Sorry for the hiatus. I’ve been somewhat busy and, honestly, not excited about writing anything since my dad died. The response to that post has been incredible and touching, coming from friends and strangers alike. My thanks to all of you.

Bachelor days

My girls are up in Canada for their annual pilgrimage to visit with her side of the family. I won’t bore you with the details of their horrendous flight up there — broken planes, airport switches, and a tired baby — but it was nothing to relish. I felt so frustrated that they were having such a difficult time and there was precisely bupkus I could do about it. I flirted with the idea of flying up to New York just to help her get from Kennedy to La Guardia but at $500 I figured that was pushing it a bit far. They made it and are in good company now so I can stop worrying.

As a bachelor I get to dabble in a bit more freedom which can be nice for a change of pace. My wife is not one of the “load the hubby up with a ‘honey-do’ list to keep him busy” which I appreciate. We’re both adults, we have things we want to do and we do them in some fashion or timeframe. This business of one side dictating to the other what will be accomplished, regardless of whether the other party is there or not, is for the birds. There’s no wonder the divorce rate is up if people see their spouses as laborers that must be given tasks in their absence.

I’m trying to work on my business concept and the software side of that but it’s relatively slow going primarily due to the size of the existing code base and my lack of knowledge of it. I’m ever so slowly getting there, but it’ll take some time. It hasn’t reached the critical juncture where I’m driven to do it, which is mostly because it seems “tough” right now and that’s a direct result of the lack of knowledge. Once I get my teeth in it it’ll go faster.

Now that’s a home entertainment device

I’m getting some time in on the Xbox 360 and coming away more impressed than ever. I finished Kameo and Call of Duty 2, both of which were excellent games in their respective ways. I’m currently working on beating Call of Duty 2 on Veteran difficulty to get those achievement points, Condemned, and Project Gotham Racing 3.

Condemned is a very well-made action-horror game that I simply had to try after playing through the demo. I don’t usually like horror games, but this one is appealing in its presentation and thoroughness. I’m an enormous pansy when it comes to games like this so I’m getting through by starting up a voice chat with a buddy as I traverse the levels. Don’t worry, I know I’m ridiculous. I embrace it. I haven’t made it far, but man have they done an amazing job of creating tension and fear. Jerks.

So long Xbox

And today I say goodbye to my little Xbox buddy. I put my original Xbox on eBay and sold it for a reasonable sum when the auction ended last night. Good little system but it was set to languish alone now that the far sexier 360 is here. I’m pleasantly surprised by how much the auction went for. 4 years of use and I still got a nice chunk of change. I attribute it to the people that want to turn it into a media streaming box via mod chip. Whatever, I don’t care… I gots my cash.

So there’s this neato thing called your Gamerscore in the next generation Xbox Live. You can see it right over there in the sidebar. It is meant to be an easily referenced numeric indicator of your achievements over all the games you’ve played. Full games can hand out up to 1000 points to add to this score while Xbox Live Arcade games can dish out up to 200. Fine so far.

The only disconnect comes from the seemingly arbitrary nature of the achievements required to gain these points for each game. As an example, if you complete the game King Kong you will get all of the points right then. Poof, 1000 points. What does it take to earn 30 points in Madden? Score a touchdown offline. Yeah, a touchdown in any difficulty. Just cross that line and you’ve got 30 points. That same 30 points will be acquired in one of my personal favorites, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, when scoring 1,000,000 points in a game. This is a far more difficult task.

Some games do it well, providing a rather linear ramp for acquiring the points. Those last points will be a considerable challenge to earn. Condemned did it right with a plethora of achievements requiring varying levels of effort. Call of Duty 2 has a good selection too, with an easy 50 for completing the training level to get your feet wet, then a nice 150 for completing the game on any difficulty, then the rest for completing each of the levels at the hardest difficulty. That’s a challenge.

Achievements and these points, if they’re done correctly as in the games mentioned above, can lead the player to play in ways she might not usually play. The classic example is the Pacifism achievement in Geometry Wars, awarded for surviving the first 60 seconds of the game whiteout firing. I know I’d never personally never not fire when playing, and it was a unique challenge to pull off the achievement.

But as a single, universal number supposedly representing your aggregate “achievements” or overall gaming “ability”? Not hardly given the wide swing in difficulty in earning the same number of points in different games. I know that was Microsoft’s intention, but without some guidance from above levelling out the playing field it’ll primarily be a measure of how many people rented King Kong and Madden.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been using the Anonymous monospace font for programming for a long time. Now I’m trying out Bitstream’s Vera Sans Mono. Very nice, readable, clean programming font. You might want to give it a shot.

(I didn’t “discover” this font. Hat tip to Kuro5hin for the discussion.)

Dear Sirs/Madams:

I realize that you are likely inordinately busy with your efforts to stem the tide of rampant piracy that’s likely costing you tens of dollars of profit and literally taking the food out of the mouths of set dressers if those insipid, pandering missives you used to show before paying customers in theaters are to be believed, constructing newer and more powerful technologies to make your Academy screeners harder to copy (or, as it happens, even watch), and your endless lobbying of Congress to ram legislation through that would essentially make any activity involving a movie that constitutes anything more than “press play” illegal. However, I’d like to take the time to provide a couple of points I think might help your audiences actually enjoy your movies a bit more. These observations sprung into my mind following my recent viewing of The Family Stone, a fairly representative example of the kind of dreck you regularly spew out and then have the temerity to complain that, of all things, piracy is the single cause for movie attendance to be down.

1. You may be unaware of this, but you really don’t have to include every demographic in each movie. Having said that, it was rather impressive seeing you work in a homosexual, interracial couple. That must have taken chutzpah! You are blazing trails! But it did set up that extraordinarily painful “conflict” when, believe it or not, your acerbic, uptight stereotype character got to start up an apparently unintentional (wink-wink) bigoted conversation. Not only was she picking on gays, but she also got in something that could be construed as racist! Brilliant!

2. If you need to add emotional weight to a movie, for the love of everything holy, come up with something more original than “one of the parents has cancer and will die by movie’s end.” It’s pathetic when, as Diane Keaton’s face came on the screen in the first scene in the movie I said to myself “I bet they’re going to kill her off.” He shoots he scores!

3. “Hamfisted” doesn’t begin to describe your dealing with the “main” relationships in this movie. So the two non-relationship couples spend a few hours with each other, then at the dénouement (AKA “okay, 15 minutes of celluloid left, let’s wrap this shit up!”) they’re so comfortable with each other that one “couple” is snuggling in bed together and the other “couple” is shown resting their heads together in a moment of tender intimacy? Really? Like an hour after they decide not to get married? Three cheers for believability!

A personal response to Dan Glickman

So, Danny here, the chairman and CEO of the MPAA, by the way, wants to correct some misinterpretation of their desire to close the “analog hole.” Alrighty, Dan. Here’s his letter and my response.

Hollywood isn’t the bad guy in content flap

Your Dec. 30 editorial, “Congressional copycats,” regarding proposed content-protection legislation resorts to the tired and perplexing premise that Hollywood is working overtime to prevent customers from watching our movies. In fact, the bill simply corrects a technical glitch that opens the door to theft of copyrighted material by individuals with the technical savvy and disposition to do so.

Hollywood is the only bad guy in content flap

Well Dan, that sounds somewhat akin to the MPAA resorting to the tired and perplexing premise that putting in technical limitations on what people can watch, when, and where is somehow good for your customers.

It would not prevent technological innovation. To the contrary, protecting copyright will speed innovation and ensure consumers have more options for viewing programming.

To the contrary, it will give you the impression that you’re protecting your business model while causing the average consumer to have fewer options for viewing programming. Furthermore, the people you purport to desire to stop, the ones with “technical savvy” will actually not be hampered in the long run. As has been shown repeatedly, the “technically savvy” will always find ways around whatever bastardized protection scheme with which you come up. Therefore, the only ones you’d end up hurting in the long run are the technically unsavvy customers that actually pay for your product.

The preferred approach to content-protection issues is private-sector solutions, and we have made great efforts to subject the analog-hole issue to public scrutiny and debate, particularly among technology companies. The legislation introduced in Congress reflects the output of that discussion.

Yes, the public is able to scrutinize the technology involved in plugging the analog hole. They are, of course, required to pay $10,000 for the privilege of scrutinizing this technology and then are unable to discuss — or debate as you so thoughtfully put it — their findings anywhere.

The analog-hole legislation levels the playing field for manufacturers in a narrow and limited fashion. Without this legislation, movies and TV shows cannot be securely delivered to consumers in the wide variety of viewing options they desire.

With this legislation the number and variety of viewing options would shrink and the level of functionality would decrease. Until you realize that the best way to win viewers and, oh, by the way, make money is to provide more functionality and value to your customers such that they are compelled to pay for it and instead maintain the “tired and perplexing” stance that the only way to keep your customers is simply to make sure that the same old shit is “securely delivered,” your industry will continue to slide.

DAN GLICKMAN

Chairman and CEO

Motion Picture Assn. of America, Washington

COLDFORGED

Movie Watcher and Paying Customer

The people that you rely on to make payments on your Mercedes, Raleigh

I’ve mentioned time and time again that I subscribe to Rhapsody’s music service. At this point you could logically conclude that I’m a corporate shill and skip everything I ever say again if you haven’t already. I honestly wish I was a corporate shill so I could at least get my service for free if nothing else. I’m still very satisfied with the service for the uses that I put it through, namely listening to music at work and streaming it through my 360 at home. My library has grown from around 600 songs about 8 months ago to 3,400 songs today. I could theoretically go about 11 days without hearing the same song over again if the shuffle function was perfect.

I’ve actually gotten quite liberal with my playlist, simply throwing whole catalogs of music in from diverse artists as I go along. Why not? Technically I could put their entire damned collection on there and listen to it all, it doesn’t cost me any more. That, to me, is the value of this business model over the piecemeal method espoused by their competitors.

I did say almost perfect

If there’s a fly in the ointment it’s with Rhapsody’s player and it’s sensitivity to Internet connections. My work connection is flaky at best, and Rhapsody loses connection with the server roughly a dozen times a day. If I’m streaming music when it happens, I ain’t any more which requires human intervention to fix. I don’t like that.

Luckily, Rhapsody relatively recently added a feature whereby you can download protected version of songs rather than stream it. Costs hard drive space, but sure saves your ass when the connection goes down. Unfortunately, not every title is available for download. Out of the 3662 total tracks I have in my library, 278 aren’t available for download. For me this means that they don’t get played. Because if I hit one of those streaming songs when there’s a connection problem, I’m left with silence that I have to take an action to correct, and I don’t like taking action when I’m working. So, my playlist consists of things I can download.

If they could clear up the reliability of the streaming — or at least the recovery, maybe skipping streamed songs if there’s a network problem — they’d have a near perfect product.