Glenn's Junk Chest

iPad App Recommendations

2010-05-12T22:51:00.004-05:00

I've created a fairly extensive list of my favorite iPad Apps and done it up as a nice PDF.

download it here.

Let me know if you find it valuable.

1.01 Update: Minor fixes, added ToDo app, suggested new comic reader.

The Four Series

2009-11-15T23:31:00.004-06:00

Some series I'm considering reading to my girls.

The Deed of Paksenarrion, 1st book: Sheepfarmer's Daughter, by Elizabeth Moon.
The Honor Harrington books, 1st book: On Basilisk Station, by David Weber
The Belgariad, 1st book: Pawn of Prophecy, by David Eddings
Arrows of the Queen, 1st book: Arrows of the Queen, by Mercedes Lackey

Something I Once Said on Slashdot

2009-06-22T09:45:00.004-05:00

"We are not, and never have been, a nation of laws. Laws aren't at the top of the hierarchy, and hopefully never will be. We are a nation of principles, and all our laws are subject to adherence to those principles.

When someone breaks a law in pursuance of those principles, they do our country a service. If they have the courage of their convictions, they may even be able to get the law overturned. If, on the other hand, it is determined that those principles do not support their action, the law will be upheld, and they will be held accountable for violating it."

I wrote that on Slashdot in May of 2006, and I just stumbled over it again today, re-read it, and thought it wasn't bad. link

Computers: Building a PC with my Daughter

2008-12-27T22:18:00.028-06:00




Me, my daughter Ivy, & her new PC

A few months ago, my daughter and I were discussing technology, and talking about the various things that people can do, and somehow the topic came around to putting computers together, and I assured her that if she wanted to, it was something we could do.

"Really?!?" she asked.

"Yep," I foolishly affirmed.

A few months later she reminded me.

"Remember that computer we're going to build together?"

So... As we ramped up to Christmas, Ivy and I talked about the kinds of projects we could do, from building a small circuit board with transistors, to putting together some kind of simple computing device from chips, to assembling a PC from parts. After some discussion, she opted to build a PC.

Our Project Requirements

A "real" computer. Uncrippled, updatable, and useful.
Runs Linux as primary OS.
Capable of running World of Warcraft
Useful as a home theater media box
Not horribly expensive.

Selecting and Acquiring the Components

Our first stop was at the Computer Store West, out by Frugal Muse on the west side of Madison. They've got a lot of computer parts, cases, and advice, and Ivy and I found it very helpful. After some discussion, we decided to select a motherboard, and work out from there. The store sold a nice little board, the "Asus P5N-EM HDMI Motherboard" It's a Micro-ATX motherboard with a 775 socket. (The 775 socket is a pinless socket that accepts Intel-manufactured chips).

You can look at it here: Asus P5N-EM HDMI Motherboard. $100




ASUS P5N-EM motherboard & CPU fan

This board was attractive to us because of the low price ($100), the integrated graphics card (nVidia GeForce 7100) and the built-in HDMI support, which meant easy hookup to a HD television. It also supported a wide range of powerful (and not so powerful) processors, as well as a wide range of DDR2 RAM.

Unfortunately, despite a desire to buy locally, the premium on some of the individual pieces was too much, and they didn't carry everything. Our goal was to get the minimum specification on every part, and it didn't suit our purposes to spend twice as much to get a slightly better part when we knew a cheaper (and slightly less powerful) part was readily available online.

So, we purchased the following pieces online from TigerDirect:

Thermaltake Black LANBOX Micro-ATX Case. $120

We liked this because it had clear sides. (If you're building it yourself, this is a plus, so you can show it off.) It also has a nice carrying handle, and a cool blue light when it's on.

Intel Celeron Dual Core 1.6ghz CPU. $40.

This is the cheapest processor readily available that will fit in a 775 socket. One thing I like about the route we took here is that if we need more power later on, we could replace it with something like this, a $500+ 2.93ghz quad core processor.

A Masscool 775 CPU fan. $20

Apparently modern CPUs need fans right on them. A heat sync alone won't do anymore.

2 DDR2 667mhz 1gb DIMMs. $24

I figured 2 GB of RAM, would be enough, and by picking the slower 667mhz stuff, it's another place where we could improve the computer's performance in the future by acquiring a more expensive set of DIMMs.

A Power UP 550 watt ATX power supply. $30.

Relatively low power, simple, and cheap, but it has all the needed connectors, and I don't think we'll need bigger for quite a while.

I didn't want to buy anything I didn't have to, so I started scrounging around for leftover hard drives, optical drives, keyboards, and mice. I've got extra monitors around the house, and part of the idea is that the thing should hook up to our TV as-is.

My brother was kind enough to supply a 330gb hard drive that had been dropped and that he no longer trusted for business purposes, even though it passed tests. I ended up purchasing a new mouse with Ivy, and while I was going to purchase a straight DVD-ROM, Ivy threw in her X-mas money to get me to go up to a Blu-Ray optical drive. For now, we're just using old crummy keyboards scavanged from older computers.

Scavenged Maxtor 3.5" hard drive. (PATA, 330gb), $0

Logitech wireless USB mouse. $20

LG blu-ray optical drive. $120

I'm still not sure (see below) that this thing will play blu-ray movies as is. But it comes close, and it might allow ripping them, even if it doesn't allow direct playback.

Total parts cost: $474

So, without telling Ivy, I ordered all the parts, boxed them up, and carried them as wrapped gifts down to the in-laws for our Christmas visit. I think it's telling that we could have shaved $100 off the price by going with a regular DVD instead of the blu-ray. By staying away from the cutting edge on a project like this, you can save a lot of money.

Assembly




Ivy screws in the Hard Drive

On Christmas, we opened it all up, and Ivy and I set to the assembly with a will. Mostly, this is just a physical process of plugging things into other things, screwing things into other things, and spending a lot of time looking at the manual to make sure that everything that needs to be hooked up is hooked up.

One observation I have about this process is that most connectors are keyed, so you can't connect them backwards or to the wrong thing. The only exception I noticed was that the firewire and USB connections to the motherboard look the same, and you can apparently damage the motherboard by hooking them up incorrectly. We didn't have firewire on this motherboard, so I tucked that cable out of the way.

Everything else was pretty straightforward. Including mounting the drives, which required a little ambitious positioning and screwing, but nothing too out there. It was especially convenient that our case had lift out mounts for both the power supply and the drives, which meant we could pull them out to screw things in. Very nice.




Still not done, but happy.

Our only hang-up during initial assembly came in connecting the "power" light on the case to the appropriate pins on the motherboard. The case manufacturer thinks that an ATX motherboard power light connector should have three pins, and the important ones are 1 and 3. The motherboard from ASUS, however, had two pins as part of a grid of many connectors. I had to reconfigure the power connector by pulling loose one of the wires and reconnecting it, and then jamming into the available space, with part of the connector hanging out over the edge. Inelegant, but it works.

After we wired it up, we plugged it in in the kitchen for the smoke test, and had no trouble. We then hooked it up to one of my father-in-laws monitors and keyboards, and we were able to boot to the bios configuration screens, where the computer promptly froze.

A little research revealed the only significant misstep Ivy and I made in the entire process. The motherboard has three DIMM slots for RAM. One of which is a different color than the other two. I put the two DIMMs we had into the two slots that had the same color. Turns out that the 3rd slot is a different color because it requires a DIMM to be inserted there. After about 15 minutes with the motherboard manual, I figured this out, moved one DIMM to that slot, and then I could boot to BIOS configuration without crashing. Huzzah!

Configuration and Installation

Since my goal was to create a linux-primary machine, I then installed Ubuntu linux on it. I cannot stress just how easy this was. Unfortunately, I also wanted to be able to boot Windows XP, because A) That's the easiest way to play World of Warcraft, and B) The blu-ray video playing software only comes for Windows.

Sadly, it would turn out that this was a mistake on my part. Important tip: To create a dual-boot system with windows, install windows first. The dual boot manager I'm using is called "grub", and if you install Ubuntu after you install windows, it ends up properly installed, but if you install Ubuntu first, Windows blows it away during its own installation.

In my experience, new system configuration is always a hassle, and this was no exception.

Problems Overcome:

It passed the smoke test!
Couldn't get grub reinstalled after Windows blew it away. Fixed that by running it from the command line in Linux after booting Ubuntu from the live CD. However, the grub menu didn't show Windows as an option. Had to modify the grub boot config file to add Windows to the list. Solution: Some messing around at the linux command line. Annoying, but not too bad.

No sound on Windows XP. For whatever reason, the default configuration after installation didn't have Windows using the nVidia sound hardware. Solution: Changed settings in Sound control panel in windows.

Ubuntu didn't have nVidia drivers, so maxed res at 800x600. In addition, the automatic installation program in Ubuntu doesn't currently work for this. Solution: Found and downloaded current drivers. Had to boot Ubuntu in recovery mode to install them, since the installer wouldn't let me do it while x-windows was running.

World of Warcraft and its two expansions took 8 hours to install. I kid you not. Solution: Excessive patience.

Problems still outstanding:

Blu-ray software "PowerDVD" won't play blu-rays. When I first installed it, I put in the Dark Knight blu-ray, and it played at a reduced frame rate. I fiddled with the settings trying to get better performance. Then quit and tried installing an updated version of PowerDVD. Since then, and despite a full reinstall of PowerDVD, when I put a blu-ray disc in and try to play it, PowerDVD quits without generating an error message. Very frustrating, especially since it worked once. mini-update: It worked again when hooked up to HDMI instead of VGA. Could it be a copy protection thing?

All photos courtesy my wife, Liana Loos-Austin.

20 Good Things: 4 - DiSalvo Sauce

2008-03-14T16:49:00.000-05:00

http://www.disalvosauces.com/sauces.html

You won't be sorry.

Fun: Be Warned

2007-11-05T14:32:00.001-06:00

check the Metahuman Activity Map

Glenn Loos-Austin

SoonIWillBeInvincible.com

Fun: Test Embed

2007-10-08T08:23:00.000-05:00

UPDATE:
Here's a new version that's in development (and might have some bugs):

We added the ability to embed stories from storybridge.tv on other people's websites. This is a test of some embed code:

Here's some more.

and here's another:

iPhone Hack - The Lightest of Tethers

2007-07-09T15:57:00.000-05:00

One of the limitations on the iPhone is that it doesn't support "tethered mode", which is where you hook it up to your laptop (either by bluetooth or cable) and use it as an external modem to get your laptop online.

The reason for this limitation is probably threefold. 1) AT&Ts EDGE Network is slow, and possibly overburdened for this purpose. They may have been reticent to have a bunch of bandwidth-hungry laptop users with shiny new iPhones flooding onto it. 2) AT&T charges extra for this service. 3) The phone plays big to people that are often in Wi-Fi enabled areas. Such people don't need a tether, and may chose another phone anyway, thus making heavy R&D investment in this space a dubious investment.

The most galling limitation of this, for me, proved to be in composing email. I'd want to send an email from a non-wifi area, and could either compose it on my laptop and wait to send it later, or compose it on my iPhone, which doesn't allow for easy composition of long email messages. (little keyboard, small view space, no cut and paste, etc.)

So, the question in my mind became, how do I write an email on my laptop, then sync it to the iPhone and send it? The mail sync on the phone syncs only account info, not content. The notes application doesn't sync. You could write the message into an address book entry (maybe) or a calendar entry (maybe), but without cut and paste, there's no way to get it into the mail program. In fact, the only content that syncs from your computer to the iPhone that you can send via email is photos. This does work, if you put your email body into a 320x480 image file, sync it to the iPhone as a photo and then email it, people can get your message as an image. It's a terrible kludge, but with photos being the only synced and mailable content, there was no other way.

Or was there?

The iPhone allows for one more data type to be synced. The Safari bookmark. (It allows IE bookmark syncing on Windows, but I haven't tried that.) For sending email, this offers two possibilities.

The first is that you could create or use a web service somewhere that allowed messages to be encoded in the URL used to access the service. Such as:

http://www.fakeemailservice.com/email.php?body=This+is+my+message!

Make this into a bookmark, sync it to your iPhone, and then use the service to send the email. This solution has a lot going for it, but wasn't quite what I was looking for. I wanted to use the mail program (already configured on my iPhone) with the accounts found there.

The second (drumroll please) is that you could encode the message as a "mailto" link, like so:

mailto:glenn@theMediaNinja.com?subject=Test&body=This+is+my+message!

When you make such a link into a bookmark in Safari, sync it to your iPhone, and then select it from the iPhone's bookmark menu, it pops up the mail interface, with addressee, subject, and body intact. You can then send it right from the iPhone. I don't know how long such a bookmark can be, but it's at least several thousand characters.

In order to take advantage of this capability, you'll need to URL-encode the body of your message. (this is because characters like & and % are reserved, and because you want to replace spaces and carriage returns). The iPhone also has a slightly non-standard way of converting mailto links, in that it doesn't use %0D or %0A for carriage returns, but instead likes "<br>". (This suggests that you might be able to use this technique to build more complete HTML to send from the mail program, but I haven't tried that yet.)

In order to make this more palatable, I have created a quick-n-dirty flash movie that does the proper URL encoding, you can try it or download it from:

http://www.themedianinja.com/linked/textprocess_iphone.swf
(option-click or right-click the link to download it.)

Remember to download it if you actually want to use it at some point. Hope this helps someone out!

Suggested improvements welcome.

Family: Ivy the Grandmother

2007-03-16T14:55:00.000-05:00




Ivy Channels Grandma-Power

Ivy's 2nd grade class gave their musical performance yesterday, and Ivy and her friend Kathleen were chosen to dress up for the song "Grandma's Chicken Soup". The video link takes you to an edited-down version of the event that runs about 5 minutes, and shows the Ivy-centric highlights. If you're interested in the full half-hour 2nd grade program, you can download it here. (It's an H264-encoded MPEG4 document.)

You might also consider comparing this with the muscial performance Ivy put on in Kindergarten. I blogged about it.

Apple: 10 Burning Questions about the iPhone

2007-01-09T16:50:00.002-06:00

Update: I've updated some of the answers as of 3/14/08

The just-announced iPhone looks very very cool. So cool, in fact, that if you'd told me all the features before the announcement, I would have called you a damn liar. This post may not make sense if you aren't already familiar with the baseline, so you might want to check out the link to see Apple's multimedia presentation on what the phone will do.




The Apple iPhone

That said, the announcement (and my subsequent reading) has left me with some questions. None of these are necessarily make-or-break deals, but I'd dearly love to know the answers.

1. Is the storage space expandable?

It comes with either 4 or 8GB, but that's not much when you're talking about full length movies and tv shows. There's a slot on the side, can you put some sort of memory card in there to expand its storage?

Answer: The iPhone does not have memory expansion, which means the video-playing capabilities are a little dubious, especially if you have a lot of music you want to keep on the device as well. I'd say to figure the 8GB model as a must if video storage is in the plans. That will let you get 2 or 3 full length movies on there at any one time. More if you skimp on either quality or other data.

Update: However, if you have wifi, and the wherewithal, you can compress a movie in MP4 so that you can play it in the web browser. I've compressed a good chunk of my library in this way, so I can watch movies on the road from my home server.

2. Can you access the unix command line?

One of the very cool things about OS X is that when you need to, you can fire up the terminal and access the basic unix command line. The new phone "runs OS X" but that's only an advantage if it offers the same sort of accessibility that makes OS X what it is.

Answer: Not yet. Someone has hacked shell access using the port on the bottom, but that's a far cry from command line access on the device itself.

Update: Yes, if you hack it. The hack, called "jailbreaking" has improved to the point where you can get true shell access. However, it does involve either a fair amount of work to keep up to date, or a commitment to not updating to the latest firmware at every chance. Apple's upcoming official solution for third party apps will doubtlessly not include shell access.

3. Does it support ssh?

A device that allows me to make a ssh (secure shell) connection to a server at my office is easily worth half again as much as one that doesn't.

Answer: Kind of. There's no way to do it on the device itself, but, since it supports a pretty powerful web-broswer with SSL, you could connect to a secure web service that provided a terminal window. It's clunky, but doable. I still hope for a real ssh client to be added at some point.

Update: Yes, if you hack it you can install a true ssh client, and it works quite well. I imagine that there will be an decent ssh client that runs in the 2.0 firmware as well.

4. Does it support video to an external TV?

One of the super cool things about the current video iPod is that with an inexpensive cable, you can hook it up to a TV and use it as the source for watching a movie or show. I'd hate to lose that capability.

Answer: This is not possible with any existing iPod peripherals or cables. I'm still not sure whether this means that the capability is truly gone, or if it just requires a new peripheral of some sort.

Update: Yep, it just required new cabling, which is now available. However, you do have to watch out for GSM interference on the audio from the cell phone. Putting it in airplane mode will solve this if you're doing a presentation or the like.

5. Does it support the iTunes music store?

If you can use the device itself to buy music from the store, and then transfer that music later to your other devices, that would be pretty nifty. If you could use the store to buy games, movies, and tv shows as well, even better. (but see question 9.)

Answer: No. However, this capability could easily come as a software update. The presumed problem here is AT&T's desire not to have their limited EDGE network bandwidth taken up by this kind of traffic. This might be a feature that waits until a G3 version of the iPhone hits the shelves.

Update: They added this capability in a firmware update (1.1.1), and the addressed the bandwidth concern by making it something that only works over wifi, not over the cell network.

6. Is it compatible with the games already released for the G5 iPod?

I own three of these. Admittedly, they're not expensive, but I like them, and it would be really nice if I could bring them along, and one more reason to make this my portable device of choice.

Answer: No. Doubtlessly there will be games for it eventually, but there were none at launch. There are now some games that can be played in the Safari web browser, but none of them are especially grand.

7. Does it support Adobe Flash in the browser?

Sure, it's Safari in name, and looks like a pretty good browser, but a browser that doesn't support Adobe Flash is essentially crippled on today's web. Lots of video sites rely on it, many web games rely on it, heck, even some web comics now depend on it. What degree of Flash is supported? (For that matter, how well will it work with web 2.0 apps?)

Answer: Actually, this isn't turning out too badly. The answer is still no, but A) web 2.0 support is decent. and B) Flash is rumored to be coming as a future update. Wait and see, I guess.

Update: Still not too bad, but it doesn't look like flash is coming.

8. How open will it be to third party developers?

This is a biggie. One of the nice things about many of the palm and windows-based smartphones is the ability to install applications written by independent developers. From useful utilities to entertaining games, this ability is nearly crucial, but Apple won't even talk about what kind of processor the device has yet, so it seems like it's not exactly approaching the development community with the most open of arms.

Answer: No. Apple is calling it a "Closed Platform". Steve Jobs told the New York Times: "These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them." Which is obviously bullshit, since I put stuff on my PDA, my computer, and my PSP, and all of them continued working just fine. Jobs told MSNBC: "Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.", which is, I suspect, closer to the truth. The deal-with-the-devil AT&T exclusive probably required some compromising, and crippling the device so that user apps couldn't be installed was probably one of those compromises. This may be simply to proctect AT&T's various fee-based markets. I wouldn't use SMS messaging at all if I could install an AIM chat client, for instance. I hope this position changes, or that (at least) it allows for widgets and/or Adobe flash programs. Even decent support for HTML or Web 2.0 apps running from local memory would be better than nothing, here. (Web apps so far only run from the web, not from local storage.)

Update: Well, Jobs relented, and the SDK for writing applications is now available. Full application support is coming in June with the 2.0 firmware. While there are some caveats, I think it will address this point quite nicely.

9. What will the monthly service cost?

This is a pretty big deal. With the capabilities of the device, you're going to want unlimited (or nigh unlimited) data transfer. What kind of a monthly pricetag is that going to amount to? Especially important because of the two year contract.

Answer: $60 for 450 minutes with unlimited data. Not too bad, actually.

10. Does it support easy net access for my MacBook via Bluetooth?

One of the grails of cell phones for me has been the transparent ability to set it up next to my laptop and get my laptop online through the phone's access to the net. This has, historically, been way more difficult that it should be. This phone seems to have all the pieces, but I've seen that before.

Answer: Nope. I'm guessing that AT&T didn't want this because they charge a lot more for data plans that allow "tethered" access of this sort. I've crafted a way to write an email on my laptop and send it using the iPhone, which takes part of the burden of this restriction away. Would be nice to see this capability added.

Update: It is possible to do this with a hacked iphone now, but it's against AT&Ts terms of service, so is probably not a good idea if you want to keep your cell phone plan.

Bonus Q: Will I be able/want to get one?

Despite my initial skepticism about some of the devices limitations, the fact turned out to be that I needed a phone. With that as a baseline need, and the surprisingly reasonable monthly rate, I decided to spring for it. Its email capabilities are really what I needed in way of data, and it's phone features are just what the doctor ordered. The rest of the built in capabilities vary from cool to great, and that makes it a pretty good phone for me. I'm still hoping to see some of the shortcomings fixed, either by new versions of the device or by software improvements. Time will tell.

Fun: The Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Meme

2007-01-05T13:25:00.000-06:00

One of the blogs I occassionally read (Chronicles of Bean) recently posted a copy of the Science Fiction Book Club list most significant SF novels between 1953-2006. I thought I'd take a break from pondering HDTV and participate.

The meme part of this works like so: Bold the ones you have read, ~~strike~~ through the ones you read and hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put a * next to the ones you love.

I'm doubtlessly way late to the meme party, but I couldn't resist such a tasty list of books.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien*
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.*
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey*
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card*
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson*
24. The Forever War, Joe "Robot Jox" Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
~~29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice~~
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin*
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
~~32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny~~
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson*
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer*

A few interesting observations. My favorite books in the whole world are the first two books in the Harper Hall trilogy. They didn't make the list, but Dragonflight, set in the same world, did. My second and third favorites, The Chronicals of Thomas Covenant and Snow Crash, made the list at #23 and #43.

I quibble with #48 being on the list at all. I've read it, and it seemed way too derivative of #1 on the list to be seriously considered of significance. It's a fun read, and later books in the series are much more original, but still...

#4, and #20 almost earned strikeouts. I took a lot of valuable stuff away from the first, but didn't exactly think it was a fun read, and #20 was brutally difficult for me to get through. I kept thinking it was about to start making sense, and then I'd lose the thread.

I haven't read #28, but I did read a graphic novel based on it.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see how highly a Canticle for Leibowitz rated. It's a great book.

20 Good Things: 3 - Samsung 46" Widescreen Slim DLP HDTV

2007-01-04T14:48:00.000-06:00

Specifically, the HL-S4676S model.

As many of you probably already known, We recently took the plunge and decided to purchase an HDTV. Knowing what I knew about video, I had some specific expectations going into the experience, some of which were validated, others of which... weren't. If you're interested in the ins-and-outs of the current state of HDTV, read on. If not, I'll simply say that the model I name above is a very very good compromise on all of the possible pros and cons.

For those who want to know more, here's the skinny. HDTV is the new standard broadcast model. In the next few years, all of the existing NTSC broadcasts will cease, and people with old sets (who don't have cable or satellite or whatnot) will need to buy a new tuner in order to continue to receive broadcast television. The old broadcast standard employs a system of sending images that works like this: Every 60th of a second, one half of the image is sent as a series of horiztonal lines. On the odd 60ths, the odd lines of the image are sent, and on the even 60ths, the even lines are sent, to be slotted into the empty spaces between the odd lines. This alternating between even and odd lines is called "interlacing". The end result is an image with an effective resolution of about 720x480, and an effective framerate of about 30fps. Toward the end of the SDTV (Standard Definition TV) era, certain sets have become capable of dealing with images that weren't interlaced but rather were "progressive" with all the lines coming in a batch that started at the top and worked down to the bottom. When you see a "progressive scan dvd player" it means it is capable of outputing in that new format.

HDTV starts with this and goes up, but they give everything names:

480i - 720x480 30fps interlaced video, as above.
480p - 720x480 30fps progressive video, like what a progressive scan dvd player can output.
720p - 1280x720 30fps progressive video.
1080i - 1920x1080 30fps interlaced video.
1080p* - 1920x1080 30fps progressive video. (The grail of this quest)

(*1080p is not part of the upcoming broadcast standard, and sets aren't required to display it, but it obviously represents the best possible display in this space.)

But of course the format of the data is only part of the equation here. While the HDTV specification has slowly crept into more and more sets, other market forces conspire to add confusion. Heres the high-level list:

1) Video hardware - There's DLP (and many other variants on rear-projection), CRT (glass tubes), LCD (like a laptop screen), Plasma, and finally there's front-projectors of at least two kinds.

2) Gaming consoles - The Nintendo Wii will only do 480p, the Xbox360 renders many things at a maximum of 720p, but outputs them at 1080i through upsampling. The PS3 handles certain video improperly on 1080i-only sets.

3) Inputs - There are four ways to get HDTV-resolution content into a set. Component, DVI, broadcast, and HDMI connectors. There are also legacy needs for s-video and composite video. Finally, audio signals come in two channel and multi-channel formats, and some of those are digital formats while other are analog formats.

4) Most broadcast channels (in Madison, at least) are at 1080i, but some are at 720p, and some legacy content is at 480p or even 480i.

5) Older PVRs (like Tivo) work at 480i.

6) DVDs are usually encoded at 480p, but non-progressive DVD players can only work at 480i.

7) The screen is a different shape. Old TV was 4:3 (4 units wide by 3 units high), but HDTVs are all 16:9. New DVDs are encoded with this aspect in mind (16x9 enhanced) but old DVDs especially from 20th century fox and Disney, often weren't. Broadcast TV is an almost indecipherable mashup of widescreen, non-widescreen, 16x9 and 4x3 content. Even DVDs that encoded properly for 16:9 sets often have 4x3 content for the extras.

8) Cable and satellite services you already have are probably 480i. You may be able to get a lot of that content in HD instead, but you'll probably need to pay more per month, and you'll need new equipment up front.

9) If you're going to be dealing with a mix of input resolutions (and judging by issues 8, 6, 5, 4 and 2 we are going to have to) it's important to consider which resolutions the set can display natively, and how it deals with content that it can't display except by scaling it.

*whew*

So, with all this to consider, how did I decide to get the Samsung?

Having decided to purchase a set, I decided to concentrate my initial attention on the first issue, which kind of TV technology to invest in.

...To be continued...

20 Good Things: 2 - Tsuro

2006-12-30T01:51:00.000-06:00




The Game Box

There are a lot of boardgames out there. My wife, working in the gaming industry as she does, brings home a lot of them. Most of them are either too difficult, take too long to play, or suffer from poor game design. And even when you find a game that you like, it's all too often for the wrong number of people.

Tsuro is none of those things. It's fantastic. It takes only about 20 to 30 minutes to play a game, whether two people or eight people are playing it. It takes about 5 minutes to learn the basics, and the rules are elegant, simple, and fun. It's got enough strategy to satisfy, and enough randomness to keep the min-maxers from ruining the experience.

On top of all that it has fantastic design, from the terrific Asian theme to the awesome physicality of the playing stones.




The Game Board

In short, it comes very close to being the best board game I can imagine and if you're only going to own one board game, I think it should be this one.

It even has a really low list price of $24.99, and you should be able to find it at any good gaming store. It's still in print, and comes from WizKids, the same people that produce the Heroclix line of miniatures-based gaming products.

Seriously folks, the next time you find yourselves considering purchasing one of the 1,238 specialty-themed versions of Monopoly, buy this instead. You'll play it more often, and have time to do something else besides.

20 Good Things: 1 - Lego Mindstorms NXT

2006-12-28T22:40:00.000-06:00

Well, as part of the Christmas festivities, my family picked up the new Lego Mindstorms robotics kit. As someone who owned the old kit, allow me to say that they've made a lot of cool improvements.




Our Tribot

For one thing, they've switched from a brick-based building primitive (the studded bricks used in traditional legos) to a girder, pillar, and beam based system, and it's a big improvement. The problem with the studs was that an operation that produced a lot of torque would have a tendency to disconnect the bricks, meaning that over time, your robot would literally tear itself apart. The new system isn't like that at all. It's still easy enough to build (and take apart) but it's also very sturdy once built.

The second notable improvement is the CPU and the associated programming language. While there's still a lot of alternative systems for doing the truly powerful development, the basic NXT-G development model isn't bad. I worked with Ivy on it for a while today, and was very impressed.

While the sensors are predictably improved, and the addition of the new ultrasonic rangefinder is pretty cool, I really want to mention the improvement made to the servos. In the old design, the motors didn't really deliver enough torque to do many of the tasks that were needed, so building a robot often meant spending hours trying to figure out exactly how to get your gears all placed properly so that you could gear down the motor. In the new kit, the gearing is all inside the servos, and they are very robust. If you want to use one to move your robot around, for instance, you can just stick a wheel right on the servo itself. In fact, you can have a working basic robot (the tribot) in about an hour out of the box, and if you've got another hour, you can add the sensors as well.

Finally, this time around the software that comes with it is Mac-compatible, which means I get to use it without having to find a special machine. There's a problem with my Intel-based Mac CPU communicating with the brick via Bluetooth, but the USB cable works fine, and isn't too cumbersome, and hopefully the Bluetooth thing will get fixed soon too.

Right now I've just built the Tribot, and am working on programming it to do fun things. If I build anything else interesting, I'll try and get a photo up.

News: Akuuuuuuu.....!

2006-07-25T11:35:00.000-05:00

The Asian-American actor Mako (Mako Iwamatsu) just died, at 72. I don't usually mention such things on my blog, as I like to use this for more creative work, but I'll confess, I was bummed that the CNN article didn't mention his role as the voice of Aku on the animated series Samurai Jack.

Ah well, at least they mentioned his role in the Conan movies.

My Photos on the Web

2006-07-15T10:52:00.000-05:00

Used with a Creative Commons License:
- in an Open Political Protest Letter. (Machine translated from Spanish)
- in a weird blog entry that uses my fireworks photo (oddly) to represent a dangerous party mishap with an acetylene-filled balloon.
- as a humorous photo entry in a blog.
- in an admiring blog post about my Body Language photo.

Used in ways that are probably "fair use" under copyright law:
- in one of those blogs that aggregates links to pictures of pretty women.
- in a blog's list of interesting links for 6/6/6.
- in a blog's photo of the day for May 5th, 2006.
- in a blog's discussion of a hail storm that struck our area (links at the bottom).
- in a photo blog cherry picking photos that were in flickr's top 500 interestingness for a day.
- in a photo blog cherry picking photos self-identified by their posters as being some of their better or more interesting work.
- My photo of Rose's last days at preschool was featured on a website about South African Montessori schools. It looks like they rotate through images, so it probably won't be there forever.

Used with permission
-On the Isthmus paper's thedailypage.com website, as one of their Madison Snaps.
-A portion of a photo of plaster buddhas is now being used on the Media e Società web page. (Here's a babelfish translation from the Italian.)
-A photo of Polly and Ivy is being used by the Kansas University Special Education department website.

Used without permission in ways that don't technically constitute fair use, but which I've no real objection to:
- in a blog post about Arizona's cyber education initiative.
- in a blog post about the madison chapter of the Belegarth foam fighting organization.

Finally, the photo of my daughter Rose eating sushi was apparently used on this Japanese blog page, but I can't find where. Perhaps it's been taken down.

Storytelling: Photo Job Disasters

2006-06-22T00:38:00.000-05:00

So when I discuss my career as a photographer, people are always asking me about the worst things that have happened. I suspect that secretly they're hoping for a tale of epic disaster, something like the groom not showing up, or the bride and groom fighting at the altar, or possibly even someone objecting in the middle of the ceremony, hollywood-style. But nothing on quite that scale has ever occurred. This is not to say that nothing untoward has ever occurred, however. On three separate occasions, someone has fainted during the ceremony, once even a coworker. But when the subject of jobs gone wrong comes up, I have the following stories to relate:

The Lonely Bride

I arrived at the job expecting a typical wedding for my area. 3-7 attendants on a side, 100 to 300 guests. Typical wedding stuff.

I noticed that right away that the bride and groom were kind of simple. They didn't talk much, and what they did say wasn't very interesting or engaging. They only had 3 total attendants, 2 for him (brothers) and 1 for her. I'm thinking this is strange. I take the pictures, and she's got no family. I mean, no sisters, no brothers, no parents, no cousins, no personal attendant, nothing. In fact, it turns out she doesn't even have a friend. The bridesmaid is a relative of the groom's.

When the ceremony is starting, I'm staring at the church in amazement. There are maybe 16 guests. And all of them are sitting on the groom's side. (Obvious advice: Skip the whole bride's side, groom's side thing. If you get few guests, it looks like you're keeping score, if you get a lot, you'll have to seat wherever space is available anyway.)

Anyway, the ceremony is normal enough, and then they hit a few bars on the way to the reception, which is also normal for my area. But I'm already speculating about the reception. I mean, maybe their friends just don't like church ceremonies? But no, the reception is the same. They have a full hall, and food for at least 100 people. They have a DJ, a dance floor, and a big cake.

But no guests. There's literally less than 20 people in a setting where I'm expecting at least 5 times that. There's no critical mass, so they all just stand around. The DJ is practically in tears. I photograph everything I can think of. A portrait of every person there. Pictures of every decoration. I keep count of my shots until I know I have the barest minimum needed to fill the planned album, and then I flee. To this day, I wonder what the deal was. Did the bride run away from home to marry this guy, or what?

An Excuse to Boss the Clients Around

It was a normal job. Couple from a family we've worked for before. Church we get along with fine. Standard setup. Pretty bride, handsome groom, nice and friendly. Heck, they've even decided to do the formal portaiture before the ceremony, which always earns lots of points with me. What could go wrong?

I'm sick. One of the problems with wedding photography is that unless you've got a photographer lined up to pinch hit, you've got to do the job unless you're in the hospital. So I gather my gear and go. But I feel bad. Really bad. I start the portaiture of the bride and groom, but I just keep feeling worse and worse. My stomach is roiling, and all the sudden, right up at the altar, I realize I'm about to puke. "Excuse me," I blurt to the bride and groom, "I'll be right back". And I start sprinting for the back of the church, where I know that there's some bathrooms just off the lobby. About halfway down the aisle, I realize I'm not likely to make it. I force myself to hold it (ew!) until I clear the carpet of the sanctuary and get to the marble floor of the lobby, and then I blow chunks all over the floor.

Standing there are all of the early-arriving guests. The bride's parents, the groom's parents, a few bridesmaids, groomsmen, and ushers. They're clearly lucky I didn't splatter their shoes. They stare at me in suprise and horror. I consider my options and straighten up.

"Hey," I say to everyone, "I'm really really sorry about this. But I'm the photographer, and I'm in the middle of photographing the bride and groom, and I feel terrible. I have to get back to work, and I'm sick as a dog, so I'm not sure if I can get everything done with the time I have. If someone could clean this up for me, that would be great."

And then I turned and went back in to the sanctuary. I didn't feel well for the rest of the day, but I did harbor a little secret amusement at having compelled complete strangers in formal clothing to clean up my vomit off a marble floor.

The Enemy Encampment

Not a wedding, but certainly a disaster. We were booked to photograph and videotape a concert. This came up from time to time, and my parents (photography is the family business) had a lot of experience doing this in small venues. They wanted me along because I was younger, and since the job was 3 hours away they figured they could all use the extra support for moving stuff around.

We arrive at the venue and start setting up. At first, everything seems cool. The people we talk to are reasonably friendly, relatively photogenic, and accomodating. The manager for the record label that's hired us explains the details of the job. They're to be 4 or 5 bands from the label performing, from about 8:30 to 1 in the morning. But as more and more people begin to show up, the real picture starts to become clear.

It's a white power label. All the bands do "white power rock" and all the attendees are white supremacists. My Mom, Dad and I put our heads together and try to decide what to do. Finally, we decide to forge ahead and record it. But it was weird. All my enthusiasm for doing a good job was just gone. I didn't want to conduct interviews, do portraits, play with lighting, I just wanted to get the hell away from these people and their hateful prejudices.

The worst part of the whole thing is that I think most of the young men involved were just deluded. They were polite and relatively friendly, but any inclination they had to act to better the world around them had been completely mischanneled. It was tragic. We got a lot of footage and left during the last band's set. I only remember one song, a ballad titled "While the Snow came down" apparently about the "tragedy" of the defeat of Nazi Germany on the Russian front.

My father made a deal with the label after the fact. We felt like the situation had been misrepresented, and that our existing arrangement didn't have any legitimacy. He said they could have the raw footage of the event if we could use the footage as well to make a documentary about the event. They agreed, and that's what we did.

Family: Ivy's Photoblog

2006-05-14T15:14:00.000-05:00

Ivy wanted to do a photo of the week, so I've created a blog and flickr photoset to support her ambition.

Update: Ivy has now posted her second photo of the week.

Update 2: And Ivy has now posted her third photo of the week.

Politics: The Wisdom of Slashdot

2006-05-12T11:03:00.000-05:00

So the NSA is indeed spying on us all by watching our phone traffic. Practically all that they can use this information for is abuse of our civil liberties, it has no other function. Yet, according to a recent phone poll by the Washington Post, 63% of Americans don't care. I'm aghast.

Reading the feedback to the poll news on Slashdot, there are several cogent observations. One reader (GigsVT) mentioned that he didn't think it likely that phone polls were a good way to get valid statistics about what people thought about phone privacy. Are the ones that value their privacy actually answering these polls?

Amusingly, Myrrh writes that this could be the solution to our nation's energy problems:

As more and more civil liberties are trampled upon, faster and faster will the Founding Fathers spin in their respective graves. If we attach magnets to each Founding Father, then wrap copper wire around each of them, we should have a potentially unlimited energy source.

More seriously, boldtbanan writes "The masses almost always value security over freedom until they have so little of either a revolution is born."

And again and again, as our civil liberties erode, I see the following two quotes in discussions of what's happening. Quotes that seem to me should enlighten anyone as to how deeply we're wounding the principles our country should be built on.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
--Benjamin Franklin.

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
--Thomas Jefferson

Let's hope we can act on the truth of the former before we're forced into the harsh realities of the later. But still, that 63% of people, however they were surveyed, could say this is OK? I'm horrified, and if the citizenry at large doesn't know to fight this, I think we're in real trouble.

Gaming: Rules Presentation on Google Video

2006-05-11T12:47:00.000-05:00

I did a presentation at work in order to test out our MediaLandscape Presenter software. It's a package that allows for a presentation to be captured, along wtih associated materials, and then combined together and published in a variety of ways. One of those ways is to make the presentation into a single video that's suitable for portable devices. I published my presentation this way, edited it slightly to show a little bit of how the presentation was recorded, and then uploaded it to Google Video. (You can see it, along with downloadable versions, here.)

The presentation itself is about movement/combat rules for my Role-Playing game. It has a a bunch of slides of explanation, followed by some examples that I photographed miniatures for.

Fun: The Heights of Pretension

2006-03-20T22:37:00.000-06:00

There are a lot of serious topics I could discuss. There are things that excite me, like the newfound ability to run Windows directly on the intel-based Macintosh hardware. There are things that anger me, like Marvel and DC's shameless attempts to claim trademark on the term "Superhero". Hell, there are things that amuse me, and thus should (by extension) amuse you as well, such as this gravity game.

But instead, let's talk about pretension.

Now don't get me wrong, I like "art". I consider myself an artist, I produce artistic works of various kinds. However, I've noticed that no matter what the medium, there are people that take themselves far far too seriously. They annoy me. Since I've been dealing with photography a lot lately, I've been especially noticing pretentious photographers. ("The horizon is tilted and the foreground is out of focus because I'm making a statement about the transient nature of relationships, and anyone that can't see that is a soulless hack.")

However, I'm pleased to announce that I have found something that buries the needle on the pretention scale, and I'm going to share it with you. I believe that in the future, we will be able to measure anything by comparison, treating this as a "10" and rating everything else against it.

It's a movie trailer, for a movie named "Drawing Restraint 9". A good trailer distills the essence of a movie into a 2 to 3 minute segment. Here, that distillation has produced something so purely high-falutin' that it beggars the mind. It has everything. Random imagery, something vaguely disgusting portrayed as art, unpleasant music, jarring editting, association of physical things with intangibles, and Bjork. Here's the blurb:

The core idea of Drawing Restraint 9 is the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity, a theme it symbolically tracks through the construction and transformation of a vast sculpture of liquid Vaseline, called “The Field”, which is molded, poured, bisected and reformed on the deck of the ship over the course of the film.

And here's the link to the trailer itself. Enjoy it, I dare you.

We'll find a way to violate the Superhero trademark a little later, OK?

Politics: Welcome to China

2006-02-21T10:28:00.000-06:00

If you're in the United States, visiting this video at Google's video service currently presents you with this stark message:

This video is not playable in your country.

No reason is given. No avenue of appeal is suggested. It's not clear whether this is due to government action, google's own self-censorship, or some obscure feature of the political landscape. Go ahead, visit the realms where someone else decides what's suitable for you to see or hear. It's not a good feeling.

Now, the fact of the matter is that this sounds like it may be an option available when a video is uploaded. Some yahoo checked the option for "Don't show this video to visitors from the US". They probably did it to make a point, and as far as I'm concerned, the point is successfully made.

Governments and organizations need to stop trying to filter content from other countries at the border. I don't care if it's comic books being shipped to Canada, offensive cartoons published in Europe, yahoo auctions of world war II nazi memorabilia, or opinion articles about taiwanese independence. If free expression is a fundamental human right (which I certainly believe it is) then placing restrictions on who can access other's expression is just as much a violation of that right as stopping the expression itself.

Video: DVD video onto a PSP using a Mac

2006-02-07T13:20:00.000-06:00

Well, I've been looking into this a lot lately.

An MPEG4 file that is playable by the PSP has the following characteristics:
1) It is 320x240, 368x208 or 400x192
2) It has a framerate of 29.97 or 14.985 fps.
3) It has stereo AAC audio at 24000 hz.
4) Its total bitrate is no greater than 768 kbit/sec.
5) It is named in the format "M4V#####.MP4", where ##### are numerical digits, and placed on the PSP's memory stick in "/MP_ROOT/100MNV01/"
6) It has properly formed PSP-friendly headers.

Optionally, there can be a second "thumbnail" file accompanying the MP4, which is a 160x120 jpeg image named "M4V#####.THM", where the ##### are the same numbers as used for the video file. This file is entirely optional and has no other features.

If any of the above 6 things are not true, it won't play. If you're on a Macintosh, and you have arbitrary source material that Quicktime can read, I recommend using the altShiiva application. (google translated version). Since it reads files using Quicktime, it's very input friendly, and, once you figure out its quirks, quite dependable. If you produce output that is 368x208 or 400x192 you'll need to run it through a command line utility called PSPREZ before it will work, since files at those resolutions require deliberately malformed headers in order to work. (no kidding.)

I, of course, totally hate it. The documentation is in Japanese, it doesn't appear to be frequently updated, and there's no provision for saving your settings, so you have to make sure you get them right every time you launch the app. Many people prefer to use ffmpegX on the mac, but I find it buggy and the UI confusing, and some of what it's doing under the hood really perplexes me. What I really want to do is use ffmpeg from the command line, because that way I can simply record the command line I used and reuse it, modified as needed.

Here's what I currently do when I want to go from a DVD to PSP on my Mac. I capture the video using Handbrake, to a reasonably high quality MPEG4/MP3 AVI, typically at 480x272 resolution. I do this because I figure if I keep this file, it's a useful resolution for playback on my TV or Mac, and if I gain the ability to compress a better PSP version in the future it's already at the PSP's native resolution. (I also like this format because it will play on my PS2 over the net using the media player software from gameshark. In general, I find it a good format for legacy devices.)

Then I use the ffmpeg command line that's built in to the PSPWare application. ffmpeg can be compiled in a bunch of different ways, with a bunch of different options, but the one in PSPWare is already compiled with the necessary libraries and extensions to do proper PSP output, and is capable of reading the AVI I just created without modification.

I then issue a command like this:

./PSPWare.app/Contents/Resources/PSPWareHelper.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg -y -i /Vid_Movies/SteamBoy480.avi -title "SteamBoy" -s 368x208 -r 29.97 -b 450 -acodec aac -ac 2 -ar 24000 -ab 32 -f psp /Vid_Movies/M4V10102.MP4

The "-i /Vid_Movies/SteamBoy480.avi" is the source
The "-title "SteamBoy"" is the name that will appear in PSP menus
The "-s 368x208" specifies the video size.
The "-b" is the bitrate for the video
The "-ab" is the bitrate for the audio
The "-f psp" switch tells ffmpeg to do proper PSP output, and it does proper headers so there is no need for PSPREZ.
The "/Vid_Movies/M4V10102.MP4" is the output file name, already in a PSP-acceptable format.

ffmpeg has a lot more options, but I find that this is a pretty good starting place. I rarely use the others except sometimes for cropping or padding video.

As a bonus, the ouput of this command will work on a video iPod without further modification, though you'll probably want to change the filename to something less crufty.

If you're interested in compiling your own ffmpeg that will do this, I suggest you look at the one in PSPWare. It displays the following information when it is run:

ffmpeg version 0.4.9-pre1-based-MobileHackerz030, build 4743, Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
  configuration:  --enable-faac --enable-a52 --enable-gpl --disable-ffserver --disable-ffplay --enable-memalign-hack --disable-vhook --extra-cflags=-mtune=970 --enable-pthreads --enable-faac --disable-mmx --disable-audio-oss --disable-audio-beos --disable-v4l --disable-debug --disable-pp --enable-g726 --disable-network --disable-gprof --extra-cflags=-force_cpusubtype_ALL --disable-strip --disable-shared 
  built on May 22 2005 23:36:15, gcc: 4.0.0 20041026 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 4061)

Sometimes, I want to do a compression from DVD to PSP overnight, without being on hand to initiate the second step of the two-step process. When that's the case, I often do something like this on the command line:

sleep 13800 ; ./ffmpeg -y -i /Vid_Movies/SteamBoy480.avi -title "SteamBoy" -s 368x208 -r 29.97 -b 450 -acodec aac -ac 2 -ar 24000 -ab 32 -f psp /Vid_Movies/M4V10102.MP4

This tells the shell to do nothing for 4 hours, then run the command that comes after the ;. Since I can count on handbrake being done by then, this allows me to have it happen without intervention. If I'm ripping multiple things from a DVD, I can even queue them up with multiple commands, separated by semicolons.

Update: My company, Clotho Advanced Media, Inc., has now written a command-line utility for OS X that allows for Quicktime conversions on the command line. Using it, I can now convert from a much wider variety of sources into PSP (and thus iPod) playable formats. In order to do this, I first convert it using our tool into an intermediary format that ffmpeg can process, and then use ffmpeg to convert it into PSP format. This is proving pretty succesful for us, and we're likely to put it together into a commercial offering at some point in the near future.

Copyright: Ownership?

2006-01-03T01:17:00.000-06:00

The media giants have been very clear in their position. You don't own your content, you have a license to view/use it from them. In their eyes, you're not allowed to make a backup copy, install it on your iPod, watch it on a device built for a foreign region, etc., because the license they set all the terms for doesn't cover that.

This isn't fair in any eyes but theirs, of course, but let's say, for the purposes of argument, that it's all true.

Now, take one of those shiny discs, with the content you've licensed. Gaze at it warmly. Fondle its smooth digital surface. Hold it up to the light and marvel at the way the light refracts. Take out a key, and put a big scratch across it. Try to play it in your device. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Doesn't work anymore, right? But you paid good money for the license to view that content. Call the content owner up, and ask for a replacement. Patiently explain that since you already paid your $25 for a license to use the content, and they said you couldn't back it up, that you should be entitled to a new copy for the $1 or $2 cost of the media alone.

Did they say no? Fancy that. Where is all the convoluted language about licensing and right-to-view now? Is it possible that when the media is intact, you license the content, but as soon as it's scratched, you own it? Looks like it to me.

Could it be, in the end, that the huge quest to control your ability to copy content you buy, all in the name of preventing piracy, is really all about selling you the same thing over and over again?

Photos: Ivy Goes Ice Skating

2005-12-22T15:56:00.000-06:00

I recently had the pleasure of going to watch Ivy and the rest of the first graders at her school ice skate at the Madison Ice Arena. It was pertty cool. Some of the photos will probably end up as photos of the day, (In fact, one already has) but if you're interested in seeing all of the photos, here they are.

Photography: Ethics Test

2005-12-15T00:36:00.000-06:00

Ok, well, Clotho's website seems to be having a little hiccup, which means none of the graphics on my blog, including the photo of the day, are currently working properly. So, to keep you occupied while we wait for the DNS to clear, here's a small ethics test that's apparently been circulating among photographers. I first saw it from Mr. Mark in a discussion thread on Flickr.

This test only has one question, but it's a very important one. By giving an honest answer, you will discover where you stand morally. No one else will know, so you won't be fooling anyone but yourself if you give anything but a truthful answer.

The test features an unlikely, completely fictional situation in which you have to make a decision. Remember that your answer needs to be honest, yet spontaneous. Please read slowly and thoughtfully, giving due consideration to each line. Here is the situation:

You are in Florida; Miami to be specific. There is chaos all around caused by a hurricane with severe flooding. A flood of biblical proportions. You are a photo journalist working for a major newspaper, and you're caught in the middle of this epic disaster.

The situation is nearly hopeless. You're trying to shoot career-making photos. There are houses and people swirling around you, some disappearing under the water. Nature is unleashing all its destructive fury. Suddenly you see a man floundering in the water. He is fighting for his life, trying not to be taken down with the debris.

You move closer...

Somehow the man looks familiar. It is George W. Bush, President of the United States!! At the same time you notice that the raging waters are about to take him under... forever.

You have two options: -you can save the life of G. W. Bush, or you can shoot a dramatic Pulitzer Prize winning photo documenting the death of one of the world's most powerful men.

So here is the big question, and please give an honest answer.

Would you select high contrast color film, or would you go with the classic simplicity of black and white?

Hopefully photos will be working again shortly, until then, check out my Flickr Photostream if you want to see the new photo of the day. (I typically post each photo of the day to Flickr in the morning.)

Update: I've changed the address for the photo of the day links so that they use the IP address rather than the DNS system. This should fix the problem in the short term. In a week or so, when things have settled down, I'll change it back.

Photography: Advice for Weddings

2005-12-12T10:17:00.000-06:00

I wrote this for someone who was seeking advice on wedding photography, and thought it might be worth posting on my blog, especially since I'm looking toward doing some wedding work in 2006 and have been thinking about how exactly I want to do it, moving forward. That said, I highly recommend that you not allow yourself to be manuevered into photographing someone's wedding for them unless you're very sure that it is what you want to be doing. It's demanding work, and people can be very touchy. A minimum prerequisite should be experience as a portrait photographer, since the most important shots of the wedding day will be portraits.

Weddings are a one-shot deal, and there are no reshoots. With that in mind, regardless of other technique, there are three things I recommend keeping in mind. In priority order:

1. Take at least two cameras, and use both throughout the day. There are a bunch of things that can go wrong with a shoot and not be noticable until you look at the finished product, and having a backup camera minimizes that risk by a huge amount.

2. Pay attention. Not only to what is currently happening, but to what is about to happen. Get a copy of the wedding program early and consult it during the ceremony. If you're photographing the reception, talk to the DJ or hall coordinator early, so you get a sense of what's happening when. The trick is to be waiting in the right place when something is about to occur, not to have to rush to get there only to miss it while you're setting up your shot. I would say that this alone is what separates most wedding pros from otherwise competent photographers. This is also the hardest thing to simulate without experience, and why our studio traditionally requires photographers to apprentice for a season before they fly solo.

3. Remember the following 13 shots that you have to take or your shoot is catastrophically incomplete:

Portrait: bride alone, full length.
Portrait: bride alone, head to bouquet.
Portrait: bride and groom, full length
Portrait: bride and groom, heads to bouquet.
Portrait: entire wedding party, (inc. kids and ushers)
Portrait: bride's family (inc. spouses and kids)
Portrait: groom's family (ditto)
Portrait: bride and grooms hands & rings.
Ceremony: Bride and groom facing each other at alter.
Reception: Cake
Reception: Bride and groom cutting cake.
Reception: Bride and groom first dance.
Reception: Bride and father dancing.

Don't get me wrong, there are dozens of other shots I consider important, but if I miss them, I don't consider the job blown. If you miss one of the ones I've listed here, however, there's likely to be trouble. These would be especially good photos to be sure you get with both cameras, and to take multiple shots of.

My other piece of advice is about how to shoot the altar portraits. Start with the bride. Have her stand at the top of the altar steps. If she has a train, spread it in front of her by wrapping it around on her right side (your left.) Shoot portrait and full length. (I especially like to do looking at camera and looking at bouquet for each.)

Then put the groom in next to the bride, on her left side (opposite the train). Have him put his arm around behind her, but under her veil or he'll tug it awry. I have the bride put an arm around him as well. Have the bride and groom turn toward each other making a bit of a V, and then have him help hold the flowers with his other hand. (This keeps it from hanging limp at his side, and since the bride is holding them one-handed, they'll be getting heavy) readjust the train. Shoot portrait and full length. The bride and groom will be in this pose for a while, so keep reminding them what do do for the rest of these shots, especially when the groom drops his hand. I sometimes find it helps to tell the bride and groom to tilt their heads slightly toward each other as well.

Add in the best man and maid of honor on appropriate sides. Shoot portrait and full length.

Move the best man to stand next to the maid of honor. Add the rest of the wedding party as couples, women toward the middle, men to their sides. Alternate sides and put each couple one step down from the next couple on that side. If it's a small wedding party put the ushers at the ends, if a large one, have them kneel in front. Kids should be in front of the groom, as close as possible, even tucked a little bit inside the draped train would be OK. adjust the train, and shoot. If desired, kick out the kids and ushers and shoot again.

Kick everyone except the bride and groom out. Have the bride's parents stand on her side, like the maid of honor and best man just were. (If the parents are divorced, put the mother next to the groom instead unless you know they get along.) Shoot. Add in brothers and sisters. Shoot. Add in spouses and children of brothers and sisters. Shoot. Take out everyone except the bride, groom, mom and dad, put in the other mom and dad on the grooms side. Shoot. Drop out the bride's mom and dad and repeat the family build up with the groom's family.

Only when you've done all of the above should you even consider entertaining anything other than the most urgent of requested shots. The reason for this is because there are often time pressures, and if the shoot gets cut short, you want to have the above photos, because it will be hard to do them in any other location. Especially once the groomsmen start drinking.

After 20 years of practice, I can get through the above set of photos in about 15 minutes with a cooperative group, leaving me time for available light portraits by a window and request shots. If this is your first job, I'd expect it will take you closer to 30-45 minutes, so be prepared to feel rushed.

As a job, it really can be fun, but it can feel very high pressure. Make sure you eat breakfast, because it's always distracting when the photographer faints. Happened to an assistant of mine once, I was mortified.

Copyright: Doctor Who 2005

2005-11-25T23:18:00.000-06:00

Well, thanks to the internet, I got to see the first episode of the new Doctor Who back when it came out, even before it premiered in England. I thought it was pretty good, balancing the traditions of the series with the need to convert it to a more modern serial format. I asked a friend to help me track down the rest of the series, and some months ago, he loaned me the first 10 episodes.

Over the past week or so, I finally got around to watching them. They're all good, and some are great. I'll give a rolicking good adventure nod to the two-parter of episode 9: The Empty Child and episode 10: The Doctor Dances. And a very poignant (and somewhat teary) nod to episode 8: Father's day.

It looks like there's more, I'm going to have to track them down, and therein lies the rub. There doesn't seem to be a legitimate way for me to acquire these in useful form. I could proabably order them from Amazon UK, but they'll be in region 2, unplayable on US DVD players or computers, and encoded in the european PAL standard to boot. I have the technology to get around this, but it's more than a little painful to pay £44 for something that won't work without quasi-legal measures. In addition, because DVDs are encrypted, it will be hard to convert them into other formats for viewing on portable devices.

It represents the ultimate failure of the DRM (digital rights management) model that the entertainment and consumer electronics industries are trying to cram down all our throats. I have the desire to purchase these items (well, to have them purchased for me for xmas or something), they presumably want the money. (And if I'm going to pay a hundred bucks, I want to be able to watch it on my PSP, my office's video iPod, my computer and my DVD player, whichever is convenient at the time.) All of this represents a problem that we've solved from a technology standpoint. There are at least a dozen ways for me to give the BBC money across the sea, and at least a dozen ways for them to deliver what I want back across it to me.

But the insistance on controlling every aspect of what I do with my purchase destroys the paradigm. They won't sell it on terms that allow for reasonable fair use. I won't buy it on terms that don't. I'm going to presume for a minute here. You wouldn't buy a chicken that you're not allowed to cook the way you want, you wouldn't buy a book you're not allowed to loan to a friend, you probably wouldn't buy a car that would only let you drive to certain places, or at certain times, but somehow we're all expected to pay money to buy (at full prices) heavily use-restricted videos from businesses that are actively trying to remove our rights? Fuck that.

I guess I'll need to talk to my friend again and see if he can loan me some more episodes.

Fun: Our hotel room

2005-11-25T12:05:00.000-06:00

Here's a photo from the hotel room window where we're staying for Thanksgiving weekend.

I think it's the best hotel window view I've had in years. I had to use a wide lens and stitch together multiple photos.

Family: Our Looming Financial Apocalypse

2005-11-08T23:35:00.000-06:00

I hate to be all gloom and doom after so long a blogging silence, especially when I have other things to say that I haven't gotten around to saying. I've got some political thoughts that are almost organized enough to share, and a whole host of comments on photography inspired by my Photo of the Day feature.

But sadly, what's heavy on my mind at the moment is our family budget. Liana's new job left her feeling too stressed to handle the family finances, so I have taken them over. I've got spreadsheets and folders aplenty. However, the budget won't balance, I haven't been able to make it balance, and our "cushion" has dwindled away to nothing.

At the root of the problem is my work-related income. I can't and won't go into any specifics here, but it was higher once. The economy put the squeeze on our corporate clients, my company switched focus, and it's been reflected in my "take home". Before that, Liana and I were putting money into various retirement savings, we were making regular payments on our cars and house, and while we were carrying a pretty sizable consumer debt, it wasn't anything we couldn't handle the payments on. In hindsight, our big mistake was not attacking that consumer debt more aggressively.

Now that my income is lower, that debt is a millstone we can't seem to get rid of. Liana has taken a job, but it doesn't help enough. More than 3/4 of her income goes immediately back out to daycare because she's not home to watch Rose. This means that for every $4 she earns, our bottom line is only improved by $1. Not only are we incapable of reducing the size of the consumer debt, we're actually having pretty substantial trouble making all our payments while buying things like groceries and gas.

We recently took a vacation we planned earlier in the year (and had prepaid for part of). However in its aftermath it's become clear that our current situation is untenable. We're canceling our life insurance, trying to get out of our DirectTV contract, dumping Liana's cell phone and my pager, and strictly budgeting personal allowances, groceries, and gas. While this all slows things down, we're still substantially in the red. We are approaching a point in time where Liana and I will be forced to press the "reset" button, liquidating our retirement savings so that we can pay off enough of our debts that our monthly bills will fit within our income. This is a disaster, representing the loss of about 4 years of retirement savings. And it will leave us starting our retirement planning over from scratch, with four years less to do it in.

Why I am I bringing this up here? Mostly because I keep needing to explain it to family and friends anyway, and it's difficult to do. I've lost track of the number of lunch and dinner invitations I've needed to turn down in the past few months. We had to cancel our trip to Gen Con this year, which marks the first time I've missed it since age 15 or so. The gas budget is tight enough that we may need to decline trips to people's houses in the later parts of the month, because the $5 or $6 the round trip will take in the bug is going to be hard to fit in. It also seems likely that there aren't going to be any Christmas gifts coming from the Loos-Austins this year. (Sorry!)

All is not lost. While our expenses exceed our income, our assets do exceed our non-mortgage debts, if only barely. This means that we're in no real immediate danger of being out on the street (or staying at one of your houses. *wink*) I'm working with my brother, who is very money-shrewd, to make up a financial plan. Liana is seeing what she can do to bring in more money, and my income is supposed to be going back up (though sadly not to previous levels) in the first quarter of 2006, due to my company's steadily improving financial health. When Rose gets into kindergarten in September of next year, and we can stop paying so much for daycare, our budget will be nearly balanced. But that target is very far away, and if I don't manage to do something sooner, our debt will grow each month until then.

In the meantime, we're going to eat a lot more ramen, I guess.

Fun: Best Doonesbury Ever?

2005-10-10T10:27:00.000-05:00

I love Doonesbury, but I don't always laugh aloud. The dark humor of this strip, however, had me chuckling for quite a while. Like most good Doonesbury, it's funny because it's true.

Photos: Disney Vacation

2005-09-28T23:19:00.000-05:00

I've decided to post six pictures a day of my current vacation in DisneyWorld to my Flickr account. The idea is that at the end of each day I'll post the best six photos from that day, with an eye to telling whatever stories can easily be told about the day's events.

I'm calling the set Disney on 6 Photos a Day.

www.flickr.com

Update: We're back, the rest of the photos from the remaining days should be up soon now that I have easy internet access once again.

Blog: Comment Spam

2005-09-27T12:26:00.000-05:00

With some regret, I have turned on Blogger's "Word Verification" feature for comments. I've had to do this because of the recent increase in the amount of comment spam I've been getting. It wasn't so bad when it was just an occasional rogue comment on the most recent post, but the last time I made a small update, a script seized the day and made two comment posts deep in the archives. This is truly obnoxious, and it took me a while to find and delete them.

Verification is done by means of a captcha. This means that in order to leave a comment, you'll need to look at a distorted graphic of a short nonsense word and then type that word into a verification field. You've probably done something similar when registering for certain internet services.

Apologies for the extra (albiet slight) hassle.

Fun: No Purchase, No Pay

2005-09-19T10:28:00.000-05:00




Me Cubicle's Share o' Swag

Ahoy, me hearties, and be welcome on board me ship. We're bound for Cape Horn with the tide, and there's work t'be done aplenty.

I'd like to remind ye that there'll be no caterwaulin' over the hardships o' the voyage, for each and ev'ry one of ye is entitled to yer fair share of the booty should we take a fat galleon. Heave away lads and lasses, for our fair prey awaits!

In celebration of our voyage, I prepar'd various libations, and gath'red all me booty from past voyages to take into the office where I usually spend me days. I believe me coworkers, lubbers all, were amused rather than awed, so ye'll be happy to know that I have a full schedule of keelhaulins' to round out our day's festivities!

Fun: Some Links

2005-09-16T10:38:00.000-05:00

I hope everyone's been enjoying the photo of the day. I've made a few improvements to the popup image, so that it should (in general) scale down to the size of the window. I've been using rather large images for most of the photos, and was worried that the title was getting lost off the right and that the text at the bottom required too much scrolling back and forth to easily read. Now, big images should be scaled to the width of the window. You'll still have to scroll up and down for the vertical format photos, but hopefully not left and right. (Try resizing the window, I like how dynamic it is on most modern browsers.)

While I continue ruminating over my upcoming post about the Katrina, politics, economics and the environment, here are some amusing links to tide you over:

Onion's 2004 parody becomes today's reality (via Waxy.org.)

I highly recommend the Renaissance Festival Music Podcast, especially the three pirate editions. If you're looking for great music in support of Monday's Talk Like a Pirate Day, look no further. My favorite pirate song so far? "Hellship" by the Pyrates Royale.

Oh, it's a hellship, with a bully mate,
the bastard son of malice and hate,
the captain's the worst that's ever been born,
and together we're sailing around Cape Horn.

The first mate, if he don't like your face,
You'll find yourself in a far worse place,
At the bottom of the sea with your head stove in,
by capstan bar, or belaying pin.

The new iTunes interface from the perspective of Brushed Metal. (Link fixed)

I also have four new web comics to recommend, three of which stick close to traditional comic book formatting:

Gossamer Commons, about a writer who sees a fairy and is thus marked for death. Very narrative.

Fantasy Realms is an amazingly well drawn manga-style comic. This one may have been derailed by Katrina, though.

Fallen. Beautiful art, complicated storyline, sporadic updates.

Alpha Shade. Drawn in Flash, very cool alternate world setting, and an extremely well-implemented comic browser.

More Soon!

Blog: 5000 Visits

2005-08-31T07:54:00.000-05:00

Huzzah, the Junk Chest has had 5000 visits! This time the magic visitor looks to be identifiable from the logs, and is probably my father-in-law Larry. In terms of visitors, I'm seeing an ever-increasing percentage of visitors finding the chest from Google, many of whom are searching for information on an eclectic mix of topics, such as mediawiki extensions (currently Google's 3rd result), high definition trailers (13th result), Google tourism (1st result) and Bush vampire (4th images result).

Blog: Photo of the Day

2005-08-26T15:21:00.000-05:00

Well, in anticipation of my 5000th visitor, I've decided to add a new feature to the Junk Chest, the Photo of the Day on the right sidebar. Unless otherwise indicated, all photos will be mine, and will represent my attempt to pick out the best of my photography from a variety of subjects. I'm primarily an event photographer, thanks to my professional wedding photography background, so many of these photos will be from things like parades and renaissance fairs. While I'm sure that an occasional family photo or vacation photo will sneak in, my intention is to mostly stay away from that sort of thing and concentrate more on photos that might be of general interest. Feedback, as always, is welcome.

Right now, almost all photos are taken with my beloved Canon Digital Rebel, for which I have a variety of lenses. Since I am not usually working in a professional capacity, most of the really snazzy event shots are taken with my 300mm zoom lens, since, lacking the aegis of authority, I can't get in really close to the action with a shorter lens.

Note that the day-to-day updating is handled by Javascript, so if you don't have that turned on, you won't see the photo. Let me know if there are any browsers where the update isn't happening and I'll try to fix it.

Update: People that come to this entry directly, such as from my yahoo 360 page's feed, won't see the picture thumbnail on the sidebar unless they go to the main page of my blog, where today's image is shown. To help with this, I have added text links to item page sidebars. For people who are catching up, here are the 1st, 3rd and 4th photos.

Copyright: A Modest Destiny Indeed

2005-08-03T12:19:00.000-05:00

Update: As of Sept 19th, the original site is down, however, here is an off-site archive of everything. Squidi linked to it at one point, so I presume it had his approval.

Squidi, the creator of the popular web comic A Modest Destiny has decided to give it up. This is unfortunate, because it was one of my regular reads, but not uncommon. Drawing any comic is demanding, and I've lost track of the number of people that have given it up over the past few years due to various pressures such as time, money, or simply the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the internet.

There are, however, two interesting things about the end of the comic. The first, and more important, is that if you've never read it, Squidi has posted the entire run as zipped chapters on his website. You can download these to browse at your leisure, and it's worth doing, because they're funny and well done. In fact, while the series has gotten darker, the first series, a year worth of comics, was some of the best webcomic-ing out there. He's only going to leave them up for a few weeks before he takes the entire site down, so, if you haven't ever read them, this will be your last knowable chance to see. (see update above.)

The second is that Squidi is a victim of the extremely harsh intellectual property war that's currently going on, and I don't think he even realizes it. I want to reflect on this.

If you read Squidi's current rant on the main page about why he's ending the comic, you may be confused about the history he alludes to. In a nutshell, here's what happened. A forum user in Penny Arcade's forums (Tubesteak Samurai, if I recall) used an avatar based on one of Squidi's characters. Squidi doesn't allow this kind of derivative use of his characters to pass unchallenged. He asked for the offending avatar to be pulled and was initially rebuffed by the forum authorities. Attempting to escalate the issue, he wrote to the creators of Penny Arcade, asking them to intervene. At some point in the exchange he mentioned that he had used legal action (or the threat of legal action) to force the removal of his content from other sites in the past. This was perceived as an empty threat and he was rebuffed again, publicly and rudely, and has been mocked for the incident to this very day. He's gotten quite bitter and defensive about the whole thing.

Most of the arguments I've seen about this have hinged around three points. Firstly, the dubious claim that pixel-based characters such as Squidi's are insufficiently distinctive to deserve copyright protection. Secondly, the resonable claim that derived forum avatars really ought to constitute fair use. Finally, the commonly held belief that, right or wrong, Squidi was being way way too prickly about this and should have just let the whole matter slide.

Regardless of the merit of these points, which really have been done to death in other forums, I'd like to say that I don't really think any of these things is the problem. I think these are merely symptoms of a greater problem, which is that the attempts by the corporate world to broaden intellectual property in general, and copyright in specific, have lead Squidi into a false position.

For decades, the corporate world has been trying to broaden their rights. in the past decade this has gotten pretty bad. We've got laws like the DMCA that strip away established fair use rights from citizens of the US. Explosive patent breadth that allows for the patenting of everything under the sun, inhibiting the advancement of the state of the art in direct contravention of the founders' intentions. Worst of all, these restrictions are being exported to the rest of the world via treaties, such as the recent CAFTA, which requires signatory nations to enforce DMCA-like provisions.

In fact, most intellectual property law traditionally existed to protect the little guy from the big guy. You write a book, or paint a painting, you get paid for it for a reasonable period. During that time, no one can copy it and sell it without your permission. Similarly, if you invent something, you get paid for that invention for a similarly reasonable period. Finally, if you start selling something under the name of tasty-taps, a huge food manufacturer can't suddenly start selling something called tasty-taps for half the price and ruin you. Copyright, patent, trademark.

That scenario has been transformed. Most intellectual property in the country is now being used by the big guys to crush, limit or stop the little guy. The copyright on any classic pieces of american art produced in the last 80 years is now so indefinite that the "reasonable period" might as well be infinite. It is common policy at large corporations to patent everything, no matter how obvious, because if the patent is granted they can use it to crush or extort competitors, especially small ones. Finally, with a combination of trademark and copyright law, corporations are continually assaulting the rights of the citizenry to use, modify and discuss the products that we get from them. Since these products are woven into the fabric of our very lives, this treads dangerously close to a free speech restriction. They use the law to crush fan sites, fan fiction and other derivative works, and even, through laws like the DMCA, attempt to practically restrict established rights such as archiving and review.

Accompanying all this is a constant barrage of propaganda that seeks to continually expand the borders of what Intellectual Property means, one millimeter at a time, often with distortions of the truth or what the law actually says. This effort has, sadly, been mostly successful, with your average person on the street unaware of the rights they actually have, or that, in fact, there was once a time that they could look forward to meaningful content entering the public domain on a continous basis. It's only understandable that content creators would begin to feel like these new wider boundaries on IP apply to them, as well.

But they don't. And therein lies Squidi's problem. The machine has been rebuilt from the ground up to serve corporate needs, and corporations have armies of lawyers and very very thick skins. Squidi clearly has neither of those things, and by trying to apply the same sort of all-controlling copyright regime that a corporation like Disney does, he has learned a harsh truth. Without the lawyers, people will actually use their own judgement in distinguishing between reasonable use and unreasonable use, and it's a far easier fit than the standard the corporate world currently applies. The weapons that the big guys use to force their definition of "reasonable" are just too big for Squidi to use, but he tried to use them anyway.

In the end, Squidi drew more fire than he could handle, because his actions kicked up a cloud of latent resentment. Resentment that's not aimed at him, but at the insane copyright regime that would control our culture and its art and artifacts. A lot of people are fed up with the way the IP war seems to be going, and anyone who takes the side of the oppressors, wittingly or unwittingly, may find themselves taking a metaphorical bullet meant for them.

I'll certainly miss the comic, I congratulate Squidi on his new child, and I hope that he can pick himself back up, dust himself off, and find a niche, any niche, that allows him to publish his work in way that makes him happy. But I don't think he can get the control he seems to want so desparately. In order to have the power to do so, he'd need to get a corporation on his side, and in order to get that, he would have to give up the self-same control to them, which I suspect is a far worse devil's bargain than the rough-and-tumble of the internet.

Photos: Summer Update on Liana's Blog

2005-07-14T01:21:00.000-05:00

While I don't usually mention updates to my wife's blog here, she has just made a long post about our summer activities so far that has a large number of my photos, including some fairly nice ones of the Bristol Renn Faire.

I also put up a small gallery of photos of the Aerial Angels, a group of aerialists that was performing during Bristol's opening weekend.

Music: Pink Floyd at Live 8

2005-07-08T16:33:00.000-05:00




Pink Floyd at Live 8

Pink Floyd is my favorite band. I've had the pleasure of seeing them live twice (albiet in the post-Waters era) here in Madison. As many of you probably know, at the recent Live 8 concert they reunited with long-estranged Roger Waters long enough to perform 4 of their songs, "Breathe", "Money", "Wish You Were Here" and "Comfortably Numb". Since it was in London, there was no way I could be there. This makes it the second such thing I've missed, since there wasn't any way I could be present for Roger Water's special Wall concert when the Berlin Wall came down, either.

Anyway, I wanted copies, and was extremely pleased when AOL (of all organizations) posted fairly high quality Quicktime movies of the Pink Floyd numbers, as well as movies of almost every significant Live 8 performance. (Update: These are now offline.) However, they tweaked the little flag that disallows Quicktime Pro from downloading copies to keep on your hard drive, which was a real blow. Fortunately, the actual video URLs are in the HTML, so I was able to grab them, which is always a handy trick to try when people try this kind of lock-out.

Gaming: Scott Haring and Car Wars

2005-07-08T13:28:00.000-05:00

I've always been a huge fan of the tactical miniatures game Car Wars from Steve Jackson Games. In fact, when I was 15 or so (1984ish), I submitted a Car Wars event to Gen Con 18, hoping to run a game. It was to be called "lakeshore drive", and would have featured a running battle between cars and some boats. (I had made up my own rules for boats, since Boat Wars would not be published until 1988). Alas, the fine folks at Gen Con, possibly taking my age into consideration, or possibly feeling that they had enough Car Wars events already, turned me down.

Imagine my surprise when they called me up weeks before the con, and asked if I could run a Car Wars event that another GM had submitted. The other GM had canceled, but the event was already in the prereg booklet. I agreed. From the vague description in the prereg booklet I cooked up a scenario. I decided to liven it up with 3D foldup ramps and jumps, which my father helped me to construct by showing me the joys of spray-on adhesive.




Part of my Arena

Gen Con rolled around, and lo, I was semi-prepared. I set up my table, and a bunch of grown-ups showed up to play. Things went, in my opinion, fairly well. I, however, was doing my best to contain my nervousness. The goal of the gamemaster in Car Wars is mostly to adjudicate player-to-player disputes over the rules. When he makes a ruling, it has to stick, otherwise the game can't get on. But everyone was older than me, and I was worried that someone would dispute my authority and the game would come to a screeching halt.

In addition, the game was visually interesting. In those days at Gen Con, a lot of the games weren't as visually striking as they are now, and mine, with its 3D ramps and jumps, had a certain style that wasn't usually being brought to Car Wars. As a result, I was attracting a lot of spectators. Before too long, the spectators grew to outnumber the players, and everyone was having to yell to make themselves heard across the table.

It was at this point that I began to notice something odd. Every time I would make a ruling, some of the people at the table would look at one of the people in the audience. The guy didn't ever say anything to dispute my rulings, but they kept glancing at him anyway. I began to be a little annoyed. Who was this guy, the Grand High Poohbah of Car Wars Rulings? Finally, someone did the unthinkable. I issued a ruling on a particularly dicey point, and the player who had come out the worst for it turned to this guy in the audience and said "Is that right?"

The audience member, to my relief, backed me up, saying only "What the referee says goes." A little later, when we were taking a break, he approached me. I thanked him for supporting my ruling, and he introduced himself as Scott Haring, editor of Autoduel Quarterly, the official Car Wars magazine. In addition to his other duties as editor, that made him responsible for writing answers to all Car Wars rules questions posed to SJ games. Ironically enough, he effectively was the Grand High Poohbah of Car Wars Rulings.




One of my Diagrams

He was interested in what I had done to build my 3D ramps and jumps, and asked me if I'd be willing to write an article about how I had done it. I eagerly accepted, wrote up a description of what I had done and the rules I had used, took photographs of my arena, and printed out exemplar ramps and jumps to be folded up, bundled it all together and submitted it. My submission was printed in Autoduel Quartery Volume 3, Issue 4, and I got a check for $72, which was a fair amount of money for my 15-year-old self. While ADQ3-4 has long been gone from the shelves, and even the version of Car Wars that I'm familiar with has gone out of print, it turns out that you can still buy a copy (in PDF form) of my first ever published work.

What brings this story to mind right now, however, is that Scott Haring's name has come up on a blog (nothinggood) and a webcomic (Dork Tower) that I read because he was just involved in a serious auto accident on July 4th. He's apparently in the hospital, and his youngest son has died. I want to extend my condolences, and hope that he has a speedy and complete recovery. I don't really know him, our interaction was brief and professional, but his long-ago actions had a fairly positive and profound influence on my life whether he knew it or not, and I really want to wish him the best.

Update: A lot of people are sharing similar stories about how Mr. Haring has been influential on either their lives or careers. Clearly this accident has caused many to reflect on how he's affected them. Here's a few I've spotted in the blogosphere:

Micah Jackson
Matt Forbeck
Kenneth Hite (has an address to send condolences).
Jeff Grubb
Moe Lane
RPGnet Forum Topic
John Wick

In muted good news, it sounds like Mr. Haring's required surgery was on his knee and he is in stable condition. I'm certainly pulling for him.

Family: Happy Birthday to Me!

2005-07-01T00:45:00.000-05:00

Today is my 36th birthday. This weekend, a large group of friends has a combined Independence Day and July Birthday party and my birthday is one of the ones that will be celebrated. I'm looking forward to it.

I don't know that I'm expecting much gift-wise, but so far, I have received a new alarm clock. Since I didn't manage to get to work on time on Wednesday because I either didn't set the alarm right, or turned it off without waking up, this is a fairly timely gift.

Update: From my family I got a very nice tiny bamboo cutting board for our picnic backpack. It's got a really interesting texture and scent, but looks a lot like a more standard hardwood board. If you look closely, you can see that it's made of lots and lots of small segments. They also got me an iPod Shuffle!! (I've been wanting one for a while, so this is very welcome. I'm filling it now.)

Confusion: Confusion Quarterly, Summer 2005

2005-06-30T23:55:00.000-05:00

Well, the inaugural edition of Confusion Quarterly is ready for press. I'll be printing a bunch tomorrow to hand out to friends at this weekend's festivities, but here's the PDF for those of you who won't have access. Enjoy!




The Front




The Back

Humor: Putting the Trilogies Together

2005-06-30T10:58:00.000-05:00

Because the Star Wars trilogies were made non-chronologically, it's occassionally hard to figure out exactly how they connect, especially for those of us who watched them in their released order. Fortunately, a brilliant individual has put together an explanation that connects everything to my satisfaction.

Consider such gems as:

On first seeing R2, Obi-Wan has a twinkle in his eye and calls him "my little friend". Well, he is. However, when Luke wakes up and says that R2 claimed to be owned by an Obi-Wan Kenobi, he blandly says "I don't seem to remember ever owning a droid." Ben has in fact owned several but the remark is aimed at R2 and translates as "You keep quiet. I'm not about to tell him everything just yet."

or:

Given his background, there is no way that Chewie would spend the crucial years of the rebellion as the second-in-command to (sorry Han) a low-level smuggler. Unless it's his cover. In fact, Chewie is a top-line spy and flies what is in many ways the Rebellion's best ship. The Millenium Falcon may look like a beat-up old freighter but it can outrun any Imperial ship in normal space or hyperspace, hang in a firefight with a Star Destroyer or outmaneouvre a dozen top-of-the-line TIE fighters. It's a remarkable feat of engineering and must have cost a colossal fortune to build. How does Han come to own a ship like that? He only thinks he does, actually it's Chewie's.

It suddenly seems so clear. (Many thanks to Kit for the link.)

Fun: Google Tourism

2005-06-26T12:57:00.000-05:00

Recently, Google Maps added world-wide satellite imagery. I've been taking shameless advantage to visit a bunch of places that I think might be interesting to look at from the air. After she saw what I was doing, my wife pitched in to help. Here are the fruits of our sojourns.

Eiffel Tower
The Great Pyramids (don't forget to visit the Great Sphinx too.)
The Arc de Triomphe
Fallujah
Niagra Falls
The Grand Canyon
Forbidden City
Epcot at DisneyWorld
Statue of Liberty
Golden Gate Bridge
Mt. Everest
Buckingham Palace
St. Louis Arch
Washington Monument
The Pentagon
Hollywood Sign
Mt. Saint Helens
SeaWorld
Bristol Renaissance Faire
Cape Canaveral (Shuttle Launch Pad?)
Area 51
Red Square

Disappointing Trips:
Maybe at some point in the future these will be worth visiting, but right now you can't get in close enough to matter for one reason or another.
Sydney Opera House (inadquate photography)
Stonehenge (inadquate photography)
Capitol Building (deliberately fuzzed, sound dumb?).
Mount Rushmore (bad angle)
Taj Mahal (inadequate photography)

Undiscovered Country:
Great Wall of China (I can't find a section that's been adquately photographed.)

Time Travel:
Obviously all of this stuff wasn't photographed yesterday, and here's a few locations that show the time lag.
Twin Towers Site (before new construction)
Cape Girardeau's Mississippi Bridge (The new bridge is now finished, the old one gone.)

Other Lists of Locations:
Assorted US locations

Fun: Infographics Music Video

2005-06-24T12:02:00.000-05:00




Exploded Escalator

I don't know how you feel about infographics. I've always liked them, especially the kind which use simple isometric iconographic illustrations. They fascinate me, especially when they're done well. Anyway, a colleague recently fowarded me a link to this music video for Röyksopp's "Remind Me". As near as I can tell, it's done by a production group called Machine Molle. They've got some other great videos on their site, but they're small. If anyone can point me at a higher-quality version of any of these videos, I'd really appreciate it.

(Link courtesy of Lin Wilson of Funnel Incorporated, who produces some pretty stunning Infographic work himself, and who has designed a lot of Clotho's collateral.)

Status: What I've Been Up To

2005-06-24T09:57:00.000-05:00

So, as always, there's a bunch of stuff going on, and as always seems to happen in my life, when I start concentrating on one thing, other things fall by the wayside. I haven't been doing a lot of updating lately, which is a shame, as it's not because I haven't had anything to say.

But in the spirit of getting back into the groove of saying those things here, I thought I'd do a little bit of posting about what's been going on with me recently.

Gadget-wise, I've purchased a PSP, and am fascinated with it. In addition to having a couple of very nice games, it's potential as a piece of hardware is pretty broad, even though Sony has struggled to cripple it. While isn't supposed to allow you to run your own programs, people have now found workarounds for this for both the 1.0 japanese firmware and the 1.50 american firmware. I've got a copy of MAME, a GBA emulator, and a SNES emulator running on mine, as well as a chess program. Even without running your own programs it does still allow you to do a lot of useful things with the Memorystick Flash Card.

First among them, for me, is that it allows you to put your own video on the device. I've converted a number of Movies into the subset of the MP4 format it supports, and it rocks. The screen is bright and clear, the audio sync is good, and you can easily get an entire film onto a 512MB stick with acceptable quality. Sony, presumably worried about undercutting their own market for UMD movies, has hampered this capability a bit, however. The screen resolution of the device is 480 x 272, but the maximum resolution of video that you can play from a memory stick right now is 320 x 240 or 368 x 208. I prefer the latter format because it's the same aspect ratio as the PSP's screen, so video I compress that way is the right shape on both the PSP and while I'm working with it on my computer.

The PSP also supports JPGs and MP3s (without any obvious limitations), but it does not have a built in text reader, which is a shame, because the device makes a pretty nice book reader. In fact, there's a program for the macintosh called PDF2PSP which can easily convert a PDF into a series of JPGs suitable for viewing on the PSP. I've done this, and it works great.

Despite these limitations, however, the gadget community seems to be embracing the PSP's capability pretty enthusiastically. A lot of sites now exist where one can go to download content for a PSP, with more coming every week. I highly recommend psphacker.com if you want to keep up with every little thing, especially homebrew applications and emulators, and PSP|>rive.com if you're looking for podcast-style content such as videos, audio broadcasts or photo collections.

Anyway, my fascination with the video aspects of the device lead me to convert a number of my DVDs into PSP format so I could watch them on the go, and then I started thinking about our current direction at Clotho. We make a video converter as part of our MediaLandscape product line. Right now what is does is take output from a MediaSite box, and convert it into flash. I got to thinking that maybe there would be a demand for converting presentations so they could be viewed on the go.

So, I whipped together a quick set of proof-of-concept videos for the PSP, for a Palm-OS handheld, and my trusty Sharp Zaurus, and we sent them off with the folks who went to InfoComm and the Apple WWDC. For people who are interested, here's the flash version of the presentation I converted, and here's the file for viewing on the PSP. (If you can view MP4s, you might be able to watch it on your computer. On the other hand, If you are going to watch it on a PSP, here's the associated THM icon file.)

Reaction, so far, has been very favorable, and Clotho is now offering such conversion as a service, and is beginning to look at creation of a toolset for selling to people who want to do such conversions themselves. Neat, huh?

Photos: Confusion 2005

2005-05-12T20:46:00.000-05:00

For the past three years, my family heads up to Sturgeon Bay to hook up with a dozen or so other families for an event we call Confusion. In general, the idea is to enact a science-fiction convention in miniature, with as many of the trappings as practically possible. As I do at Oddcon (a real SF con), I run a movie room, but other activites abound, and this year, as in previous years, we had plenty to do. Here are some photos.




Ivy Prepares to Travel




Rose Readies for the Art Show




Gaming in Living Greyhawk




Dread Pirates Bill and Griffin

I'm also working on a quarterly newsletter to help us plan for next year, which looks like it will be in late March. I'll post a link to the newsletter here for people that don't want to track down the dead tree version.

Video: High Definition Trailers

2005-05-02T09:03:00.000-05:00

I'm really into movie trailers. I like to download them to my computer and show them to friends at parties and conventions, or associates at business meetings, for that matter. For quite a while, Apple has been my staunch ally in this effort, putting almost every movie trailer of note online on their site in high quality, easily downloadable Quicktime movies.

Now, it may be that they've gone too far.

With last week's release of Apple's new OS, Tiger, they've included a new version of Quicktime. (Version 7, for those keeping track). One of the things introduced in the new version is a video codec called H.264. From wikipedia:

The intent of the H.264/AVC project has been to create a standard that would be capable of providing good video quality at bit rates that are substantially lower (e.g., half or less) than what previous standards would need (e.g., relative to MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2), and to do so without so much of an increase in complexity as to make the design impractical (expensive) to implement. An additional goal was to do this in a flexible way that would allow the standard to be applied to a very wide variety of applications (e.g., for both low and high bit rates, and low and high resolution video) and to work well on a very wide variety of networks and systems

Now, with each movie trailer for a movie I'm really interested in, it can sometimes be hard to resist the temptation to go through the trailer frame by frame, analyzing




Serenity's Crew in HD

what is (or isn't) there, and trying to figure out stuff about the movie that the trailer shows inadvertently. With the upcoming Firefly-based movie Serenity, this temptation was already there, but Apple has made it far, far worse, because they are posting some trailers and clips in High-Definition resolutions, such as 1920x816, using their fancy new codec. (I've extracted a frame of the video so that you can get a sense of the amount of data we're talking about, here. Here's another.)

And my lowly 867Mhz G4, so good at so many things, is totally and completely unable to play them at speed. It drops frames like crazy. If I want to peek at the all the HD goodness that Apple is offering, I practically have to do it one frame at a time.

Media: Press Hits

2005-04-21T16:56:00.002-05:00

Thanks to Slashdot, I found an article on how PR firms seed the media with stories. When they succeed, it's called a "press hit", and it's better than any ad. Fascinating stuff.

Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.

Politics: Operation Falcon

2005-04-14T17:15:00.000-05:00

So, as widely reported in the news, Operation Falcon apprehended more than 10,000 fugitives, nationwide, between April 4th and April 10th. Reading the article, which is being widely touted as a victory for victim's rights (it coincided with Crime Victims Rights Week), a publicity coup for law enforcement, and a demonstration of the value of increased inter-agency cooperation in the wake of 9/11.

The focus, they say, was on violent crime. In fact, our new Attorney General says "Operation FALCON is an excellent example of President Bush’s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime."

But looking at the numbers given in the article, I had the first inklings of doubt.

10340 total arrests.

162 who were wanted for murder.
638 who had outstanding arrest warrants for armed robbery.
553 who were wanted for rape or sexual assault.
106 who were unregistered sex offenders
154 who were gang members.

Yay! 1613 scumbags who are off the streets and now (deservedly) behind bars. But 1613 from 10340 leaves 8727 arrested for some other reason, not specified in the article.

Surely someone must know, I thought, what the vast majority of those caught in this massive dragnet were arrested for? But as news article after news article neglected to mention exactly what, I began to fear the worst. I became convinced that huge amounts of government resources, utilization of the over-broad powers granted in the wake of 9/11, and zeal to generate positive publicity on the new AG's watch had resulted in a massive drug bust, a meaningless continuation of the unwinnable war on drugs. I finally tracked down a more complete official breakdown, and unfortunately, my fears seem well-founded.

In addition to the above numbers, the operation involved:

the arrest of 68 kidnapping suspects
the arrest of 38 arson suspects
the arrest of 1727 assault suspects
the arrest of 1818 burglary suspects
the arrest of 12 extortion suspects
the arrest of 483 weapons violation suspects
the arrest of 203 stolen vehicle suspects

and

the arrest of 4,291 major narcotics violation suspects and the seizure of 30kg cocaine, .19kg heroin, 204kg marijuana, and 39kg other drugs. (A total of 210 drug seizures.)

There it is. Considerably more than 1 out of 3. More than twice as many as any other category of crime. The ruinous War on Drugs continues, and law enforcement continues to broaden its powers and reach to fight that war while claiming their focus is on "fighting terrorism" and "stopping violent crime".

Gaming: Spike's Journal Updated

2005-04-13T17:01:00.000-05:00

After a long hiatus, I have once again updated Spike's Journal. More to come soon.

Photos: Oddcon 2005

2005-04-12T22:52:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend, my family and I attended Odyssey Con, a local science fiction convention. I host a movie party there, and a lot of people stopped by, visited, and enjoyed the various wacky videos I had to show. The big hits this year were the new Doctor Who and Heat Vision and Jack. Generally, feedback was pretty good, (the main complaint was that the room was too small) and I look forward to doing it again next year.

As it happens, I also took some photos.




The Nick Atoms




The Dread Pirate Liana




A fandom wedding




The Masquerade




Princess Rose

If you'd like to see more, I put up a whole gallery of them. There's a bunch more of The Nick Atoms, in and out of costume. There're also a few more shots of Amalor and Dragon in their wedding duds, and various miscellaneous con shots.

Video: Interlacing Headaches

2005-03-31T19:41:00.000-06:00

Well, this morning I had my wisdom teeth out, and my jaw hurts. So far, I haven't resorted to the oxy I was prescribed, because the ibuprofin seems to be doing the job. I'm really hungry though.

As a result, I've spent some time today doing some recreational video encoding. As previous posts may have lead you to believe, I'm fascinated by figuring out how to utilize my fair use rights to convert video from one form to another. Lately, I've received an unlikely, and perhaps unwitting, ally in the fight from Sony, who in a strange turn, have released a spiffy portable device capable of playing user-created kick-ass video.

One outcome of this is that there's a lot of interest in the blogosphere in how to convert video from DVDs into more portable forms. As I've mentioned before, this is possible, but there are practical and legal impediments. With a will, I set myself to the task of converting our new Incredibles dvd to a portable form. (Disney is notoriously stingy when it comes to video releases, so the prospects for an offical portable release seem dim.)

What I'd like to say is that if you're on a Mac, there's a great tool for starting this process called Handbrake. The old version (0.6.2) was great, the new beta (0.7.0-beta 2) looks even better. It comes very close to the ideal of inserting DVD, pressing go, and getting a useful video file that you can play on your computer, burn to CD, stream over your intranet, or put on a portable device. If you have to convert some DVDs to computer form, it's a great tool.

People who aren't interested in annoying technical nitty-gritty can go download it and stop reading here.

For the rest of you, I was perusing the Handbrake forums and came across this interesting tidbit.

I've noticed that while the individual deinterlaced frames look good, when you play them, it'll skip every two seconds or so (really noticeable in long pans). It looks really out of place. I've tried it in both XviD and FFmpeg (both at 1280 kbs) and still the same thing. Just wondering if there's any way to fix this. If you don't know what I mean I can upload a sample. I just really want to know what's going on here. Thanks.

To which I offered the following response, which I think gives some interesting insight in to just what kind of a hassle it is to deal with digital video from analogue sources behind the scenes.

The reason that this is happening is possibly because the original source material (pre-interlace) was at 24fps. When someone converts 24fps film into 29.97fps interlaced video (often referred to as 60 fields henceforth) they have a few options, but the one that is typically used is to spread the 24 fps video frames out over alternate groups of 3 or 2 frames by using the interlacing.

So, what often happens is that:

Source frame 1 is field 1,2,3
Source frame 2 is field 4,5
Source frame 3 is field 6,7,8
Source frame 4 is field 9,10
Source frame 5 is field 11,12,13
Source frame 6 is field 14,15

6 frames at 24 fps = 1/4 second.
15 fields at 60field/sec = 1/4 second.

This is pretty groovy, and looks pretty smooth, but (wait for it) here comes your problem. deinterlacing is pretty tricky stuff. I don't know anything about the guts of handbrake, but however it's converting 60 field/second video into 30 frame/second video, the result is going to look like this: (assuming the odd frames are dominant).

output frame 1 comes from field 1 and thus source frame 1
output frame 2 comes from field 3 and thus source frame 1
output frame 3 comes from field 5 and thus source frame 2
output frame 4 comes from field 7 and thus source frame 3
output frame 5 comes from field 9 and thus source frame 4
output frame 6 comes from field 11 and thus source frame 5
output frame 7 comes from field 13 and thus source frame 5
output frame 8 comes from field 15 and thus source frame 6.

Note that this introduces a duplicated frame every 5 frames. This is not too troubling normally, but it tends to make pans and smooth movement look a little jerky. It _might_ be possible to use a smart deinterlacing mechanism (called a 3:2 pulldown) to turn the video back into its original 24fps frames, but in my experience this is an approach fraught with perils, and to be avoided if possible.

Finally, because 29.97 frames per second is the reality instead of the cleaner 30fps, we'll have an extra hiccup every once in a unless the source clip was at 23.985 instead of 24fps.

Short answer: Try to get a copy of your source material that isn't interlaced in the first place, interlacing is the bane of rational, easy-to-understand, computer video manipulation.

Neat, huh?

Family: Ivy 1, Santa 0

2005-03-21T23:35:00.000-06:00

So as I was driving home from playgroup tonight, with Ivy and Rose sitting in the back, Ivy suddenly begins an interesting conversation. Here is a partial re-enactment, for the benefit of history.

Ivy: Daddy, I have a friend at school who says that her Mom and Dad are Santa Claus for her.
Glenn: Ah.
Ivy: She's wrong, right?
Glenn: What do you think?
Ivy: "I think that she's wrong, and that Santa Claus comes to her house."
Glenn "Why do you think that?"
Ivy: Because.
Glenn: Ah.

A few minutes pass. At this point, I have two worries. The first of which is that Rose will rouse from sleep, overhear this discussion and get upset. The second is that Ivy will press the point further and become upset if I tell her the truth.

Ivy: Daddy, would you tell me the truth?
Glenn: Yes, but I want to ask you some questions. Why is this important to you?
Ivy: I just want to know the truth.
Glenn: Is it because you're curious? Or because you're afraid you won't like the truth?
Ivy: Curious, I think.
Glenn: Do you remember when you asked me about Santa's reindeer, and I said that they could fly because they were magic?
Ivy: yes.
Glenn: I also told you once that magic was "just pretend", and when I said that about the reindeer, you said 'But you said magic was pretend.' At the time, I asked you what you thought about that, and you said you didn't know. What do you think now?
Ivy: (with dawning smugness) I know! I know! Mommies and Daddies dress up in Santa clothes.

Interestingly, at this point, Ivy, rather than bursting into tears, became fascinated by the logistics of the illusion. Most of this centered around Mall santas and the fact that they looked different, which she confessed to having observed. But I thought the following was interesting:

Ivy: Do the mall santas carry the presents to the Mommies and Daddies?
Glenn: (laugh) No, the parents buy the gifts.
Ivy: But how can they go to the store at night?
Glenn: No, we buy them beforehand.
Ivy: Then we'd see them sitting on the counter!
Glenn: We hide them.
Ivy: Oh!

Finally, I asked her if the discovery made her sad, to which she said no. In fact, she was very excited to tell mommy that she was "in" on the big secret. I told her not to tell her sister, but I imagine that's a doomed effort and that Ivy will let the truth slip sometime as Christmas approaches. We'll see.

I share with you this final exchange we had while talking about my elaborate marble trail.

Ivy: (suddenly) You ate the cookies and milk!
Glenn: Yes, they were very tasty cookies.
Ivy: Thanks, daddy!

Politics: Fiddling while Rome Burns

2005-03-21T01:40:00.000-06:00

I can not fucking believe that while our economy lies in near-ruins, our debt is skyrocketing out of control, and our soldiers are overseas at war, the most important elected officials in the United States are wasting their time destroying 200 years of jurisprudence to overrule the husband of someone who's been in a persistant vegetative state for 15 years.

Sure, the helpless have rights, and the courts and laws need to uphold them. But you can't convince me that this hasn't escalated beyond the rational. In fact, the courts have already had their say. But, here we have it, instead of going all-out to save the livelyhoods of millions of American citizens, or going all-out to save the thousands of soldiers who will die in the desert, or going all-out to do something good for the billions of people in the world who are affected by the United State's governance, we're going to go all-out to save the life of somone who hasn't really even been a person for more than a decade.

I don't know what the actual motivation is behind this stupid political grandstanding, but I'm disgusted.

Gaming: Character Sheet Display Engine

2005-03-21T01:11:00.000-06:00

I've finished the preliminary work on my Flash engine for displaying character information embedded in a wiki page. I don't have much up yet by way of example content, but things are looking pretty functional at the moment. You can check it out on our gaming wiki. Further improvements may come, but for now, I'm very happy with it.

Web Comics: Gabe on Rick Dees

2005-03-20T23:13:00.000-06:00

As many know, (possibly from the numerous web comic links in my sidebar), I'm a big fan of web comics. They're quite good, often touch on dangerous topics, and are predominately free. In general, I think of them as alternative as well, but today I had a little surprise.

I'm listening to Rick Dees Weekly Top Forty this morning, and all the sudden, Rick Dees starts talking about the Sony PSP. No surprise there, after all, it's an upcoming gadget with a lot riding on it, and Sony is doubtlessly dishing out the millions to anyone that's willing to shill. Suddenly Rick Dees says, "...and I have Gabe from Penny Arcade here in the studio."

For those who aren't in the know, Gabe is the alter-ego of one of the two creators of one of the most successful web comics, Penny Arcade. It's a pretty good comic, with the proviso that you often need to either read the rant or know about happenings in the world of computer games. I read it regularly, along with lots of other folks. But I wouldn't have thought that elevated its creators to the kind of celebrity status I typically associate with guests on national top 40 radio shows.

To be honest, since the strip can be very off-color, it must be even more popular than I thought for Rick Dees to be willing to directly link to it, seeing as it'll almost certainly generate some complaints from parents. The only reason I could see that they'd be willing to deal with that is a big paycheck from Sony. And why would Sony pay to have Gabe talk about the PSP unless it was a big draw?

I don't know, maybe web comics are moving up in the world.

So, just in case I can ride that particular wave, here are some other excellent web comics for you to check out.

Life on Forbez: This sci-fi comic, set in a school on an alien world, is incredibly well drawn black and white. While it is often more dramatic than funny, it's worth reading through the archives to see the storyline and characters develop. I believe that the creator is about to try and achieve three postings a week, which is close to being the web-comics standard. (Possibly because of the influence of Penny Arcade, interestingly enough.)

Questionable Content: This interpersonal romantic tension comic has soap-opera tendencies, but I'm liking it anyway. Despite the name, I doesn't really have any questionable happenings. It also makes a lot of jokes about the indie music scene and the young hipsters that follow its trends. It updates every weekday, and is well worth a look see.

Fallen: I think the full color art here is simply amazing, and setting is complicated enough to be truly intruiging. Unfortunately, once you've plowed through the archives, you may be left hanging for a while, because the creator lost her scriptbook and some finished pages, and the comic hasn't been updated lately. Here's hoping she brings more soon.

The Wotch: This Buffy-esque comic about a young girl with special powers who moves to town is a lot of fun, if a little silly.

Alice!: This sweet and fairly traditional comic strip about an over-imaginative girl has been around for quite a while, but has been defunct until just recently, when it returned with a vengeance. The current update schedule seems to be every weekday.

Glenn: Status

2005-03-16T11:18:00.000-06:00

Well, there are a number of things going on right now.

Most of us are feeling better, but Ivy is sick.
Liana and I laid a lot of groundwork for the Avarrè campaign setting, more is on the way. There are crude maps now.
I'm working on a flash-based character sheet display program for use as a wiki extension. It will read XML data that will contain one or more characters at one or more power levels in one or more rulesets. You can see the current state of development here. If it's not exciting, check back in a day or so.
I have a long entry for Spike's Journal about three quarters written, but It keeps breaking down into a rambling blow-by-blow which is not at all the feel I'm going for with the journal. I think I need to pick a theme for the post and leave out some detail.
I set up a gmail account today, and decided to use it as the contact email for this blog. You should see the email link on the sidebar. Posting the email address to the web at large ought to really put its spam-filtering to the test. Conclusion so far: It's fairly impressive for a web-based email system.
In other Google tidbits, the customization feature for Google News means I can customize my news page to not show sports, and the super-cool Google Maps now works with Safari.
I'm beginning to put together the film list for my film party at OddCon, but I've decided not to put the list on the web. If you're curious, email me.
There's a similar list for my film party at Confusion, which is the convention-in-miniature my friends and I have in Door County. I designed the logo this year.
I've seen the newest Dr. Who. It's great, and still very doctor-who-ish. It's also really strange to see the internet play a role in a Dr. Who episode, since the last episode was in 1989. I hope that someone will show it state-side for those of you who can't or don't want to download TV episodes.
In other film news, Clotho (my Business) did a lot of the heaving lifting for the Wisconsin Film Fest website. Though I personally was working on other projects, and won't want to attend, since I'm getting my wisdom teeth out on March 31st.

Gaming: Bad Impressions

2005-03-09T23:34:00.000-06:00

It has recently come to light that the Israeli Army has an actual policy that soldiers who admit to playing D&D will only be granted a low security clearance. I was curious about details, so I read this article.

Man, talk about a bummer. The list of things that those responsible believe and do makes a pretty depressing litany.

Players are "detached from reality and suscepitble to influence".
Soldiers who admit to playing are "sent to a professional for an evaluation, usually a psychologist".
Finally, such people may "have a weak personality".

Currently, with the success of the video game industry and movies like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, geek culture is ascendant in the States and abroad. However, I still remember that when I was in high school, the various pressure applied (mostly by religious groups) actually lead the parents of one of my friends to forbid him to play. He never told me in so many words, but I believe he wasn't even supposed associate with me. Stuff like this IDF policy, even happening in Israel, makes me worry, just because there are still plenty of people out there that hate my favorite pastime.

So, I was looking for some differing perspectives to help cheer me up after this. I found this darkly sarcastic take which I found pretty humorous. I also found this commentary, however, which I thought was more uplifting.

To put it simply, Dungeons and Dragons reinvented the use of the imagination as a kid's best toy. The cliche of parents waxing nostalgic for their wooden toys and things "they had to make themselves" has now become my own. Looking around at my toddler's room full of trucks, trains, and Transformers, I want to cry out, "I created worlds with nothing more than a twenty-sided die!"

Update: You could also check out this fine Dork Tower strip on the subject.

Wiki: Adding Extensions to MediaWiki

2005-03-05T15:03:00.000-06:00

Since I often use Flash to illustrate topics and create animations, and may use it for maps, I wanted to have the capability to use flash in my new wiki. (see previous post). Alas, by default, my installation of mediaWiki doesn't seem to include this capability.

However, using just a bit of php, one can write an extension to mediaWiki that allows for custom tags that can do just about anything, so, with some programming, I've added this capability. Now, if you include

<gflash>480 340 http://www.somewhere.com/someflash.swf</gflash>

in your wiki markup, it should embed the flash at the url inline, 480 wide by 340 tall, in your wiki page. Here's a working example on the GlennGameWiki. For people that want the code of the extension, I'm including it as a comment, below.

Update: Since being indexed by Google, this post appears to have become something of a resource for people looking into how to do this. For instance, a large business linked to this article from the main page of their internal wiki for a while. Since my business Clotho Advanced Media, Inc. does internet development work of this sort, I'd certainly invite anyone who is having trouble with this, or needs custom php extensions to mediawiki, to contact my office (608-294-7900, ask for Glenn) or email me. I might be able to help you out, and Clotho can always stand to develop new business-to-business relationships.

Update 2: (5/26/05). My wiki server isn't up to much bandwidth, so I don't allow the uploading of images. Perforce, this means that the flash content referred to by my extension is hosted elsewhere. However, if you're interested in making an extension to allow the inclusion of uploaded content (such as swfs), I refer you to this page. The extension there also has a more sophisticated parameter passing methodology, which may be of interest as well.

Gaming: New Gaming Wiki

2005-03-05T01:00:00.000-06:00

I've been busy setting up a personal mediaWiki server to use for gaming purposes. Right now, it has the beginnings of world information for Avarrè, which is the campaign setting I'm using for playtesting Glennworld. I'm also going to use it to post a copy of the Glennworld rules in-progress, so that people can comment on them or collaborate. (Though I haven't done this yet.) Finally, I may use it to post shared information about other games that are currently in progress.

I have some hopes that if I can get a few people interested in helping me write the Avarrè stuff, it can fairly quickly develop into a more full-fledged RPG gameworld. The first things I need to take care of are maps, and then I believe I'll be moving on to simple descriptions of each of the kingdoms around Avarrè, most of which don't even have names yet. What does exist so far are history , laws, gods, organizations, and the basic calendar.

Anyway, you are all cordially invited to drop by, peruse what's there, and comment or contribute if you see fit. Right now it's running at the fairly unimpressive address of http://66.222.39.45/wiki/.

(This is my first attempt at running any kind of server through my home NAT router, so please let me know if it isn't working, and I'll try to fix it.)

Family: Liana Begins a Blog

2005-02-24T22:16:00.000-06:00

Well, my current obsession with blogging apparently wasn't sufficiently terrifying to keep my wife away. I give you a valley, two vines, and a flower. I, at least, am looking forward to her future posts.

Cooking: Glenn's Jambalaya Chicken Soup

2005-02-24T12:36:00.000-06:00

Warning: This recipe is still in beta. I was looking for a good way to prepare two dark chicken quarters using other ingredients lying around, so the other night I pioneered this, and it came out great. That said, the proportions below may still require some adjustment.

Ingredients:
    • 1 1/2 cups (approx.) Zatarain's Jambalaya
            (cooked according to directions)
    • 2 dark chicken quarters
    • 8 cups water
    • 1 medium yellow onion, diced.
    • 2 tbs. extra virgin olive oil
    • 1 tsp. salt
    • 1/2 tsp. oregano
    • 1/2 tsp. basil
    • 1/2 tsp. thyme
    • 1/4 tsp. black pepper
    • 1 cup dried vegetables
    • 2 cups wide egg noodles
    • 1 tbs. corn starch.
    • 4 oz. can mushroom stems and pieces
    • habeñero pepper sauce (optional)

Directions:
Prepare a package of Zatarain's Jambalaya according to the directions. (you don't need to add meat.)

Put the chicken in a pot, and add water, onion, olive oil, salt, oregano, basil, thyme, and pepper. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and gently simmer, covered, for 1 hour. Remove chicken to a plate. Add the dried vegetables and continue simmering, uncovered, stirring occasionally.

While the vegetables are cooking, separate the meat from the chicken bones, remove and discard the skin, and cut the meat into small pieces. Add the meat back to the pot.

When the vegetables are becoming soft enough (about 15 minutes), add the noodles, and cook for about 10 minutes. Add the corn starch and mushrooms. Stir until corn starch is dissolved. Add rice a little bit at a time until desired consistency is reached. Cook for 5 more minutes. Salt and Pepper to taste, adding habeñero sauce if desired. Serves 4-6

Notes:
    • I like using the Zatarain's because it's easy to make in my rice cooker and it's something I usually have around. That said, I imagine any prepared rice would work, including leftovers, and each different type of rice should give the dish a different "spin".
    • I buy bulk dried vegetables for soups, stews and sides at the Willy Street Co-Op. They include carrots, corn, red peppers, and other yummy vegetable bits I cannot currently name.
    • When I add the meat to the pot, I put the bones back in too, figuring that they're easy enough to fish out at the end.
    • As written, I think the recipe needs more salt, but I don't want to risk saying too much until I get a chance to try it again.
    • As always, if you're going to spice it up with Habeñero sauce, I recommend either Da' Bomb or Dave's Insanity Sauce. Remember not to add too much. I'd probably use a single drop for most audiences, but if everyone wants their food spicy, you could probably add 3 or 4 safely. The Jambalaya will add a little heat all on its own, so this is definitely optional.

Fun: Latigo Flint, Gunslinger

2005-02-22T12:32:00.000-06:00

I was hitting random blogs, trying to figure out if there was a way to apply my own style sheet to the new Blogger comment system, (there doesn't seem to be) when I ran across the blog of Latigo Flint, the greatest quickdraw the world has ever known.

It recently occurred to Latigo Flint that one of these days he could be called out by some upstart quickdraw looking to make a name for himself - and as the challenger, it would be well within the rights of the little punk to stipulate that the combatants wear rollerblades.

Latigo Flint is the quickest quickdraw the world has ever known. He can slap thigh and shuck iron so fast that Aaron Copland would be inspired to compose again... from beyond the frickin' grave.

But Latigo Flint does not rollerblade. It had never even crossed Latigo Flint's mind to touch a rollerblade, much less strap it to his foot. And this is a potential weakness - Latigo Flint recognizes this with grim clarity. The quickdraw of yesteryear, beyond his prodigious skill with a firearm, needed only to ensure he possessed the supplementary skills of walking, running, crouching, squinting, horseback riding, spitting indifferently and moseying. We live in a very different era now - an era in which the specter of gunfight failure demands I learn to rollerblade.

I was debating the wisdom of including a link to it here, as some of the posts, perhaps, wander just a little over the funny-but-too-offensive line. But then I got to his field dressing post, and after laughing aloud for about 5 minutes, knew I had to share.

TV: Heat Vision and Jack

2005-02-17T19:54:00.000-06:00

Did you like Knight Rider? Do you like Doctor Who? Have you ever wondered what it would be like if those two shows were somehow combined into a freakish amalgamated send-up of 80's action television? Well wonder no more! Everybody's favorite everyman, Jack Black, stars in this never-aired pilot. It's directed by Ben Stiller, and features Owen Wilson as the voice of Jack's talking motorcycle. Not surprisingly, Fox decided to take a pass on this one, but it's very funny, and worth the download if you've got the means.

Liana and I just watched it and really enjoyed it. This sort of thing is always a bit bittersweet for me, because it's good enough that I'd like more, but there isn't any, and probably never will be. Well, at least I can look forward to watching blurry 5th generation videotaped copies of it at Sci-Fi conventions. Kudos to waxy.org for hosting the Torrent.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to continue downloading an audio recording of The Last Starfighter, The Musical.

Movies: Hitchhiker's Guide Trailer

2005-02-16T15:53:00.000-06:00




Marvin the Paranoid Android

Today the first real (non-teaser) trailer for the upcoming Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was posted as an "exclusive" advertisement on the front page of Amazon. Unfortunately, it's a dinky little Flash version, and can't be downloaded. Here's a link to a much nicer (possibly unofficial) Quicktime version. Personally, I like the look of it, but I'm already seeing in forums that it doesn't make everyone happy. The film's scheduled to be in theaters on April 29th. update: Thanks to waxy.org, I've updated the links to point to a higher quality version.

Books: Elizabeth Moon

2005-02-14T23:27:00.000-06:00




Oath of Swords

Over the years, I've read a number of books that are based in D&D-like universes. In general, I find these acceptable, but rarely exceptional, because of their grounding in a stilted role-playing universe. In recent years, for example, I've found a great deal of enjoyment in David Weber's War God's Own books, but I hardly consider them to be pinnacles of the fantasy genre. (The link is to the free online version of the entire first book, thanks to the always wonderful Baen Free Library.)

My favorites by a wide margin, however, are Elizabeth Moon's trilogy about a female paladin, called The Deed of Paksenarrion. Elizabeth Moon is an ex-Marine, having joined in 1968, and she brings a great sense of versimilitude to all of the routine of Paks's enlistment in a mercenary company, and the lifestyle of drill and training. That realism grounds the books, and sustains the reader as the more fantastic elements of the story begin to creep in, eventually encompassing so many of the aspects of D&D that one can almost envision the race and character class of each and every participant in the story. Somehow, though, she does this without ever slipping into what I've come to think of as "Dragonlance Mode", and the result is a fairly gripping set of books that don't shy away from some fairly harsh realities of war and still deliver a fairly epic storyline. (In a side-note, I'll say that If a D20 sourcebook is ever released, I'm definitely going to buy it.)

Recently, I've begun re-reading them, and it occured to me to wonder if Elizabeth Moon was in fact a gamer. I stopped by the Amazon page for the book, and found an interesting comment.

The Deed of Paksenarrion does, in fact, have its roots in roleplaying, but not in the usual sense. Rather than being written either as a sort of record of someone's favorite character in a game, or as a publicity/demonstration piece for some gaming system or mechanic, Paksenarrion was born (according to an email exchange I had with the author) from bad roleplaying: Elizabeth Moon, not gaming herself, heard some people playing "Paladins" (Holy warriors in the service of a god) and doing so very poorly. Her reaction was of course that "such a person wouldn't ACT like that"... and in thinking about what they WOULD act like, Paksenarrion was born.




The Deed of Paksenarrion

Now, as most people who game with me are aware, I'm a big fan of playing paladins in roleplaying games, and in fact, when I play a paladin nowadays I usually try to model his behaviour on that of Paksenarrion, so I thought this was pretty funny. In fact, I thought it was interesting enough that I wanted to confirm it as fact. (Mostly so I could post about it here.)

So I took an unusal step, and started looking for interviews and essays by Elizabeth Moon. The reason that this constitutes an unusal step for me is that I consider it dangerous. Because I'm a very liberal atheist, I often find it hard to enjoy something as much when I learn that the talent behind it has a very conservative or religious mindset. What I knew about Elizabeth Moon was what was written in her bio on the back of the book. i.e. she was both a Texan and an ex-Marine. Under the circumstances, I had some trepidation about finding out things about her that might sully my enjoyment of one of my favorite fantasy trilogies.

I tracked down her set of pages at ssf.net. I'm still not sure that Ms. Moon and I would see eye-to-eye across the political spectrum, but it turns out that I really didn't need to worry that I'd take an instant dislike to her.

If George Bush had really been willing to serve his country in time of danger, many other avenues of service were wide open in the Sixties....So why didn't he? Why didn't this proponent of patriotism and responsibility and accountability and so on just walk into a recruiting office and say "Send me to 'Nam--I'm willing?" What kind of patriotism--what kind of courage--wants the uniform but not the risk? If even women were willing to serve in the military and risk being sent to Vietnam, what kind of man would choose to pretend he was serving, while not actually serving?

I don't know why. I cannot think of any valid, honest, honorable reason why someone would claim to support the war, and then by his own actions ensure that he himself was not at risk--and by those actions put others at risk.

George W. Bush claims that questioning the validity of his service in the Texas Air National Guard insults the men and women who have served there and been in combat. This is a disgusting perversion of the truth. It is he and other draft dodgers, with the connivance of Texas government (including the governor who wouldn't release the unit to the military and the individuals who jumped Bush over the waiting list to get him in) who sullied the honor of the National Guard here in Texas, and in other states where a politically-motivated governor allowed this injustice to occur. It is he and the others like him who insult and dishonor those who served honorably before and after this shameful period, those who actually put their lives on the line. Because of him and men like him, others were drafted into the service and sent into combat in their place.

But while that made me happy, her point-by-point analysis of the President's record as Commander-in-chief, from her perspective as military authority, made me chuckle aloud. (Heck, check out her interesting commentary on global warming too.)

After you've read all that, try out the Deed of Paksenarrion if you've never read it. (The link is to the first 20 chapters, which are available free online as a sample.) I bet you won't be disappointed.

Web: Inside Google Maps

2005-02-10T11:38:00.000-06:00

First off, if you haven't checked out the beta of Google Maps yet, you really should. It's an amazing use of web technologies and provides the most satisfying map-browsing experience I've ever had on the web. It's still got a few rough edges, but even with them unresolved, I expect to be using Google Maps instead of any of the other internet map services. It's just that cool.

But how does it work? If I had implemented such a thing (and I've implemented some similar stuff) I'd have undoubtedly done it in Flash. I would've thought that the obvious other candidates would have been shockwave or Java. All of these provide a robust client-side application development platform on which to do this sort of thing. To be honest, I would've suspected that any technologies built into web-browsers, such as CSS, DHTML, and Javascript, would have been either inadequate to the task, too buggy, or too slow. Not so, it proves, and here (via as simple as possible, but no simpler) is a fairly high-level explanation of how it was done.

Family: Hear the Children Sing

2005-02-10T01:18:00.000-06:00




Ivy Sings

Ivy's Kindergarten class (and some of the other kindergartners at her school) sang some songs last night at the a program the PTA put on in honor of African-American History Month. I'd been wanting to get some good video of the kids singing for a while now, so I began by taking this opportunity to shoot some footage of them warming up. We then headed over to the school, where I shot about 35 minutes worth of miscellaneous elementary school programming. However, I tend to find this sort of thing interminable, so I tried to edit it down to the bare essentials of the kindergartner's portion. The result is about 5 minutes of video, which I offer for your enjoyment.

Note:If for some reason the Quicktime video link isn't working, you could try this Flash Version instead. It's non-streaming, so be prepared to wait.

Politics: Failing to Make Tough Choices

2005-02-07T22:54:00.000-06:00

A combination of personal circumstances and news articles have caused me to form a new opinion about the United States, and how we do things.

We have a consistent inability to make tough choices, and on some fronts, it's proving to be our undoing. The scary thing about our failure is that it's not rooted in any individual, tempting as it is to blame certain politicians. It's a structural failing. A person can choose to make tough choices, like giving up beef so they can buy more food with less money. A political organization often can't.

They can't, because, simply put, no one has a mandate. With almost every important political contest falling within 0 to 5 percent of the middle, no group can afford to give up any block of votes without getting another block almost immediately to replace it. Even something that clearly needs changing to avert a problem in the future. Take this question that Time poses and answers:

So how would Bush fix Social Security's long-term funding problem?
That remains the big unanswered question. Everyone in Washington knows it would be political suicide to cut the benefits of today's retirees or those about to retire. Absent those options, there are only three ways to bring the system into fiscal balance: cut future benefits, raise taxes or borrow the money, which adds to the debt.

Rather than concentrating on the vexing question of how to fix Social Security, which I don't care to wrestle with right now, I ask you to note the second sentence and think about what it means. There are four possible solutions to the posed problem, and one of them is off the table for all parties. The problem is that it would be off the table even if it were the best solution for the country as a whole, not on its merits, but because it would result in an immediate loss of political power. The group that backed such a solution would lose big in upcoming elections, would fail to accomplish its Social Security goals, and would probably fail to accomplish any other goal the organization had as well.

This kind of problem manifests in a startling array of areas. Global warming is a disaster that's already happening. The glaciers are melting, there were multiple terrible tropical storms last year that wreaked untold personal and economic havok on Florida. Every degree that the temperature rises is adding an incredible amount of energy to the weather systems of our planet.

Clearly the world needs to crack down on emissions that increase greenhouse gasses. There's international agreement on that point. Many nations, both industrialized and not, have an accord to do just that. The U.S., the biggest source of the problem is, of course, doing nothing. It's just too painful for poor old us.

The Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement, mandates cutbacks in such emissions, but the reductions are small and the United States, the biggest emitter, is not a party, arguing that the mandates will set back the U.S. economy.

It's the same problem. If car prices rise, if gas prices rise, if taxes rise, if SUVs become harder to buy, it will be regarded by the voting population of the US as a failure by those political organizations that backed the measure. Even if the resultant money is used to pay for slowing down the damage done to the global climate. Everyone in power knows that it will be seen as a failure, and so they defer the problem to the future.

We are a country that routinely votes "no" on referendums to fund needed improvements at local public schools, even if we attended them and our children attend them. A country that supports useless government programs not because we don't realize they're useless, but because they earn votes from some important constituency, or would cost votes if cancelled. A country that is consistantlly unwilling to have things like gasoline, cigarettes, cars, computers, cell phones and plastic bottles include the actual costs to the nation associated with their disposal or health effect in their purchase price. A country that has a skyrocketing national debt as we continue to borrow from our descendants without apparent concern for the consequences it will bring them.

I'm going to say something atypically nice about President Bush. His social security plan is a sham designed to break the current system. It's clearly a sham and any serious analysis reveals it's a sham. Why is he doing it, then? Because sooner or later someone has to fix social security, but we've become a country that can't take our medicine. Any parent or pet owner will tell you that one of the easiest ways to get someone who doesn't want to take their medicine to take it is to make them think it's something else. I happen to think his plan is a very bad one, but I certainly can see why he feels like he needs to trick people into it.

Is there an answer? I don't know. One solution is to make those in power less accountable. In general I think this is a terrible idea, but it does allow for real tough decisions to be made. For instance Cuba just instituted a public smoking ban, which will unquestionably benefit the entire country, but is probably not a terribly popular move. Similarly, a Supreme Court justice has no need to shy away from unpopular decisions, he has the position until he chooses to quit.

Alternatively, having elected officials serve longer terms buffers the problem a bit. If you've got a position for eight years, a painful decision made at the beginning might actually have time to bear tangible fruit by the end, or at least people might become reconciled to it by the passing of time. If you've only got the position for two years, that's a lot less likely. After the recent "morality push", Tammy Baldwin smells trouble on the horizon. She's begun her fundraising for the next election already. How much is her effectiveness as a legislator compromised by this need to look ahead to the next election immediately after the previous one is resolved?

But in the end, I think the problem needs to percolate down to the individual voter. Voters in the U.S. need to learn that when the price of gas rises at the pump, and the reason it did is so that we can make the world a better place, that they should take their medicine and move on. I just don't know how to bring about such a major cultural shift in a land where everything's been pretty easy for decades.

Cooking: Glenn's Curry Scrambler Recipe

2005-02-05T23:11:00.000-06:00

Ingredients:
    • 1 slice of turkey ham, cut in small pieces
    • 2 green onions, chopped
    • 3 oz. mushroom stems and pieces
    • 6 eggs
    • 3 tbs. coconut milk
    • 1/4 tsp. pepper
    • 1 1/2 tsp. green curry paste
    • small pat of margarine
    • chopped leaves from 1/2 bunch of cilantro
    • salt
    • habeñero pepper sauce (optional)

Directions:
In a bowl, put in ham, green onions and mushrooms. Add eggs, coconut milk, pepper and curry paste. If desired, add a drop or two of habeñero sauce. Mix gently until yolks are broken and curry paste is distributed. Melt pat of margarine in a large non-stick frying pan over medium-high heat until bottom of pan is greased, then pour in the mixture. Use a turner to periodically scramble the mixture in the pan until the eggs are cooked, and then remove from heat.

Plate the eggs as desired, salt to taste, and then sprinkle the cilantro over them. Serve immediately. Serves 2-3

Notes:
    • Don't use light coconut milk, it's the worst ingredient rip-off I'm currently aware of, as it's just coconut milk diluted with water at almost the exact same price. I don't think water would add anything to the dish, so if you want light, just use less coconut milk.
    • I'm using Thai Kitchen's green curry paste.
    • I'm using McCormick's szechuan style pepper blend for the pepper, but I bet anything would do.
    • The habeñero sauce is mostly about adding the "heat" that I associate with curry dishes of this type, without changing the flavor much. I use Da' Bomb, but I bet Dave's Insanity Sauce would work just as well. I'd stay away from pepper sauces like Tabasco, as I think they would add too much vinegar flavor.
    • I usually use about 1/2 a can of mushrooms, but I bet fresh would work as well, if not better. I also think you could probably replace the mushrooms with more meat instead, if you were so inclined.

Gaming: Spike's Journal Updated

2005-02-04T01:00:00.000-06:00

There's a new entry for Spike's Journal. Originally, I was going to try and post an update shortly after each session. I fell behind a while ago, and I haven't managed to catch up yet. I'm doing pretty well at the moment, but that still leaves me about 4 sessions behind where Spike & Co. actually are in the game. I keep telling myself I need to do two updates a week to catch up, but they take a while to write and I haven't been quite that focused. Maybe next week.

Blog: Thousand Visits

2005-01-30T10:18:00.000-06:00

Well, Glenn's Junk Chest just had its thousandth visitor, which is cool. One additional cool thing is that the anonymous Ms. Thousand wrote a truly great comment on the piggy bank post, so the occassion was marked by something more than just a blip in my logs.

Family: Cracking Open the Piggy Bank

2005-01-29T23:02:00.000-06:00

When I graduated from high school in 1987, one of the graduation gifts I was given was a small wooden chest. I don't have as much detail on the chest as I might like, but it was brought over to America from Europe by one of my paternal ancestors, and so is quite old, if not exactly valuable. Not having any immediate use for it, I kept important papers in it for a while, and then decided to use it to store spare change.




The Mighty Money Bin

All of my spare change, in fact, for the next ten years or so. During that time, I ate a fair amount of fast food, and it seemed like every time I'd pay with cash, I'd get a bunch of change, and then I'd stick it in my pocket. Periodically, I'd notice that my pockets were too full of change, and I'd drop it in the box. I'm not really dedicated to any kind of coin collecting, but when an interesting coin came my way, I'd throw it in the chest as well. The resulting box full of money was actually kind of fun to play with, in an Uncle Scrooge's money bin kind of way. (Something I'd always wanted.)

Eventually, the box was too full of change to be used for important papers anymore. I got married, stopped eating so much crappy food, and the rate of accumulation slowed, then all but stopped. (When you buy food at a nicer restaurant using a plastic card, there's rarely change, after all)

Recently, money's been kind of tight. Very recently, it's become extremely tight. Enough so, that we've made some tough decisions, like giving up our South Beach diet (meat is expensive) and deciding not to go to Gen Con this year. And with some sorrow, I decided to convert the contents of the box into something more spendable. Liana, the kids, and I spent about an hour and a half sorting through the coins, removing all the silver dollars, half dollars, Aladdin's Castle tokens, and miscellaneous foreign coinage. When we were done, Liana suggested weighing the bag, since it was nearly too heavy to lift. How much does 15 years of pocket change weigh, anyway?

It turned out to be 78 pounds, about as heavy as my two daughters combined.

How much is that worth? I wondered. Trying to be conservative with my wife, I guessed two hundred. On the phone with my brother, I was less guarded, and I guessed four to five hundred. The actual total of 1430 quarters, 2027 dimes, 1261 nickles, and 5296 pennies was six hundred seventy six dollars and twenty one cents, which, while it doesn't solve any of our longer-term financial problems, will certainly buy a lot of groceries.

Gaming: Spike's Journal Updated

2005-01-28T01:12:00.000-06:00

I've written a new entry for Spike's Journal, which has just passed 2000 visits. Occassionally I check the logs, and I find it gratifying that with fair frequency, people stop by and spend more than an hour reading the story so far. According to a recent commenter, Spike's Journal has been mentioned in the back of Knights of the Dinner Table #98, which is nice if true. My wife is going to track down a copy for me.

It's actually proving to be something of a writing challenge, however, because of the unpredictable nature of D&D games. It's hard for me to foreshadow, for instance, or begin new plot threads, when I don't yet know what's going to happen, and can only control it to a very limited extent. Hell, the party has come close to dying twice, so I have to wonder what exactly I'll do if Spike should cash it in. That said, it's been a very rewarding experience, and I'm beginning to hope that I can follow Spike all the way through the dungeon. Time will tell.

Clotho: A Slashdotting, Once Removed

2005-01-21T15:52:00.000-06:00

Many of you will already be familiar with Slashdot, a website that posts "news for nerds" touching on many topics, including new gadgets, video games, biology, physics, politics, copyright and other topics that are of interest to the nerdy. The site is so popular, and receives so much traffic, that when there is a link from a front-page article to another website, that website often can't handle the huge traffic generated from Slashdot and goes down in flames. This is referred to as being "slashdotted".

Some of the work that my company, Clotho Advanced Media, Inc. does for UW-Madison is fairly innovative, and Preston (my brother and Clotho's chief architect) was at an Accelerate Madison gathering last night, and spoke to reporters, and was quoted in an article about how video games can be used to teach, and the article linked to Clotho's main website.

That article was then linked from Slashdot, because news about how video games can be used to teach is exactly the sort of thing that Slashdot likes to link to. So, not quite a slashdotting, but only one degree of separation away from one. Maybe next time.

Now, that was enough to put some of us at the office into a flurry of activity. We make a product that converts MediaSite video presentations into Flash video presentations, so we'd like to take the video of last night's presentation and present that online as quickly as possible. In addition, the application development that Preston indirectly refers to using the Neverwinter Nights game engine is my project for the UW-Madison, which is only just getting started, and I don't have anything to show yet.

So, no pressure.

Wiki: Wowzers

2005-01-21T11:15:00.000-06:00

So, thanks to my office, I've been forcefully introduced to Wiki. Wikiwiki is the Hawaiian word for fast, and the idea is that wikis are supposed to be the quickest possible way to create a collection of interlinked web pages. HTML has been replaced by a sort of simple shorthand that's very human readable, even in its unprocessed form, and highly functional (even attractive) in its processed form.

A wiki page might be entered like this:

==Wikis are Fun!==

===About Wikis===

Wikis are a very cool way to write a lot of [[web pages]] very quickly.

===Notes===

* They use a human-readable syntax.

* They are usually editable by visitors.

And should then look like this:

Wikis are Fun!

About Wikis

Wikis are a very cool way to write a lot of web pages very quickly.

Notes

They use a human-readable syntax.
They are usually editable by visitors.

For comparison, the HTML for such a thing would probably look like this:

<h2>Wikis are Fun!</h2>

<h3>About Wikis</h3>

<p>Wikis are a very cool way to write a lot of <a href="http://junkchest.blogspot.com/">web pages</a> very quickly.</p>

<h3>Notes</h3>

<ul>

<li>They use a human-readable syntax.</li>

<li>They are usually editable by visitors.</li>

</ul>

The first cool thing about wiki pages is that creating links is easy. You just put the link inside your text with a syntax like [[Foobar]]. The word Foobar will then show up as a link. If there is already a Foobar page in the wiki, you'll have linked to it. If there isn't, the word will show up in red, and when you click it, viola, you'll be creating a new page called Foobar. In this way you can build an interlinked hierarchy incredibly quickly.

The other cool thing about wiki pages is that they are usually collaborative. This means that anyone who visits a wiki page can edit it. There are obviously potential ways that this can be abused, and potential problems with authority and expertise, but it's still an awfully cool thing. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, with nearly half a million articles in English alone, that has been created in this way.

Anyway, my office has decided to do our internal documentation in Wiki, partly to save time, and partly because it standardized the myriad of approaches that were previously being used. It should also allow our non-technical staff to quickly gather presentation-ready material out of the base. I'd link to it, but because it is an internal wiki, it's behind security, and you can't get there.

However, I recently wrote an extensive wiki page on non-roman text, and since it contains no customer information, I thought I'd post it out on a public wiki farm, which is a service that allows people to set up wikis of their own, in much the same way that blogger.com allows people to set up blogs. Feel free to stop by, and if you'd like, make corrections and additions, because that's the wiki way.

(Unfortunately, it doesn't look quite the same as the Clotho internal wiki, because I wasn't able to find a free unrestricted wiki farm based around MediaWiki, which is the wiki engine that both Wikipedia and Clotho are using, but this is still close enough that you can get the idea.)

Movies: Trailer Musings

2005-01-20T17:46:00.000-06:00

Well, having seen the new teaser trailer for Fantastic Four, and having commented already on the trailer for Sin City, I'll say now that Jessica Alba as a blonde may not be quite so hard to accept as I had feared. I'll also say that the Thing looks better in action than my initial impressions might have lead me to believe. So, here's hoping.

In other trailer news, some of our winter fare is starting to have trailers in Japan, and the trailer for The Incredibles is pretty interesting because it really seems to present a much more accurate picture of what the movie is about than the American trailer did. I also find the name change to "Mr. Incredible" as the title interesting. I'm also wondering whether スカイキップテン：ワールド・オフ・トゥモロー (sukaikipputen: waarudo ofu tumarou) will make a bigger splash in Japan than it did here. I loved it, and I bet it goes over well with the Japanese, it seems like their kind of thing. And if you've got broadband, it's worth watching the trailer just to hear the announcer say the title in Japanese at the end.

Blog: Some New Links

2005-01-13T18:01:00.000-06:00

I've added some new links, including a link to Dashi's Journal. It's a serial collection of off-the-wall photographs and illustrations which I often find amusing, if occassionaly not safe for work. The titles are in Russian, but don't let that stop you, as the humor is mostly visual.

I've also added a list of about half of the webcomics that I read, and I'll add in the rest of the good ones later. I've tried, for this batch, to include a variety of webcomics that have things that the more traditional print comics don't offer.

Sadly, Claudia Jane has stopped blogging (and apparently taken down her unfinished novel), so I've removed her from the blog list for now. Who knows, perhaps in time she'll return.

Politics: Evolution in Public Schools

2005-01-13T16:38:00.000-06:00

From a scientfic standpoint, evolution is a theory in the same way that gravity is a theory. A discussion of whether or not it should be taught in public school is thus pretty much a non-starter with me. Recently, some schools, under pressure from religious conservatives, have considered doing (or done) all sorts of inane things, from teaching intelligent design (thinly veiled creationism) alongside evolution to putting warning labels on textbooks that say "evolution is a theory, not a fact."

In what seems like one of the few good things to come out of the court system in recent years, a judge has said one such set of stickers, used in Georgia, violate the separation of church and state. To most of us, this is probably self-evidently true, but the problem is that nothing on the sticker mentions religion, nor does it contain any factual errors. The problem is that the sticker relies on a common misinterpretation of the word "theory" when applied to science, and further reinforces that misinterpretation by careful wording, but without reference to creationsim or actual factual error, how can a judge rule against it?

I found his rationale insightful.

His conclusion, he said, "is not that the school board should not have called evolution a theory or that the school board should have called evolution a fact."

"Rather, the distinction of evolution as a theory rather than a fact is the distinction that religiously motivated individuals have specifically asked school boards to make in the most recent anti-evolution movement, and that was exactly what parents in Cobb County did in this case," he wrote.

"By adopting this specific language, even if at the direction of counsel, the Cobb County School Board appears to have sided with these religiously motivated individuals."

Well put, Judge Cooper, well put.

Apple: Small Toys, Big Excitement

2005-01-13T15:06:00.000-06:00

Apple has released some new products, as expected, and I'm really excited. There's the tiny iPod Shuffle, that I'm almost certain to acquire, since at $99 for the smaller capacity one, it's pretty damn affordable. I haven't previously thought the iPods were worth the money for me, but this is perfect.

There's also a new productivity suite, iWork, which includes Pages, a new word processor. I'm itching to get my hands on it and put it through its paces. The Macintosh hasn't had a really good word processor since MS Word 5.1 stopped working properly. The Microsoft Word for OS X that I'm using now is adequate, but only barely, and it does crash from time to time. I don't know if Pages will suffice, but if it even comes close, that'll be a pretty exciting development.

But I'm most excited by the Mac Mini. In part I'm excited because it's a computer that I can comfortably recommend to a lot of people I know that already have some stuff, like monitors and keyboards, but need a new computer. It's a computer that I can envision using to replace just about any old and ailing macintosh at a really low price point. In short, it's both physically and economically convienent, and that's awesome. What's really got me excited, however, is a feature of the device that's not even referenced in any of the press releases or ads I've seen.

You can hook it up to a TV. It supports the Apple DVI to Video Adapter.

While you can do this with some bigger computers, it's usually not very practical to put them near your TV. But the Mac Mini is nearly the size of a Nintendo GameCube. You can take it and put it right into your entertainment center. For someone like me, who uses a laptop for many tasks, this opens up worlds of possibility, since I can remote control it from my computer via Airport wireless. I can put movies and audio on it, and play them through my speaker. I can use my firewire video tools to capture, edit, and display video on the TV. Hell, I envision setting it up so that it's a server, video player, and jukebox, all in one, that can be used to do computing tasks on the TV when needed, or moved (it's really small) and hooked up to a real monitor if needed.

Give the thing a decent game controller, and it's like a Mac OS-based X-box that you can put your own software on. This excites me greatly. People have spent hundreds of hours trying to put thier own software onto the X-box, despite Microsoft's serious obstacles and objections. This is a more general purpose box without all the barriers. In short, I think it's time for us to sell our old G4 Tower and get one of these instead.

Apple: Whither the Tablet Mac?

2005-01-10T09:27:00.000-06:00

It is my not-so-secret dream that someday in the near future I will be able to get a Mac OS based tablet computer. Every time a new set of announcements from Apple roll out, I check to see if they've finally released one. But as of yet, if you want a tablet computer, you have to use Windows XP, which I really don't have much interest in doing.

It's probably a futile gesture, but if you feel as I do, you could sign this petition.

In other Apple news, there should be some new stuff announced tomorrow, including (possibly) a $499 model. If it's really cool, I'll post about it.

Copyright: Audio from DVDs

2005-01-07T16:40:00.000-06:00

I know nothing about such things but plan to be learning soon. Is there a way to pull a music/audio track off a DVD and burn to a CD? (We will soon have both a DVD and CD burner)
--Vicki

Short answer: yes.

Medium answer: Yes, if it's a commercial DVD, you'll need a utility called a DVD ripper that allows you to pull the audio track of the DVD, and then another utility to convert the audio into something you can burn easily to a CD.

Long answer: Yes, but it may be illegal to do so, even if you own the DVD and your use of the music/audio would otherwise be considered fair use under copyright law. There are two possible reasons for this, neither of which has been adequately challenged legally.

The first reason is that the studio does not consider you to "own" the DVD in question at all, they consider you to be using it under "license". As a result, they have attempted to prohibit certain actions that you would normally be able to perform under the law. Since you have never agreed to the terms of this license, probably even implicitly, this is mostly deceitful bullshit, but I'm not a lawyer, so you do this at your own risk. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be against the law for them to falsely claim that you're not allowed to do certain things with what you bought, even if those things are perfectly legal, such as making a backup copy.

The second reason is more complex. When the DVD format was released, the studios were hesitant to embrace the format for fear of perfect digital copies expanding the already significant role that piracy, especially in Asia, plays in that industry. Since nothing can be done about the Asian problem, or large-scale psuedo-commercial piracy ventures, the studios insanely decided to attack the much lesser problem of "casual" piracy. Since people that pirate videos routinely are hardly even slowed by their measures, the effort, like most copy-protection, damages law-abiding customers the most.

Their approach to this was two-pronged. The first part is that every DVD player manufactured is supposed to be part of the DVD consortium, and the manufacturer pays a one million dollar fee to the consortium to get encryption codes to read the content off of commercial DVDs. Only software with the code can read the DVD, thus, computers wouldn't be able to easily copy the data in a useful form. This had the side-effect of almost completely stopping any "small" video operations which couldn't pony up the fee, such as a free open-source DVD player for linux. This scheme is called the Content Scrambling System (or CSS).

The second part of the approach was legislative. Using the various lawmakers that Hollywood and the music industry have in their pocket, an inane piece of legislation generally referred to as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed. While the bad (or at least corporate-serving) provisions of this law are too numerous to account here, one of them is highly relevant. Under this law, it is illegal to "traffic" in devices or software intended to circumvent copy protection. In other words, even if your use of the data from the DVD would be otherwise clearly and indisputedly legal, such as making a CD to listen to in your car, the acquistion and distribution of the software or hardware necessary to perform the act is a crime.

Now, there are those of us in the tech community (most of us, probably) that don't think it's OK to backhandedly take away our fair use rights by making it illegal to acquire the tools needed to exercise those rights. This is like assuring us that it's still legal to travel freely, while making it illegal to buy and sell cars. As a result, a _lot_ of work has gone into circumventing the copy protection on DVDs. Because the people designing or implementing the system were relatively inept, and in part because the US export regime at the time prevented the use of any truly strong encryption, the encryption has been cracked, and the keys and software necessary to decode a DVD are now generally available. A number of programs for both the Mac and PC will take a DVD and extract the tracks from it. If you're on a Macintosh, I recommend going to Version Tracker, and typing "DVD" into the search box. I've heard good things about MacTheRipper, however, though I'm unsure of its suitability to audio-only extraction.

OK, once you've "ripped" the DVD, you'll have a bunch of files to deal with. Here's a guide to the types of files you may see.

.VOB - this is a dvd-format video and audio file. If you've got this, you'll need another tool to extract the audio/video tracks from it if you want to work with them seperately. A .VOB file may be all you need if you're making another DVD, however.

.PCM - this is an unencoded audio file. It's similiar to a CD audio file, but I believe it's at 48Mhz instead of 44.1Mhz. You won't see this very often, because such files use too much space on disk when multiple audio tracks are desired. If you do see one, it's probably a good place to start, because it's encoding is relatively simple. Many audio programs can probably convert this into something CD burnable quickly and easily.

.AC3 - this is a dolby digital encoded audio file. The encoding is fairly complex, and it can include anywhere between 1 and 8 tracks of audio. The most commonly found will be 2 (left and right) or 5+1 (left, right, center, back-left, back-right, + low frequency effects). This format is proprietary, but many tools out there can be used to convert it into a stereo file that can be burned to a CD. Try and find a good tool, as simply taking the left and right channels out of a 5.1 mix is going to result in dialogue that's too quiet, you'll need to mix in some of the center channel to both left and right. Good software should handle this automatically. There may be multiple audio tracks, so be careful to get the one that's in English.

.DTS - this is a Digital Theatre Sound Encoded file. They're less common, and should always be accompanied by an .AC3 as well. Unless you know something I don't, stick with the AC3.

.m2v - this is MPEG2 video with no audio.

.m2a - this is a MPEG2 audio file. DVDs for the US market aren't supposed to have these, but DVDs sold in Europe might. There was some liscensing or patent problem that caused this, but I don't remember the details.

One final note: the DVD consortium requires that all DVD players support an analogue copy-protection scheme on the outputs called Macrovision. Any commercial DVD producer that wants to pay a small fee can turn it on with a single bit on any disc. This is pretty meaningless if you're going to "rip" the DVD as above, but is a real problem if you want to, say, copy a DVD onto a video tape. That said, I don't believe that macrovision has any effect whatsoever on the audio outputs of the DVD player. So, if all the above is proving too much, you really ought to be able to hook up the DVDs audio outputs to the audio inputs of your computer, and simply record the whole thing in a CD-friendly format and burn it. There will be more quality loss, but probably not a lot, and may be easier than any of the above for certain purposes, especially if this is a one-time deal.

Fun: zefrank

2005-01-07T14:00:00.000-06:00

I know, you come, and you come to be amused, yet many times, I disappoint. Many things there are that I wish to post, yet the writing and the doing, sometimes it takes too long, sometimes I procrastinate, sometimes I try, but the words are ungainly and ill-suited for presentation to as fine a guest as you. But still you come, to be (as I said) amused, and if I disappoint, whence shall your amusement spring?

Today, it is my dearest hope that you shall find zefrank.com fresh and to your liking.

While its entertainments are so numerous that even I have yet to sample them all, I especially direct you to Communication #1, which has valuable advice for all who must write business correspondence. I further direct you to Buddhist, Christian, and Athiest, for guidance in your spiritual life. The simple joys of snm #1, are sure to be entrancing, and are suitable even for the very young. Finally, if you are familiar with the so-called "Nigerian spam", you might be interested in this sincere request.

Family: Christmas 2004

2005-01-05T07:01:00.000-06:00




Incoming!

Well, my family and I went down to visit my in-laws in Missouri this year. The journey itself takes about 9 hours for us, and was a little more eventful than usual since there had been a heavy snowstorm there. Cape Girardeau has many strengths, but neither its citizens nor its infrastructure were quite up to the 14" or so of snow that got dumped on them for Christmas this year.

As we drove south out of St. Louis and into this blizzard, I was astounded afresh, as I am every year, at how bad people are about driving in adverse conditions. When I hit the slick, icy roads, I slowed down to what I thought was a reasonable 30-40 miles per hour in the right lane, which was somewhat clearer. That didn't stop people from trying to pass me at 60 in the ice-covered left lane, however, and I kept thinking as they wobbled past that I was going to see one of them crash right there in front of me. Thankfully, I did not, but we did see plenty of evidence that other drivers were not so lucky. We kept saying how drivers in Missouri didn't know how to cope with the conditions, but while there may be some truth to that, I tried to remind people Wisconsin has no shortage of people that drive like idiots as well.




Marble Trail

I enjoy the showmanship of the whole Santa Claus thing, but am kind of insistant that the illusion remain a little threadbare. I bought the children a box of marbles this year, and when my kids decided to leave out milk and cookies for santa, I left a trail of marbles from the base of the Tree around the room, under a table, and behind a sofa to the crumb-covered plate, where I left a note that said "Thanks". But when the kids needed to put the marbles away, I went and got the marble tin from my bedroom. I think that's the tone I want to set, little hints here and there, but nothing that overtly shatters the illusion before they're ready.

Despite my family not having as much money as we have in recent years, we managed to exchange some pretty nice gifts. In large part, this was due to Kit's generosity. Kit, a friend of ours who we game with regularly, has been working in an IS position at AmericanGirl for about a year now, and one of the perks of working there is a chance to grab some merchandise at year end. As a result, we were able to give each of the girls more presents that we had originally planned, including an awesome AG Minis boutique set and a Girls of Many Lands doll and book for each of them. (Spring Pearl and Leyla). The girls were very excited about these things. Thanks Kit!




AG Minis

Ivy's special present this year was an Easy-bake Real Meal Oven, which she'd asked for and was very excited about. I've played with it a bit with her, and I can see the appeal. So far, we've made some cookies, some mac and cheese, and a few mini-pizzas. I find myself wanting to hack it to make it hotter, because I'm finding it hard to get the pizza crusts to come out right. Still, it does work.

Rose's "most-wanted" present this year was a Glow-in-the-dark Care Bear. I'm as surprised at anybody at the sudden resurgence of interest in toys like Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake (not a work-safe link), and My Little Pony, but there's no question that it's what Rose really wanted. For more than a month, she's been telling everybody she can that she asked Santa for a "Glow-up Care Bear". She's usually pretty understandable, but a lot of people were thinking she was saying "Blow-up Care Bear", and it was funny seeing them try to figure out exactly what that was. We got her Bedtime Bear, and each night before bed, we charge it up for her by holding it up by the light.

I got Liana two things she wanted. Firstly, I got her the X-men Legends game for the Gamecube, but I threw it in with another cheap used game so that the package would look like the Return of the King Extended Edition. Secondly, I got her the ROTK extended edition, but I wrapped an audio tape into the gift with it so that the package wouldn't look like what it was. It all felt very devious.




Happy Rose in Snow

Liana and I got her parents a nice kitchen knife. We usually end up doing a lot of cooking when we visit there, and every time I needed to cut up meat or vegetables, I tripped over the fact that their knives were either small or serrated. (I will spare regaling you with the many horrors that a serrated knife visits upon both the vegetables and the cutting surface beneath.) I don't know if the gift will convince them of the merits of having good cutlery, but I used it a few times before I left, and it's really nice. Hopefully they enjoy using it.

I myself recieved a spanking new Nintendo DS. I'm was especially excited by this because I had steeled myself not to expect it because it was really stretching our available budget. It's pretty awesome. I've been playing Super Mario 64 DS and Ridge Racer DS on it, and am eagerly looking forward to the new implementation of the best GameBoy Advance game, Advance Wars DS, even though it's not out until late in the year. Just looking at the little 3D rendered graphics on the thing makes me drool over the potential titles that might be coming. I hear the PSP is supposed to be even more impressive. I can hardly wait. (Fortunately, the fact that the DS has a slot for GBA games means that the waiting won't be too painful.)

One of the best parts is that Super Mario 64 DS is a really, really great game that I somehow missed entirely back when I used my Nintendo 64 more heavily. They've apparently juiced it up during the port, but I get all the advantages of playing a really great game on my new handheld without having to replay something I've already done.

Webcomics: Order of the Stick Book

2005-01-03T09:12:00.000-06:00




OOTS Book

While I have yet to share much of the large list of webcomics that I regularly enjoy, one of my absolute favorites is The Order of the Stick. It's a comic that follows the adventures of a fantasy adventuring party, all the while satirizing some of the more ridiculous or campy elements of gaming in general, and D&D in specific. If you're a gamer, I'd say it's a must-read, but it may well be worth a look even if you're not. (Certainly, if you're a regular reader of Spike's Journal, I can't see how you wouldn't enjoy this as well.)

That said, if you're not into webcomics, or just don't have the bandwidth to forge through the archives, the very good news for today is that Rich Burlew, the creator, is now taking orders for his first book. If he gets enough orders, he says he'll update the strip more often, so everybody wins. I put myself on the pre-preordering list a while ago, and will undoubtedly upgrade to an actual preorder as soon as I get an email notification that it's time to do so.

Movies: Sin City

2004-12-28T15:06:00.000-06:00

Sorry I haven't posted more. My vacation is going well, but I haven't been doing as much writing as I'd planned/wanted. I've got some photos of snowy Missouri to share, and have done some work on the Skills chapter for Glennworld, which I'm still planning on posting soon.

So I've been vaguely aware that there was a Sin City movie coming out for some time, but it's only during the past few days that I've started to get an inkling of just how cool it might be. Robert Rodriguez has directed it, which I didn't know, and apparently he got Tarantino to direct at least one scene. The cast is pretty amazing too, though I'm really curious how well Elijah Wood is going to do as Kevin, a sociopathic serial killer.

What I like most about it is that Rodriguez is going to great pains to recreate the three stories from the graphic novels in the movie as closely as possible. I've even heard it said that the stuff from the comics that doesn't make it into the theatrical release will be included on the DVD. There's a video clip around which has cuts back and forth between scenes from the comic book, and their recreations, and it's pretty amazing stuff. Apparently the first part of this was something of a demo reel, used to convince Frank Miller (Sin City's creator) that the project would be in good hands. Rodriguez feels quite strongly about the project, insisting that Miller get co-director credit, even going so far as to resign from the Director's Guild over it.




Goldie's Sad Fate

Anyway, what finally got me to do a little digging is the official trailer on Apple's trailers page. Well worth a look.

For those interested in more Sin City stuff (and aren't squeamish about violent comics) I highly recommend you check out the source material. (Amazon will actually let you look at the first ten pages or so of each of the books online.) For those who are already familiar with the originals, check out this site, which not only clears up some questions I had about the timeline of the stories, but also includes a bunch of Dark Champions writeups for the main characters, for your gaming pleasure.

Family: How I Proposed

2004-12-21T08:41:00.000-06:00

Note: This is old content that was on my old website, long since abandoned. However, now that I've started a blog, it seemed like I should rescue some of this content before it became forever lost. I've edited it slightly. For those hungry for newer content, I'm busy working on the draft of the chapter on skills for Glennworld, and may have some thoughts on this and that to share in the next few days while I'm on vacation.

Liana and I had been dating for about a year, and I'd been meaning to pop the question for some time, but hadn't quite decided how. When Liana went out of town to New Orleans for a business trip, however, I thought my moment was at hand. I went to a convienent jeweler's (Ausman's, next to Pegasus Games), and discovered that I was too picky.

It turns out that if you have any sort of taste at all, you can't get an engagement ring without waiting for them to make it to your specifications, and my specifications were just odd enough that they told me it would be two weeks before the ring was ready. Ouch! Liana got back from her trip, and all I had was flowers and a kiss. The big day would have to wait.

Two weeks later or so, I had her ring (1/2 carat, white gold, sized to fit her by snitching a ring she liked from her jewelery box) in pocket, and felt sufficiently antsy to give this a try.

I made arrangements to pick her up from work, showered, shaved, dressed nicely, but not too nicely. She had figured (read "knew") that something was up, and was also dressed nicely. I picked her up, and we went out to dinner at a pleasant corporate steak place, the Timber Lodge Steakhouse. We dined, chatted, and generally had a good time.

Earlier in the day, I'd offered her the choice of movie, either The Little Mermaid which had returned for a limited engagment during the holiday season, or Mortal Kombat 2. I was happy with either choice, (I thought seeing MK2 on the day I proposed had humor value) but Liana, perhaps wisely, perfered to see my then favorite Disney animated feature. We had a good time there too, and we snuck a quick kiss during the "Kiss the Girl" musical number.

By this point I was feeling kind of nervous.

So, we went home, she slipped into the bathroom, and while she was there, I turned down the lights, and put my CD of the Little Mermaid soundtrack on the stereo, and track-skipped it forward to "Kiss the Girl".

When she returned, I sat down with her on the couch, kissed her passionately, and then got down on one knee, saying "Well, this is it." I then proceded to get the ring out of my pocket, in it's little white box, opened it towards her and said "Liana, will you marry me?"

Liana burst into tears, and I gave her a big hug. We made a lot of emotional noises, kissed each other a few times, at which point, she said "When are you going to stop holding that thing behind my back and put it on my finger?". I sheepishly complied, and we were thus engaged.

Gaming: Spike's Journal Updated

2004-12-17T18:41:00.000-06:00

I've written two new entries for Spike's Journal. I've got my vacation coming up, and I hope to be able to catch up with our progress in the game during it. Right now, I'm about two sessions behind, and since we game tonight, I'm probably about to be three sessions back.

Fun: 20 Questions

2004-12-16T15:27:00.000-06:00

I'm sure this has been posted elsewhere, but here's a website which you can challenge to guess something in 20 questions. It's actually pretty good at it, especially if you pick a concrete physical object. If you go with an abstract, like "my blog", it doesn't always do so well. (courtesy of a random blog hit on k2h.)

Sometimes the questions it asks are pretty funny, too:

26. Can it cheer you up? No.
27. Does it help accomplish tasks? Yes.
28. Does it have anything to do with salad? No.
29. I guess that it is a lumberjack? Close.

I was actually thinking "coworker".

Fun: TinyURL Fishing

2004-12-16T13:27:00.000-06:00

For those of you not familiar with TinyURL, it's a web-based service that takes a long URL and produces a short, redirecting URL that goes to that location.

For instance, the URL for this blog entry is:
        http://junkchest.blogspot.com/2004/12/web-tinyurl-fishing.html
But after a quick pass throught TinyURL, you can get to it with:
        http://tinyurl.com/3k7ez

This is typically used by someone who has a long URL that won't work well in email or posting, and wants to send a shorter, more portable version. I myself use it for Yahoo maps, a lot. (Take this map to my new office, for instance. The original URL was 354 characters long.)

Anyway, I haven't figured out the exact scheme by which TinyURL assigns numbers, but it turns out that you can guess at them, and effectively produce a random hit on something that someone, somewhere, thought was worth e-mailing to someone else. (Obviously, trying such random links is not a work-safe activity.)

Most interesting (to me) finds so far:

http://tinyurl.com/47591
        a Chinese dance music video.
http://tinyurl.com/4757h
        The Universal Music Machine. I need to play with this more.
http://tinyurl.com/47555
        a take on the recent election with an amusing sci-fi twist.
http://tinyrul.com/4754x
        Spy photos from the street shoots of Fantastic Four. I remain concerned. (I'm not sure the lovely Jessica Alba makes sense as a Blonde, and the Thing costume looks a little silly. Maybe they're going to CGI it up.)

If anyone else decides to mess around with this, let me know what you find. This is obviously not a productive use of one's time, especially with all the e-store links people mail back and forth, but I do find it interesting to survey what kinds of things are being emailed around out there.

Humor: World's Largest Dungeon

2004-12-13T10:54:00.000-06:00

As many of you know, I have a character making his way through the World's Largest Dungeon. Anyway, we've been travelling through the an area that's been full of shadows, an undead monster that exists as a pale shade that leeches away a victim's strength until they too become one. They're tricky to fight, but, interestingly, they always seem to be coming at the party in groups of four. In fact, we've run into many groups of four.

I observe that this is strong evidence of the high quality of the writing of the World's Largest Dungeon. After all, lots of four shadowing is one of the hallmarks of a good narrative.

Fun: Liked and Disliked Words

2004-12-13T10:52:00.000-06:00

Claudia Jane posted a list of liked and disliked words, and I felt the need to comment with my own list, which I replicate here, for your elucidation or disdain. (If this intrigues, Jon spoke about something similar a few weeks back on Nothing Good.)

like:
gazebo: A freestanding, roofed, usually open-sided structure providing a shady resting place.
eschew: To avoid; shun.
genre: A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, marked by a distinctive style, form, or content.
characterize: To be a distinctive trait or mark of.
勉強する: (benkyou suru) to study. [japanese]

dislike:
laparoscopy: An operation in which a laparoscope is used, as in an examination of the liver or the surgical treatment of endometriosis.
employe: optional spelling; person who works for another in return for financial or other compensation.
anaranjado: the color orange. [spanish]

Blog: New Image Link Format

2004-12-11T23:39:00.000-06:00




Sample Photo of Ivy & Rose

I've been a little disappointed with how I've been linking to photographs from images in blog. Partially this is because I often want the photos to have captions, which was tricky, and partially it's because I've wanted the images to have drop shadows, which was even more tricky. Most of all, however, it's because I think that people have been missing that the images are usually clickable to bring up a larger version of the photo or image in a popup window.

So, with a little effort and testing, I've put together an image-posting format that accommodates all of my desires except alt tags. (Since it allows for captions, I can live without the alt tags.) For those who are HTML minded, it's a small borderless table, with the main image as a background of a table cell so I can put the "click for larger image" violator on it. I also had to change my Blogger template a bit in order to make it work.

It seems to work well in most things I've tested that don't have trouble with the Blog's style sheets as a whole. However, if it doesn't work for you, please post a comment to let me know, along with what OS and browser you're using.

Update: Well, it didn't seem to be working properly in my copy of Internet Explorer running under Windows 98. I've had to learn more about style sheets in order to fix it, but I think it's working now. One quirk, in other browsers, the whole table is clickable, but in IE, you can only click the little "click for larger image" violator. I'd still welcome feedback from anyone who's seeing it as broken. (12/13/04)

Blog: Creative Commons

2004-12-10T15:59:00.000-06:00

I've been meaning to properly license my two blogs since their inceptions, but hadn't yet, leaving them to flounder along under the standard copyright protections. However, between Spike's Journal's continuing popularity and increasing length, and my posting of my gaming system here, Seth reminded me that it was past time I took care of it.

So, I've taken the obvious step of assigning both Creative Commons licenses, which I rather approve of. I strongly considered putting Spike's Journal (which is more of a unified work) out under Founders' Copyright, which I approve of even more, but it turns out that's something of a hassle, especially for a work-in-progress. Perhaps I will do it when Spike's Journal concludes, or if I ever commercialize any of my content.

Video Games: Intense Focus

2004-12-10T13:24:00.000-06:00

It's no secret that people can become very absorbed in their video games, tuning out the housework, their need to exercise, their schoolwork, possibly even their friends and family, and maybe even other things. Video games play a very important role in my life, but even I'm reluctantly forced to admit that these observations have more than a grain of truth to them.

But, then again, everything has its upside, as this CNN article relates. (Link provided by my lovely wife.)

Glennworld: Potentials

2004-12-08T23:30:00.000-06:00

Note: These are rules for my RPG system. They are still very much in development and playtesting, so take what you find here with an expectation of future change. For those curious about the system's philosophy and goals, I refer you to this post. Because this is still in development, this post will occassionaly be updated with changes. If the changes are major, the update will be noted at the top of the blog.

The Six Potentials

Once a background and race are selected for a new character, it's time to figure out her potentials. Potentials are each tied to a physical trait, and measure how much aptitude the character has for related fields of endeavor. Each Potential is measured on a scale from -7 to +7, where 0 is human average, and -6 and +6 are human minimum and maximum. The Potentials are Body, Strength, Dexterity, Perception, Intelligence, and Determination.

Body is an measure of how physically tough a character is, and whether she can easily learn the occasional skills that rely on that, such as endurance or running. Even without learning these skills, a character with high body is more likely to shrug off injury or hardship, and is substantially harder to put down even when injury is suffered.

Strength is a measure of how physically strong a character is, and how quick she is to learn new highly physical skills, like fighting with a simple weapon, sailing, or smithing. Even if she learns no related skills, a strong character can lift more, fight better with makeshift weaponry, and will probably be larger and more imposing.

Dexterity is an indication of how quick and agile a character is, and how quickly she can learn new skills that rely on speed and coordination, like fencing, lockpicking, and acrobatics. Even without learning these skills, a dextrous character can move more surely, avoid sudden trouble better, and will be more graceful.

Together, Strength, Dexterity and Body measure a character's physical aptitude, and a character with high potentials here will more easily learn the skills of fighting hand-to-hand, and dealing with the physical world in a straightfowardly physical way. In addition, most non-scholarly professional skills are more easily mastered with high physical potentials.

Perception is a measure of how acute a character's senses are, and how easily she will learn new skills that rely on observation or snap judgement, such as archery, tracking, and cooking. Without learning skills, a perceptive character is still better at noticing things, has better distance vision, and will probably be a better judge of things about which full information is not yet known.

Intelligence is a measure of how smart a character is, and how quick she is to learn new primarily mental skills, like book-learning, the mechanics of trade, or alchemy. Without acquiring these skills, she still knows more languages, and is quicker to understand things that need to be thought through.

Determination is an indication of how driven or stubborn a character is, and how easily she will master new abilities that rely on perserverance and refusal to give up, such as resisting magical effects, healing the sick or wounded, or surviving in hostile environments. Even without these skills, a determined character is more likely to resist magical compulsion, stay on track when the going gets tough, and have less trouble dealing with fear.

Together, Perception, Intelligence, and Determination measure a character's mental aptitude, and a character with high potentials here will more easily learn the skills of fighting at range, and dealing with the world by understanding and influencing it. In addition, Intelligence and Determination both play very important roles in the mastery of magic.

The six potentials can also be thought of as existing in a circle, with the physical potentials on one side and the mental on the other. Each potential is somewhat complementary to its two neighbors, (for example, Body complements both Determination and Strength) and skills that rely on multiple potentials will more often rely on adjacent Potentials than non-adjecent ones. Additionally, there is an opposition between each Potential and the the Potential that lies directly across the circle, so Strength and Intelligence are opposed, as are Dexterity and Determination, and Perception and Body.

The Potential Ratings

A character with a positive rating in a potential is more apt than average. At levels like +1 or +2, this is useful, but not exceptional. She will find related skills easy to learn at first, but may find that they become more difficult to pursue before they are truly mastered, which may dissuade her from ever excelling. Such a character will probably still be thought of as fairly average in this Potential by most observers, however. Only someone who is training the character in a related skill is likely to notice the character's aptitude.

At levels like +3 or +4, the character has a substantial advantage in related skills, and may find even skilled proficiency easy to achieve. She has a proficiency that would allow her to excel in almost any related profession, and woud probably be highly desirable as a student for those who seek to recruit. A character with this kind of Potential will be easily noticed by others as being smarter or stronger, and it may be that more is expected of her as a result.

At +5, she is better than 99% of all humans at related fields of endeavor, and may become a highly skilled professional in a related skill without ever even touching the limits of her natural ability. No one who regularly associates with the character can fail to notice her strengths in this area, and people may assume she is capable of things that she has not actually studied, merelly by dint of her clear natural advantages.

At +6, she is 1 in a thousand, better than 99.9% of all humans at picking up related skills. She can become a master of a related field, and highly respected, without ever running into her own limitations. Anyone seriously considering her abilities in this area will realize that she is a prodigy.

Finally, at +7, the character is better than any unaltered human, with a supernatural aptitude for learning related skills that is likely to breed resentment among those of more normal capability who must struggle to learn alongside her.

A character with a 0 in a potential is not crippled in any way, rather, they are average. Related skills can be learned, but they won't come especially easily, and unless the character dedicates a lot of skill points to these skills, they will probably never rise to the highest levels in them.

A character with a negative in a potential is less apt than average. At levels like -1 or -2, this is no big deal, it will keep the character from progressing beyond a certain point in related skills, but she can, by dint of effort, still become quite proficient, if not a master. Such a character will probably still be thought of as fairly average in this Potential by most observers, however. Only someone who is training the character in a related skill is likely to notice the character's difficulties with the subject.

At levels like -3 or -4, the character is substantially handicapped in related skills, and even basic proficiency may be an elusive goal. She has effectively no aptitude for them, and can't even attempt to use them without significant practice. (For example, a character with a -3 Strength simply cannot make effective hand-to-hand combat unless she's actually spent some skill points to learn a combat skill.) Such a character will be noticed as being a poor functioner in this area by others, a character with a low Dexterity potential will probably be regarded as clumsy, for instance.

At -5, 99% of humans have more aptitude than her, and she will never be better than a novice at any related skill. No one who associates regularly with the character can fail to notice that she has trouble in this area, and people may assume that she's not capable of any level of function here, whether or not it's true.

At -6, 99.9% of humans are better, and the character is the one person in a thousand who is effectively barred from participation in related fields of endeavor. This represents someone who is unfortunate enough that she is too weak to lift a sword, or too stupid to learn to read, for instance. Someone with a -6 Dexterity cannot attempt acrobatic feats, and no matter how much she tries, cannot become even a novice fencer.

At -7, the character is worse than any unimpaired human, and is not only inept at related skills, but will have difficulty learning skills of the two complementary Potentials as well. A character with a -7 Intelligence, for instance, will not only be completely unable to learn a new language, but will also have greater difficulty learning Perception-related skills (they'll be too stupid to realize the importance of what they percieve), and Determination-related skills (the focused determination required will too often be replaced by ill-considered stubbornness).

Generating Potentials New Characters

There are three ways to generate a new character's Potentials.

Random Realistic Potentials are generated by rolling 6dF, and assigning each result in order. Using this method, a completely random set of potentials is generated. About a quarter of characters generated this way will have nothing better than a +2, and nothing worse than a -2, 60% will be in the -3 to +3 range, and 90% within the -4 to +4 range for all Potentials. This is an ideal method for generating NPCs, as they are not required to be exceptional individuals, but is usually a poor method for generating player characters, since it leaves too much to chance.

Random Targeted Potentials are generated by rolling 6dF for each value, but the person creating the character assigns the values as desired. This allows randomness to play a role while still allowing the creator to target a specific character goal. If better stats than average are desired, 1, 2 or 3 adjustment points can be applied to each roll. This is an ideal method for generating NPCs, and a good method to use for PCs if random Potentials are a goal.

Purchased Potentials are generated by giving the person who is developing the character a certain number of points to work with. When all the potentials are added together, the result must equal this number of points. Using this system, a character's creator can slight one Potential to favor another. If given zero points to work with, the only way to get one Potential up will be to put another down. The more points the creator is given, the less slighting she'll need to do in order to have high Potentials for the Character.

Keep in mind when using this system that characters with positive scores in all Potentials can have very diverse capabilities, because they can buy skills in all areas without penalty. As a result, if you want characters to be more specialized, it's a good idea to keep a tighter rein on the points, so that people feel compelled to take some zero or negative Potential values. Here are some recommendations for different kinds of campaigns.

Suggested Point Totals
Realistic	3 points
Adventurous	6 points
Heroic	9 points
Legendary	12 points

This is an ideal method for most role-playing oriented campaigns, as it allows the character's creator to adjust points to suit the desired character conception. Six points makes a good point value for most campaigns.

Family: Multitasking with Rose

2004-12-07T13:39:00.000-06:00




Rose Multitasks

So today when I got home from work so that Liana could go to work, Rose and I made a pizza together. (Medium frozen Home Run Inn four cheese pizza, we put canadian bacon, oregano, smoked sausage, and onions on it, then sprinkled sharp cheddar cheese on top.) While the pizza was baking, I suggested that we play with blocks, and Rose wanted to build the Teen Titan's Tower. I obliged, and other than being short a block that I thought would've helped the aesthetic, I was pretty happy with how it turned out.

Then the pizza was done. I wanted Rose to eat, but she wanted to play with toys on the blocks. I would tell her to take a bite, and then she would return immediately to the game. I'd tell her to take another bite, she'd oblige, and then go right back to the game. Suddenly, she announced, "Playing with toys at the same time as eating is called Muls-pi-tass-king." You could have knocked me down with a feather.

I asked her where she picked that up, and she said "from Vicki". Thanks Vicki, that was pretty cool!

(Of course, not 5 minutes later, she waited too long to go to the bathroom and didn't quite make it. Ah well, you win some, you lose some, I guess.)

Comics: Open Letter to Scott Kurtz

2004-12-06T08:49:00.000-06:00

Mr. Kurtz,

I've been looking at the PVP strip for Sunday. It bothers me, and it took me a little bit of thinking to clearly articulate why.

You often have Francis saying "gay" in response to things he doesn't like. I can live with it because he's a teenager in the gaming community and it can be construed to be fairly accurate representation of what this community can be like. I think it's a bad idea to include such a highly offensive characterization in a newspaper-targeted strip, but I can stand it.

Yesterday's strip wasn't like that.

This is a strip format you've used before. A convoluted organizational name that shortens to a funny acronym, which another character then points out. The problem is that this kind of convtrivance isn't produced by the characterization, it's produced by the strip's author. The hand of Scott Kurtz, if you will, is very apparently shining through the characters whenever this technique is used.

Put another way, when you have Francis say "gay", it's believable that the speech comes from Francis, and that Scott Kurtz doesn't really think it's OK to backhandedly insult a whole group of people just because he needs another synonym for "stupid". Because this strip is so contrived, it's clear that it's not Francis saying "homo", it's not Brent saying it, it's Scott Kurtz saying it.

If this were in a newspaper I read, I'd probably be demanding an apology, and possibly asking the newspaper to consider removing the strip. Since that isn't the case, I'm asking you directly. Please change or remove this strip, it's offensive, and it reflects badly on you.

Sincerely,

Glenn Loos-Austin