Sleepless in the Seattle Metro Area

The quotes file

2008-05-15T18:45:00.000-07:00

All throughout college I had my Quotes file—a Word document of eighty pages that was just full of quotes that I thought were funny or interesting, mostly from my friends. I had a good time maintaining it. But at some point, I think my senior year, I stopped maintaining it. I occasionally—just a couple times a year now—put new quotes in it, but I've pretty much given up on it.

I don't know what really motivated me to create it in the first place. Perhaps subconsciously I thought that maybe I'd never be around people as funny as the people I knew in college, and I had to preserve those memories forever. Or maybe it was just part of my obsessive need to collect, store, and organize things. But whatever it was, I grew out of it. When I go through the list today, I realize that I hear and say things every day that are funnier than a lot of stuff in there. Only a few pages' worth of quotes in that document are probably truly special. It doesn't make much sense to worry about keeping most of the stuff in there, especially if I'm not going to keep adding new stuff that's just as entertaining as or more than other quotes in it.

The last quote I put in there was actually only about a month ago, and it was from 30 Rock, not real life.

Jack: But let me ask you a question, Kenneth. If Mr. Bright here told you to vote Republican, would you do it?
Kenneth: Oh, uh, no sir. I don’t vote Republican… or Democrat. Choosing is a sin, so I always just write in the Lord’s name!
Jack: That’s Republican; we count those.

Puzzle Quest

2008-05-14T00:47:00.001-07:00

After finishing Crysis, I'd intended to get into Assassin's Creed. I'm about two hours in; I'd mostly just tried it out before I got around to starting Crysis. But now I'm not so sure that it's the sort of game that I want to play right now. I got my mom the weird puzzle/RPG hybrid game Puzzle Quest for Mother's Day, since she likes puzzle-type games, and she and my dad have become addicted to it. (Mom's into puzzle games, and Dad's into RPGs, so it seems that they both found something they like.) They had run into some questions about using spells and constructing buildings, so I decided to download a demo on the Xbox yesterday and try it out for myself. I only played it for about 20 minutes, but it was entrancing. I had to stop myself. Now I've been finding myself thinking about it from time to time. Twenty minutes! That's all it took.

This Bejeweled-Plus-Hit-Points infiltrated my mind in only twenty minutes, and now there is a greater-than-zero chance that I will succumb to temptation tomorrow and buy it. I almost feel like the veteran gamer in me should be immune to the allure of these gem-matching parlor tricks. But it's not.

It's a fairly silly concept, really. To use a cliché, it feels wrong, but yet so right. It's an RPG in which all battles are fought by playing Bejeweled. Honestly, there are plenty of RPGs that are very entertaining when combat consists of clicking a fight button a dozen times, so I guess it makes sense that Puzzle Quest is fun when the fight button has been replaced with a grid of gems—something proven to be fun in and of itself. The RPG mechanics really do seem to add depth to what's normally an extremely casual game. It's certainly good to see that people are innovating and mixing and matching genres.

Update from the comments: I indeed bought Puzzle Quest from the Xbox Live Arcade, and I played it a bit last night. It has already helped me to nearly miss one workout.

Crysis

2008-05-13T21:40:00.000-07:00

I finished Crysis, the spiritual sequel to Far Cry, and I have to say... it's a pretty fantastic game. It looks gorgeous, and it plays great. The one-sentence synopsis is that you're a soldier on an island in Korea, equipped with a "nanosuit" that gives you a choice of special powers: superhuman strength, speed, or resilience, or a cloak. The nanosuit idea actually works very well in practice, because it leaves your options open. Say you're facing an enemy base. You can switch your suit to speed mode, dash in across the bridge, and hide when you get there. You can use armor mode and try to fight your way in before you're killed by snipers. Or, you can put on strength mode to give yourself incredible jumping ability, and then fall down to the rocks below, engaging your cloak before the enemy spots you, and then finding a stealthy back way in. Most of the time, you really do have a wide variety of options for how you'll tackle each situation, so the game fits a bunch of different play styles. Your suit recharges power and heals you very rapidly between battles, so there's no need to be anal about hit points, yet you're still fragile enough (especially when not in armor mode) to make you think and play smartly.

It might sound like I'm overstating the open-endedness of the game based on how poorly most games that purport to give you a choice end up implementing it, but in Crysis the levels are massive just so you can do things at your own pace in the way you want to. It's like the Oblivion of shooters. And like Oblivion, the environments are fantastic, and every once in a while make you want to stand around and gawk. The detail level is incredible; you can stand on a hill, put on your binoculars and zoom in to the maximum level, and see trees and rocks on another hill elsewhere on the island—a part of the island that you might not even have a reason to ever visit, but they put the details in anyway. There's no real limit to the draw distance, unlike most games that would start to draw "fog" to keep the framerates high.

And did I mention it's gorgeous? Everything about the game's visual quality is topnotch—the models, the terrain, the textures, and the special effects. When there's electrical interference nearby or you take heavy damage, your suit's visuals begin to distort in a very believable way. You can even get blood splatter and ice crystals on your mask, and some levels have night/day transitions. Even the computer screens in-game are high-resolution, interactive, and believable, like Doom 3. It comes at a price, though—my computer's specs are pretty decent, but even my machine could only run it at medium settings. I had to turn off antialiasing to get a decent framerate in some areas. I can't imagine there even exists a computer today that would render Crysis playable at the maximum settings. (All of the screenshots in this post are at the settings I played with—medium—except with 2x antialiasing because that's how I started the game out.)

The story plays out well, though the last third of the game doesn't have the massive scope or open-ended feel of the first two-thirds. The story isn't exactly incredible, but it's not a liability, and it's presented very well, like any good blockbuster action movie.

If you're a fan of shooters and have a computer that can run it, I can wholeheartedly recommend Crysis with no reservations. It's one of the best I've ever played. Versus Gears of War and Half-Life 2 it wins out in graphics, and is right on par in gameplay. Gears of War is more visceral, Half-Life 2 has better storytelling, and Crysis is far less linear than either.

Principles of hot waitstaff

2008-05-12T15:09:00.000-07:00

I was thinking that, if I were in an economics class and had to write a paper, I'd want to do it on this topic: what would different historical economists have to say about how much you should tip attractive waiters and waitresses?

I was originally going to mention Adam Smith here, but I'm not going to show my ignorance by losing the "match the economist to the theory" game, so let's just call my theoretical economist "Madam Sith." I like the ring to that. Madam Sith believes that people in a capitalistic society will act selfishly, but everyone acting largely selfishly will actually yield the best possible outcome for society as a whole. Would she, then, tip well so as to encourage that hot waiter to stay a waiter forever, or would she tip lightly to save as much income for herself? What if the waiter was just working a temporary job to pay for school, and was eventually looking to get into the same field of work as Madam Sith? Should Madam Sith tip very poorly to encourage him to study hard and get out of waiting tables as soon as possible?

These are the questions that need answers... these are the questions that should be answered by a sophomore economics student in a class paper.

Pope Mark Twain III

2008-05-12T10:02:00.000-07:00

Science fiction short story idea:

In the future, the dominant religions are all based on one-line adages of today. For example, there is an entire religion based on "a place for everything and everything in its place." I bet you could extrapolate that into an interesting story.

Omen

2008-05-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

Today after I got out of bed, when making my bed, I picked up a corner of my out-of-place sheets and blanket and threw it toward its correct destination. I intended to just get it near where it needed to be so I could reach it more easily when I went over to the other side of the bed. But when the sheets fell, everything was already exactly where it should be. I had made my bed with a single throw. If that's not an omen that today is going to be a good day, I don't know what is.

Painful experience

2008-05-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

As obnoxious as it can be sometimes to be on the homeowner's association board, after last night's emergency meeting (I won't get into the details publicly) I think that this is probably going to be pretty good life experience in the long run. At work I make the occasional important decision that has a significant impact on our product. But it only impacts people who use SharePoint Designer, and they're not financial or business decisions. In the homeowner's association I have to consider the needs and situations of everyone in the association, but more significantly, I'm playing around with real dollars. I own (well, in 29 years I will) about 5.3% of the association, but I have 20% of the voting power. That 20% is a lot of money to be responsible for.

Oops

2008-05-07T00:03:00.000-07:00

Well, the bad news is that I didn't successfully finish my Ethernet wiring project tonight. The good news is that I now have a handy window from my office room to the stairwell.

Wait, that's bad news too. The hole was supposed to end up downstairs through the floor, not in the stairwell through the wall. Flexible drill bits are approximately as hard to use successfully as they look.

I failed at pretty much everything today. I'm glad it's over.

lolangelz

2008-05-05T00:44:00.000-07:00

Nothin' says funny like a font joke. (Why haven't lolangelz caught on?)

Flowers

2008-05-04T23:26:00.000-07:00

I gots me flowers now.

All Along the Watchtower

2008-05-04T17:16:00.000-07:00

The third season of Battlestar Galactica ended with a cover of the Bob Dylan song All Along the Watchtower. I've listened to several versions today, and I like the Battlestar version considerably better than the others. I think that these are the best I've come across, in order of increasing how-much-I-like-them-ness.

Bob Dylan (original)

Eric Clapton and Lenny Kravitz (live)

Seph and the Bloods (never heard of 'em until now)

Bear McCreary and BT4 (Battlestar Galactica version)

Introvert clubs

2008-05-04T12:57:00.000-07:00

Dance clubs, and to a lesser extent bars, are geared toward extroverts. For an introvert, they're downright hostile—they're loud, packed with strange people, and the expectation that you're going to get to know one or two of them. But I wonder if there's a way to make a club that caters to introverts. And if you made it, could you get people to come?

What group activities do introverts have? Board games at hobby shops, and Magic: The Gathering at the same. In areas with internet cafés, online multiplayer games paid by the hour. It seems that the common thread amongst introvert-friendly group activities is that they're all things that you have to have another person for, at least to get the same experience. (Single-player video games are very different from multiplayer, even in the same game.) They're also things that work in small groups, even when playing within a larger group.

So I guess an introvert club would want to have gaming rooms. Instead of a bar, maybe a coffee house or café area. The place would have to have free wireless internet.

The biggest problem with the idea besides the fact that there's no guarantee it would be successful at all is that it would almost certainly be far less profitable than a regular dance club. An introvert club would require many times the space of a regular club to comfortably house the same number of people. Most introvert activities don't mix well with alcohol, so the place would have to come up with a model where they can sell non-alcoholic drinks and overpriced snacks to make up for that.

I have my doubts that it could be successful, but it would be interesting. Even Lincoln, Nebraska could get together a few hundred people at a HobbyTown USA to have Magic tournaments on Saturdays; I'm sure a large metro area could offer enough people to have an introvert-focused club. You'd just need to convince people to go. Maybe it would just have to open a couple times a week at first; introverts seem to prefer their limited social activities to be planned out in advance. I have my doubts that it could work. But at least in concept, it would be nice if such a place existed.

I Heart Huckabees

2008-05-04T12:39:00.000-07:00

I saw I Heart Huckabees on Saturday. It's got a good cast that all acts well, decent writing, and good direction. And it's awful; I hated it. I don't know if I've ever respected a movie I disliked this much. And that's pretty much exactly what I was told to expect from the movie.

The concept is unique and clever—people struggling to find meaning in their lives go to get help from existential detectives Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman. The detectives spy on everything they do, their backgrounds, and so forth, discovering facts that will help them find the meaning in their clients' lives. But the plot is nonsensical and the characters are all very unlikable, and completely unrelatable unless perhaps you're having your own existential crisis.

So, clever concept aside, I'm left with a movie made up of characters that I hate, doing things I think are stupid, behaving in unpleasant ways, and not generally being any funnier than tongue-slightly-in-cheek. It reminds me of a Wes Anderson movie, except with a couple redeeming qualities. Just not enough to save it.

Battlestar

2008-05-04T02:11:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally finished season three of Battlestar Galactica tonight, so I'm out of things to watch while working out. Good timing, though, because I should be able to wire my place for Ethernet as soon as Tuesday night. Then I'll be able to watch TV on my Xbox without the wireless hiccups that made me temporarily give up on the idea. That should be sweet.

Here is my review of season three, and the final few episodes in particular:

:-O

I won't be able to wait for season four to come out on DVD. As nice as it was to watch the whole season over the course of a few weeks instead of a year, I think I'll go nuts if I try that again. I'm just going to have to watch the episodes on scifi.com.

Wide Angle

2008-05-03T17:43:00.000-07:00

The short version:
Sia—Colour the Small One: 7/10
Hybrid—Wide Angle: 5/10

One CD that I've listed to quite a bit recently is Sia's second, Colour the Small One. It's not quite as good as her most recent, but noticeably better than her first. The sound is definitely more similar to her recent work than her debut, but more melancholy and reserved than either. For a taste of what it sounds like, try Breathe Me (video), Where I Belong, and Numb (animated video).

I've also been listening to Wide Angle by Hybrid, and I haven't been that impressed. It's a bit more trance-y than I'm usually in the mood for, which hurts my opinion of it. I guess "cinematic trance electronica" probably describes it about as well as I can. You'd be better off listening to If I Survive (video), Sinequanon, and Altitude (Red Square Reprise).

Currently listening: Morcheeba—Wonders Never Cease

Fast

2008-05-03T03:48:00.000-07:00

Today I got a package from Amazon.com that shipped... today. I ordered it last night, it shipped out today, and it was on my doorstep today, a few hours later. The carrier is Dynamex, a company I'd never heard of that specializes in same-day deliveries.

Amazon.com: for when you really, really need that new Madonna CD delivered to you via same-day service.

Hand-ripping death packaging

2008-05-02T00:27:00.000-07:00

As much as I hate our overly litigious society sometimes, I think that I'd be pretty happy if someone bought something packaged in one of those super-hard plastic shells, cut their hand on the packaging, sued the manufacturer, and won. Maybe if a few people sucked a few big chunks of cash from major corporations they'd stop using that damned impossible-to-open plastic for every random product that doesn't need it.

Enum parameters

2008-05-01T14:31:00.001-07:00

This is something that I've wanted for many, many years. (Warning: coding post.) It's considered good coding practice to not use boolean flags as parameters to functions, but rather to use enumerated types, so that things are extensible in the future by adding new items to the enumeration rather than yet another flag parameter, and so that the calling code is more explicitly readable. In concept it's usually good advice (though there are times that what you want really is a set of boolean flags), but generally I avoid using it in practice because I dislike the way that it makes the code look.

person = FindPerson(name, false)
...versus...
person = FindPerson(name, PersonFindOptions.CaseInsensitive)

The latter is clearer since it's explicitly case-insensitive rather than having to wonder whether that second parameter means "is case sensitive" or "is case insensitive," but it puts too much visual emphasis on the unimportant part of the function call—the case-insensitive flag. It's important to me that as much as possible of the textual content of a line of code be meaningful. What I'd like to see is this:

person = FindPerson(name, Insensitive)

That's so clear and nice-looking! In version 2, when you want to specify a second option, it's still simple and clear:

person = FindPerson(name, Insensitive RefreshCache)

(It's not as essential that whitespace become synonymous with the logical or operator in this context, but it seems like a nice bonus, since what you want is both option 1 AND option 2, but what you have to type to get that is "option 1 Or option 2", which looks especially dumb if your language uses the word "or" and not a symbol, like Basic.)

Specifically what I want from my language is that if the compiler knows that what I'm about to type is a value from an enumeration (parameters, variable assignments, et cetera), the name of the enumeration becomes optional. This doesn't work in C++ without some language extensions, but it could easily be made to work in VB or C# or most any other modern language (except ones that don't have enums, like older versions of Java). The chances of conflicts between existing names and enumeration values seem like they would be low in practice (especially in a case-sensitive language), but local variable names should win out if they do. That way, if you add a new item to your enumeration that matches a variable name used in a function anywhere, you don't change the meaning of the existing code.

Screw annuals

2008-05-01T00:48:00.000-07:00

I took a day-vacation today, and it was pretty refreshing—it's like a bonus half-weekend, smack dab in the middle of a week. I spent the day buying and planting flowers and decorative grasses for my miniature front yard and my carport. It all looks pretty nice now, if a little sparse—I'll have pictures soon, I'm sure. I still don't like touching flowers, but I'm getting much better (less ridiculous) about it. With latex gloves on I wasn't bothered at all today.

I was sure to only buy perennials, so I won't have to do all this again next year. Screw annuals and their needy passive-aggressive plant-me-every-year nonsense. I don't need another extremely mild sunburn next year, thank you very much.

Anyway, that's one more project down. Now I just need to get that ceiling fan up in the stairwell, and in a couple weeks I should have the last tool I need to wire my "office" and living room for Ethernet.

Interest rates

2008-04-30T09:48:00.000-07:00

Today's payday, so I went to pay my Visa bill and see how much money I had lying around. I was kind of sad to see the numbers. I thought I had a lot more money than that, and looking through the transaction log, it seems that my balance has been steadily decreasing. This was worrisome, so I started going through my records, and found a transaction for many dollars that was responsible—I'd put it into my different-bank savings account. This is so unlike me. I didn't even remember doing it. I usually just keep everything in checking; certainly I know it's theoretically better to keep things in savings, but when the difference is about five bucks a month in interest, I usually don't care enough to bother moving numbers from one box to a different box on a different website.

So it turns out I have some money saved around after all, just in my ING Direct account, where I get 3% interest instead of .5% interest like I do in my hilariously pitiful credit union savings account. It used to be 4.5% interest a year ago... oh, economy. (And now I feel super-clever for buying that 5.75% CD half a year ago.) I'm saving up to do some home improvements, mainly redoing my kitchen, which is amusing in its hideousness, but that amusement wears off pretty quickly. My stove is about a decade older than I am, and the cabinets and countertops are unspeakably ugly. I figure that it's half an investment in my sell value, half something to make me like my house better while I live in it, and that seems like a decent enough ratio to make it worthwhile.

I hope to get started on planning out what I want to do with the kitchen in a month, when my CD matures.

YouTube subscriptions

2008-04-29T01:53:00.000-07:00

I was thinking earlier tonight... YouTube channels are, for a lot of people, basically video blogs. Personally, I'd rather read what people have to say than hear them say it (podcasts), or watch and hear them say it (YouTube). (Or, in most cases, none of those things.) I'm only subscribed to one channel on YouTube, that of Chris Cendaña, and that's just because he can sing.

Actually, though, there's some appeal to the idea of posting my thoughts in video form instead of text. You can get a lot more nuance in speech than text, and I really like talking. The downside is that I hate the sound of my voice, don't like the way I look all that much, and greatly enjoy being able to edit and correct and fine-tune my text whenever I want. I wouldn't worry about Sleepless in the Seattle Metro Area becoming a YouTube channel anytime soon.

Public service announcement

2008-04-29T01:51:00.000-07:00

Public service announcement:
MOTHER'S DAY IS NEXT SUNDAY

I haven't fully decided on my gift yet. I've got a few ideas. I haven't just forgotten it. I need to just give up and pick one. NOW. Or at least tomorrow.

[Corrected; I just wrote "Sunday" originally.]

Bad jobs

2008-04-28T00:44:00.000-07:00

My benchmark for how bad a job can be is when I worked at Gallup. (An odd number of people have never heard of them. They're the world's most famous polling organization.) In hindsight it should have been obvious that I'd hate the job—I don't like talking on the phone, and that's all you do at Gallup. But that wasn't even why.

It's not that the work itself was hard. I was pretty good at the technical aspects of the job. I could stick to the script without improvising, I knew what I could say to coerce people into answering questions properly without tainting the results, and so on. It was air conditioned, and it paid pretty well. I didn't have to lift heavy vats of oil or stick my hands into 400-degree fryers or mop floors. But it was kind of emotionally traumatizing. It didn't take long to realize that I would never be good at the job. I never even did well enough at the job to get paid on what I did; I always had to be bumped up to minimum wage, as we were paid on commission for surveys completed, and I never completed enough to make more than the minimum.

It's not that I was bad; it's that I wasn't being paid based on how hard I tried. I was paid based on how many people liked the sound of my voice. You could tell that the women who worked there were far more successful in terms of pay than the men. If you sound like a hot young girl, you can make a pretty decent amount of money at Gallup; almost everyone is willing to talk to a hot young girl for a few minutes. It's like phone sex that calls you. Sadly, one or two of the surveys I'd complete each night would be with people who apparently didn't hear when I said my name was Travis, and then would start hitting on me, assuming me to be a hot young girl. I actually had someone hang up on me once when they found out I was a guy.

Now, there were ways that I could have gotten more money. I could have lied to people, or bent the truth, to get them to take the survey. Or, I could have completed surveys with people who didn't actually meet the qualifications of the survey. For example, often our criteria for who we could talk to would be something like "the youngest male over the age of 18 who lives at the house." I imagine that there were people who would accept a survey response from a different guy in the household, or someone who was almost 18, or something similar. The chances of being caught are pretty low (they did randomly listen in on our calls to try to prevent that sort of thing), and as long as you played it off as a mistake it probably would end up being fine. You'd probably get a lot more survey completions if you were dishonest.

But mostly I think it was my inability to sound like a hot young girl. And that feeling that no matter what I did, I wasn't going to improve much; that most men who worked there were doomed—that was really depressing and crushing. The women were all more experienced because turnover was lower, and they just did better. I imagine that a lot of women and minorities must feel that at some point in their life, that they were pretty much just screwed. I had to get out of that job. I stuck with it for the summer because I needed the money and didn't want to start someplace and then work there for just a month, but it depressed me more and more. They spend a solid week training their interviewers (phone grunts), and because of this everyone signs a contract promising to work for them for at least six months.

But I couldn't do it. At the end of the summer I said I was going to transfer to the downtown call center so I could work during school. Once school started and I first walked into the call center to meet my new boss, the feelings of doom and gloom were stronger than they'd ever been. I walked up to the manager, introduced myself, and said that he didn't know me, but I wanted to resign effective immediately. He was understanding and wished me well. I handed him my security badge and walked out.

The feeling I got when I walked out of that call center was one of the best shifts in morale I'd ever experienced. That was the only time I'd ever really quit a job.

Currently listening: Bill Brown—Command and Conquer Generals: Zero Hour, USA theme

Moody

2008-04-25T11:37:00.000-07:00

Occasionally when I search for music on Amazon.com I get pointed at one of the Pure Moods compilation CDs. I remember that they used to advertise all the time on something that I watched when I was much younger—maybe The X-Files? So, I decided to click on the most recent CD in the series, Pure Moods IV, and see how many of the songs on there I already own on other CDs. There are 18 tracks, and I own eight already. That seems like a lot. Maybe I should be compiling the Pure Moods CDs.

I already own the CDs that contain the tracks from:
Balligomingo
Enigma
Delerium and Sarah McLachlan
Secret Garden
Yann Tiersen
Moby
Paul Schwartz
Afrocelts and Peter Gabriel

And I own different albums or compilations containing tracks from:
Mythos
George Winston

So, seeing as I already own more than half of it, it seems like a bad idea to pick up this CD. On the other hand, I guess that it must be a pretty good disc since I know I like at least ten tracks on it. (Actually, I listened to samples of the ones I didn't already own, and I was not too thrilled.)

Eight point five inches

2008-04-25T01:23:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed how people with vision deficiencies often like to brag about how bad their eyes are? I don't really know why that is, and I tend to do it myself. It's kind of like the mythical boys' locker room conversation, with "inches" replaced by "diopter" and "penis" replaced with "eye."

Mine are 8.5/8.0.
—Oh, mine are both 8.5.
Well, it's not how bad your vision is; it's how you use it.
—That's just a lame excuse that people with good vision use.