry DayQuil people ... no change to a working decongestant for you.

Thoughts on the morning after ...

2008-11-05T07:25:00.000-08:00

Waking up on a chilly Wednesday morning following the most historic election that I've ever had the privilege to be part of, I know that we are simply one step closer to fixing the problems in our country. As a Republican, I understood early on that this election had to be about more than ideology, more than race, and more than age. It had to be about getting Americans to stop thinking about themselves, and to begin working towards the common goal of making this country better.

The economic collapse wasn't about President Bush. It wasn't about Republicans. And it wasn't about a Democratic Congress. It wasn't about bad loans, or a war overseas, or foreign oil.

It was about greed. It was about people looking out only for themselves. It was about people forgetting to "be subject to one another." And so I voted for Barack Obama. I voted for a man with little political experience, with no executive experience, and with an ideology very different than my own.

Because what our country needed most right now was a "community organizer."

We need someone with the experience of getting people to work together towards a vision. The President wasn't going to fix the country's ills on his own. No President could. Real change only comes from the people that work towards it, united towards a common goal. Mixed in with the media-savvy phrases of hope and change was the most important message, the one that truly resonated with Obama's supporters.

We.

The next four years has to be about more than race. It has to be about more than political ideology. And it has to be about more than who won and who lost on November 4th, 2008. It has to be about all of us rallying behind not a man, but our country, to make it better. It has to be about us becoming a community, being subject to one another, and working for what we believe in.

It starts now.

A bit of a personal one ...

2007-12-15T08:37:00.000-08:00

It's been a while.

I've avoided getting too personal on my blog for a variety of reasons. Part of it was to protect the privacy of my friends and family, partly to keep from boring those reading, and partly because I didn't want anyone that Googled me to come across anything overly personal. I'm tearing those walls down now, because I've learned that while walls can protect you, they also keep people from getting to you when you need them, and until recently, I didn't realize how much I needed other people in my life.

Anyone that has read this blog in the past has probably noticed that my post rate has plummeted in recent months. A bit of this was due to work and school pressures, but mostly, it was because of some major "life changes", which is the PC way of saying that I was going through a divorce. Andrea and I were high school sweethearts; we started dating my senior year of high school and got married in August of 2000.

I was absolutely devoted to her, but marriage is incredibly hard ... it never seemed like we were able to get our lives completely on track. Life was constantly throwing challenges in our way. I was laid off the same day we were supposed to close on our house back in 2002, and the marriage never fully recovered from that setback. In 2003, we made the decision together that I should go back to school and get my degree, and while it was the right decision at the time, the cost was far too high. I really wanted to have some sembalance of a real college experience, and that required making a lot of choices that took even more time away from my wife. Group projects, extra-curricular activities ... I did very well in school, as I felt I had to, but the sacrifices were more than I ever should have asked Andrea to make. We didn't get to spend nearly enough time together, and despite what others might say, absence does not make the heart grow fonder.

We grew apart in a lot of ways, and finally she decided that despite being nearly finished with my degree, we would never really get the marriage back on track. We separated in April of 2007, filed for divorce in August (just after our anniversary), and the divorce was finalized this week.

I blame myself in a lot of ways. I've never been very good at maintaining releationships with my friends and family, and while I know that I was put into an impossible position of trying to keep a marriage together on my schedule, I just let the marriage coast ... thinking that Andrea could keep us together on her own. She's a lot tougher than she'll ever admit to, but she underestimates herself, and in this case, she just didn't think she was going to be able to keep it together the additional few weeks until I graduated. I can't fault her for anything other than not realizing the light at the end of the tunnel was closer than she thought. Regardless, by the time I realized we were in trouble, it was far too late.

That brings us to today. I've realized that living my life for one person, while admirable in a lot of ways, was just unhealthy. Luckily, I met a lot of great friends at the UW, and they've been incredibly supportive during this tumultuous few months of my life. I can't believe it took me this long to allow others to get this close to me, but I'm glad that I finally did. I can honestly say that I wouldn't have made it this far if not for them. They're every bit an extended family to me, and I thank God every day that they're part of my life.

On December 3rd, I went to Slave to the Needle and got a tattoo on my back. I've never really identified with the Native American part of my heritage, but it's always been in there somewhere, and I knew I'd get one at some point once I figured out how to tell my story. I started planning my design a few months ago, something to not only reflect not only my identity, but serve as a reminder of where I'd been, where I was now, and where I am headed. The Superman shield is from "The Death and Life of Superman" novel by Roger Stern, and symbolizes the transition from my old life to my new one. The Kryptonian word at the top I'm keeping to myself, but is just a reminder to me that I'm never really alone. There's a lot more to this design than that, even the placement had meaning, but I'm very happy with how it turned out.

I had a little celebration last night, part birthday party and part rebirth. By the time all was said and done, I was dumbfounded by how many people came to hang out and offer their support. This is a major turning point in my life, and I'm determined to not make the same mistakes I've made in the past. These people have graciously allowed me to be a part of their life, and the absolute least I can do is offer mine in return.

So there it is. I get to have a second chance of sorts, starting over with the benefit of a great deal of experience to rely on. I don't know if I'm going to maintain this blog, I've actually got a social life that I never made time for in the past, but if I do, it's going to be far more than the ridiculous minutae and random crap I stumble across on the internet. I don't know if it will be worth reading, but it's going to be something.

Heroes is Back!

2007-09-25T09:12:00.000-07:00

The second season premiere of Heroes aired last night, and it's great to have the show back. Flanked by Chuck and Journeyman, it was a great night of TV. And of course, there's a ton of speculation about what the new season has to offer.

One thing I noticed last night that seemed to stand out is that the symbol (the half-helix, or what Ando called "godsend") took a certain prevalence during the opening episode. But what bothered me is that it seemed different. When positioned vertically, the symbol normally has one line coming out of the top, and two on the bottom. Yet, several times last night, the symbol is shown inverted. Particularly coming from Molly's dreams about the man that can see her.

It reminded me of a typical convention of comic books, one that was the focus of the movie Unbreakable. Every hero has an opposite, a villian. It makes me wonder if the inverted symbol is a foreshadowing of sorts, preparing us for the introduction of anti-Heroes. In the first season, Sylar as Peter Petrelli's opposite was a primary focus, but I don't remember if the symbol was ever shown in conjunction with Sylar.

It's worth noting that on the pictures of Kaito Nakamura and Angela Petrelli, the symbol was in it's normal form ... perhaps Angela isn't as evil as Nathan wants to believe.

Journeyman

2007-09-11T22:05:00.000-07:00

Journeyman is another one of those shows in NBC's Fall lineup that could have been awful if not executed perfectly, but again, NBC has another potential smash hit on their hands, and Monday nights are going to be hard for the other networks to beat.

The premise is similar to the old show Quantum Leap, but without the futuristic aspect to it, but it feels even more human, as they show the strain that the time travel takes on Dan and his family and friends. That makes the show even more engrossing that Quantum Leap ever was, and it's only the first episode.

After watching these three shows, Journeyman, Chuck, and Bionic Woman, I find myself incredibly thankful that these shows are on NBC and not Fox. Fox would have probably found a way to cancel them after just an episode or two, and the world would miss out on great drama (and in Chuck's case, comedy, too).

One funny thing I noticed ... when Dan jumps through time, his items go with him, including his Apple iPhone. It signals several times when he jumps because you can see that there's no digital cell signal back in the past. However, in once scene in particular, you can see that he's holding the phone upside down, but the text is right side up.

NBC Fall Season Rocks!

2007-09-11T21:35:00.000-07:00

While I'm not a big fan of Comcast, when there's something on their On Demand service, I'm certainly grateful I have it. Sadly, the only network shows Comcast has had in HD for a while has been reruns of CSI.

I wanted to kill a little time today while something else was recording, and decided to check to see if the next CSI episode was ready yet, and there was a new listing for NBC. Imagine my surprise when the pilots of NBC's big fall season were there waiting for me. And from the looks of it, it's going to be a GREAT season.

Bionic Woman is a fresh take on the old series, and if it feels familiar, it should. It has the same tone as the remake of Battlestar Galactica, and even features a couple of those familiar faces as well. The last few minutes felt a little cheesy, and I don't want to spoil it for you, but when you see it, you'll know exactly the scene I'm talking about. That brief Velveeta moment aside, the show was really entertaining, and I can't wait to see where they go with it.

When I first saw the previews for Chuck, I thought that the show would either be really good, or really, atrociously bad. Lucky for us, it's great. To crib the phrase from his Steveness of Jobs, it's insanely great. Again, don't want to ruin the plot, but this show is going to pluck the strings of every geek out there as hard as Heroes did. So it's no surprise that it'll be airing right before Heroes in the lineup. That's going to be a hard one-two punch.

I still have to watch Journeyman and Life, so look for those impressions soon!

Oh, one small complaint ... Comcast didn't make the 5.1 soundtrack available on the HD feed, only the ProLogic sound. That's ok, it's just be even more reason to watch the shows again!

Problems with Heroes Disc 2 on HD-DVD? Read This!

2007-09-07T16:36:00.000-07:00

If you've bought Season 1 of Heroes on HD-DVD recently, you might be running into probably getting the second disc to load. What's the solution?

Sadly, just patience.

The second disc is web-enabled, and when you first load the disc, it will attempt to download the web content to the hard drive built into your HD-DVD drive. Of course, this is a popular web series and the servers seem to be getting overloaded. This means that it might take up to an hour to download the content.

The disc should give you the option to cancel if it appears that it's going to take a prolonged amount of time. All I can recommend is that you load the disc before you want to watch it and let it download while you make dinner or something.

Just a reminder, Season 2 starts on September 25th!

The Best of Tina Fey, SNL Weekend Update

2007-08-15T16:05:00.000-07:00

Super Mario Strikers Review

2007-08-09T10:12:00.000-07:00

Rent It.

Universal Exceeds Expectation with HD DVD

2007-08-08T18:28:00.001-07:00

HD DVD is having a rough time of it in the media, but a problem some consumers have run into is discs that just won't play. It seems to be mostly HD DVD/DVD combo discs, and appears to be a slight film that doesn't come off the disc in manufacturing.

A copy of Smokin' Aces that I bought recently had this problem, so I contacted Universal to get a replacement. They offered to send me a postage-paid envelope to send back the disc ... just the disc ... and they'd mail a replacement.

In six to eight weeks. How annoying.

In a couple of days, I had my envelope and mailed off the bad disc. In just two weeks, I had a replacement in a brand new case! Now I have an extra case should I ever need it, and they beat their shipping estimates.

This is how you delight your customers ... by handling problems promptly and by exceeding expectations. It would have been great to have the disc work right the first time, but this was the next best thing. Universal is clearly embracing the format.

As for the movie ... Buy It.

Comcast Can Bite Me ... If They Ever Show Up

2007-08-08T18:15:00.000-07:00

I just moved into a new apartment over the weekend. I made sure to call well in advance (last Tuesday) to make sure they'd be able to install on the Saturday that I moved in. After getting a confirmation number, pricing, and a time and date, I showed up Saturday ready to get the new service up and running.

And I waited. And waited. Finally, I called Comcast to find out what was up. They scheduled me for Saturday the 11th, not the 4th. No where in the call record did it show that I needed it on the 4th, and the support rep was completely unsympathetic with the fact that I would be both TV and Internet-less for an entire week.

I'm super-pissed about it, which probably led to my getting a cold, which only made it worse when I'm stuck home Tuesday. Luckily, I have a fairly sizable DVD library, although I mostly ignored them while I slept off the cold.

Fortunately, it looks like Verizon is tearing the roads apart in Kenmore to roll out their FIOS fiber-optic service. I'm not sure when it'll be available, but it'll be nice to be able to play the two companies off of each other. Competition is almost always great for the consumer.

Official Xbox Magazine going to Xbox Live

2007-07-26T07:33:00.000-07:00

I must be psychic or something, or at least, know a good idea when I come up with it. According to Kotaku (by way of the Xbox.com forums), the Official Xbox Magazine (OXM) is going to be made available through Xbox Live.

Of course, I was just lamenting what a great distribution medium Xbox Live would be for the mag after playing Eternal Sonata, and less than a week later, there you go.

Kotaku seems to think that this somehow equates to charging for demos, since it'll cost $2.50 to get the mag this way. They wouldn't be charging any more for demos than they are now, they'll actually be charging less than you'd pay buying at the newsstand. How do I figure? It cost me $6.00 to get the Eternal Sonata demo ... yes, like many others, I paid for the demo, not the magazine. If there is a demo exclusive to the magazine, this is a far more economical and convenient way to get it.

That said, what publisher in their right mind would bother with an exclusive demo now, unless there's some payoff from OXM?

GameFly Free Trial for One Month

2007-07-24T07:39:00.000-07:00

GameFly normally only gives you a 10-day trial of their service before you have to start paying, but they just sent me a link that will give you an entire month for free. If you've been on the fence, you owe it to yourself to give GameFly a try. It's a better value than Netflix when you consider how expensive it can be to buy new games.

The offer expires on 7/31/2007, so get in while the getting is good!

Hallows of a Deathly Variety

2007-07-23T10:25:00.000-07:00

I bought two copies of the final Harry Potter book early Saturday morning. I had waited in line for the previous two books, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it this time. I wasn't in a hurry to end my adventures with Harry. The second copy of the book went to my friend Sarah as a birthday present. She texted me Sunday to brag that she was over 400 pages into the book.

I'm on page 2. Seriously, a Harry Potter book hasn't started this excruciatingly slow since the first one. I hear the second chapter really takes off. Still, I haven't been able to start down the road to the end of the series. I'm probably projecting ... well, there's really no probably about it. I know exactly why I'm putting it off. Once I finish that book, a new chapter in my own life is starting in a lot of ways, and I'm not eager to head down that path either.

Yes, that's incredibly vague, but that's also how I'm feeling, so somehow, it's fitting.

Further Adventures in High Definition

2007-07-21T12:48:00.001-07:00

Life with the new HDTV is going swimmingly, but not without a few hiccups along the way. I've got the old PC hooked up to the TV through the DVI connection, but found out the hard way that Creative still hasn't got their act together when it comes to drivers on Windows Vista. As such, the digital out port still doesn't work, and I'm limited to stereo sound on the PC side. It's really quite annoying.

After getting a new amplified antenna, I tried to give some HDTV action a go through Windows Media Center. Unfortunately, the system couldn't seem to give me anything but stuttering and pixelation, no matter how strong the signal was. I'd just about given up after reading all the problems other people were having when someone mentioned that for some reason, they had no stuttering problems when using the Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender. Sure enough, HDTV is a wonderful experience and stutter-free through the Xbox 360. At this point, I'd call the Xbox 360 a perfect device if it weren't for the fact that it's so freakin' loud, particularly when trying to watch an HD DVD with it.

I'm moving to a new place in a couple weeks, and I'll probably be back with Comcast since I don't think I can get a DirecTV satellite dish installed where I'll be going. But, that'll give me a chance to see how Comcast's HDTV DVR works compared to my trusty TiVo. I have very low expectations at this point, but I'm hoping that what I've heard about a TiVo software for Comcast's hardware is true and that they'll roll out soon. Either that, or I have a friend at Moxi that might be able to hook me up.

Next up ... Intec has sent me an HDMI/Component switch that I'll hook up and run through it's paces. Fair Disclosure: I didn't pay for this switch, but I'll do my best not to let that color my perceptions.

Etnernal Sonata, and Xbox Live

2007-07-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

When I first heard of the story behind the forthcoming Xbox 360 RPG Eternal Sonata, I figured it was going to be one of those strange, childish RPGs that would hold absolutely no interest from me. As it is, while I enjoy some of the RPG heavy hitters like a Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, they just take up too much time for me these days.

A little while ago, I downloaded a video of Eternal Sonata through Xbox Live, and I was blown away by the graphic fidelity and art style. The game looks like an anime comic brought to life, but it's even more detailed than that. I really can't explain it except to say that it seems like they got the cel-shaded style and lighting exactly right. Still, the story seemed a bit silly ... an imaginary world dreamt of by Frederick Chopin while he lay sick on on the verge of death. Silly, and a bit dreary. And yet, the world he dreams of is vibrant and full of life.

When I heard that there was a demo in the new issue of the Official Xbox Magazine, I grabbed it (while out getting the final installment in the Harry Potter series). Before delving into The Deathly Hallows, I fired up the 360 and popped in the demo disc, and was absolutely blown away. Eternal Sonota is an incredibly accessible RPG, adds a few new gameplay twists (different special attacks depending on whether you're in the light or the dark), and some absolutely beautiful music. In fact, I think the music (which had to be good, if the game is about Chopin) is what really puts the game over the top.

Hard to say until a final copy is in my hands in September, but I think it's going to be easy to give the game a Buy It review. Until then, go grab the magazine and play it!

On a side note, Microsoft is really onto something with Xbox Live. Being able to download demos, trailers, movies and other content helps open gamers' horizons to new experiences. For example, I really disliked the Blue Dragon demo for some reason (probably the aforementioned dislike of overly childish RPGs), but quite unexpectedly played the demo of EA's The BIGS repeatedly.

I'd really like to see OXM delivered electronically through Xbox Live, but I don't know that the publishing industry is ready to make a jump like that. Given that the content in OXM was dreadfully old by the time I read it, electronic delivery seems like it would make a lot more sense in terms of timeliness and convenience.

Creating a Community is Hard

2007-07-19T13:16:00.000-07:00

AMD is really tying to reach out to the enthusiast community with their news AMD Unprocessed website and forum, but so far, the going is pretty slow. It's always that way, because building a community takes time. The conversations are kind of forced at first, and no one knows quite what they can get away with, and when the community is somewhat exclusive (Unprocessed is primarily for tech bloggers) it takes even longer.

That said, the joint appears to be run by AMD and notable Windows blogger Robert McLaws. It looks like the idea is similar to what Microsoft is doing with The Hive (of which I am also a member), but focused on AMD products primarily.

I've got a bit of advice for AMD, and we'll see where it goes from here. First, they need to get more involved. Right now, a few of us are trying to get the ball rolling, but there has been very little involvement from AMD directly in the conversations. While it might not be Scott Carroll (who took over for Chris Aarons), some AMD people need to be there talking and assuring us the place is open for business. The only way bloggers will make a point to come there is if they have a direct conduit to information ... it's all about access. Otherwise, they can probably get better information from other third-party sources.

Second, with all due respect to Scott, get your welcome message off the home page. The idea of AMD "Unprocessed" flies against the idea of a PR guy providing us with information, so you may want to consider hiring an experienced Community Manager. Either that, or you've got to "open the kimono" right away and give bloggers access to information they couldn't get otherwise. Building trust takes time, but if you want to jump start a community, sometimes a grand gesture is required.

Lastly, if it's going to be a community, give people more places to talk about off-topic stuff, and maybe even about your competitors. Communities don't always stay on-topic, and sometimes it's the off-topic stuff that keeps people going in that difficult genesis period.

Anyway, it's an interesting experiment, and I hope it works. AMD has an opportunity to grab a little more mindshare from their competitors, and it's critical at a time where AMD is falling behind in the performance area, both in processors and graphics. Hopefully this will be great impetus for them.

Two Word Review: Bomberman LIVE

2007-07-19T09:34:00.001-07:00

Buy It.

Game Reviews ... How Do You Review Art?

2007-07-18T09:12:00.001-07:00

The Escapist (easily the single best game industry "magazine" on the planet) is running a piece on the seedy underbelly of game reviews. I can't help but agree with a lot of the points in the article. Reviewing games (or movies, or any other sort of art) is always going to be controversial. They never seem to do a product justice, they're totally arbitrary and loaded with bias (or worse, favoritism), and really don't seem to affect how a game sells at all.

There are aspects of game reviewing that the article never quite gets to. Reviewers are unconsciously pressured into not only skewing a review score because of the pressures mentioned in the story, but even the language can be crafted to try to get a review onto the box or into an ad campaign as promotion for the publication.

The "games as art" thing is a oft-debated issue, and despite the fact that every game "journalist" (as if there was such a thing, don't get me started) has broached the topic at one point or another, I decided to wade into it for a research paper at the University of Washington. I took it in what I feel is a different direction, keeping it personal as all artisitc experiences should be. You can download a PDF copy of my "Video Games as Art" paper, or you can e-mail me for a file. One thing that I came across is that some of the games that were most like art (to me) didn't sell very well.

And there's the root of the problem. For as much as games (and movies) are an art form, they're also a consumer product, and anytime someone is exchanging money for something, they want to know what they're going to get in advance and whether or not it will be worth it. The product has to make a value proposition, and the end result needs to meet or exceed that proposition. Valve is a company that gets this on a deep, fundamentatal level. Gamers know that if they buy Half-Life, they'll get a great game. But they'll also get enough free content and other game experiences with it that they could play that game for YEARS. The reviews just don't matter, because the value proposition is blown out of the water.

So I've finally reached a level where I feel I can put my metaphorical foot down and say, I'm not going to review games anymore. Everyone's experience will be different with a game, so all I can really tell you is whether or not you should Buy It, Rent It, or Skip It. Anything else is just background and opinion, but those two words are enough to tell you whether or not a game meets or exceeds its value proposition. I could talk at excruciating length about how gorgeous a game's graphics are, or how the controls work, or how it sounds, but in the end, none of that matters unless you play the game (or don't).

Thus, I'm getting rid of all the fluff, and Two Word Reviews is born. The great part about this is that it simply doesn't matter how long I play a game, or finish it, or anything about me. It becomes all about whether or not a game is worth the price they're charging, or the price to get it into your hands temporarily. (On that note, I should specify that when I say "Rent It", I'm talking about a service like GameFly, so we're talking roughly $20/mo. or just under half the price of the game.) Pretty much all opinion is taken out of the equation, because by and large, the value proposition of most people is the same.

It'll be an interesting experiment. I'll probably never get my review on a box, most game websites wouldn't want to run these reviews (or pay for two words), but I know I'll feel a lot better about it.

iPhone or iFlop?

2007-06-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

Today marks the launch of the ridiculously hyped iPhone, and while it's certainly the sexiest consumer electronics product to launch in quite some time, it also marks the triumph of form over function that Apple started with the Mac Cube some years ago.

Apple fans always tout the ease of use as the hallmark of an Apple product, and the multi-touch screen of the iPhone was the ultimate culmination of that philosophy. It certainly looks easy to use in those commercials, and initial reviews seem to be fairly positive. But then there was it's first major failure, televised for all to see, no less. Meridith Viera, pretty much exactly the type of person Apple would like to appeal to with the iPhone, was completely unable to get this easy-to-use phone to work in a live demonstration on TODAY. Worse yet, she couldn't get the single function to work that is most important ... she couldn't answer a call. Intuitive or not, the lack of tactile feedback that you get with a hard button has kept other touch devices from reaching a mass-market. Apple has that, plus a limited partner and high price to contend with. Past that, if the phone just isn't as easy to use as they make it look, there could be a significant problem. I mean, why else would Apple start posting tutorial videos on their website showing people how to perform very basic functions.

Add to the problem that even the tech savvy are going to notice pretty quick that this $500-600 phone is a full generation behind other phones in basic phone functionality. Walt Mossberg and others complained of slow internet speeds (admittedly before AT&T turned on their "Fine Edge" speed upgrade), and that's before thousands of people with the new device are flooding the network with Google Maps data. People don't like to hear that they cutting-edge gadget they just bought was obsolete the minute they bought it, and for the iPhone, it's a no-brainer that a more advanced version that uses 3G and possibly has GPS will be coming in a year or two.

Once that reality sinks in, people will realize that they've paid six bills (and all those service charges) for smoke and mirrors. iPhone is NOT revolutionary. It is lipstick on a pig, and sure, that's some gorgeous shade of lipstick. But all the iPhone does is make incredibly basic functions of a phone a lot prettier to look at. Even the more advanced stuff, like how you can earch in Google Maps and make a call from from that result, is sure to come to other devices like Windows Mobile sooner than later, and for no other reason than that Windows Mobile is an open platform. And that's the real rub ... unless you're going to make a basic web application, you can't write programs for the iPhone. The ability to get Java and other sorts of apps on just about any other phone platform means that people may start wondering why they're getting nickeled and dimed for things after having already missed a mortgage payment to buy their phone.

Yes, today the iBacklash is sure to begin.

37" Westinghouse LCD 1080p - First Impressions

2007-06-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

Well, my graduation present (the Westinghouse LVM-37w3se) arrived yesterday morning, and I only got a chance to unpack it and make sure it worked before heading out to work, but once I got home, it was time to experience the HD revolution.

The first thing I did was hook up the TiVo, since it's one of those things I just can't live without. Sadly, being on the cutting edge means making a few sacrifices, and the TiVo's low-res display looked terrible once it was deinterlaced and upscaled to the 1080p of the screen. Of course, I knew this going in, but was a bit surprised at just how bad it really looked. It didn't help that I was literally kneeling in front of the screen while I set everything up, either. Of course, the PS2 and Wii fared about as well. Only capable of 480p, both consoles looked just terrible blown up, even over component connections.

Next was the Xbox 360. I just couldn't take another disappointment, so I hooked it up to the VGA port of the TV, went into the system settings and set it to 1080p widescreen. It was absolutely gorgeous. No more "dot crawl" like I had on my old Sony, fonts were smooth and clear in the Dashboard, and the whole thing just looked, for lack of a better word, spacious. Seriously, it felt like you had room to move around in that thing.

I couldn't let it rest there. I hooked up the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive and threw in a copy of Mission: Impossible III to see if there was really that much of a difference. I remember being blown away by the quality of DVD when it first came out, and HD-DVD is a similar leap forward. It was really impressive just how good it looked. The "In-Movie Experience", or IME, was nifty too, adding video overlays of commentary or other features while you're watching.

Was it really that much better than DVD, though? I'm not sure yet. My next test will be to run my DVD and HD-DVD copies of Mission: Impossible (the original) at the same time and flip between them to see how different they look, controlling for the fact that the DVD would likely be upscaled by the TV rather poorly.

Speaking of which, I heard that the last Dashboard update for the Xbox 360 added the ability to upscale DVDs to 1080p over the VGA connection. So I tossed in the first Harry Potter movie to see how it worked, prepared to be disappointed after M:I III looked so great. Despite the very dark opening scene lacking detail, it actually looked pretty amazing, and didn't look like it was upscaled. It certainly wasn't as razor-sharp as M:I III (you could see every pore in Lawrence Fishburn's face), but it was more than adequate.

I pulled out Star Wars: Episode I and ran the THX Optimizer, a special video tuning program on the DVD. After adjusting the settings in a dark room, I flipped back over to the TiVo and noticed two things. One, properly adjusted, the standard definition upscaling doesn't look too bad. Don't get me wrong, it's still awful, but it's at least watchable now. Second, viewing distance matters a lot. From right in front, it was all a mess, but 8-ft. back was a slightly different story. Macroblocking (giant pixels) was less evident, and it just felt a bit smoother.

For my last hurrah for the night, I turned the Xbox 360 back on and threw in Gears of War. I'd played this on a 1024x768 projector on a giant screen at MindCamp, but WOW. I was absolutely blown away by the graphical fidelity. I don't know if it's rendering a 1080p frame buffer, or just 720p upscaled, but it just looked amazing. The best way to describe it is like playing a war movie set in the future. I expect to really impress some of my friends when they see just how good it looks at 1080p.

So that's it for now. I have more stuff to try, but it'll take a few more days to get everything together and whatnot. Next up: Windows Vista Media Center and HDTV!

Keeping up with the High-Definition Joneses

2007-06-11T15:03:00.000-07:00

I graduated from the University of Washington yesterday, and it was a bit of a melancholy affair. The four-year grind has culminated in my Bachelor's degree, but it's also come at a fairly high price (not just tuition-wise, but relationship-wise as well). People keep telling me that they couldn't have done it, but at the same time I wonder if knowing what I know now if I'd have made the choice. I guess I'll never know.

Regardless, it's done now, and to celebrate, I ordered myself the 37" Westinghouse 1080p LCD TV (LVM-37w3) that I've been lusting after for a few years. Costco has the TV (monitor, really, since there is no tuner in the set) on sale for $799, and I just couldn't turn that down. Even after tax and shipping, it was $100 cheaper than I could find it anywhere else, and Costco's return policy is fantastic.

Of course, that means I'll be rewiring my entertainment center (one of my favorite hobbies), and probably moving my computer into a smaller media center-like case to take advantage of my HD card. I might upgrade my DirecTV receivers to HD, but since I may be moving shortly as well, I'm probably going to hold off, especially since Verizon has FIOS rolled out on Washington's "Eastside".

I'm also pretty excited to see how the Xbox 360 looks after the 1080p upgrade, since they rolled out a software release turning on 1080p upscaling a while back. The PS3 is still way out of my price range, but maybe after a year or two I'd be able to afford it.

New TV should be here in a couple of weeks!

Crazy Business Idea ...

2007-06-08T12:55:00.000-07:00

Game shops like EB Games and GameStop largely traffic in used game. Even new releases tend to come back within a week as a used copy, which the company then resells, making close to a 100% margin or more on some games. They have massive inventories of these games and easily a national distribution network already in place by virtue of their retail locations.

So why hasn't one of these players (pun somewhat intended) gotten into renting games. They're used already, right? Copy the GameFly/Netflix model right down to a T, but build your inventory from games that people turn in, rather than buying new copies.

Seems like a no-brainer. What am I missing?

What's 42 Up To Now?

2007-05-23T13:23:00.000-07:00

I've wondered what sort of project 42 Entertainment might come up with after Vanishing Point to capture my attention as firmly as they have in the past. As it turns out, I had stumbled upon some of their work without even realizing it.

As it turns out, they've been commissioned by Warner Bros. to do some of the viral marketing work for the upcoming Batman sequel The Dark Knight. The recent reveal of the new look for The Joker, as well as a recent hint at news in December has been tied back to 42. It doesn't appear that a real game will be incorporated, but who knows, since the next website was only registered a day or two ago.

It also appears that they collaborated with Trent Reznor for the Year Zero alternate reality game promoting the new Nine Inch Nails album. They're pretty busy over there.

ATI Starts an Interesting Conversation ... Unintentionally

2007-05-15T13:21:00.000-07:00

The technology blogs have been buzzing for the past two days about what is perceived as a weak launch of ATI's new flagship graphics card, the HD 2900 XT. Less emphasis is being paid to the extremely cost-competitive offering (ATI's top of the line, while underperforming Nvidia's, is $200 less) than the fact that they expected ATI to beat Nvidia on performance. Part of this is due to a late launch, and the remainder is simply fanboy wishing. It's more fun to argue about who has the better card when the answer isn't so clear.

What's interesting to me is what the price difference offers in terms of value-added opportunities. Already, vendors are coming forth with ways to make these uninspiring cards more appealing. Namely, Sapphire has launched a custom liquid cooling package, offering overclocking for two cards in Crossfire mode, as well as cooling CPU and RAM as well. There's really no room in the market for this kind of option at Nvidia's high-end.

I haven't bought a high-end card in years, simply because the need for them quickly eroded as I transitioned away from PC gaming (all I was playing was WOW, and I quit that cold turkey) and moved back into the living toom for console gaming. What's very interesting to me is video processing and offloading of the UI onto the video card in Vista, and it looks like even ATI's low-end cards should do this very well (they even have one passively cooled).

One of my favorite ATI products is my HDTV Wonder. Without an HDTV, it's the only way I can catch some of my shows in HD. Surprisingly, ATI has no mention of the card on their website any more, and there doesn't appear to be an HD tuner option on any of the new cards. I wonder if they're holding back, or if they've written off the HD market. Doesn't seem like there's much reason to be able to process high-end video without the one way to get video into your machine that makes the most sense; not everyone has an HD camcorder yet.

Maybe I could talk one of my friends at AMD/ATI into sending one of the new cards my way. I've got a hankering to build that Media Center PC that I've been putting off for a while.

Back From Orlando ... Final HP TX1000 Impressions

2007-04-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

I came home from Orlando Wednesday night, but with Thursday loaded up with a work back-log and classes, I'm just now starting to get back into the swing of things. I think I'll need the weekend to get off of East Coast time, though.

First thing's first, my partner and I managed to take Second Place in our International Marketing Case Study for Delta Epsilon Chi. We were a bit disappointed that we didn't get first, but from what I've heard in the rumor mill, the field was incredibly competitive. We'll have scores probably end of next month, so I'll just have to live in suspense for a while. Either way, second is better than third, so we'll take it. Another of our Huskies came home with both a second place plaque and a job offer from ESPN, and a fourth placed in the top ten in her subject, so it was a good trip. Sadly, that's pretty much the end of my DEC run, and I think I'm really going to miss it.

Walt Disney World was pretty much as I remember it, albeit with a few additions. Honestly, I didn't have as much fun as I would have liked; it was really difficult to try to enjoy myself without my wife to share it with. By the end of the trip, I was getting really lonely and just wanted to come home.

The HP TX1000 continued to both delight and disappoint in equal measure during the trip, however. On one hand, the small size and swiveling screen made it perfect for enjoying on the long plane ride, and the machine was great for our presentations. One small issue came up in that while the remote control could run our PowerPoint presentation, the angle of the machine made it impossible to get line-of-sight to the infrared receiver. HP should really consider a radio for future iterations of the remote, or just make it Bluetooth.

Sadly, while I loved watching movies on the machine while flying, the batteries, even the extended battery, just weren't up to the task. I was lucky if I could squeeze just about two hours out of either of them, and then only by lowering the brightness to the point where I could hardly watch the screen. (Having to switch the batteries out was a pain as well.) It's worth noting that running the movies as files off the hard drive might have been a factor, but I'd think it would be better than having a second spindle (the DVD drive) running. The touchscreen did make controlling the movies a breeze, and the machine definitely attracted attention from people who saw it on the plane.

Overall, I like the machine a fair amount. Would I buy it? If HP added an active digitizer, I'd probably buy it in a heartbeat. Other nice-to-haves would be a DVD drive bay battery option for those longer flights, a bluetooth remote, and a better amplifier for the headphone jacks (it was hard to hear the movies, even with noise-cancelling headphones). But I think that for many people, especially those not looking for a perfect ink experience, this is a great alternative to something like a UMPC, and a very attractive and capable machine.

Chris Aarons Leaves AMD

2007-04-17T12:27:00.000-07:00

I'm a little late to the going-away party, but suffice it to say that I was thrilled when I heard that Chris Aarons was leaving AMD. Chris and I haven't worked together much (the HP TX1000 I currently have on loan was orchestrated by Chris), but the few conversations I've had with him proved to me that Chris is a man that "gets it" (to borrow Andru's wording).

Chris is starting his own "word of mouth" marketing company called "Buzz Corps". It sounds like a very exciting time for Chris, and he's going to be amazingly successful. I can't see how he won't. Companies need to understand that marketing changed into a collaborative process while they weren't looking, and no one can communicate that better than Chris. What's really funny is that it was one of Chris' "mistakes" (the free laptop debacle that was part of Vanishing Point) that proved both his own value and the message he was trying to send.

Congratulations, Chris, on the new adventure you're headed out on, and next time you're in Seattle, give me a ring!

WASL Woes

2007-04-16T07:18:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of discussion today about ways to fix the WASL, a standardized test that students in Washington State have to take in order to be promoted to new grades or even graduate high school. The test is being taken today, so the discussion today is even more intense than usual. For those of you unfamiliar with the discussion, here's a quick recap ...

It's "discovered" that students in Washington schools are graduating without basic skills.
The blame is put on the teachers for "failing" these students.
To provide accountability, a "high-stakes" test is devised that will give a quantifiable way to determine if kids are learning what they need to learn.
In its first few years, more and more students are failing the WASL exam, despite teachers spending an inordinate amount of time teaching to the exam.
The proposed solution? Waive the more difficult parts of the exam for a few years.

Now, if you got lost in the logic there towards the end of that recap, so did I. It's absolutely asinine that this is way they've decided to solve the problem in the short term.

Look, the problem isn't the exam. Having an exam that can quantifiably determine if a kid is prepared for real life is a good thing, so long as you control for kids that suffer from test anxiety. (A fair amount of that anxiety comes from knowing that you won't do well, which is a whole separate issue.) The problem is that the burden is put on the teachers, and relatively little on the students and/or parents, and that they feel that burden too late to really do anything. It's a cumulative exam, and you can't catch a student up on five years of learning in just a month or two.

By waiving parts of the exam, it suggests that the problem is with the exam. It isn't. The problem is that the WASL comes all at once, and not at the end of every year. Teachers should never have been given the authority to promote a student past a grade without the skills they were supposed to have learned, dodging responsibility for those failing students. Break the WASL up into individual exams, and administer them at the end of every school year, and if a student fails, you can see what they failed on and put them in a summer school class to reinforce those particular skills. If they can't pass the WASL by the end of the summer, the student is held back. I'm sure that my solution would be a fairly expensive one, but that could probably be mitigated with logistics and technology. The important thing is to put the focus back where it should be, which really isn't teacher accountability but on whether or not our kids are learning anything.

More TX1000 Feedback Coming ...

2007-04-12T12:11:00.000-07:00

I've written a fair amount about the TX1000 that I have on loan from HP (through AMD), and there's even more on the way. I'm heading out to Orlando next week on my first ever flight on Southwest, and I'm curious to see how the batteries (they provided two) hold up to a non-stop, cross-country flight in the cramped Southwest confines. I've loaded up some music and movies, and with two headphone jacks, I'll even be able to share it with one of my travelling companions.

Reading back over some of my impressions, it strikes me that I might have been a bit harsh on the Tablet features of this particular unit. Let me just say that the Tablet features all work, and for someone who's never used a Tablet PC before, they would likely not have the same issues that I've had with it. That said, if you have experience with an active digitizer in a Tablet PC, or if you're primarily looking at the machine as a way to add ink to documents or to take ink based notes, the experience is sub-par.

Most of my Tableteering comes by way of Microsoft OneNote, which is an absolutely fantastic note taking application. The big advantage for me is the ability to have all of my documents, notes, research, web links, etc ... all catalogued in one location, and be able to search through it all. In order for OneNote to be truly useful, however, you really need to be able to write into it as effortlessly as you would a regular notepad, and that just isn't happening for me on this machine.

It's only my opinion, but I still believe that the Tablet functionality is a by-product of having a screen that turns around (bringing the screen closer to you for watching video) and a touchscreen (for easy media accessibility with the screen turned around), and that it was never really intended to be a selling feature. That's fine, and if you treat the added features as a bonus, you won't be disappointed.

That aside, my trip next week won't have me needing to take a bunch of notes. I'll be using it primarily for web research and for giving a short presentation in close quarters, and it'll be interesting to see how it does in that capacity. I expect that being able to turn the screen towards the evaluators will be very helpful. I don't know yet if the included remote control will be able to run Powerpoint, but I'm hoping it will ... it'll be one less thing to bring with me. I might even try Vongo a bit and see how it fares. Edit: Maybe I won't try Vongo after all ...

Nearly forgot, I promised some feedback from my wife, and here it is ...

It's a nice machine, but the screen is too small.

I finally got her to elaborate (sometimes you have to drag opinions out of her), and she said that while she really liked the overall size and weight of it, some of the web games that she likes to play had elements that were too small to see clearly. She likes the layout of the keyboard far more than my current tablet, but like me, didn't like how difficult it was to get an ink stroke out of the tablet. She likes the funny sculpted trackpad, but found the mouse buttons to hard to hit by feel. She thinks that the texture of the trackpad desensitizes you to being able to easily find the buttons by feel (and she doesn't like to just tap the trackpad). All in all, she'd have probabaly bought the machine after her experience, but not for the features HP was trying to sell it on.

Yeah, once you get her talking a bit, she does OK. :)

I don't have a problem with the screen size/resolution like she does, but then again, I have perfect eyesight and she doesn't. I hate the trackpad intensely, and really miss my like track stick nubbin thing. I do think that her insight about buying the machine for purposes other than HPs intent are pretty interesting though. As a marketing guy, I had felt that the machine was sort of at odds with its positioning, and that statement from Annie made me realize that it was true ... there's a market for this machine but it's not the one HP might think it is.

Who Killed JFK? LBJ.

2007-04-12T07:13:00.000-07:00

According to a story in Rolling Stone (who seems to be getting a fair amount of newsy exclusives lately), E. Howard Hunt has fingered Lyndon B. Johnson as the orchestrator of the Kennedy assasination.

This entire possibility with all of the details had been speculated about before, but if there was one person who would have been in a position to be in the know, it was Hunt. I haven't decided whether or not to beleive this story or not, but it's certainly compelling.

Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 Impressions

2007-04-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

Sweet Mother of Pearl ... what is it with companies and these ridiculously long product names. Let me tell you, there's a reason why "Flickr" is popular, and it's probably because it's easy to say.

Now that I've gotten this out of the way, I got a box of goodies from Microsoft the other day. Included in the box were a couple of cameras for Windows Live Messenger that I'm going to put to use over the next couple of weeks (especially while I'm in Orlando in April), but the one that has been the biggest surprise was Microsoft's new ergonomic desktop mouse.

Strangely enough, it wasn't that long ago that Microsoft's mice were considered to be the most ergonomic that you could get, but in reality, while they were more comfortable to hold, they were never truly ergonomic. I've been using computers from a young age, and as a result, I have a fair amount of RSI built up in my wrists, mostly the right wrist. I can't use a non-ergonomic keyboard for long without experiencing pain, and that's why although I've tested a great many keyboards in the past, I keep coming back to Microsoft's Natural series of keyboards. Finally, they put a mouse through the same ergonomic design process as their keyboards and what came out was one of the goofiest looking mice ever made.

The Natural Mouse (and that's all I'm calling it, thankyouverymuch) looks a lot like a ball sitting on your desk. The flat edge is smaller in width than the rest of the mouse, which widens out for your thumb and palm to rest on. Speaking of your thumb, that's one of the first things people will notice about the mouse ... it has a thumb rest. Your right hand (sorry, this mouse is for righties only) is sort of hanging off at an angle, which will feel strange for a while. In fact, everyone I've handed the mouse has said how weird it feels. That doesn't go away when you actually start trying to do work with it; the mouse feels like it's moving at angles, and that's because you haven't adjusted to it yet. Just like the Natural Keyboards, an adjustment period is needed. Thankfully, it's less of an adjustment than the keyboard, you simply need to think of mousing as moving your arm and not your hand. Once you make that transition (it took me only a day), you'll be moving as precisely as ever.

In just a couple of days, I've noticed that I haven't had any pain or numbness in my right wrist and arm, which I normally feel towards the end of a long mousing session. This is because your wrist is now on it's side when resting on the desk, not the unprotected bottom compressing the nerves. OK, so I'm playing doctor here a bit and I have no clue whether this is technically accurate, but suffice it to say that it works. Other than that obvious benefit, the mouse is functionally equivalent to the standard Wireless Laser Mouse 6000, with the notable addition of a battery life indicator on the mouse itself, which sadly, can't be seen when you're holding the mouse..

I want to give it a few more weeks and see how things go, but so far, I'm a big fan of this mouse. I did notice that the driver has specifications for a 7000 series Natural Mouse as well, but I haven't heard anything about it or what the differences might be. Curious.

Update on the HP TX1000

2007-03-29T07:14:00.000-07:00

Tuesday was my first day of classes of my last quarter at the UW. I took HP's new machine to class and received a lot of interested questions from people, which was cool, but the way I grabbed their attention wasn't exactly ideal. Most people in a class won't even notice that you're writing on your laptop screen over the course of the class, but when you "break" the screen to put it in tablet mode, that will usually attract a few glances. Although in my case, I was pulling the screen back up because I just couldn't stand to keep trying to write on it.

Since the TX1000 is using a touchscreen rather than an active digitizer like my Tecra M4, HP had to turn the touchscreen sensitivity way down to compensate for the tendency for you to rest your hand on the screen while you write. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that you have to use a significant amount of pressure to get a smooth, unbroken stroke. The effort required to do this is not insignificant. Unfortunately, when you're trying to multitask during a class (especially late classes when you're pretty tired), you have to put as much effort as possible into thinking about the class and not thinking about writing. While the HP rep that I talked to last week said that it only took him a couple of hours to adjust, I'm finding it much more difficult. So sadly, I've gone back to my Tecra M4 for the time being.

This isn't to say that the TX1000 isn't great in every other regard, quite to the contrary, it's a great little machine. To make sure that you get a fair representation of the machine, I've decided to try something new: I gave it to my wife.

That in itself is a bit of a funny story. When I told her that HP was sending me this laptop to review, the first words out of her mouth were, "Goody! Now I get a laptop." Then I explained that it wasn't really going to happen that way. "So what, you get all the laptops and I get no laptops?" (I can always tell when she's irritated, but still playing with me, because she'll use just atrocious grammar.) "Yes, sweetheart, that's exactly what that means." So when I told her she was going to get a week or so to play with the HP, she was pretty excited. Maybe I'll even let her make a blog post to two about it ... we'll see how it goes.

One last note: in my conversation with HP a few days ago, I asked why they didn't include both digitizers (active and passive) in the machine. They said it was a cost issue, but when I asked them about thier target market, it seems to be targeted at segments that wouldn't be as price sensitive, so I'm not sure that I buy the explanation. Regardless, it seems that Annie is closer to the sort of person that they want to approach with the machine, so her feedback should be interesting. I know that she absolutely loves the size, and I don't know that she'd care so much about the touchscreen being less than ideal for writing, but we'll see how it fares with her under more strenuous use.

Oh My God of War II

2007-03-26T15:41:00.000-07:00

I finally talked the wife into letting me get a new game as a present for making Dean's List again last quarter. After much hemming and hawing, I finally chose God of War II for my dusty PS2, since the praise heaped upon the title has reached near epidemic proportions. Not only did my lovely wife let me get the game, she (get this) bought it for me. Managed to get the last copy at Fred Meyer, too. She's the bestest wife ever!

I managed to hold off playing it for approximately 45 whole minutes (I was watching Planet Earth on Discovery) before getting my hack and slash on. The game is every bit as epic as the press would have you believe, and it's not at all an understatement to say that you'll be jabbing your twin swords into the eye of a Collossus inside of 15 minutes flat. The cinematics are also quite amazing, and it's possible that I might include this game in a project I'm working on about Video Games as Art for the UW. Not only is the art direction superb (the camera alone deserves some sort of award), but the game does a great job of conveying emotion.

My wife was half-stunned, half amused by the sex minigame and relative plethora of nudity to be found in even the game's first few hours. Nothing says "mature game" like nipples and ass-crack, I suppose. Still don't think I could tempt her into picking up the controller, though. She might like to watch it, but there's enough of a leap between watching and playing that I don't think she'd ever traverse the gap.

The only thing that would have made this game perfect? Achievements. Damn the Gods for making this game a Sony exclusive!

Battlestar Galactica Season Finale Mindfrak ...

2007-03-26T12:37:00.000-07:00

The following post is going to discuss the season finale of Battlestar Galactica. If you haven't watched it yet, stop reading this and go watch it! There are some massive spoilers ahead ...

So the mystery of the music in the ship was solved, and what an amazing mystery it was! It turns out that Chief, Saul, Sam and Tori are all Cylons! That's four of the final five, and with the return of Starbuck, it seems that she could be the fifth. The final season (not to be seen until January 2008!) is going to be a barn-burner, that's for sure.

There was also something interesting happening with Roslin, Sharon, and Caprica, as it turns out that they're all sharing the concert hall visions. Perhaps even Hera as well, Sharon's half-Cylon, half-Human hybrid baby. The visions center on Hera, and we've been told that she's very important, but this latest revelation just confused the hell out of me. I could understand Hera's importance if she were the only hybrid, but if the Chief is a Cylon ... that means his baby is a hybrid too! Plot hole, or important development? I'm not entirely sure.

Where does the show go from here? The "Caprica" spin-off has been shelved, and the word is that Season Four will be the last. Given that they appear to be very close to Earth now, it sounds like that's the case. But there's one more adventure in store for us before next winter ... there's a BSG movie coming in the fall that will focus on the Pegasus, but also adding one more piece to the puzzle for the new season. I can hardly wait!

More Impressions of the TX1000

2007-03-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

The more I work with the HP Pavilion TX 1000 Entertainment Notebook (and I just now decided that I'm never typing all of that again) the more I realize that despite having tablet functionality, this machine was not designed for me. This is not a "Tablet PC", and I think that the lack of Tablet PC branding on the machine should have been a huge clue. In fact, I'm seriously debating at this point if I should even try using this machine at school next week. You can't write on it ... well, you can in a technical sense, but it requires so much effort to write anything legibly enough that it just isn't worth it. Ever try to write on the screen of a PDA? It's exactly the same thing.

It's clear now that HP knew this, and thus the "Entertainment Notebook" branding. So what exactly is that supposed to mean? It means that it's designed primarily as a computer you can watch movies on. So why can you turn the screen? Because it's actually easier to watch a movie when you swivel the screen and put the keyboard behind the machine. The speakers are part of the screen, so they'll always be posititioned correctly for you. Combine that with dedicated DVD playback buttons, DivX codec preinstalled, and a free trial for Vongo, and you've got a capable entertainment device. So what's up with the touchscreen and stylus? Well, it looks like the touchscreen is for ease of video watching when you've got the screen turned, and the stylus is for fingerprint prevention. The only problem is that the touchscreen turned on the Tablet features and that causes a bit of an expectations issue for someone familiar with a Tablet PC feature set.

I'm going to talk with an HP representative later today, and will probably adjust my review plan to focus more on the entertainment features, but that will depend on whether or not HP really wants to position this machine in the Tablet space or not.

The TX1000 is here!

2007-03-20T15:17:00.000-07:00

Despite a minor shipping snafu (involving FedEx leaving the package at the completely wrong address, and about two hours spent trying to track it down), I've got the HP Pavilion TX1000 Entertainment Notebook sitting here in my hot little hands. I should have some unboxing shots later (when I get home and can re-create the experience for you), but for now, here are some initial impressions ...

First, this thing is tiny! It's about the size of a small folio (about the same footprint as an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper), although fairly dense. The screen is touch only, which means that it does not have an active digitizer. The extended 6-cell battery gives it a nice little handle by which you can grip the machine in portrait mode. The screen resolution is lower than I'd like (1280x800), but in a 12" size it's fairly serviceable.

The machine is covered in what HP is calling their "Imprint Finish". They should call it the "Fingerprint Finish" because it'll be covered in them before too long. Note to HP ... when you have a device with a fingerprint reader and a touchscreen, expect to combat prints, not enhance them. Seriously though, the keyboard area has this interesting pattern embedded under a clear coat and it's fairly attractive. Perhaps not so much to dissuade potential Mac buyers, but it is attractive with the lid open or closed.

What isn't attractive, however, is the ridiculous amount of pre-installed utilities and software. Call it "scumware", "bloatware", whatever you want, but there's a lot of it. How much? On first boot, there were 16 shortcuts on the desktop, not counting the Recycle Bin, which is the only icon put there by default in Vista. The rest were links to MSN, eBay, Vongo, Rhapsody, and a bunch of HP utilities. But that's not all! You also get two completely redundant icons for pointing devices and sound utilities in the tray, things that Vista does better by default. I'm really not a fan of this trend towards tons of pre-installed crap, and I wish manufacturers would simply include a disc that will allow customers to install it if they wish. Hell, label it as a "must install" if you want, but allow us savvy users to opt out!

Using a finger swipe to login is pretty slick, and should be especially useful in portrait mode. What isn't so useful is the touchscreen, however. It requires a very firm press to activate, and writing on it seems like it will be uncomfortable as a result. I'm going to reserve judgement until I've really put it through it's paces, but so far, I'm not overly impressed with that feature. That said, this device is supposed to be primarily an "entertainment" machine, and the datasheet highlights the swivelling screen as great for DVD watching, which I can confirm that it is. Heck, don't even bother with DVDs ... the 160GB drive has tons of space for downloaded movies as well, so use the weightsaver and save some battery life at the same time!

Another thing that strikes me as being sub-optimal for a user expecting a tablet ... the microphones are placed flanking the webcam on the top of the screen. Ideal for video conferencing (does anyone even do that?) but not at all where you'd want them if you want to record a lecture and write on the screen, since your left arm (if you're left-handed) will be rubbing all over them the entire time. I'd love to see a tablet manufacturer have a second set of redundant microphones on the left side of the machine (which becomes the top in portrait mode) for just such an occasion. Even one on each side of the screen would be sufficient.

That's all I've got time for right now, but I'll be back with more impressions as I put the device through the ringer and see what happens. If there's anything you want to know, leave a comment and I'll be sure to answer your questions for you!

Specs on this model

AMD Turion64 X2 (2GHz)
12.1 WXGA (1280x800) "High Definition" BrightView Widescreen with Integrated Touch-Screen
160GB 5400RPM Hard Drive
2GB DDR2 SDRAM
802.11a/b/g Wireless LAN + Bluetooth
Lightscribe Super Multi 8X DVD+/-RW with Double Layer Support
6-Cell Lithium Ion Battery (plus optional 4 Cell battery)
HP QuickPlay
HP Mini Remote Control
5-1 Digital Media Reader
ExpressCard/34 PC Card Slot
Nvidia GeForce Go 6150 with shared graphics memory
Windows Vista Home Premium
1.3 megapixel Webcam
Fingerprint Reader
Stereo Earbuds (2 pairs!?)

HP Pavilion TX1000 Entertainment Notebook PC en route ...

2007-03-19T09:03:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since I got a new piece of hardware to play with, and very shortly I should receive a new HP TX1000 Tablet PC (which oddly bears no Tablet PC branding) to run through the ringer. Big shout out to Chris at AMD who worked out the details for me, after hearing what a big fan I was of the Tablet concept.

I'll give you a bit of the "out of the box experience" in terms of how the pre-load runs, then I'll load it up with my standard config and see if it holds up to my work and school schedules. I love my Tecra M4, and it'll be interesting to see how a smaller unit puts up with me. This won't be your typical review, but it'll give you an pretty good picture of how this machine lives up to the expectations of a serious tablet user.

The new machine should be here sometime today, so expect some first impressions this afternoon. I've heard Andru over at GearLive should be getting an identical unit around the same time, and I'm sure he'll have all the great unboxing shots and that sort of thing, but maybe I'll have a few as well.

Fair Disclosure: This laptop is a "loaner" and will not be kept by me unless I pay for it in some fashion, unlike the "free" laptops some bloggers received a few months back when Vanishing Point began. Should this change, for example, HP decides to let me keep it (highly unlikely), I will make a full post disclosing the fact.

Update: The Tablet is actually arriving Tuesday morning, so the first impressions will be delayed a pit. Patience, grasshopper.

Is 'Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader' Rigged?

2007-03-14T10:54:00.000-07:00

Before I start, let me preface by saying that I have the weakest of "evidence" to go on, and that I'm truly grasping at straws here. And yet, I just can't shake the feeling that the newest game show hit, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader is rigged.

The realization crushed my spirits during the last episode, the one with the question about how many cups there were in five and a half gallons. At least, I think that was the question. It was called a "measurements" question, but really, it was just basic math. If you knew how many cups there were in a gallon (16), then it was just a matter of doing the math properly (multiply by 5.5 or by five and then add eight).

Of course, the correct answer was 88. There were a variety of ways to get to it, but when the adorable 5th grader Alana revealed her answer as 89, I was flummoxed. How on earth could she have been off by one!? I worked through the math in my head, a variety of ways, and finally determined that she simply couldn't have been off by one. Yes, she's a fifth grader, but if she knew the number of cups in a gallon (and she clearly did), then no math could have given her THAT answer. She could still have been wrong, sure, but not with that answer. Hell, there wasn't even a way that I could find that would have arrived at 89 if she had the wrong number of cups in a gallon.

So what happened? Sure, Alana is the youngest of the group of kids (she's only 9 ... you could never tell by how tall she is), but considering that the kids are coached ahead of time--they get multi-subject workbooks that many of the questions are derived from--so it makes sense that they'd be right more often than wrong. But again, how on earth could she have gotten that answer at all?

Unless she was told to miss it.

That was the only conclusion to which I could come. The kids are coached, but maybe they are also coached to get the "tough" questions wrong on occasion. I'm sure that there's some sort of statistical analysis one could do on what the likely wrong answers would be to that question, based on the type of math or assumption error and I'd be stunned if the answer "89" showed up on any of them. (Many multiple-choice exams are written with this in mind ... the wrong answers are "correct" if you made the right kind of mistake.) And when that happens, that's where teachers would look for cheating ... the outliers. What is the probability that a student will get this question right if they've gotten previous related questions wrong? Of course, here we'd be looking for the opposite ... what is the likelihood that Alana would miss this question given her previous answers on measurements questions, and if so, the likelihood that it would be such a frickin' odd answer?

The show is rigged in other ways too. For example, they'd never put me on the show. I'd never get past the initial interviews or exams, because I'd probably blow through them. The people they cast (and these shows are definitely cast, unlike Jeopardy!) may have had great grades, but that doesn't mean that they retained the information past the initial exams or papers. People who know me will tell you that while my grades may not be stellar, I do very well with concepts as opposed to rote memorization. So they quiz potential contestants, and figure out which personalities will work on the show and how likely they are to win.

By the way, if anyone is going on the show, and wants to know how to give yourself the best shot possible, here's what I would do, assuming the game was on the up-and-up:

Start with the 5th grade questions. While the show's name may lead you to believe that these will be the toughest, if you consider the rate at which you lose retained information, you might be better off going with questions more recent than 1st grade.

Don't use your "helpers". They may seem like they're there to bail you out, and they are--sort of. The worst thing you could do is use them early. What you should do is answer the questions to the best of your ability; you'll get one free pass in the form of the SAVE, where the fifth grader you chose got the answer right if you missed it. Next, use the Peek. Knowing a possible answer should allow you to puzzle out how they got the answer. However, this could also bias you towards a wrong answer. Finally, use the Copy, because it's pretty much just up to the 5th grader at that point and should be the least-reliable helper.

Again, this is all assuming that the kids haven't been coached to "throw the game" once in a while. If they have, all the more reason to avoid using the helpers at all if you can.

UW DEC Cleans Up At State!

2007-02-24T21:03:00.000-08:00

After the great time our Delta Epsilon Chi chapter had at the Fall Occupational Leadership Conference in Leavenworth, we were all excited to go back this weekend for the State Career Development Conference. Out of the eight members we brought to the conference, everyone placed either first or second in their event. Our chapter president and myself placed second in International Marketing, and we and the rest of our chapter will be going to Orlando for the International Career Development Conference this April.

Go Huskies!

Studio 60 Devolves into West Wing Reruns

2007-02-20T07:22:00.000-08:00

I'm a Sorkin fan. I thought The West Wing was one of the best shows on TV while Sorkin was still running it, and a great deal of my knowledge of how our government works (or should ideally work) came from that show. One of the things I've liked about Studio 60 was just how much like The West Wing it was in pacing and writing style. Even some of the actors were the same, people who've proven to be able to handle the way Sorkin writes. Hell, the title of the episode is in the same font.

Studio 60 stopped being similar to The West Wing last night, and practically turned into a rerun.

In the first five minutes of last night's episode, Sorkin managed to reuse at least three different lines that I clearly remember from The West Wing. First, the phrase "we're nowhere", which was used frequently in Sorkin's White House to describe the state when all of your progress had just brought you right back to square one. Next, when Matt Albie tells his assistant to go home, and she says, "I go home when you go home," it was lifted right out of an identical conversation between Josh Lyman (played by Bradley Whitford, also on Studio 60) and Donna Moss.

And in case you didn't remember where those had come from, Sorkin reminds you right before the opening titles ... when the lawyer in a sexual harassment suit walks into the room declaring that she was from GaugeWhitney ... the same fictional law firm that Rob Lowe's character was from on The West Wing.

I really don't think it's possible for someone to rip themselves off. They're still your own original ideas, you just had them earlier. But Sorkin certainly pushed that line, and he'll be lucky if he didn't just push this show off the network schedule in the process

Troup Fails to Advance on Idol

2007-02-14T07:52:00.000-08:00

I haven't had a chance to watch the show yet, but online reports suggest that the first Hollywood round of American Idol: Season 6 was somewhat haphazard and most certainly confusing. Several people who forgot their lyrics were allowed to advance, meanwhile, even Robyn Troup's performance at the Grammy's two nights previous couldn't help her get to the next round (Idol was taped before Troup performed Sunday).

Blake Lewis, however, is all over local news and radio. Hailing from Bothell, WA (my own hometown), Lewis' beatbox skills and a well-orchestrated performance (I've heard this performance about seven times already this morning) propelled his group into the next round. The actual singing wasn't great, but they did something memorabe, illustrating that sometimes it's not enough to be able to sing, you need to put on a show as well. This is something Taylor Hicks had down pat.

The big complaint is that with only an hour, the judge's decisions didn't always seem to make sense, and some of the rationale may have been left on the cutting room floor. Either that, or it's possible that they're simply preparing for the eventuality that they need to have an even number of men and women (a ridiculous requirement anyway). Seemingly talented women are going home, while Sundance Head (male) got a pass after two lackluster performances (including forgetting the words in the group sing). In fact, Sundance advanced, and Robyn Troup (who was in the same group as Head) went home in time to sing with Justin Timberlake.

Sounds like it'll be a curious season, as the judges might be looking for something specific in their finalists this year.

DreamScene and DeskScapes Released

2007-02-13T12:53:00.000-08:00

Windows Vista Ultimate users are getting a preview release of Windows DreamScene today, with an animated Aurora background included. Any WMV or MPEG2 file can be used as a background, though there are some limitations. I expect that the community will rally and create some great looking content around this idea very soon.

One note ... MPEG2 files tend to perform better than WMV files, due to CPU requirements. However, unlike what is being spread by Stardock, it's not a pure performance bonus, as you're trading CPU time for GPU time. If you're using a laptop, expect to see lower battery life and more heat generated when using DreamScene.

Also released today is the companion to DreamScene ... Stardock's DeskScapes product. Basically a wrapper around a DreamScene MPEG2 file, these can be scripted to transition between videos based on the time of day or other critera, and can even support true 3D content. There is no dynamic content available yet, but this is also a product I can see the community rallying behind.

DeskScapes is free, and if you install it, be sure to get the Nebula theme. All that moves on this background are the stars pulsating; it's very subtle and soothing. I'd like to see more DeskScapes like this one, and not the incredibly busy ones I can anticipate seeing in the next few weeks.

American Idol Season 6 ... Over Before It Began?

2007-02-12T11:30:00.000-08:00

Anyone who knows me has probably heard me rail on the "parade of mediocrity" that is the audition process for American Idol. I'm just the kind of guy that thinks that to get your fifteen minutes of fame, you must be able to do something significant to contribute to ... something. Looking like a jackass and not being able to sing don't count.

But that's neither here nor there. Tomorrow starts the first round of hopefuls that were talented enough to get to the Hollywood stage of the competition, and this is normally where I start paying attention to the show. Idol has the ability to make stars out of even non-winners, and in fact, not winning could end up being a major opportunity for you. Kelly Clarkson notwithstanding, some of the biggest names to come out of Idol are Jennifer Hudson and her meteoric rise to capture a Golden Globe and probably an Oscar, and Season 5 finalist Chris Daughtry who's debut album just went platinum (and is a great rock album).

Which led me to have an interesting conversation with my wife last night. How is it that the audience has been getting it so wrong, since they are the ones making this decision? The voting should be roughly analogous to how sales should go, right? And yet, winner Ruben Studdard falters while Clay Aiken makes out like a bandit. What's going on?

My hypothesis is that only Season 1 of Idol was "pure", meaning that the producers and the judges themselves didn't try to steer the voting too much. In later seasons, the producers and judges learned to distrust the voting audience and tried to find ways to steer votes. Simon Cowell in particular makes his attempts to guide the voting rather transparent ... after all, he's the one with money on the line when he has to package the winner for a mass audience.

Unfortunately, the agenda with the vote steering could be completely unrelated to who will be the bigger star, or the most marketable personality. Anyone putting on a TV show knows that you need to deliver a story, and the better the story, the better the ratings. So how do you do that with a reality TV show? That's where all the "back home" and "behind the scenes" vignettes come into play. How else can you explain the inexplicable win of Fantasia Barrino, other than that the audience bought into her story and wanted to reward her. One might even suggest that there were other reasons too, such as wanting to add more diversity to the list of winners. It probably doesn't go quite that far, but you never know. The vote steering can have the opposite effect at times, however. If enoguh fans of someone like, say, Jennifer Hudson, can be steered to another choice (and if they feel she's safe enough to continue), you end up with the results "shocker" that we're all so familiar with.

At the start of the finals round of Season 5, I told my wife that who will win American Idol that year depended on what kind of album Cowell wanted to produce. If he wanted another true pop star, it would be Kat McPhee. If he wanted to try his hand with a rock album, Chris Daughtry was a lock. Of course the joke was on me (and Cowell) as it turns out that Taylor Hicks was an unstoppable force from Day 1. Of course, Daughtry and McPhee both have hits on Top 40 radio right now, and I've yet to hear anything memorable from Hicks (though that could be due to the stations I listen to). Hicks win was partly due to a strong fan base back home (and loyal voters), and partly because of how many votes he was able to pick up from departing finalists. But arguably, the fans had their minds made up about Hicks from the get-go adding more to the argument over how "pure" the contest really is.

That brings us to Season 6, and the story this time around is that one of the Hollywood Hopefuls has a gigantic and arguably unfair advantage going into the voting (should she make it past the semi-finals). Robyn Troup has confirmed that she auditioned for Season 6, but could not say if she made it to Hollywood ... which of course means that she did (her NDA wouldn't bar her from saying that she didn't make it). If you don't know who Robyn Troup is, you probably didn't watch the Grammy Awards last night, where Robyn won a contest to sing with Justin Timberlake on the show and wowed the audience. If Robyn makes it to the Final 12, what are the odds that she won't win the entire thing? I suppose that depends on the story they want to tell, or if the audience has their mind made up at the beginning.

Addendum: As I've mentioned in previous blog posts, the producers have ways to steer the voting, from lighting and song availability in the "genre weeks", down to who performs first and last. If you think that the performance order is random, you're kidding yourself ... it's no surprise when one of the best performances of each week is the last to perform. "Send the audience home happy" is one of the old adages of showmanship. When they get to the finals, pay close attention to background and lighting for the performances, and see if you can pick out who the people behind the show want to win.

Also, as commenter Sue mentions below, I failed to acknowledge that Hicks' album went platinum one month after its release, though I credit my omission to the fact that it did so before releasing a single, which is likely why I hadn't heard anything from it on the radio. And to clarify, I'm not pointing out Hicks as an example of the fans getting it wrong, but more of a point to show that the judges failed to sway the fans away from Hicks. I've updated the post with a link to my blog post from last season explaining how DialIdol.com had Hicks picked to win by a landslide.

How to fix RSS

2007-02-10T09:12:00.000-08:00

I love RSS, but it certainly isn't perfect. Far from it, in fact. And Robert Scoble is starting to realize this.

I was complaining about this problem of finding the source of a story at the first two Seattle MindCamps. As a journalist, I wanted to have a "smart" RSS reader. One that could figure out what the theme of a story was, track links back in those stories back to the original source. Of course, it wasn't just about links, you'd have to look at timestamps as well.

It finally occured to me that RSS really needs to support sources in the root code, but even that alone isn't the answer. The answer, like a great many things in the Web 2.0 world, is crowdsourcing.

I should be able to see two stories in my RSS reader, see that one was the source and that the others were all derivitave, and manually link it back. Something like a drag-and-drop interface that would let me insert a secondary story into what I thought it was related to. That information should be uploaded back to a server, which then pushes that information back out to others using the same service. This serves two missions ... you can then pass that information on to others, so they know where the story came from. Second, that allows people to see additional stories that might not be in their RSS feeds, which is my other main gripe with RSS ... the echo chamber. RSS's big flaw is that you have to manually sign up for feeds, but you have no way of easily finding other feeds outside of your own field of vision while inside the reader. Having what are essentially "suggestions", similar to how TiVo does it, gets around that problem, and linking it to a source story seems like an elegant way of integrating it.

If this sort of feature was implemented in Google Reader, it would instantly crush other online RSS readers.

What's AMD Up To? Barcelona.

2007-02-10T08:37:00.000-08:00

So it's been driving me crazy for a while now. AMD took on a relatively high-profile when they partnered with Microsoft for the Windows Vista launch. Smart move, strategically, especially since Intel has their fingers in other pies on the Apple side of things. What was really confusing me was ... why? AMD really wasn't that big anymore when it comes to mindshare.

Talking with Chris Aarons, he said a bit about their 4x4 initiative, and how important it was to get the enthusiasts involved. This was in response to my very frank question about exactly what the heck AMD is doing. They used to be the kings in the processor space, lauded for their fantastic gaming performance, when Intel took back the crown in a bloody coup and never looked back.

In many ways, the AMD hardware is still superior, especially in how dual-cores are handled, but Intel just keeps beating the pants off of them performance-wise. So when Chris mentioned 4x4, the first thing that came to mind is, "That's all well and good, but I can't afford that!" Turns out, Chris was keeping his cards closer to his chest than I thought.

So what exactly is AMD up to? It's called Barcelona, and it's a brand-new chip design for AMD. See, part of the problem with trying to innovate in the processor space is that you're tied to the current applications and operating systems that people expect will just plain work. AMD took a long, hard look at the x86 architecture, and tried to figure out what they could reinvent while maintaining compatability. Barcelona is the answer.

Essentially a quad-core Opteron chip, Barcelona raises the bar by boosting the SSE unit (Streaming SIMD Extensions) to 128bits ... doubling them in size. And there's four of them, one per core. The SSE unit is important because they're floating-point math units, which is where AMD used to really shine. According to Infoworld, floating point performance is improved by 80 pecent over the previous Opteron. Per Core. I can hear the hardcore gamers out there salivating now.

One of the other things that's becoming a hot topic is virtualization. My other big complaint to Chris was that it's all well and good to have all of this computing power, but my trusty 3.0Ghz Pentium 4 and old ATI X800XT run everything I need just fine. I even get decent scores in Vista. Why on earth would I need to buy anything else? Well, virtualization is supposedly the answer. Virtualization is the ability to run something similar to copies of your operating system (or other operating systems) in protected memory space.

Now, that sounds kind of boring, but think of it this way ... have you ever wanted to try out some piece of software, or play around with something in your computer, but you were afraid it would break everything? That's where virtualization comes in. When you end a virtual session, it just goes away. Poof. When you load it back up again, it goes right back where it was before you started the first time. Or you can save the session if you like the results. This may not be something that the average home user would need, but as a gamer, the idea of having my main computer running all of my productivity and creation apps, and running my games in a fully-optimized virtual machine is kind of compelling. Of course, no gamer in their right mind would do this, because performance is everything. That's where Barcelona comes in ... AMD added something called nesting paging tables, and essentially, it allows you to flip between these protected virtual machines as quickly and easily as you might change the channel on your TV. As a gamer, this means that I can continue using Windows Vista as my main operating system, and when I want to play games, either fire up another copy of Vista, or load up an optimized Windows XP session. That's cool.

That's not all AMD has in its bag of tricks. Power savings is a big concern as well. The faster computers get, the more power they want, and it was kind of sickening to hear that a top-of-the-line gaming machine today needs around a 600-watt power supply to feed the video cards and main processor. Part of the reason is the archaic way processors currently save on power ... they simply throttle down the entire chip. In a dual-core machine, this doesn't work because even if you're only using one core, the other has to run at the same speed. Barcelona improves on that by slowing down only the cores that are running idle, and it does it a lot faster. But they didn't stop there ... they can also throttle individual parts of each core, so only what's currently being used is running at full-speed. That's really incredible.

Last, but certainly not least, Barcelona gives each individual core it's own Level 2 cache (on-chip memory), while Intel is still spreading the cache across their cores. Right idea, but wrong place to do it. AMD figured that out, and added a Level 3 cache that does get spread across the cores, giving the chip a place to store information that any core can access quickly.

So OK, Chris ... you guys have got my attention again. If Barcelona performs as well as expected, it could open up a whole new world of software development, similar to how HyperThreading opened up the world to "content creation" applications like making movies, photo manipulation, and CD ripping by allowing you to do a lot of those tasks in the background.

This is going to be an interesting year.

How Did Peter Petrelli Regenerate?

2007-02-06T06:34:00.000-08:00

At the risk of spoiling part of last night's episode of Heroes, I felt like talking about it a bit, because this was a pivotal moment in the series that hints at many things to come. Namely, for the first time, Peter was able to use a power acquired from someone else, without being in the vicinity of the person.

So how did it happen? As we saw in the show last night, Mr. Invisible threw Peter off of the roof of The Artist's building, thinking that it would force Peter to fly. Instead, something more spectacular happened ... Peter crashed into the roof of a taxi. Peter explained his miraculous survival as having thought of The Cheerleader just before he landed, but I think there was more to it.

Claire's power is involuntary. She can't control whether or not she heals herself, it just happens. Similarly, once Peter acquired her power, he too gained an ability that was involuntary. So far, just about every other ability we've seen, The Politician's ability to fly, Hiro's ability to manipulate time, and even The Policeman's ability to read minds ... each of these has an element of control to it. Until Peter learned how to tap into these abilities, he wouldn't be able to control them. The manifestation of Claire's regeneration ability was that catalyst. (Not that this was the first time he's manifested a latent ability ... he's been channelling The Artist's ability to see the future for a while now, something that was originally an involuntary ability only manifesting when he was high.)

However, my theory is that this one event is actually that sets off the chain reaction leading up to the destruction of New York. Peter has already been around most of the Heroes at one point or another, and now knows how he can access those abilities, but lacks the necessary control. What is going to happen when he is reminded of Ted, The Nuclear Man ... the person that caused Peter's radiation sickness? Boom. Will that be the end of Peter if it happens? Of course not ... as we've learned by the lesson of Claire's Mom, it doesn't appear that you can be killed by the manifestation of your own ability. This is one of the things I love about this show ... they are establishing the ground rules by which the world operates, and they're letting you in on those rules piece by piece. Much like how The Sixth Sense stayed true to itself by operating within the bounds of strict rules, so too does Heroes. Sadly, Heroes is also doing a much better job of dishing out information that keeps you interested than Lost did in its last season (I hope tonight turns that trend around).

Something else just occurred to me as I was watching the show last night as well. Every Hero needs a Villian, and I think it's interesting that as far as we can tell, Peter and Sylar have the same ability but on opposite ends of the spectrum. Could this be another of the rules? Does each hero have a counterpart? Could this be why the show hinted at Jessica becoming a villian in the next episode? (Or did it? It looked like Matt Parkman was involved ...)

Of course, I haven't ruined all of the surprises in the show, so if you haven't watched it yet, make sure you do. In particular, be sure to check out the license plate on the car that Hiro's father gets into. That was a particularly good piece of geek lore.

How Do You Market to Enthusiasts?

2007-02-01T10:47:00.000-08:00

In my conversations with Chris over at AMD, he's displayed a keen understanding of how you handle marketing to the enthusiast set. Traditional marketing techniques don't work when you're talking about a group that Malcolm Gladwell would call "Mavens". They're the people that HATE walking into retail stores, because they frequently know more about a product than the people selling them.

How do you market to groups that know more than you do? Simple ... you don't. You have to find different ways to get them involved, get them engaged. Most importantly, it's going to go against everything marketing students (like myself) learn in school. You can't plaster your brand all over it, or it'll be seen as cheesy and fake. The experience needs to be ultra-high-involvement in order to keep their attention. And it needs to get them talking to everyone about it, as Mavens are wont to do.

This was something he mentioned to me on the phone today, as he casually reminded me that I forgot to mention AMD's involvement in the game in my last post (which has since been rectified). One of the best ways a company can "manage" something like Vanishing Point is to simply get out of the way. If you're doing your job right and creating an immersive and engaging experience ... don't worry about it. They'll figure out you're behind it. They always do.

Speaking of Vanishing Point and AMD, my interview with Chris, and the rest of the video from GearLive is posted at The Bleeding Edge. Check it out!

By the way, you'll see some pretty cool ice sculptures in the video. Regardless of anything you might hear on the Internets ... I absolutely did NOT lick the ice Vista logo.

Vanishing Point, LOKI Revealed ...

2007-01-31T13:37:00.000-08:00

Just got the final contact from L.O.K.I. I'll let you read it for yourself. But it doesn't look like AMD will be making a "SuperRob" Athlon any time soon. Pity.

Congratulations on a game well played, and thank you for helping us disappear.

You were not the first to guess our identity, but because you played our game, we want to tell you our secret.

There is no such person as Loki - or rather, she is four sisters who decided to be one extraordinary person.

Each of us has a unique talent:

Lorelei is our tinkerer. Clocks and counting, space and time: she is our genius.

Odessa is our performer, our actress and magician, the girl we send in to dazzle and charm. Odessa goes to meetings: Loki gets promoted. It's very convenient.

Kara is our reader. With a love of history and a photographic memory, she gives us access to any fact, figure, or event at a moment's notice.

Ivy is our spy. She's the girl you dont notice, the face you don't remember, and vanishing is what she does best. Ivy has gotten us out of more than one impossible situation.

Together, we have presented L.O.K.I. to the world. Our mask and super-hero, LOKI has allowed us each to be bigger than ourselves.

When we heard Microsoft and AMD were looking to give extraordinary prizes to exceptional people, we knew LOKI could never find a more perfect job. This, Odessa said, would be a trick we could never top. O, how we wanted this job! (And what clever, unfair, underhanded things we did to the other applicants to make sure we got it! But that's another story.) And once we got the job, we all agreed that Loki's greatest triumph would be her last.

We created the Vanishing Point to reward the smartest minds (and communities) on the planet - and still we underestimated you. We used our smarts and our guile, not to mention money and connections and countless hours of time - and still you humbled us. We knew the terrain and barely gave you a mapand that didn't stop you. We built puzzles that should have taken you days and you solved them in hours.

"Loki" is a genius: but you were far more brilliant. You were thought made fire. You were lightning.

Thank you for your work, your talent, and your dedication. It has been a privilege to witness: an honor and a delight.

For each of us to live, Loki had to die. Thank you, thank you beyond words for taking her to the Vanishing Point.

Lorelei
Odessa
Kara
Ivy

I will say that I'm stunned at the level of detail woven into the game. In retrospect, everything makes sense. Even back to the very first video, the clues were there. The candy wrappers on the table that were assumed to be an homage to 4orty2wo Entertainment were actually a clue after all. Six total chocolates, but only four eaten, all of different flavors. I also love that the game had a great payoff, not in terms of the prizes, but a satisfying ending delivered in a personal manner. Something that even games you pay for frequently get wrong. You're asking someone to do more than pay for the privilege of playing your game ... you're asking them to devote time and attention to existing in your world for a time, and that's not something you should take lightly. Companies like EA don't get that. AMD, on the other hand ... does.

The website now hints at a "sequel", but much like their other efforts for Microsoft, I'd be willing to bet that it'll be a new game for another major launch, mostly likely for Halo 3.

Vanishing Point Goes Out With a Bang

2007-01-28T17:14:00.000-08:00

Well, the live-blogging didn't go as I expected. It never works when I want it to. Oh well.

Microsoft threw what they told outsiders was a "Thank You, Seattle" event, and what the rest of us knew was the finale for Vanishing Point. They were easily some of the most spectacular fireworks I've ever seen, enhanced by the speculation of how the clues were imbedded in the display. After the show, Microsoft shuttled us off all Secret Squirrel-like (the busses had the windows covered in butcher paper) to Fremont Studios, where they had a relatively lavish party for the community. Plenty of laptops running Vista were on display, including one that not many people noticed ... a limited edition ASUS Tablet with a light-up Vista logo in the lid. Oh, it was a pretty, pretty machine, and I'd kill to get one.

While most of the party goers wandered the location convinced that there were more clues to be had, I took the opportunity to talk with some of the people involved with putting on the game. One of whom was Chris Aarons, the head of AMD's Community Relations department. We had a great conversation, and he's definitely someone what understands that technology buzz can be managed at a grass roots level. Eventually the conversation diverged into creating personalized experiences for consumers who are spending large sums of money on products. Why doesn't Porsche put a nameplate on the dash of their high-end cars that says that the car was designed specifically for the buyer? Why doesn't Dell do is on the high-end XPS products? It's low-cost and goes a long way towards building customer relationships as well as satisfaction and advocacy. Speaking of advocacy ... hey Chris, do you know where I can get one of those ASUS Tablets?! :)

Of course, before the in-depth marketing conversation with Chris, I was goaded by my buddy Andru into interviewing Chris on camera for The Bleeding Edge, where I asked Chris about Vanishing Point and the inscribed AMD chip prize. If I win, watch out for the special edition AMD Athlon 64 FX "SuperRob Edition" processor ... coming to a box near you!

When I got home, there were still puzzles to be solved, and the Neowin and Unfiction communities banded together again to break them down. Less than 24 hours later, we're headed down the road to immortality, but to get there, we have to figure out what Loki's name is. Didn't I already do that? Not exactly ... see, Loki isn't one person. She's FOUR distinct people, and you have to find the names of all of them. First person with the right answer wins.

What was my guess? Based on the clues given, I'm certain that the first three names are Lorelei, Odessa, and Kara. The last is somewhat murky, but I submitted Irene as my official answer sometime around 1PM Pacific. We'll see what happens. Regardless, I have over 1300 entries for the contest, so there's still the possibility that I'll be headed into space sometime in 2009. Either way, I'll have the distinction of being the first person to have figured out the prize, and that Loki was more than one person (though I thought she was twins).

My hat's off to the amazing and talented people at 4orty2wo that put together this fabulous contest for Microsoft. I can't wait to see what they do next.

Edit: Turns out that the final name was "Ivy", but I figured it out too late. Despite the website saying different, the winner was notified immediately. Also, they added clues after the fact, which I didn't know until it was too late. Somewhat unfair, really, but I'll live. :)

Cingular Giving Away 18 mo. Service With iPhone?

2007-01-25T10:36:00.000-08:00

Well, that's the rumor going around. And as a former wireless industry insider, I can tell you ... it just might be true.

First, there's been no mention of whether or not Cingular/AT&T is subsidizing the cost on the iPhone. If this story is true, than I would suspect that they are not, which allows them to give you "free" service to lock you into a contract. But here's the thing, they'll probably just give you the free basic phone service. Data? Messaging? Any other feature you'll want to make full use of the phone? Be prepared to pay.

Why do this? Well, the actual phone service isn't a high-margin deal for the "T" anyway. Data and text messages are far more profitable, so why not give away the phone service as a loss-leader?

Just wanted to throw that out there quickly. School is a bear this quarter, thus, my quietness. I'll probably blog a bit from the Vanishing Point event this weekend. I can live-blog it, so stay tuned! Maybe you'll even see stuff from the inside of the VIP party!

New, Cheap Lumines Live Content Wednesday

2007-01-18T11:09:00.000-08:00

Gotta give credit where credit is due ... Microsoft just announced that three new Lumines Live! packs would be available on Wednesday at a discounted price for a limited time (until Feb. 21). What would normally cost over 600 Microsoft Points, you'll be able to get the Puzzle Pack and VS. CPU Pack for just 100 Microsoft Points each. The Heavenly Star pack, basically a "skin" for the game, will be FREE.

For just 200 Microsoft Points, that will take a little of the sting out of feeling like I got screwed on the initial purchase. Maybe I can feel like I've purchased an entire game now. :)

Why Aren't Retailers Crying Foul Over Vista?

2007-01-18T08:41:00.000-08:00

One feature of the "upcoming" Windows Vista that has been getting a fair amount of the virtual ink is "Anytime Upgrade". Regardless of the version of Vista that you buy, you can upgrade directly through Microsoft to any higher version. On top of that, Microsoft has announced that you can now buy and download Vista online, and that Ultimate edition buys can buy up to two lower-cost Home Premium licenses for only $49 each.

Here's what I don't understand ... why aren't retailers super-pissed about this? Microsoft is essentially going direct to the consumer, and had built that into the OS itself. For the Anytime Upgrade feature, you don't even have to get another disc at the store ... every version of Vista is on every disc. You're literally just buying a new key.

Microsoft has thought about this a little I'm sure, since the upgrade prices aren't significantly different from the in-store prices, but that means far higher margins for Microsoft as a result. Still, I'm pretty surprised that I haven't heard much about the retailers grousing, so the wholesale prices must be fairly decent. Also, I'm sure the retailers are taking a bit of a "loss leader" perspective on it, knowing that Vista is likely to drive additional hardware and software purchases. And yet ... a ball has been set in motion to make retail irrelevant.

Would you buy your Microsoft software directly through them if given the option, or would you prefer to have a boxed copy? What if there was a price premium for buying the box?

The Crusade ... It Burns!

2007-01-15T14:54:00.000-08:00

Annie called to tell me that I got a package from Blizzard today. It can only be one thing ... The Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft.

I'm really not sure how to feel about this. On one hand, there's some cool new stuff in the expansion that I'm dying to try. On the other hand, I've had this monkey off my back for about a year now, and it's probably the only reason why my grades are decent and my wife hasn't left me. There was a time when I thought my office chair was growing out of my ass ... so firm was the grip Blizzard had on my cold, dark heart.

Of course, I had a great excuse to not get sucked in ... I didn't want to pay the monthly fee any more. Then my wife (having already committed a felony by opening my mail) proceeded to tell me that I can call Blizzard's PR rep and get a 90-day play code.

Those ... bastards. I wonder if I have to have the original installed, and if it'll run on Vista or not. I don't know that I even know where the original install discs are. I might just have an out. At least it wasn't the Collector's Edition they sent ... I might not have the willpower in such a case.

New GHOSTBUSTERS game coming?

2007-01-15T06:27:00.000-08:00

Saw a post at Ain't It Cool News with four YouTube videos from what appears to be a GHOSTBUSTERS game! Not just the original GhostBusters, mind you, but this one is updated and all new. For one, the Ecto 1 hearse is gone in favor of an all new Dodge Magnum (actually, the Chrysler 300 Touring variant from Europe). There also doesn't appear to be any use of ghost traps in the game as near as I can tell.

Don't know if this game is official or a mod, nor if it is a prelude to the GHOSTBUSTERS 3 sequel that has been on-again, off-again for so long. But mother-pussbucket ... this game looks GREAT. Check out the videos, and in particular, the last one of Peter Venkman at a press conference, complete with Bill Murray audio.

Another Week of Puzzles Come and Gone ...

2007-01-13T18:19:00.000-08:00

Week 2 of Vanishing Point is here, and for some of us, already gone. Despite hiccups for Microsoft in delivering clues (they were written in the sky, and weather problems caused delays and cancellations), fans managed to crack some of the puzzles without needing the clues at all. There are some really smart people in this community!

Of course, the part that's really driving many of us is the "Meta Puzzle", the chance to win our names on an AMD processor. Unfortunately, those hopes stalled out today as we realized that it doesn't seem like we're going to get any further for at least a week if not two due to the nature of today's secret message in Loki's congratulatory video.

That's not to say that progress hasn't been made. So called "white boxes" were discovered in the first week that were linked to today's part of the meta puzzle, and people have been working furiously to find out what they mean. They're clearly related to the next step in the meta puzzle, but no one knows how ... yet.

Guitar Hero: 80's Edition

2007-01-12T10:21:00.000-08:00

According to Joystiq (who cites EGM), we should be getting an 80's edition of Guitar Hero on the PS2 by spring.

First the iPhone, now my much wanted 80's Guitar Hero? That cements it ... it's the coming of the apocalypse. But I welcome Armageddon with open arms, because I'll be rocking out 80's style the whole way, baby!

Speaking of "open arms", there had damned well better be some Journey on that disc!

Cisco Suing Apple Over iPhone ... and they'll LOSE

2007-01-11T14:08:00.000-08:00

I called my buddy Mike an idiot when he messaged me yesterday and told me that Cisco was suing Apple. No, Cisco is licensing the name to Apple, and even if they did file suit, it's just a squeeze play. Now, just about everyone on the internet is talking about the lawsuit and what it means to Apple.

I'd just like to say this, and with the caveat that I'm most certainly not a lawyer (althought I watch them on TV) ...

This lawsuit would fail what's referred to as the "reasonable person" test. A reasonable person would find that "iPhone" would be far more likely to have been associated with Apple than Cisco, Linksys, or the previous trademark holder. Apple's iWhatever branding is just that strong. Plus, Apple already had history of defending that branding.

This lawsuit isn't going anywhere.

I've got Vista, and I still have UI Lust

2007-01-10T18:11:00.000-08:00

Just saw a post at the team blog for the Origami project ... the thing that became the Ultra-Mobile PC. They've got an all-new, Vista-fied Program Launcher for the UMPC and supposedly for the Tablets as well.

While I still want that original writing-enabled dashboard shown off for Longhorn oh so long ago, this would certainly get the job done. Hey guys, hook me up!

KFC's New Trans-Fat Free Oil

2007-01-10T14:27:00.000-08:00

I recently dumped a story into my Google Reader starred items about KFC and their process of switching to a frying oil free of trans-fats. At the time (just days ago), it was only being trialed in select cities.

Well, it could have been rolled out within the past week or so. I stopped by a KFC today in a rush to get lunch before class. I grabbed an order of Crispy Strips, and munched them on the way to school. I immediately noticed the difference in taste and texture.

First, they taste great! I eat at KFC with what I can only refer to as alarming frequency, so I'm quite familiar with the taste of their food. The new strips had a lot more spices on them, and from the story linked above, this was to counteract the oil's tendency to wipe out the flavor profile of the "11 herbs and spices". Well, you can definitely taste (and see) them now.

Second ... the strips are noticably darker in color. While before they were a light tan or beige, they are now a deep golden brown, bordering on reddish. They almost look over-fried, but they are not crunchy ...

Which is why the "Crispy Strips" might need a new name. These were definitely not "crispy", tasting almost "bready" at times, and the texture was totally different than what I was used to. This is not to say that I didn't like them, I actually enjoyed them quite a lot. It was just ... different.

Finally, the strips were absolutely deviod of any grease! This was what really amazed me. I don't know if it was the oil, or if there's a new cooking process, or if it was just extra care in the face of a "new product", but these things were dry and not at all greasy. I didn't even have to wipe off my hands, and the box looked clean as a whistle (though I didn't check very thoroughly.

Frying is not an inherently bad way to cook food. Done right, the food only cooks in the oil and doesn't absorb any (as long as the oil stays hot enough to convert the water in the food into steam, which pushes out of the food and keeps the oil at bay). The new Crispy Strips at KFC are definitely fried food done right.

I'll have to check some of the other foods some other day, but these just snuck up on my unexpectedly.

Loki Identified

2007-01-10T11:47:00.000-08:00

Vanishing Point continues, and while most people have been satisfied to finish the puzzles for the first week with the help of the Internet, many have moved on to the "Meta Puzzle", the winner of which will be immortalized on a new processor by AMD.

Interestingly enough, in the course of following Loki's clues, we've managed to uncover her "real identity".

Lorelei Kitsune ... we're on to you. And we're completely hooked. However, it appears the trail has gone cold, and the wait begins for next week, for more puzzles, and more clues ...

Apple Computer Inc. is now ... Apple Inc.

2007-01-09T14:15:00.000-08:00

Why'd Steve Jobs go through an entire MacWorld keynote without introducing a Mac product? Because like it or now, Microsoft just spent five years building an irrelevant product in Windows Vista. Apple, just two hours, and with one product ... moved the playing field entirely. Companies like Microsoft and Sony have been trying to do it for years. Problem is, they've been trying to move the battlefield to the living room.

In retrospect, it's obvious. In a global world, your living room isn't how you reach out. It's not going to be in front of a giant screen. It's going to be in front of a tiny one, big enough to fit in your pocket. Look at the sales figures Apple touted. Cell phones trump everything. People are out of the living room more than they're in it. It makes perfect sense that the real fight is for that one device you have in your pocket.

What, then, of Apple TV? Consider it a hedged bet, but it isn't, really. Notice how Apple TV, right down to the name, is all about entertainment. iPhone is about information, connectivity ... reaching people. iPhone is everything a convergence device is supposed to be.

I hardly use my Xbox 360 or even my Wii as of late. I'm too busy, and when I'm at home, I'm probably asleep. My phone is my constant guide. Apple's the one that gets that. Me, a die-hard Windows guy, who's only wish is that his iPod were a phone and that he could get down to one device. Make it play games (watch your ass, Nintendo), and you've got me.

Nuclear War?

2007-01-09T10:23:00.000-08:00

I'd heard a quote thrown around in the wee morning hours about Apple's MacWorld event.

Apple's going to start a Nuclear War.

Normally, I hear something like that, and the hype alarms go off. Something told me this would be different. I had absolutely no idea.

Apple could charge anything they wanted for iPhone, and they'd get it. The device is VERY high-res, 160dpi which is even better than my laptop screen. They appear to be using sub-pixel rendering as well, so everything looks amazingly smooth. If the user-interface lives up to the MacWorld demo, they'll have managed to kill the entire iPod line all at once. THIS is the iPod now.

I'm a Microsoft fan. I've got ton's of Microsoft stuff, save for Zune, because that thing was stillborn. But even if it wasn't, Apple just put a bullet in it. Nothing on the planet, and nothing at CES, is sexier than the iPhone.

And I, for one, welcome my new widescreen, touchscreen overlord.

Update: Nuclear War indeed. Apple just announced that the reason the Google functionality is so pervasive and seamless in the iPhone is because they've been working with them, and Google's CEO just took the stage.

That there in the distance? That's the mushroom cloud over Redmond. Even Vista isn't sexier than this phone. I keep calling it that. Apple calls it an "internet communicator". It's neither. This is a computer, and it's the best looking computer around. People will buy these instead of laptops.

Apple Announces iPhone

2007-01-09T09:46:00.000-08:00

From Engadget's coverage of MacWorld ...

9:42am - "Well today, we're introducing THREE revolutionary new products. The first one is a widescreen ipod with touch controls" The crowd goes wild. "The second is a revolutinoary new mobile phone."

9:43am - "And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device." Tepid response on that last one, but he almost got a standing ovation on the phone.
"An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator. An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator.... these are NOT three separate devices!"

"And we are calling it iPhone!"

More soon ...

"The second thing we're doing is we've learned from the iPod, it syncs with iTunes. People know how to sync all their media with their iPod. iTunes is going to sync all your media to your iPhone -- but also a ton of data. Contacts, calendars, photos, notes, bookmarks, email accounts..."

9:52am - "We do that through iTunes." It shows 8GB on the screen.

9:52 - "The third thing -- I want to talk a little about design. We've designed something wonderful." 3.5-inch screen, highest resolution screen we've ever shipped, 160ppi. There's only one button, the "home" button.

"It's really thin, thinner than any smartphone. 11.6mm, thinner than the Q and the BlackJack, all of them. Ring and silent, volume up and down."

9:53am - "We have a 2 megapixel camera built right in, let's take a look at the top. A headset jack, 3.5mm, SIM tray, and a sleep-wake switch. Let's look at the bottom, we've got a speaker, mic input, and an iPod connector."

9:54am - We've also got some stuff you can't see -- 3 advanced sensors. It's got a proximity sensor, bring the iPhone to your ear and your display shuts off and toushccreen shuts down. Ambient light sensor -- adjusts brightness, saves power. Third thing is an accellerometer, it can tell whether you're in landscape and portraid. Let's turn it on."

Transform DreamScenes into DeskScapes

2007-01-08T14:08:00.000-08:00

Looks like the team at Stardock has been busy! (Heya, Brad!) I haven't run much of their software in recent years because it's very hard to find a desktop that's clean and that I felt was an extension of my personality. Lately, the Zune skin for Windows XP has been close.

Vista's a trickier bird, with the new desktop compositing engine and whatnot. However, it seems like Stardock has been working hand in hand with Microsoft and actually helped develop the Windows Ultimate Extras feature that is now being called "DreamScenes." However, it's far more than animated desktops. Stardock has built this feature to be extensible (and theoretically for free if you bought Ultimate) and you'll be able to add something they're calling "DeskScapes."

Basically a DeskScape is a series of video files (while DreamScenes are a single video) that allow you to switch video files based on some criteria, whether it be weather, time, or some other event. I'm trying to dig up more information on the feature, but that's all I've got for now.

What is strange is the following quote from Brad Wardell in the comments on the page linked above ...

Incidentally, DeskScapes will be part of Object Desktop.

Could this be a Vista Ultimate loophole? How do you make the upgraded feature available as part of a pay service without locking out regular Vista users? I'm sure more info will come to light soon.

Vanishing Point Game is LIVE!

2007-01-08T10:35:00.000-08:00

You can't solve any puzzles until 6:30 PM Pacific, but you can register for VanishingPoint and see the prizes. The game is point based, so you don't have to be first, you just have to be smart, and lucky. The only puzzle where speed counts is the "Meta Puzzle"; the first person to solve it gets their name laser inscribed on new AMD processors.

If you sign up for the game, and use me as a referral (superrob at gmail dot com), let me know. I'll add your name to the list below so people can get maximum referral credit in the game.

--

Referral List

Coming soon ...

I was right. Vanishing Point prize a trip into space, and more ...

2007-01-08T08:59:00.000-08:00

If this photo by Long Zheng can be believed, then I was right with my gut reaction to Vanishing Point. The grand prize is indeed a trip into space. Read the last paragraph.

Other prizes apparently answer the part about being "immortalized", as the winner's name will end up in a computer chip. Maybe the chip in question is the new smaller processor for the Xbox 360? How could would that be?

Xbox 360 in 2007

2007-01-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

I was debating going to CES this year, but after having heard that there wouldn't be a lot of innovation (evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, progress), I decided not to go.

Sure enough, sounds like Microsoft is having a big show, announcing IPTV support for the Xbox 360. Never mind that the video downloads are effectively the same thing, just not in real time, but there you have it. Would it get me to ditch DirecTV? Would it get me to get another 360 for the bedroom? These are questions Microsoft needs to be asking, because for all intents and purposes, this is the model you're looking at. Then again, it could be that Microsoft is hoping that IPTV providers will give away Xbox 360 units in exchange for programming contracts.

The elephant in the room with that announcement is the complete lack of mention regarding the "Xbox 360 2.0", the one that had pictures and specs floating around in the past week. HDMI, new HD scaler, and a 120GB hard drive. I could take or leave the rest, but the 120GB drive is absolutely necessary for the sort of features Microsoft is trying to pack into the white box. That leave the obvious question ... what about those of us with first-gen hardware? How do we get our data off the 20GB drive and onto the 120? Could the drives be stackable? Another question people might be pondering is, could a new Xbox 360 be quieter? Features aside, one of the biggest complaints about the Xbox 360 is the distracting fan noise coming from the console.

Surprisingly, outside of the announcement of new Gears of War content, all the news seemed to center on the stuff moving from the Xbox 360 over to Vista, Geometry Wars and Uno being notable examples. Even Gears is rumored to be hitting Vista, after some stray lines of code in an Nvidia graphic driver hinted as being optimized for the game. There's going to be a lot more Vista/360 crossing over as Live Anywhere starts to gain momentum. I'm just wondering if Microsoft will be keeping the promise of making Vista and/or mobile versions of the games free for anyone that purchased the game on 360 already.

Other Vista talk revolved around Gates announcing two specific features that would be released as part of the Windows Ultimate Extras. One, DreamScene, is essentially video on your desktop. Could this be the form that the "Desktop Aurora" will take? The other feature is specialized sports content for the Windows Media Center. No discussion at all of Texas Hold 'Em or any other features that were rumored to be part of the Extras.

Update: Yep, DreamScene is Desktop Aurora (or Motion Desktop), and the guys at Stardock are the ones behind it. Looks like it'll get a lot of community support at dream.wincustomize.com. I expect that "Matrix Desktop" will be available within the week. Also, the Extras page at WindowsUltimate.com specifically lists Hold 'Em.

Finally, Gates specifically mentioned the "secret meeting" at the Bellagio tonight at 6PM. If you needed any confirmation that this is when Vanishing Point officially kicks off, there you have it.

Note: Links coming soon ...

SuperRob.com

2007-01-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

Friday, Google announced support for Custom Domains in Blogger. I immediately went to GoDaddy and updated my DNS records and set Blogger to use my SuperRob.com domain, and all of you should be seeing the old BlogSpot address resolving to SuperRob.com now. Any bookmarks you might have should still work, since Google just forwards them on, so you can feel free to use the old address if you like. But for the rest of you, SuperRob.com is the place to go.

More Vanishing Point - Manifesto

2007-01-03T07:05:00.000-08:00

Just when I thought that Loki would be taking time off until CES, she posts a video to YouTube. Putting "formula" into the box on the VanishingPointGame.com site yields a page full of colored numbers. Connect the dots for each color in numerical order and you get a bunch of letters, which rearrange into the word "MANIFESTO". Go to that directory, and you get the following:

Builders build. Writers write. Dancers dance.

I disappear.

In a few weeks, I will vanish. In the meantime, my job is to find—and reward—some of the cleverest people on the planet. Every week I will leave you twelve puzzles, ranging from easy to.....well, not so easy. Solving them earns you the chance to win some unbelievable prizes.

Impress me. This has been but a small taste of what I have in store for you. The real challenge starts both online and off when the countdown hits zero and the game begins.

Remember, countdowns usually end with a launch, and this will be a lift-off like the world has never seen.

The video is pretty cool. Most people think it was reversed at the beginning, but it looks like it was really reversed at the end. How did she do it? Looks like it was memory metal, near as I can tell.

Idiotic Tech Journalists Strike Again

2007-01-02T14:26:00.000-08:00

A story I'm seeing all over the blogosphere today is the supposedly "ludicrous" comment by Microsoft that the Aero Glass desktop interface will not slow down a computer powerful enough to run it. I'd have to assume that part of the incredulity comes from a long history of Microsoft flaunting "minimum" configurations that are really stretching the concept. However, in this one case, Microsoft isn't even close to exaggerating.

Aero Glass is FASTER on PCs that can run it than the standard desktop, in most cases. Why?

Aero Glass is designed to use the 3D hardware in computers that usually lies dormant when performing standard Windows tasks. Think of it this way ... it's like having yet another powerful computer processor sitting in your machine that would only get used if you were playing games.

By offloading all desktop compositing to the 3D card, not only do you get some impressive translucency effects and cool stuff like Flip 3D, you also free up your computer's main processor for other tasks, and that results in a boost in performance, not a drop. Of course, this is all dependent on your hardware, but considering the threshold Microsoft put in place for getting Aero Glass to work in the first place, I can't imagine a scenario where this would ever be "slower".

What I don't understand is why so many people that are supposedly journalists in the tech field don't understand this.

New Vanishing Point Grand Prize Theory

2007-01-02T13:23:00.000-08:00

There is one other "ultimate vista" that could pertain directly to the Windows Vista launch, and that would be a trip to see the Northern Lights ... the Aurora Borealis. Anyone who's familiar with Vista's beginnings and where things currently stand knows that Aurora was a codename for the animated Windows Vista desktop that is coming as part of the Windows Vista Ultimate Extras.

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20060906/aurora-desktop/

I don't know why it took me this long to put this together, but this is now what I'm leaning towards. Don't know if less than a thousand people have ever seen the Aurora, but I'd say this would be way easier for Microsoft to pull off than shooting someone into space.

New Year and New Beginnings

2007-01-02T07:50:00.000-08:00

2007 has officially begun, and yet, I'm still wondering what the hell happened to 2006. I know I've been busy and what not, but most of the people I've talked to said that it felt like this year just ended before it really began.

Not only is it a new year, but I'm now officially six months out from my graduation from the UW. I'll be filing my application for graduation here shortly, I start the first of my two Capstone classes, and I really don't know what I'm going to do with myself when it's all over. I mean, I do ... I've got a job already, but I can certainly see how traditional students can feel overwhelmed when it's all over. It's like, "OK ... now what?"

I expect that despite being nearly finished with school, I'll be working harder in the next six months than I have at any time in my brief 30 years past. More challenging classes, expanded responsibilities at work, time-intensive extracurriculars ... and trying to figure out how to fit everything into days that feel shorter and shorter.

I'm sure I'll miss it when it's over, but for now, June can't come fast enough.

George Budabin

2006-12-28T16:20:00.000-08:00

My friend Andru has been away recently, as it turns out that his adopted father, George Budabin, has passed. My most heartfelt condolences go out to Andru and his family.

Reading Andru's post about his father, it's clear that he was a wonderful and caring man, and I wish I'd had the opportunity to meet the man that raised Andru into the wonderful husband and father that he's become. Andru has done amazing things since coming to Seattle, and I'm very glad to have gotten to know him.

Vanishing Point Roundup

2006-12-28T09:51:00.000-08:00

Decompiled out of the Flash on the main page:

REMEMBER...
Big things come in big packages:
January 8th, 6:30PM, Bellagio Fountains.

From antepenultimate:

Getting to this page means you're paying attention.
Keep it up when the countdown hits zero and you could win high-end laptops, gaming computers, media centers, software, gaming consoles, media players, and games

From zenith:

The vanishing point is the boundary between Something and Everything; between What Is and What Can Be. Fewer than a thousand people have ever been there to see the ultimate vista. The grand prize winner will be one of them.

The race for that destiny will begin when the countdown hits zero.

From Loki's Biography

One of my professors didn’t buy my vanishing act. He called a friend in a certain large corporation. Now I have the job of giving stuff away to the smartest people on the planet.

When the countdown hits zero, we’ll find out if you’re one of them.

From file:

Here’s a riddle for you:

At the end of our journey together, I will be discovered—and I will disappear.

One person will find me at my vanishing point. I will make that person famous in a way the world has not seen before. Their name will be repeated as many times as there are stars in—

No. Let’s be more precise. That name will be repeated as many times as there are grains of sand on a beach. That’s my promise.

Your chance to be that person will start when the countdown hits zero.

Countdown timers for the various world events: Circumambulation. Seattle's event is at the end of January, but look ... three simultaneous events in Sydney, Miami, and Austin. Curiouser and curiouser.

Edit: Bah ... let my enthusiasm get the best of me for a little bit. The times and locations in on the Circumambulation page all coincide with Windows Vista launch events. Most likely, they'll be doing a massive giveaway at each event, similar to Microsoft giving away Sharp HDTV's at E3 a couple years back. There's obviously something much bigger than that planned, however, so I'm keeping an eye out. And I'll probably go to the Seattle launch, just for kicks.

Bloggers freak out over free laptops, missing big picture

2006-12-28T07:55:00.000-08:00

So I'm insanely curious. Over the past several days, word of bloggers getting free laptops from Microsoft and AMD has lit the blogosphere on fire. Apparently if you got one and didn't disclose it, you're a dirty, filthy liar. Me, I'm wondering if there's a reason why they aren't disclosing it, and if it's at all related to the Vanishing Point game. Supposedly, letters from Loki are coming with them, and there's a couple of different groups of people ... encoders and decoders. We're supposed to be seeking out these people, but maybe some of them have a reason for remaining quiet for the time being. These bloggers are being recruited into the game and perhaps some of them don't even realize it.

That hasn't stopped people from grousing about the laptops and claiming bribery and unfair treatment with hardly a mention of the game they're connected to. Curious. Sure, they're "gifts" to help promote Windows Vista, but come on ... let's have a little fun with it.

I have managed to figure out part of the game, or at least, I think I have. A note from Loki suggests that the one winner will be immortalized, and will be one of less than a thousand people to see the Ultimate Vista. Of course, most people think this means that people will win Vista Ultimate. Suckers. I dug a little deeper, and noticed that one of the keycodes was "3scap3grav1ty" (escapegravity), and that the equations shown in a video provided by Loki look like calculations for Escape Velocity, which is the speed you need to achieve to break away from the Earth's gravitational pull and travel into space. Of course, it all ties into the idea of a Vanishing Point, which is the name of the game. Curiouser.

The only "ultimate vista" that less than a thousand people have seen is a view of Earth from outer space. Sounds like one lucky person will win a trip into space, probably to the International Space Station.

I wonder if the bloggers will freak out over this "bribe".

Wii is a hit with my siblings and parents

2006-12-27T14:19:00.000-08:00

Christmas always has my wife and I running all over the suburbs to visit our families for the holiday. Usually, I'll ask for a few movies or something for Christmas, and while we wait for dinner, we'll watch one in the rec room downstairs at my Dad's. This year, I decided to bring the Wii and see what happens. I figured that the Bowling game in Wii Sports might do the trick when it comes to getting Dad to play.

Well, my first surprise was when it turns out that my step-sister and her girlfriend have been trying to find one and coming up empty. They've promised each other one as a late Christmas present, but haven't had much time to play it. My step-brother, on the other hand, had not only played it, but was VERY familiar with it and couldn't wait to play.

Sure enough, we got everything set up and and soon as we were done opening presents, we all ran downstairs. I'd received a couple extra Wiimotes for Christmas, so I had a full set, and they came in VERY handy. Everyone wanted a turn, and it was no time before Dad was coming down every five minutes to steal my Wiimote and throw a few balls in Bowling. Everyone had a great time, and I decided to leave it overnight so they could play. After dinner, I went out to the car, and as I glanced back at the house, they were already downstairs playing!

It's still there ... I didn't want to take it away while they were all in town and able to play, so I'll get it in a couple of days. But it definitely seems like Nintendo has a hit on their hands. They'll need to get more games out as accessible and engaging as Wii Sports if they want to maintain their current momentum, though.

I wanna be famous!

2006-12-27T14:10:00.000-08:00

Microsoft and 4orty2wo are doing another viral game, this one seemingly promising lavish prizes and global fame for at least one person. While it looks like things really start kicking off during CES, there's an event planned for Seattle at the end of January.

Bloggers are receiving mysterious gifts, from small items like puzzle boxes containing memory cards with more clues, all the way up to tricked out customized laptops running Windows Vista (which is what this new alternate reality game is supposed to be promoting). Apparently, I'm not on the A-list, as I haven't gotten anything ... yet.

This sounds like it'll be fun ... hey Loki! I'm in.

Rest In Peace, James

2006-12-06T14:30:00.000-08:00

Several news agencies (including MSNBC) are reporting that they've found the body of James Kim, fellow journalist, husband, and father. I'd quote some of these stories, but they all seem so cold and reserved. All I'd want to say is that it was clear how many lives he's touched when you see at the extraordinary efforts that have gone into rescuing the entire Kim family. Helicopters rented at personal expense. Satellites diverted from their original course. Dozens upon dozens of blog posts like this one chronicling the search.

While I'm sad that they couldn't rescue James sooner, at least his family can gain some measure of closure by knowing that he was found. Certainly, the surviving family can use all the emotional and financial support that you can muster during this holiday season, so if you can find it in your heart, please donate to the Kim Family Rescue Fund.

Rest in Peace, James. My prayers are with you and your family.

Office 2007 Review

2006-12-05T08:10:00.000-08:00

I've been running the final code for Microsoft Office 2007 for a little while now, and I'm very impressed. In fact, everyone that has seen the work that I've turned out has been impressed. Sure, the new "ribbon" UI takes a little getting used to (my wife still isn't over it), but it makes finding features much easier now that most of them aren't buried in menus.

The biggest changes have come to Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The new version makes creating professional-looking documents incredibly easy. To give you an example, this picture is a slide from my Market Research project that my group is presenting tonight.

This presentation took very little time to prepare. The data was collected by paper survey, dumped into Excel, and then used the built-in functions to create Excel graphs. Those looked great on their own. Then it was literally a cut and paste operation into the PowerPoint slides.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. All three Office programs have built-in graphic themes that can be applied to your work. The themes are essentially painted with the new SmartArt engine behind the Office programs, basically vector art with some nice polish. However, the real power comes in by the fact that the font packages and color packages for all of the graphic themes are interchangeable and customizable. With literally a couple of clicks, you can take a "basic" theme and customize the look.

The wild thing was what happened when I took a chart from Excel (with one basic theme) and pasted it into PowerPoint. It immediately picked up the local theme settings and conformed itself to the style of the presentation I'd already created. Knocked out a few background elements and viola ... you've got a gorgeous presentation.

My only concern is that once more people adopt the new Office, this level of polish will become baseline, and suddenly my "magical" PowerPoint abilities will have to really step up to the plate. But until then, the new Office makes me look like a million bucks.

Please Help Find James Kim! UPDATED!

2006-11-30T19:37:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: According to the Oregon State Police, rescue crews have found Kati Kim and the two children. Details are sketchy, but it seems there was an accident and James left the family to go get help. Rescue crews are now focused on finding James. Mother and the children appear to be OK.

CNet has more information.

Please keep James and the entire Kim family in your prayers.

I've seen this in a few places now, apparently James Kim (formerly of TechTV and most recently an analyst for CNet) and his family have all disappeared. They were last seen in Portland this past Saturday in Portland, but they never arrived back home in San Francisco.

I've only met James a couple of times, but he was always very nice, and amazingly cool to talk to. It's unfathomable that anything could have happened, but if you have any information, please contact the San Francisco Police Department at 415-558-5508 (415-553-1071 after hours).

Six Degrees of Rafi Mohammed

2006-11-30T18:54:00.000-08:00

I've talked before (on the Marketsync blog) about one of my Intro to Marketing textbooks, The Art of Pricing, by Rafi Mohammed. It's a fascinating book, and one that I've thought about while going through some interesting pricing challenges in my work. I consider Rafi's work right up there with the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and Steve Levitt in terms of insightfulness.

So I was surprised to receive an e-mail from the author today. What! A famous author reads my blog? Wow! Rafi told me that he's launched a website companion to his book, with useful pricing tools and a blog of his own. His most recent blog post was about his pricing conversation with rock legend Don Henley. It's a mildly amusing story, if only because I've learned form personal experience that sometimes the best brushes with fame come from suppressing your desire to gush like a starry-eyed fan and try to have an actual conversation.

Then it struck me. I'm now just two degrees of separation from Don Henley! Thanks, Rafi!

Another tiny anecdote ... Rafi's sister teaches in the Nursing program here at UW Bothell. What a small world!

Vista RTM buggier than RC2?

2006-11-21T09:08:00.000-08:00

I've had the RTM version of Windows Vista on my Toshiba Tecra M4 for about a week now. Strangely, I'm having issues with the machine that didn't happen in RC2. I think it's all traceable to the nVidia video driver, which was updated through Windows Update right after the install completed. I'm getting massive video corruption coming out of sleep mode (making the machine unusable), to the point where I now have to hibernate the machine instead of sleep.

I can't exactly fault Microsoft for this, except that the driver came through Windows Update, so it should have been checked for issues like this before it was released. Hopefully this can be sorted out before the widespread release in January.

Wiimotes Breaking Your Set?

2006-11-20T11:31:00.000-08:00

So there's report (singular intended) of Wiimote straps breaking and Wiimotes flying into TV screens (precisely what the strap was intended to keep from happening).

I'm calling bullshit.

Nevermind that the frayed spot on the Wiimote strap looks like it was sawed through or cut through in some fashion. A mere 24 hours of gameplay, no matter how strenuous, is simply not going to snap that cord. I find it far more likely that these gamers, drunk and tired, decided that they were too cool for the wrist strap ("I know how to hold onto a goddamned controller!") and chose not to use it. After the inevitable incident, they cut the cord after the fact in the hopes that one of Nintendo's PR angels might want to fix or replace their TV.

I don't see it happening.

Super Monkey Ball Really Sucks, ExciteTruck Boring

2006-11-20T07:35:00.000-08:00

I suppose that with 50 mini games packed into Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, there were bound to be some good ones and some bad ones. So riddle me this ... how is it that Monkey Target, by far the most fun mini game in the previous titles, is so abysmally bad now? One frickin level, this wierd "Option Ball" thing, and what feels like a wind factor without any sort of on-screen wind indicator? How do you manage to take a great game and make it so terrible? By getting rid of the power-ups and other stuff that made the game so interesting.

Luckily, there are some bright spots. Monkey Wars is fun, even if my wife hated it. Two handed independent controls are just too much for her to get her head around. But by far, the most entertaining game was Monkey Darts. That's right ... darts. You don't have to, but we held the Wiimote like an actual dart, and you basically make a quick stabbing motion at the screen to fling the dart. The IR receiver in the Wiimote can sense depth from the screen (sensor bar, really) and you can actually see your dart hovering there in 3D space before you throw it. You can play Countdown, 301, or 501, and it's an absolute blast. All you really need to complete the atmosphere is a chain-smoking retiree in the corner, 80's hair rock, some beer, and a steak that's nothing more than charred gristle. Or maybe that's just the places I've played darts.

Monkey Bowling seemed fun at first, even if it wasn't even up to the standards of the Wii Sports pack-in. That was until we found out that the game has a critical flaw. Instead of actually making a bowling motion (which will almost always result in a hard spin to the left), you just line up your monkey on the line just right of center, and then kind of flick your wrist. You'll get a strike every time. It absolutely sucked all of the joy and challenge out of the game.

Other Super Monkey Ball annoyances include the weird sort of tournament structure of the minigames, where the person furthest behind in points gets to pick the next game. Then there's the main game, where the controls are just plain non-intuitive. Where you might instinctually want to hold the controller horizontal (like the scheme in ExciteTruck), you hold it one handed and vertical, and it just doesn't feel right. This makes the game harder than it needs to be, and my friend David at Nintendo World Report talks more about that. It's just sad to see a game that was so great once reduced to this shameful, and arguably lacking in fun, ridiculous money grab of a launch title.

Oh, and speaking of ExciteTruck, where I had high hopes for the game, they were all dashed while I was line-sitting. GameCrazy had six Wii-osks set up to try ExciteTruck, and I found that you had to complete the Tutorial to unlock the main game. Lame, but OK, new system with a new control scheme, I can understand that. Until I found that you had to complete the tutorial, of which there are 16-20 different lessons. I got to lesson five or six, and I was already bored and handed the controller to someone that really didn't seem all that interested in trying it. That doesn't bode well, especially considering we were all waiting to buy our Wiis.

What kills me about all of this is that Wii Sports and The Legend of Zelda are just so good. I know the controller is new, and developers are still sort of experimenting with it (which is why they are basically monetizing their experiments by turning them into a collection of minigames), but what I don't understand is how you can take a game that was fun and make it un-fun, and somehow manage to be oblivious to that fact. You'd have to think that as the testers started committing seppukku (ritual suicide), they might have sensed that something was wrong.

Wii-kend

2006-11-19T18:18:00.000-08:00

Went to UW Bothell yesterday to work on some posters for Delta Epsilon Chi, and then proceeded to watch the first half of the Apple Cup. Good turnout, although the crowd was a bit subdued. At halftime, I had my wife drop me off at the Game Crazy in Redmond so that I could meet up with Andru and get in line for the Wii. That was a 6PM.

Game Crazy (Hollywood Video) was pretty good to us, always coming by to take drink and snack orders, I mean, why wouldn't they want to take our money? Nintendo was there, tossing out tons of swag. I got a black Nintendo polo that says "PLAYER" on the back of the next, which is pretty sweet. I've also got a cubic assload of silicone Nintendo "PLAYER" bracelets. Andru and I were about 60th in line, but it was still 2AM before we managed to get our Wiis and get out of the store. Did find out that the Huskies managed to beat WSU, so it was a very good night.

Got the Wii home, set it up, although I had to really hack some things together since my entire AV setup is going through S-Video and there's no Wii S-Video cable yet. Setup was flawless, and it immediately grabbed a couple of network updates. Popped in Wii Sports and played a game of Bowling and a game of Boxing before we headed to bed.

All day today, I've been playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The game is absolutely phenomenal ... not perfect, but incredibly damn good. I don't know if I'd call it better than Ocarina of Time just yet, but it's very close. I'm definitely feeling more drawn into the story at this point.

I played a brief round of Super Monkey Ball just to get a feel for the controls, and it's pretty awesome too. Unlike the GameCube game, there are 50 minigames and they all appear to be available from the get-go ... no earning points in story mode to unlock them. They sort of had to do that, since there are so many other competing games in the "mini game" space on Wii at launch.

It'll be very interesting to see how Wii does in the months ahead. Will the unique controller be a gimmick, or will it be embraced by the development community. Will Wii live up to its potential, or will it suffer a fate similar to the GameCube? Most importantly, will there ever be anything that plugs into the USB ports?

Bad Luck ... No Wii For Mii

2006-11-17T11:30:00.000-08:00

Well, despite reasonable assurances that I would have a Wii this afternoon, it looks like fate has conspired against me. Nintendo is limiting employee purchases to just one on the first day, and the one my friend was going to let me have was earmarked for someone else. I just wish I'd known before I took an early lunch break to drive over there. I guess I'll either be camped out Saturday Night with my friends at GearLive, or waiting until Monday to get one from my friend at Nintendo. I did get Zelda plus an extra Wiimote/Nunchuck combo, but for now, they sit in my cavernous truck ... Wii-less.

Unless someone else at Nintendo doesn't plan on picking one up today, and would be willing to help a journalist get some reviews done early. Pretty please?

Planet GameCube is now Nintendo World Report

2006-11-16T18:55:00.000-08:00

While the domain isn't active yet (DNS issues, most likely), PGC has finally evolved from their confining "GameCube" moniker and can now justifiably claim to cover everything Nintendo with their new website, Nintendo World Report (NWR). I got a sneak peek at the design a few weeks back when I took the designer to a Seahawks game, and they've done a bang up job.

I miss being part of PGC, and with this new focus, I find myself longing for the old days again. That said, I know the site was in good hands when I left, and the new design and name is certainly proof that my faith hasn't been misplaced.

Great job, guys! I can't wait to see what else you have in store!

Nintendo Wii Impressions Friday Evening

2006-11-16T18:46:00.000-08:00

I'll have my very own Wii and a few games in my possession on Friday. I don't know how much time I'll get in, but hopefully I'll be able to give some impressions late tomorrow night. I'm looking forward to seeing how my wife likes it, I think Super Monkey Ball will be a big hit, but we'll see how it goes.

Free Windows Vista Ultimate for Technical Beta Testers

2006-11-16T18:36:00.000-08:00

Just got an e-mail from Microsoft. Unlike the Office team, the Vista group decided to reward any tester who submitted at least ONE bug. I know that there are a lot of testers out there that used only the Windows Error Reporting tool to submit data back to Microsoft, but in this case, you had to have used the actual Microsoft Beta tool to submit bug data. Even if the bug was a duplicate, you qualify.

You can download the RTM bits as an .ISO formatted DVD from Microsoft Connect. You cannot generate a product key ... Microsoft will e-mail out keys to anyone that accepts the offer. You have 30 days before you need to activate, and you don't need the key to install.

Unlike the XP beta, it appears that this is a SINGLE license, as opposed to the five licenses granted for the XP beta. Also, Microsoft will not be mailing out any product ... it is a downloadable only.

My sincerest thanks go out to the Vista team for this decision, and hopefully the Office team will follow that example (although it's doubtful).

MindCamp 3.0 is in the can!

2006-11-13T07:22:00.000-08:00

This past weekend saw the return of the 24-hour geek mashup known as Seattle MindCamp. Like the last year, I served as a "Camp Counselor", and specifically got to be the designated AV Nerd for the weekend. That suited me just fine, since it was mostly my equipment getting hooked up anyway.

I tried valiantly to get Nintendo's PR firm to supply us with a Wii for a tournament, but couldn't get a phone call back to arrange it. I turned the reins over to Andru who was largely as successful as I was. But wait! At the last possible moment, someone from Nintendo (names withheld to protect them from a gamer onslaught) contacted Andru and offered to bring a screen, Wii and a full complement of controllers) for us to play with for a few hours. I figured that while the crowd were geeks and bloggers, and not necessarily gamers, that the Wii would be a big hit, and it certainly was. There was a ton of people huddled around to see the Wii in action, and not surprisingly, Wii Tennis was the big hit, with four people swinging their arms furiously and everyone having a great time.

I really wanted to box with Andru, but had AV duties and ended up missing the entire Wii tournament. Nintendo gave away a DS Lite, some games, and some Nintendo swag ... less than what I had originally proposed, but far more than we expected at the time, and not at all unwelcome given the last minute nature of the showcase. I got back just in time to catch the tail end, just as they were putting in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I grabbed a chair, pushed my way through the crowd and plopped right next to the Nintendo rep who was starting the game. I felt like a little kid again, even going so far as to tug the end of the nice man's shirt and beg him to let me play it. "Please sir ... can I play?" Sure enough, I got to play all right. Well, sort of. First, I dropped the nunchuck like an idiot when the gentleman from Nintendo offered to skip me past the sign in part. Which is a shame because that was the extent of the real Wii experience in the short time the game was running, apparently. What I really got to do was watch a lot of cinematics and then herd some goats using a fairly standard controller setup. I didn't really get to experience any of how the "Wiimote" really works save for someone pointing out that my pointer was stuck at the top of the screen, so I waved it around a bit. The lack of voice acting was noted by the onlookers as disappointing, as was the hilarity of the phrase "GOAT IN" that pops up when you herd the goats. Then, it was time for Nintendo to leave, and that's when the ... wait for it ... ennui set in.

Yeah, I'd been making that joke all weekend.

Anyway, Andru and I and some of the other camp counselors are going to camp again this coming weekend, but this time, for the Wii. I've already explained to Andru that after taking one for the team at the Xbox 360 launch, he "owes me a solid", so I should have no trouble securing my little glossy white friend. I can't wait to get my hands on it, and neither can many of the others that stood waiting. I'd say the time was very well spent, and when MindCamp returns for Version 4.0 in April, I'll make it my mission to make it work on the gigantic projection screen ... even if it kills me.

Other than that, the entire camp seemed to be a raging success. We tried a new system for determining which rooms would be holding which sessions, which involved posting your session on the wall and having people stick a colored dot on the ones that they were interested in. Sure enough, the largest spaces ended up with the largest sessions, and the main theater in particular was usually quite full.

One session that I heard was particularly great was "Lucid Dreaming", which ended up going three and a half hours well into the night. I missed it, since I was showing the movie Mirrormask, which was also a big hit. (I knew that a trippy Alice in Wonderland meets Labyrinth style movie with story by Neil Gaiman and amazing CGI art would go over well.)

Of course, Overnight Gaming made its return, but was less attended than it was previously. Part of the problem was the need to have the PlayStation 2 in the back for Guitar Hero II, so people who just wandered in didn't get to see all the fun we were having. I'm going on record right now saying that "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns and Roses was my favorite song of the night. I tried to keep myself from singing along, and sadly, it just wasn't happening. Close runner-ups were Heart's "Crazy On You" and "Message in a Bottle" by The Police. Awesome guitar songs, and just a ton of fun to play. Of course, it helps when you know the song, which is probably why some of the lesser known songs just aren't resonating with me. Please ... PLEASE ... give us an 80's Hair Rock version!

Finally, the big game of the night was none other than Gears of War, running in HD on a 30 ft. projection screen. My god, this game is amazing looking, and the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center's theater is a fantastic place to play it. Dark, moody, loud, and nerve wracking. I'd say that if there were a flaw in the game, it's that the game tries to get you killed deliberately in order to get you to try out new tactics, and I think that's cheap. If anyone gets by the Berserker without dying five or six times before they figure out how to kill her ... well, they're damed liars. The biggest thing that people needed to learn was that the game is not like a regular first-person shooter. If you've played paintball (the clear inspiration for the game), then you know what Gears is all about ... dashing from cover to cover and only popping up long enough to pop off a few shots. Once you get that down, and you realize that the bloody gear that keeps popping up in the middle of the screen is your health meter, you'll do a lot better. You'll still die a lot ... since that's planned in the game design (the first encounter with the Kryll is another example), but overall the game is pretty solid. And frickin' gorgeous, even in SD.

Yeah, I still don't have an HDTV yet, and I have to say that I'm totally spoiled by the theater at Youngstown. Luckily, Sara McChristian told us that since the theater sits empty a fair amount of the time, she'd love to have us come down and hold a monthly gaming night. I think I'll have to take her up on it.

I took a short nap (from 4AM to 7AM), just in time to get in a few games of "Werewolf", a social game where a group of people tries to lynch the werewolves before the town is decimated. Basically, the group sits around a circle, and draws cards. Most people will end up being Villagers, but one or two might be Werewolves, one might be a Seer (able to determine if someone is a Werewolf) and one a Healer (able to protect any player).

The game works like this. A Moderator tells everyone that night has fallen. Everyone closes their eyes and starts slapping their leg with one hand. Why one hand? So that you can't tell who the Werewolves are when when Moderator tells them to wake up and collectively choose someone to kill. Then the Werewolves close their eyes, and the Seer awakens. They pick a random person, and the Moderator will signal to them whether that person is a Werewolf or not. They sleep, and then the Healer selects a person to protect. The Moderator might then check on a few things, but usually the town will awaken, and someone will be dead.

Then the Village tries to sniff out (ha!) the Werewolf (or Werewolves) in their midst. They can lynch someone if they are pretty sure, or choose not to. The problem is that they might lynch their Seer or Healer, because for their own safety, they might not reveal themselves lest they get eaten by the Werewolves. The game is hectic and fun, and I'm glad I got to do it this year. I'll have to find a way to split my time between gaming and Werewolf next time. There are apparently additional rules and roles that can come into play, like a Sorceror (who is allied with the Werewolves and can detect the Seer), and a Tinker (who works all night and thus, appears to be a Werewolf to the Seer). It'll be fun to try out some of those advanced rules. Maybe I can incorporate Werewolf into the Overnight Gaming session and play it on the stage!?

Probably my favorite part of the camp was getting to talk with Tom Bihn (bag designer and entrepreneur extraordinaire). I showed him my Kensington Saddlebag Sport, the backpack that's ushered me through my college career, and he marveled at the design and work that went into a bag that sold for only $60. It was amazing to talk with Tom and learn a bit about how he deals with having a local factory instead of outsourcing production overseas, and about management in general. He was absolutely fascinating to talk to, and hopefully I can hear more from him at the next camp.

Which is in April. You should plan to be there, and I'll let you know when we've selected a date. I just hope it's not when I'm supposed to be in Orlando!

Child's Play

2006-11-07T14:52:00.000-08:00

I'm very proud of the work my friends over at Penny Arcade have done with Child's Play. For those of you still under a rock, Child's Play is their way of proving to the world that gamers are more than anti-social, car-stealing, hooker-beating blights on society. We have money, and we like to spend it on games, even if that's just to give games to others, especially to kids suffering from serious illnesses.

That's why I'm pleased to announce that UW Bothell's Delta Epsilon Chi club, in conjunction (and competition) with Cascadia Community College's Business Club, is holding a Holiday Toy Drive, with all of the collected toys and games going to Child's Play. I can't think of a more worthy cause, and I'm thrilled to be able to be a part of it.

Our drive will be going from November 27th to December 8th, and if you live in the Seattle or Eastside Washington areas, please feel free to bring a donation to the UW Bothell Library, and deposit them in the UW Bothell collection bin (or Cascadia, if you prefer). Please note that all toys and games must be new and unwrapped, and that we are unable to accept stuffed animals of any kind, as they harbor germs and are dangerous to immune-compromised kids.

Holiday Gaming

2006-11-07T10:06:00.000-08:00

Last week officially launched the holiday game buying season with the Halloween release of Final Fantasy XII. I picked it up for a mere $37.99 at Circuit City, and it was well worth every penny. It's easily the best Final Fantasy game yet, and I'm constantly stunned with the graphic quality that the six-year-old PlayStation 2 is capable of. I wonder if the Xbox 360 or the PS3 will have that kind of advancement in their later years.

I mention that because today marks the release of Gears of War, Microsoft's tentpole holiday game. Gears of War is said to stress the Xbox 360 to its limits, something only the HD-DVD drive (and its corresponding 4+ million lines of code) is going to do this generation. If the ultra-violent Gears isn't your thing, Microsoft has you covered with Viva Pinata ... the collectible animal game. That's not to say there isn't any violence in Viva Pinata ... after all, any game where you can beat an animal to death with a stick and feed the entrails (read: candy) to the other Pinatas is deeply disturbing.

Other notable game launches this week include Call of Duty 3, Guitar Hero II, and Elite Beat Agents. Elite Beat Agents is already in my hands, and it's every bit as fantastic as the wonderfully quirky Osu! Tatake! Ouendan! on which it is based. Agents are most definitely GO!

Every game is worth a purchase, and with new consoles launching in as little as two weeks, it looks to be a very expensive holiday for gamers. Thank goodness for gift-giving holidays!

Windows Sans Support?

2006-11-06T10:16:00.000-08:00

I was reading the forums over at Microsoft's "Shell: Revealed" blog site, and came across a posting asking if skinning would be supported in Vista. The expected answer came, one that I've grown very familiar with. No, because for one thing, Product Support would be a nightmare.

Now I've heard this explanation a lot. There are a lot of visual things that don't happen in our modern OS that are possible (and even happen in some environments, like Linux), but don't come to fruition because of the need to support such widgets and whatnot. I'm intimately aware of this having worked in Microsoft's Product Support Services (PSS) once upon a time. And while it was very easy for me to walk a user through just about any scenario with only keyboard commands if necessary, I could certainly see how the majority of PSS personnel might not be able to deal with uncertainties.

Being savvy myself and knowing how to bend the almighty Internet to my will, I can recall every time that I've had to call Microsoft for a support issue with any of their software. Twice. And those were for issues that I already knew the answer, but wanted to find out if there was a workaround of some kind. And as someone who rarely calls Microsoft for support, I wouldn't be heartbroken or even a little inconvenienced if PSS was unavailable to me. I don't even think I could name a single other person I know that's ever called Microsoft for help, but that could be because they'd call me first, and I usually fix it. :)

That's when the idea struck me. Why doesn't Microsoft offer low(er)-cost licenses to people who waive the right to contact PSS for any issues?

I'm sure it's similar to the school vouchers issue (it's the aggregate of purchases/taxes that pay for PSS/school for everyone), or possibly just a way to keep the price inflated for everyone. Then again, most people I know are getting their versions of Windows and Office from lower-cost means to begin with. They either know someone who works at Microsoft, or they can get an educational discount, or OEM version or something. So profit protection is probably not the answer. Not to mention that the R&D involved is a sunk cost anyway, and software is a business built on the marginal. In fact, PSS is really the only on-going cost tied to an individual product after it is out the door. Why not get that extra copy or two from me through these means, rather than pushing me to these other options? Anyone out there know if this conversation has ever come up inside Microsoft, and what the answer was?

To answer the original question ... No, Microsoft will not officially support skinning the OS, in part due to the support issues, and in part to protect the UI as a branded experience. That said, an interesting solution was posed ... why not offer a key combination (CTRL+ALT+END was suggested) that reverts to a standard skin and includes some support diagnostics? Even one of the shell guys seemed intrigued by the suggestion.

DS-Xtreme

2006-11-03T07:07:00.000-08:00

I got an interesting package in the mail the other day. A company called DS-X sent me a review sample of a product called DS-Xtreme. It's a pretty standard sort of device, it allows you to play MP3s and "homebrew" apps on your Nintendo DS, but it's the first of its kind in that it is entirely housed inside a card exactly the size of a DS game. Other similar devices use a "Passthrough" card in the DS slot to load files from a second device in the GBA slot (or "Slot 2"). Another important note, no modification to the DS is required to use the DS-Xtreme, so you don't need to void your warranty by flashing the firmware or cracking the DS open.

The DS-Xtreme is "self-contained", and when I say self-contained, I mean it. Everything is packed into a device exactly the size of a DS card, including a tiny high-speed USB 2.0 port. It comes in an amazingly small box, one that could have been even smaller if they really wanted to. There's a USB cable included, though you might already have devices that use a similar cable (I use the dock for my T-Mobile MDA). Just drop the files into the "Apps" folder or "Music" folder, and then pop it into the DS. There isn't any software to load, Windows (including Vista) just sees it as a memory card. The card boots up just like a game when in the DS (except for flashing the power light like it's accessing the WiFi connection), and you are given a series of icons: Apps, Music, Settings, and the fairly useless (unless you upgrade the firmware) About. Everything in the About menu could have been put on the top screen, which only shows the DS-X logo, eliminating one redundant button.

An interesting feature is the addition of two LED lights on the card, which you can program to "dance" while playing music. These lights are also on by default when playing a game, and through the Settings menu, you can program the color and brightness of each of the two lights individually. And for those of you wanting to go incognito, you can turn them off entirely. For the graphics experts out there, the DS-X team has made sure that the entire UI for the DS-Xtreme is "skinnable", so that you can design your own interface. It's more than just new graphic files, though ... the UI is XML based so that you can literally create an entirely new design from scratch. Those tools should be coming soon.

What really interested me about this, is that coming from a game developer way back when, I know that a lot of game developers end up looking to these devices as a cheaper means of creating games than the "official" dev kits. I expect that this one will be no different. It runs about $130-150, which is damned cheap compared to the thousands of dollars one would need to pay for an official kit. The self-contained nature of this device is going to be very appealing to the garage developer, and will be a great cost savings even for official developers, who could now afford to give every coder on the team their own kit. Of course, they'll still need to pay Nintendo to manufacture carts for retail, not to mention having to sign on as an official developer which carries costs as well. But this would go a long way towards smoothing out the process.

I might as well get this next bit out of the way right now. Yes, while this device can play "homebrew" games, it can also play Nintendo DS "ROMs", i.e. copies of Nintendo DS games. While I don't condone piracy of any kind, and while Nintendo would never admit to it, there is a very good reason why someone would want to use this to put copies of games on. It's just more convenient! While the number of games you can hold is limited by the size of the game in question, I currently have 12 games loaded on the card (all of which are games that I own). One of the games is one that I lost when I left my original DS on a plane, but that I still have the case and instructions for. It would ordinarily be a major hassle to cart 12 cards around with you all the time, not to mention that if I lose my DS again, I'm not losing my original games. It's nice to be able to do my Brain Age training, then jump into a game of Tetris or Metroid Prime Hunters without needing to go fishing for my cards, or even remembering to bring them in the first place. It works with the DS Rumble Pack, and you can even back up your game saves ... another killer feature.

If there's a drawback to the DS-Xtreme, it's that the included memory is only 512MB ... and if you want to load games as well as music on the card, you'll need to either compress the music all to hell, or be very thrifty in what you load onto it. It would have been great to have an option to stick a Micro SD card in it (an option that similar devices offer), but given the size and cost, I can understand why the compromise was made. Hopefully they'll have a larger sized version in the works soon, or one that can take external memory ... since it would be great to have my entire Nintendo DS library stored on my card, along with some tunes. Battery life may be a concern as well, as it seems like I'm getting roughly 45 minutes to an hour less battery life than I otherwise would have. That was improved once I turned off the LEDs entirely, but it's something to consider if you would normally throw your DS into sleep mode rather than turning it off.

I've used the card in an original DS "phat" as well as the new DS Lite, and it works flawlessly in both handhelds. The card sits flush, and unless you're looking closely, or you've left the LED lights on, you could never tell that it wasn't a DS card in the slot save for the white color. The build quality of the card itself is solid, though the plastic housing is a bit flimsy (probably to ease the assembly process). Unless you're constantly handling the card, I can't see that you'd have any trouble. The USB port seemed like it might have been a weak spot when I first heard about it, but it's connected very solidly, and shouldn't weaken.

This isn't a mass-market device, and probably wasn't meant to be. The cards are hand-assembled, and the relatively high cost and low quantities will probably keep it out of the hands of anyone but the enthusiasts and developers looking for an alternative to official dev kits. However, I'm completely hooked. I've spent a fair amount of time exploring the homebrew DS scene and while it's interesting, what's really convinced me is being able to bring my games with me without needing a bandolier to keep them all in reach. In fact, the DS-Xtreme convinced me to trade in my original DS towards a DS Lite, just to further reduce the size of the stuff I carry with me every day. Additional music on the card is the icing on the cake, and while it's not a replacement for my trusty iPod, it's certainly a welcome inclusion. I can certainly see this thing ending up in Nintendo's crosshairs sooner than later, though you'd think it would be safe given the significant "non-infringing" uses of the device, but the political and legal climate has changed a lot in recent years. Overall, the DS-Xtreme is a fantastic device, a great value for the money, and one that you can have back when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

Microsoft Kills "Max"

2006-11-03T06:57:00.000-08:00

According to Flexbeta, Microsoft has killed the "Max" skunkworks project. The Max photo organizer program was a project of Hillel Cooperman, one of the Vista UI guys, and was designed to show off the capabilities of the Windows Presentation Foundation (aka Avalon). If you're not familiar with the term "skunkworks", it denotes a project done for purely research purposes. It's not unusual for a skunkworks project to turn into an actual shipping product (a lot of Google's skunkworks project end up in the wild, thanks to their 20% policy), but what's unusual about this one is that Max was looking very good. It's telling that a version for Vista never reached beta, since WPF was a key feature of Vista. The excuses for why this never happened were pretty flimsy ... could it be that Max has actually become part of Windows Vista?

Probably not. Max was very ... VERY pretty, and would have made the rest of the OS look amateurish by comparison. Not that Vista doesn't look good, but Max was incredibly gorgeous, and was pretty much the only realization of the early demos Microsoft showed off of what the then "Longhorn" would be capable of. If all of Vista's micro-apps looked as good as Max, Vista could give the Mac purists something to consider. Anyway, all we know at this point is the cryptic message left behind by the Max team ... to keep checking ideas.live.com.

Second Place, But Still a Winner!

2006-10-30T10:05:00.000-08:00

My group came in second in the competition at FOLC, where we were tasked with creating an advertising campaign to promote the City of Leavenworth. Our team ended up creating an entire new festival for Leavenworth (the "Bavarian Egg Festival"), complete with its own ad campaign and promotional opportunities, and while that risk ended up costing us the nice plaques awarded to the first place team, we received our own reward after the event. Turns out that the City Council members liked the idea so much, they're planning to go forward with the event this coming March, and want our group to come back and be a part of it!

It's times like this that I'm reminded that sometimes, it's not about who comes in first at a technical level. We did our research, and found that a better opportunity had presented itself. The group debated the merits of sticking to rules or taking the calculated risk of giving them something different than what they wanted. We might not have come in first, but I think the reaction of the City Council shows that we were winners of a different kind.

Very Busy Weekend ...

2006-10-26T14:26:00.000-07:00

I'm off in about half an hour to start the 2 1/2 hour drive to Leavenworth, WA for the ΔΕΧ Fall Orientation and Leadership Conference (FOLC). If you've never been to Leavenworth, October is the best time to make the trip. The foliage this time of year is amazing, and Leavenworth itself is an amazing town. The entire town is Bavarian, and around Christmas time, the town looks amazing.

FOLC should be fun, and it's a nice way to stretch my business muscles in a competition, something I haven't done in over a decade. Of course, that's a little stressful ... I'm going to feel like the old coot in a group full of young college kids. Still, maybe my experience will help our group. What's the competition? That's just it, we don't know. You don't find out until the conference, and then you have to construct a plan on the spot. I can't wait to find out who is in my group, and what the task will be! I'm going to try blogging the conference at the same time that I'm taking part in it, which might be tough ... we'll see how it goes. Worst case scenario, I'll write up a recap and post some pictures.

The competition part happens Saturday, and then I hop in the car and drive back to Seattle just in time to catch the UW Homecoming Game at Husky Stadium. Sunday, Nintendo's Wii console goes on pre-sale at Toys 'R' Us, and I have a group meeting for one of my classes after that.

Six Word Stories

2006-10-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

Wired recently ran an article,asking for notable writers to construct a story out of only six words. Apparently, the idea stemmed from what Hemingway would call his best work ...

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

How tragic, but yet, there's hope! While I could never compare myself to Hemingway or any of the other amazing authors and writers that wrote pieces for the Wired story, I felt like giving it a try myself.

Unfazed by his decapitation, he retaliated.

I like it, and it was fun. Maybe I'll do more of these ...