Sleepless in the Seattle Metro Area

Nebulous wholesome nouns are important things

2012-01-26T12:49:00.000-08:00

Today at lunch I wasn't charged for my samosa. I noticed it at checkout and purposely didn't mention it to the cafeteria lady. Errors at checkout just happen—sometimes they overcharge me and sometimes they undercharge me, and I don't mention it either way because I figure that it will roughly balance itself out over time. I believe this to be a moral course of action. But I already wrote what I think was a pretty good post on these sorts of moral trivialities so I don't feel a need to write another one.

What I wondered about on the way to my office is why it matters. Why does it matter to do the right thing on such an incredibly trivial issue? It's extremely difficult to argue that if it were immoral for me to have not mentioned the existence of that samosa on my plate (thereby effectively stealing it), to have mentioned it would have made the world a better place. At face value, it would have transferred two dollars from my account to that of a corporation. The effect on my life: miniscule; the effect on the lives of that corporation's shareholders: negligible. So why does it matter?

Always doing the right thing is important to me, because I strive to be the best person that I can be. But it's also important to me that things matter and that there's a reason for things, because I'm an engineer, and because I'm an INTJ.

The epiphany I had on the trek back to my office really intrigued me: maybe always doing the right thing on the little issues matters because it primes and prepares and trains you to do the right thing on the big things that do matter. Perhaps integrity and honor and love and all of those sorts of nebulous wholesome nouns are important things to strive for even when it comes to the most unimportant, everyday issues, because they are how we practice making decisions so that we can make the right ones when the time comes.

What I do know, though, is that God still loves me, because I bit into that samosa and there was meat inside. Not just any meat, but beef. There was ground-up dead cow inside of my Indian food. It was delicious and culturally insensitive and the best samosa I've ever had. God works in mysterious ways.

Cashback bonus

2012-01-12T00:49:00.000-08:00

I'd wondered off and on for a while why some credit card reward programs give you extra points or percent cashback for transactions at gas stations and restaurants. And even though my card doesn't, I think the reason finally hit me while I was filling up my tank tonight: because those are the businesses that don't want to accept credit cards.

To oversimplify things a little bit, credit card companies charge fees to the businesses based on a percentage of the transaction cost. The agreements that the businesses sign with Visa and the other credit companies prohibit them from passing those costs onto you on top of the purchase price, with very few exceptions. They can offer a discount for paying with cash, but they can't charge you 2% more for paying with a card. Anyway, generally gas stations and restaurants would make more money if everyone just paid in cash. They accept credit cards because credit cards are convenient and people demand that they accept them. Those few gas stations and restaurants that don't accept them lose business because of it—given a choice between two gas stations only one of which accepted credit cards, I'd always pick the one that accepted plastic unless there was like a 1-in-10 chance of being murdered at that one. I hate dealing with cash. Pretty much the only thing I use it for is splitting bills when I get dinner with friends; everything else goes on the card.

So why are gas stations and restaurants special? I sure don't know, but it probably has something to do with margins. 2% on the total purchase price means a lot to a business with a 10% profit margin compared to one with a 40% profit margin.

So rather than reduce fees for gas stations and restaurants, the credit card companies chose to drive even greater demand for those businesses to accept credit cards by offering their customers extra rewards for shopping there (and insisting that the business continue to accept cards). The customers presumably end up paying exactly the same amount for their gas as they would if things were less complicated—the gas stations just raise prices by a couple cents to cover the couple cents in credit card fees that they pay. You pay the gas station a couple extra cents, the gas station begrudgingly gives it to the credit card company, and then the credit card company gives you back your couple of cents except now you're happy about it because it's a cashback bonus.

I have no idea if any of that is how it actually works. But it seemed plausible at least. Bear with me here, I'm new to weaving economic conspiracy theories.

Making the world a better place

2012-01-05T10:03:00.000-08:00

I'm definitely a person who believes that creating art and beauty has value to the world—creating these things makes the world a better place for those who live here. But I had a thought this morning that intrigued me: if we assume that creating art has value, do we also assume that the world must also be improved in some way simply by consuming art and appreciating beauty, even if you never create anything? More so than other activities that make one happier? I certainly feel that society is improved when people appreciate artwork, but I'm not sure that I can really articulate why.

Anyway, this is all a pretty good justification to spend 162 hours playing Skyrim. It's making the world a better place.

Just a dollar a day

2011-12-24T15:48:00.000-08:00

I've been back in Nebraska for two days now, and in that time I've seen about 200 commercials asking for money for African orphans and animal shelters. But I'd like to see this commercial.

Thousands of middle-aged men and women in America suffer from ancient, lame-ass computers every day. They have loud, ear-shattering fans, and they may have single-core Pentium processors that can barely even browse Facebook. But it doesn't have to be that way. For your gift of just a dollar a day, your parents could get a new computer that's still crappy, but not as crappy as their decade-old one. At least it would be running Windows 7. With your donation we'll send you monthly updates on which chain emails they've forwarded, how out-of-date their Flash plugin is, and even how many new browser toolbars and pieces of spyware they've installed. You can make a real difference in your loved ones' lives, for far less than the cost of a daily cup of coffee. Please call now.

Indomitable

2011-12-22T07:22:00.000-08:00

indomitable will—(n.) euphemism: terminal illness or handicap. ex: "We're waiting to hear from the doctor. I sure hope Grandma doesn't have an indomitable will!" see also: inspiring spirit.

Seriously, though, have you ever seen someone use a compliment like "indomitable will" and have it mean anything other than "man it must suck to not have working legs?"

Paradise

2011-12-21T15:18:00.001-08:00

The short version:
Various Artists—Breaking Dawn Part 1: 5/10
Mutemath—Odd Soul: 5/10
Coldplay—Mylo Xyloto: 7/10

I haven't been listening to a lot of new stuff recently, but the Breaking Dawn Part 1 soundtrack album came out and Bruno Mars' It Will Rain is good enough that it was worth a preorder. Beyond that, there's a lot of whiny nonsense on this CD... more than one track makes me want to dive for the Skip button. Barring some unlikely situation in which I turn into a moody teenage girl I do not anticipate there being any future time in which I'll be in the mood to actually listen to this whole thing from start to finish again. Anyway, that said, beyond the amazing and fantastic It Will Rain, Theophilus London's Neighbors and Northern Lights by Cider Sky are both pretty good. But I'd generally recommend you just get an MP3 of It Will Rain and call it good, and save yourself the travesty of accidentally hearing Turning Page because you couldn't click Next Track in time.

I rather like Mutemath. I don't rather like their newest CD, Odd Soul. It seems as if they set out with the goal of making a rock album that sounds as warm and exaggerated and huge and unfocused as they could. In their past albums I was impressed with the clockwork precision of their drummer and the crazy things he was capable of. And he's still there. But he's in the background, drowned out by amped GUITAAAAAARRRWWRRRRRRRRRR and wailing. Just about every aspect of this album seems to be a big step backward from their previous body of work and it's unnerving. The band is still recognizable, certainly, but I'm wary of what I'll be hearing a year from now. Quarantine, Odd Soul, and Prytania are the best tracks, but none of them are nearly as good as some of the best stuff from their earlier CDs. Not much really stands out.

Finally, I picked up Coldplay's latest, Mylo Xyloto. It's not as good as Viva la Vida, but their last CD was pretty excellent and I suppose it would be pretty difficult for any new album to not be a little disappointing after that one. Paradise, my favorite song, is simple and catchy but sort of embarrassingly cheesy. The chorus is little more than the two-note word "paradise" repeated over and over and some very Coldplay "oohhhh-ohh-ohhhs" thrown in. But it sounds great, and I'll still take that over something with a little more creative integrity that's painful to listen to. Hurts like Heaven is rather good too, and not quite as embarrassing. Third favorite is probably Princess of China, featuring Rihanna. The style is nearly identical to Viva la Vida, with a little more electronic influence thrown in, though it's used pretty subtly.

Half frustrating and half awesome

2011-11-22T00:06:00.001-08:00

Amazon is really bad at informing you whether or not you're going to have to pay for digital downloads, but they're really good at apologizing for how terrible they are at it. I've had a $10 credit toward Amazon's game download store listed on the site for a year, and now their digital downloads work through Steam which is totally awesome, and Dungeon Defenders was on sale and it looked mildly interesting, so I decided to buy that with my $10 credit. The checkout page listed "gift certificate / Visa" as the payment option (Curse.com pays me in Amazon credit so I constantly have gift cards applied to my account), so I figured yeah, totally, that $10 credit toward game downloads must be working. Nope. The full price was charged to my credit card. I had already put my activation code into Steam and installed the game at that point too, so no hope of a refund.

So I contacted their customer service. The woman apologized and said that that $10 credit was only good for Xbox Live subscriptions. WTF. Oh, duh, I totally should have been able to tell that from the "Your Balances" screen, which from what I can tell is the only place where you can see your store credit for downloadable products, and is only accessible from the pages for MP3 albums.

So yes, obviously that is just for Xbox Live subscriptions. My mistake. But she was nice and refunded my credit card. And I get to keep the game. And I'm not sure exactly what she did because there's no place that lists your various promotions, but apparently she converted that $10 credit for an Xbox Live subscription into a $10 credit for any digital download, because all of the other numbers other than software / video games and gift card just increased by 10. WHAT IS GOING ON?

Is this what it feels like to be the annoying customer who gets free stuff just so the customer service rep doesn't have to deal with you anymore? Because it's half frustrating and half awesome.

Mainly for the health benefits

2011-11-18T20:54:00.001-08:00

Today I went to an informal lunch meeting where there were going to be several gay Microsoft employees in attendance. I thought of how I was going to introduce myself, and this is what I came up with. Unfortunately a good opportunity never really arose so I never got a chance to use it.

"So anyway, I recently decided to become gay mainly for the health benefits. I haven't really noticed any improvement in my appearance though. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong." Assuming I couldn't quite keep the deadpan look, I'd then follow up with "Sorry, I just couldn't tell that joke with a heterosexual face."

Next week off

2011-11-15T21:21:00.001-08:00

It's generally not necessary to get approval for vacations or other time off at Microsoft, but it's customary to give people a few days' warning rather than just disappear randomly. Today I sent this mail to my team:

I’m gonna take next week (Thanksgiving week / 21-25November) off and start using up some of this vacation time before it expires.Presumably I will take a short break from playing Skyrim at some point duringthat week to eat turkey but no guarantees.

It started out as a joke but at some point in typing the message I realized that it's not much of an exaggeration. Since Thursday at 9pm, life has basically been Skyrim with the occasional interruption for sleep, meals, or work.

Microthoughts

2011-11-15T16:49:00.000-08:00

Some more of my favorite random short thoughts of recent times, collected here for archival purposes...

You know you've hit rock bottom when you're just walking around and someone stops you because they think you're cosplaying the Baron Harkonnen from Dune.

Today instead of working out I went to the Olive Garden for lunch. I feel sort of like Maeby Fünke throwing away a banana for each dollar she steals.

Dear Shakira: every time you sing jealously about some woman that is hotter than you I want to slap you in the face. (Just don't bother.)

Who really throws their hands up in the air when they just don't care? Sounds like a lot of effort. If I just didn't care I'm pretty sure I'd just stand there with a dumb look on my face.

The worst part about having non-white waitstaff who are terrible is that I assume that they think that I'm tipping poorly because I'm racist. Wait, no, the worst part is that they're terrible. Then the racist thing.

Each morning I wake up and find a new spider web on one of my car's side mirrors. Some spider must have written a really good Yelp review if people keep coming back. Or maybe they're just trying to be the mayor of my car on Foursquare.

Today's gotta be a new record for number of times I've threatened to burn my work computer's house down if it didn't start behaving.

No, Visa Fraud Protection Hotline, me purchasing several things from Amazon is not unusual account activity. You should know this. You're the one with a list of my usual account activity.

Good life advice: if you're about to do something, first ask yourself if it would make a good Insanity Wolf meme picture. If the answer is yes, you should probably not do that thing.

Someone at Microsoft sent an email about some "cool Forza skins" and I just want to shake him vigorously and yell "DON'T YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE SAYING? DON'T YOU KNOW WHAT THAT SOUNDS LIKE?"

Today I rickrolled a Microsoft vice president. That's one thing I can check off the bucket list.

I'd be all like whoosh

2011-11-14T10:32:00.001-08:00

I daydream a lot. One of the things I daydream about pretty frequently, especially as I'm walking or driving, is what it would be like if I could teleport. This is usually the way my thought process works:

Traveling sucks. I wish I could teleport.
Oh man that would be sweet. I'd be all like whoosh (I imagine the visual effect of the teleportation).
If I could teleport, I'd be rich. I could quit my job and just stay at home and play [game I've purchased most recently] all day.

So basically my daydreams of having superpowers always end up with me staying at home and playing video games rather than becoming a crime-fighting superhero.

Way too many Ladies Gaga

2011-11-08T00:16:00.000-08:00

The short version:
Bear McCreary—Dark Void: 7/10
Amadou and Mariam—Welcome to Mali: 5/10
Justin Timberlake—FutureSex/LoveSounds: 5/10
O.A.R.—King: 6/10
Bruno Mars—Doo-Wops and Hooligans: 6/10
P!nk—Can't Take Me Home: 3/10
fun.—Aim and Ignite: 7/10
Teddybears—Soft Machine: 6/10
Various Artists—Almost Alice: 6/10

Bear McCreary is one of my "new" favorite composers as of the last several years. His work on the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack is nothing short of phenomenal, and he has a keen ear for interesting and unusual sounds combined in unusual ways. (By the way, I totally recommend following him on Facebook; he posts fascinating insights into his musical processes, videos of him playing BSG tunes on the piano, and so on.) Anyway, he also did the soundtrack for a video game nobody heard of called Dark Void. It's not as good as his BSG soundtracks (well maybe better than The Plan / Razor, the weakest one), but it's pretty definitely recognizable as Bear—wacky unidentifiable foreign instruments, heavy percussion, and stuff that makes you just nod your head in appreciation of this dude's ridiculous creativity. I think the best things here are Above the Canopy (which I would totally believe was from BSG seasons 3-4 if someone told me that), The Collector, and Survivor Camp Combat. Overall it's good enough that I thought about picking the game up for six bucks on Amazon until I saw how poorly it was reviewed, but I can still recommend the Dark Void soundtrack to anyone who enjoyed the BSG soundtracks, which is I suppose anyone who doesn't hate music.

I don't know what genre Welcome to Mali by Amadou and Mariam is. I admit it. Just a sec; I'm gonna go look it up. Okay, Wikipedia suggests that it might be "African blues." I dunno. I always enjoy when an otherwise pleasant piece of music makes me furrow my brow and wonder to myself what on earth I'm listening to, and Sabali fits that bill. Most of the album isn't doesn't sound like that though, with my other two favorites Africa (featuring K'NAAN) and Je te Kiffe being decidedly more blues-y and rock-ish. Overall I'd like it more but I don't really love the vocals. It's not mean to complain about the way that blind people sing is it? That's just deaf people, right? Anyway, I don't know who to recommend it to. It's a long CD and there's are several tracks that I don't care for all that much, but at the very least I can't complain that it's just like all of the other world music albums I have by blind husband and wife duos. Just check it out.

FutureSex/LoveSounds by Justin Timberlake is okay. Actually, I think that Lovestoned / I Think She Knows is completely fabulous, and of course SexyBack is super catchy. The rest I don't really care too much about. I probably should have stuck with singles for this one.

I'd heard of O.A.R. (Of A Revolution) before but I can't recall why. They had a new album called King on Spotify with a very pretty album cover so I decided to click on it. It turns out it's kinda decent. It's one of those albums that starts out strong and then probably should have ended a lot sooner than it really does. It's twenty tracks (!) and only three of those are interludes... but there's only one that's better than mediocre after #6. Heaven, King, and Not for Me are all some good head-bobbin' rock music.

I'd been on the fence for a while about Bruno Mars' Doo-Wops and Hooligans. Actually, I was on the fence for a while and then I decided on the "no" side of the fence, but I changed my mind and decided it was worth buying after all. (His amazing new single It Will Rain is mostly what made me reconsider.) That should probably adequately explain what I think of it. I think it's decent, and it's worth owning, but not overwhelmingly so. Just the Way You Are, The Lazy Song (omg best video evar, starring Leonard Nimoy), and Marry You are my favorites.

Ugh. I figured I should round out my P!nk collection and get Can't Take Me Home, but I curse my completionist nature. It's not good. There aren't any songs on it that are really all that good. There are a few that are okay, and that's it: Most Girls, Private Show, and There You Go. I say skip it, even if you're a fan. Maybe there's a reason it was impossible to find the songs on it streamed.

Another random promoted Spotify find, Aim and Ignite by fun. was well-named and unexpectedly pleasant. The opening track Be Calm is wonderfully unpredictable and perky and joyous and, well, entertaining. All the Pretty Girls is more pop-rock and less insane than Be Calm, but still really nice. And Light a Roman Candle with Me is interesting too. This is another one of those CDs for which I can't really guess who might enjoy it, but I do recommend giving those tracks a listen and see if it's something you'd like. I don't even know what genre to call it. Indie rock? Some of it sort of reminds me of Electric Light Orchestra, so maybe it's oldies...

After the resounding success with their last album Devil's Music I picked up Soft Machine by Teddybears. It's certainly not as good but it's rather similar in style and still decent. I can hear the sounds of their latest album in this one in a somewhat less refined form. Yours to Keep, Automatic Lover, and Different Sound are all worthwhile, but they just aren't as awesome and memorable as the best tracks on their newest CD.

Finally, I picked up the CD of music "inspired by the movie Alice in Wonderland," Almost Alice. I got it for Tea Party by Kerli because Kerli is awesome, and I like the idea of the lyric "I'm a lady, futhermucker, have some class" occurring in a song for a PG-rated children's movie. The video for that song is terrifying though; it's basically twenty Lady Gagas having cake, and that's just way too many Ladies Gaga. But there's other good stuff on there too. Shinedown, a band I don't really care for, has a really excellent metal-ish song Her Name Is Alice on there, probably the best on the CD. And Welcome to Mystery by the Plain White T's is rather good too. As with any compilation album there's a lot of variance, but Almost Alice fits the movie appropriately.

Not the greatest batch of CDs, but a bunch of "decent enough." I got the latest from Mute Math and Coldplay and they're also both decent but sort of disappointing so far; I'm not yet ready to pass judgment though. I'm pretty excited about this four-disc Skyrim soundtrack coming in a couple weeks however!

Don't believe the bubble

2011-10-05T00:48:00.000-07:00

Back in high school I found myself in a three-hour car ride from Nebraska to Kansas with a group of teenagers from my church. I'd recently purchased the album Europop by Eiffel 65 (containing such hits as Blue (Da Ba Dee) and... well... that was really their only hit), and being the only person with the foresight to bring a cassette tape adapter and probably the only person who brought music with lyrics describing topics other than homicide and fornication, I was put in charge of providing music to all of the denizens of our fifteen-passenger van.

Overall Europop is about as G-rated and inoffensive as it gets, at least as long as you don't have something against cheesy electronic pop or vocoders. Perhaps the catchiest song on the album is Living in a Bubble, a song that teaches about the dangers of becoming rich and famous and finding that everything seems way better than it really is. About halfway through the song, the driver-slash-chaperone of the van became very audibly concerned when he noticed the lyrics. For example:

Don't believe the bubble cause it's nothing but a dream
And when it blows you'll be alone

The problem is that the singer is Italian (not French as the name might indicate) and the vocals are very distorted, and it sounds an awful lot like he's saying "don't believe the Bible," "the Bible's not reality," "it's a place of lies and hate," "famous all over from this shit to Mars," and so on. He wasn't the only one who thought I was corrupting the other poor teenagers in the van; a couple others were also pretty skeptical of me. But the song's called Living in a Bubble. Bubbles are something that you live in, metaphorically speaking, not bibles.

It took a bit of explaining but I eventually convinced him that I was indeed not the spawn of Satan trying to tempt his daughters into a world of blasphemy. And then on the trip home he requested "that bubble song" about half a dozen times.

The least special snowflakes

2011-09-17T19:00:00.000-07:00

I was curious which of my friends on Facebook have the most common names. The winners are those named John (including Jon and other variants)—I have fourteen friends with that name.

John: 14
Dan: 11
Matt: 11
Andy: 10
Brian: 10
David: 8
Joe: 6

Of course just because you share your first name with more than dozen other friends of mine doesn't mean you're not a special snowflake. It just means you're the least special snowflake.

The Coma That Failed

2011-09-17T18:57:00.000-07:00

The short version:
Kelly Clarkson—Breakaway: 6/10
Blue Stone—Breathe: 6/10
Cage the Elephant—Thank You Happy Birthday: 2/10
P!nk—Try This: 3/10
The Roots and John Legend—Wake Up!: 4/10
Kate Havnevik—Melankton: 6/10
Justin Timberlake—Justified: 5/10
Ratatat—LP3: 6/10
Ratatat—LP4: 7/10
Xploding Plastix—Devious Dan EP: 7/10

I'm not really hip with these American Idols and the Glees so I was a good half a decade behind on hearing Kelly Clarkson's Breakaway. I think it's decent; it's a pretty standard female pop-rock affair, heavier on the rock aspect than I was really expecting. The voice and style remind me more of Evanescence than I assumed it would. There's nothing outstanding on the disc but there are no terrible tracks either. I like Since U Been Gone, Gone, and Hear Me.

Breathe by Blue Stone is a pretty acceptable new age instrumental CD. A little bit above average. The musical style is utterly unremarkable and it's one of a thousand CDs from which you should shuffle the tracks together and nobody would notice. But it's pretty and soothing and nice to listen to. Traveler is the best track on the disc, and New Beginning is a pretty piano piece, and Forgiven is rather relaxing.

Thank You Happy Birthday is not a present for anyone. I rather enjoyed the debut CD from Cage the Elephant (the Borderlands theme song guys, if you recall); it was rough and intense and interesting. Their second CD is awful, one of the worst albums I've bought recently. The opening track Always Something is actually pretty decent, and Shake Me Down isn't bad either. The rest is all atonal, messy nonsense. Just so you don't listen to those two tracks and think to yourself that you should buy this CD, let me just link to Sell Yourself so you can get that idea out of your head quickly.

P!nk's Try This kinda sucks too. Certainly not as much as Thank You Happy Birthday but there's not much more to like on this one either. The whole album sounds just sort of boring and unrefined, like a subpar debut or a rushed sophomore slump. God Is a DJ is the best single on the CD, and Last to Know and Humble Neighborhoods are both okay, and that's just about it. Not worth owning at all.

The Roots and John Legend got together for a full-length album not long ago, Wake Up!, and it fits in that weird little corner of music that's decent but I still don't really want to listen to it. The opening track Hard Times is the best, and Little Ghetto Boy and Our Generation are the next two. None of the other tracks are all that special as far as I'm concerned, and there are a few that I just don't like at all.

I don't remember where I heard about Kate Havnevik or her first album Melankton, but it's not bad. Prolific electronic composer Guy Sigsworth (the non-Imogen Heap half of Frou Frou, and producer on many of the albums I own) provides the background for the CD, and does a fine job, though a lot of the tracks aren't super interesting. (If you've heard enough of his music there are several songs on here that you can immediately recognize as his thanks to that signature synthesizer he uses all the time.) Kate's voice is pretty but it seems a little too weak sometimes. It's sort of like what would happen if Enya got a drum machine. The (maddeningly mispronounced) Kaleidoscope is easily the best track, and Suckerlove is pretty good too. Travel in Time is probably third-place.

I also picked up Justin Timberlake's solo debut, Justified. As is the case for way too many CDs in this batch, it's merely decent. Rock Your Body is a great dance pop song, but the rest of the album is not up to par. Like I Love You is pretty decent, and Señorita gets some bonus points for being rather funny toward the end. Still not something that I'm really certain one needs to own, but I'm not too ashamed that I have a copy.

I picked up the terribly creatively named LP3 and LP4 by Ratatat to round out my collection, and their music has gotten increasingly better since the beginning. The basic style of instrumental songs focusing on an electric guitar and synthesizers is the same, but the later albums have become more and more varied and intriguing. Drugs and Bare Feast from LP4 are both a lot of fun to listen to, and Shempi and Falcon Jab from LP3 are cool too.

Finally, I resolved to purchase the digital-only Devious Dan EP by Xploding Plastix after hearing the first track, The Coma That Failed. It's long and it's mostly percussion and it sounds fantastic played loud, and I love how it builds up over the course of nine-minutes-plus. Pretend You Owe Me Nothing is great too. The CD was introduced as being similar in style to Amon Tobin's older music and I completely agree; Tobin's last two CDs have been lacking, and this EP is just what I was looking for. I'll definitely be checking out more from this guy.

Rocket Scientist

2011-08-28T02:10:00.000-07:00

The short version:
Florence + the Machine—Lungs: 7/10
New Politics—New Politics: 6/10
Dragonette—Fixin' to Thrill: 6/10
Hans Zimmer, Lorne Balfe, Borislav Slavov, Tilman Sillescu—Crysis 2: 8/10
Little Boots—Hands: 6/10
Mike Posner—31 Minutes to Takeoff: 6/10
Teddybears—Devil's Music: 9/10

I decided to pick up Florence + the Machine's debut album Lungs after enjoying Heavy in Your Arms from the Eclipse soundtrack. Overall it's pretty decent. The songs are all well-made; there's just something that I don't quite love that makes me not like this CD more than "above average." Is it the singer's slightly unconventional singing style? Do I resent that the album sounds like it's trying a little too hard to avoid being radio pop? I'm not really sure. Or maybe it's just that while I enjoy listening to it for a while, I don't really ever feel like listening to the whole album at once. Regardless, I sure do like Rabbit Heart, You've Got the Love, and Dog Days Are Over.

I got the self-titled New Politics debut CD as well, and my opinion is kind of the opposite of what I feel about Lungs: it's not a very good CD but it has a bunch of catchy rock music. Overall the album is a bit screamy for my tastes but My Love, Dignity, and Give Me Hope are all pretty pleasant to listen to.

Dragonette's Fixin' to Thrill just isn't as good as her first album Galore. The backing beats and melodies are all pretty solid though they don't match the quality of the previous album, but I guess my main complaint has to be with the vocals. Her voice just doesn't come through clearly, like the whole album was recorded while she had the flu or something. The title track and Liar are the best two, and Don't Be Funny is probably third place. (The lead singer looks pretty terrifying in the Fixin' to Thrill video. I fear she may be undead.)

Hans Zimmer's the big name on the Crysis 2 soundtrack, but he mostly just composed the theme for the game and most of the tracks on the disc are by Borislav Slavov and Tilman Sillescu, who do a great job with the bulk of the tracks. It's one of the best game soundtracks I own, and it's fantastic action movie music, with good variation between the grandiose and the tensely quiet. It fits the game extremely well, but much of it sounds good on its own as well. Insertion is one of a few Zimmer tracks that feature his main theme for the game. Unfortunately there are multiple issues of the album with different track listings, and apparently what some of them called Insertion is Intro on mine, and Insertion is a different track that I think is better. Spotify has the version I like. The best two others are New York - Aftermath and SOS New York. If you liked Crysis 2's music or like instrumental action movie music in general, I think it's definitely worth looking into the 2-disc set.

Something's... off about Little Boots' album Hands. The production and beats are for the most part quite good. I just don't like the singer's voice all that much. I sort of feel like I'm saying that a lot for this batch of CDs but it's very true. About half of the songs on this album are produced by Greg Kurstin of The Bird and the Bee and he's responsible for one of my favorites, the opening track New in Town. My other two favorites are from other producers, though: Remedy and Hearts Collide. Overall the album certainly isn't bad by any means, but I feel like it could have used stronger vocals on the other tracks, like Mathematics. Maybe I'll warm up to it more over time.

Mike Posner's 31 Minutes to Takeoff is a hard one to describe. Two of the tracks are just jaw-droppingly amazing, Cooler Than Me and Please Don't Go. I think I could listen to those two back and forth for like an hour and not get bored. The bassline and beat on each of those is absolutely gorgeous. But then it's hard for me to pick a third favorite; those two are just so much better than the rest of the album. I guess it'd be Déjà Vu (featuring Boyz II Men... no, really). Most of the other tracks are pretty disappointing after hearing the best singles. Three of the others are also produced by—that's right—Greg Kurstin, and his portion of those tracks is excellent as usual, but the vocals and lyrics just don't really stand out.

I hadn't heard of Teddybears until seeing their latest album Devil's Music featured on Spotify, and I bought the CD almost immediately. The first real track on the album, Rocket Scientist (featuring Eve), rocks my world. The lyrics and singing style remind me a bit of Robyn's Fembot, but this one's got more of a rock vibe. (Speaking of Robyn, she's got a track on here too.) Second best is Get Mama a House (featuring B.o.B), and then Crystal Meth Christian (featuring The Flaming Lips). (The original version of the album has Desmond Forster on Get Mama a House but the new US version is better.) It's not quite electronic dance music and it's not quite typical rock. Dance-rock perhaps? Is that a thing? Anyway, I love this CD.

Recycled content

2011-08-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I haven't been blogging as much recently is that all of my short posts have sort of migrated over to Facebook. I'd post that sort of thing here and let them just magically syndicate over there but then it would take a random time between 1 and 30 days for them to appear which isn't really practical. Anyway, just in case you follow me here but not there, here are some of the recent posts that I'm proud of. Someone recently accused me of taking illegal humor-enhancing drugs, which is just about the best compliment I've gotten in a very long time.

* * * * *

Who decided the spacing on belt holes? Why is there no setting between "intestinal discomfort" and "pants nearly fall off in the Best Buy parking lot?"

I really hope the City of Redmond is at least aware of the irony in sending out a survey to find out if people read the inserts that come with their water bill as an insert in their water bill.

Manager: My goal this week is to finish reviews, so soon I'll have some numbers for you.
Me: That's good. If possible I'd just like my numbers in a canvas bag with a dollar sign on the side.
[Later as I leave his office...]
Manager: By the way, flaw in your plan: you did not specify what you wanted in your bag.

Last night I dreamed that I bought a head of cabbage. I carried it around for a while but it was annoying because I didn't get a bag. And now you know why the phrase "in your wildest dreams" has little effect on me.

I hereby declare that new RPGs that satirize the clichés of old-school classic RPGs are themselves now cliché. Whoa.

This Betty Crocker cookbook is way better than my old Chris Crocker cookbook. Every recipe was like "LEAVE THE POT ROAST ALONE!!"

Every time I walk down the hall toward the bathroom and kitchen with a water bottle in my hand I get this strange urge to pee in it. In summary, don't steal my water bottle.

Now that hotel wi-fi is quickly becoming a standard feature, I hope that the new differentiator is how many waffle irons they have for public use. Yum.

Today I won Photoshop. I was cropping a picture and I thought to myself, "256x256 would be a good size for this. Nah, I'll just crop it freeform and see what size that is." Then I proceeded to draw a rectangle of exactly 256x256 pixels. UNSTOPPABLE.

King of Anything

2011-07-28T23:10:00.000-07:00

The short version:
Filter—The Very Best Things: 5/10
BT—These Hopeful Machines: 8/10
Janelle Monáe—The ArchAndroid: 6/10
Sara Bareilles—Kaleidoscope Heart: 7/10
Fauxliage—Fauxliage: 7/10
Amon Tobin—ISAM: 5/10
Lady Gaga—Born This Way: 7/10
Kidda—Going Up: 6/10
Ratatat—Classics: 6/10

I got Filter's best-of compilation The Very Best Things so I'd have a copy of Take a Picture and The Best Things, already having a copy of One from The X-Files: The Album. There's not much else to be happy about on the album besides Hey Man Nice Shot which is also decent. So it's got three great hits, a couple good songs, and some moderately awful crap. I'd only recommend it if you're as anal as I am about having things on CD and not just MP3s.

BT's These Hopeful Machines turned out to be way better than I expected. I guess it's a combination of house-techno and rock? I'm not really down with my electronic music lingo. I don't really consider myself much of a fan of house music—most of what I've heard sounds pretty lame and cheesy to me—but for the most part these tracks are interesting and sprawling and beautiful. And long. The shortest of my three favorites (Suddenly, Rose of Jericho, and Forget Me) is about eight minutes long.

Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid is some moderately weird-ass R&B. It's what I would expect R&B music to sound like in Blade Runner or The Fifth Element. In fact if you told me that Wondaland was playing in a club scene in some blockbuster sci-fi movie I would totally believe you. A little ahead of Wondaland are my two favorites, Cold War and Oh, Maker, which are a little less bizarre than things like Make the Bus. The album isn't all crazy, and at least I can't say it sounds like anything else. I just can't quite tell if it's closer to genius or insanity.

I got Kaleidoscope Heart by Sara Bareilles specifically for King of Anything, which is gloriously perfect adult contemporary and absolutely the best song on any of these albums. Watch the video, listen closely, and don't fall in love with it. I dare you. Uncharted is really great and Not Alone's not bad either.

So apparently Delerium had a side project with one of their favorite vocalists Leigh Nash from Sixpence None the Richer called Fauxliage, with one self-titled album. It's no different in style than other Delerium albums of the 2000s except she's the only vocalist. It's a bit bland though, and there aren't any truly excellent tracks. All the World, Let It Go, and Someday the Wind are my favorites, but nothing stands out in comparison to the various Delerium and Conjure One CDs I already have.

Amon Tobin's latest album ISAM is a huge disappointment. Tobin's no stranger to bizarre explorations of sound effects in his music, but the word "music" is beginning to be stretched a bit too far out of shape in this last CD. Journeyman, Lost and Found, and Kitty Cat are the best tracks, but none are really all that great, and then there are just WTF moments like Surge that leave me scratching my head.

Oh, and maybe you heard: Lady Gaga has a new CD, Born This Way. And it's relentlessly cheesy. It seems like half the album has already been released as singles, and atypically, none of my favorites are among them. The CD's not bad per se: Bloody Mary, Americano, and Government Hooker are all excellent and interesting and creative, for example. But some of the new hits like Born This Way and Hair are like an entire gay pride parade condensed into audio form, and while they're generally catchy, they also kind of make me throw up in my mouth a little. Not a good sign is that the special edition is 22 tracks and most of what's after track 8 (Bloody Mary) at best qualifies as "decent."

I picked up Kidda's album Going Up from a tipoff on Snow Patrol's Facebook page because the lead singer is the guest vocalist on the best track, Shining 1. The rest of the CD is more peppy and less low-key than that one—Strong Together and VIP are both rather upbeat and fun. The biggest problem is that those two tracks aren't much different than the remaining seven (ignoring a few terrible bonus remixes). It's all heavily-sampled and repetitive electronica. There's not enough variety to really keep my attention through the end.

I gave Ratatat another chance after not being too thrilled with their debut album, and from what I can tell their music has improved consistently and become more varied with each release. Classics is their second CD and it's a lot more pleasurable to listen to. It's still starting to try my patience by the end but there's nothing else like it that I'm aware of, and the more interesting beats let the guitar madness and solid songwriting shine though better than the last album. The highlights are Lex, Montanita, and Loud Pipes.

After those I've got a lot more to check out: my music queue's pretty long again for now. I've been listening to the Crysis 2 soundtrack which is also very good, and I've got a good variety of upcoming albums to keep me company.

(Sorry, no more album art for my music posts. Blogger makes it a huge pain to format and Facebook ignores the formatting anyway.)

Paulie Bleeker

2011-06-26T15:43:00.001-07:00

I'm pretty sure that the most useful thing I've ever learned from a movie is seeing Paulie Bleeker in Juno apply antiperspirant to his thighs before heading out for a run to prevent chafing. That was pretty helpful given how much we were walking in New York. Just sayin'.

Theses I wanna nail

2011-06-26T15:40:00.001-07:00

Pickup line for a Protestant trying to pick up a Catholic: "Baby, you should show me your church door 'cuz I got about 95 theses I wanna nail there."

Feel free to try it out and let me know how it works.

British birds

2011-06-22T19:37:00.000-07:00

I'm back from a week-long vacation in New York. I wrote a few posts on my phone while I was there about thoroughly unimportant crap that I thought I'd share. Here's the first:

* * * * *

Things are different here in New York. Or technically, Newark. Naming your city Newark next to a city named New York seems sort of like those low-budget lookalike DVDs like Transmorphers and the non-Disney version of Aladdin, meant to ensnare clueless grandmothers buying gifts and trick them into horribly disappointing their grandchildren on their birthdays and Christmas.

Anyway, hotels are different here: humans not the only visitors. There are some pretty chatty birds that like to hang out outside our window at 2:00am at night. The only justification for birds chirping at that hour is if they're from the UK and they haven't gotten over their bird-lag. I wish them a pleasant vacation and hope that they STFU.

My not-strictly-intentional hiatus

2011-06-10T16:10:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I was all about to break my not-strictly-intentional hiatus and post something cute and clever, but before the time I got to Blogger to write it I had completely forgotten what the post was going to be about. So, oops.

It's not that I don't love you. It's just that I've been kind of busy, and when that happens, not a lot of interesting things happen to me. I imagine I'll have something to write about in a couple weeks though. Just you watch.

Bulletproof

2011-04-21T01:37:00.000-07:00

The short version:
Deadly Avenger—Deep Red: 7/10
Sixpence None the Richer—Divine Discontent: 6/10
The Roots—How I Got Over: 7/10
Hyperstory—Hyperstory: 6/10
Arcade Fire—The Suburbs: 5/10
Ratatat—Ratatat: 4/10
La Roux—La Roux: 7/10
Holy Fuck—Latin: 6/10

I finally managed to find Deep Red by Deadly Avenger at a reasonable price, and it's pretty good electronic instrumental music. A few of the tracks have a sort of faux-orchestra vibe going, and they work well enough, but it sounds more obviously fake than some people who are better at that sort of thing. There's a some variety between the chill tracks and the hyper tracks, with a bit more of the former, and overall I think it works pretty well. My favorites are We Took Pelham, The Quest Part 2, and the Outro.

Remember Sixpence None the Richer? No? I had mostly forgotten about them but they were all over the radio back when I was working at Burger King. I decided to pick up one of their albums, Divine Discontent, and it's pretty. I like Leigh Nash's vocals in small doses, but I can't really make out much of what she says and after a while it makes it kind of hard for me to focus on anything else in the music. I've listened to this album several times and I feel like several of the songs are good, but I can't really remember which ones are which. It's like I just sort of subconsciously enjoy them. I dunno; it's weird. Check out Breathe Your Name, Still Burning, and Down and Out of Time.

The latest studio album from The Roots, How I Got Over, flows better from start to finish than any other rap album that I can think of, and it's actually pretty nice to listen to all in one stretch. Most of the individual tracks don't stand as well by themselves. Walk Alone is a great exception to that, and the heartfelt track Dear God 2.0 is a good song with a good video. Right On's not bad either.

Hyperstory's debut self-titled album is kind of like proto-Zero 7. The musical style is very similar, but it's not quite as refined—still, if you like the latter I think you'll like the former. At just half an hour it seems awfully short for an album, though. Check out A Happening, Something Good, and A Reckoning and see if it's your thing.

Arcade Fire's highly acclaimed The Suburbs is surely the right CD for someone but it's not the right one for me. I feel like a dozen scrawny guys with black plastic glasses are holding me down on a Seattle sidewalk repeatedly screaming "I'M INDIE! LOVE ME!" when I listen to this album. It revels in its completely standard nonstandardness, and I really can't stand the lead singer. The production quality of the CD is sort of weird; parts sound really rough, and others sound like they were definitely put together by someone who knows what they're doing. It's all very intentional, I'm sure, meant to further remind the listener of just how indie they are. All that said, I've certainly heard worse music, and Rococo, We Used to Wait, and Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) are all good stuff. Most of the rest is more like City with No Children, though, and makes me want to look for that skip track button.

Ratatat's self-titled debut really, really needs some guest artists, or they need to stick to being guest artists. They've got a dude with some mad synth guitar skillz and a dude who makes some phat beats, but they need some vocals or some other instruments. It just doesn't do it for me. Almost the entire album seems incomplete—creative, with interesting melodies and song structure, but more like experimental musical playgrounds than actual complete tracks. Sort of like those "string quartet tribute to..." albums, you get the sense that you're only getting part of the whole picture. Even the best tracks on there—Seventeen Years, Desert Eagle, and El Pico—suffer from this, but then there are half a dozen songs that all remind me of Cherry. From what I can tell, their more recent albums are notably better, so I'll look into those.

Yet another self-titled debut, La Roux is great 80s-ish dance music, but most of the CD sounds like a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl (...to which a friend of mine responded, "have you seen the album cover?"). The majority of the CD is in a bizarre female falsetto voice that really starts to grate on my nerves even as the beat gets me groovin'. My favorite track, Bulletproof, doesn't really show it, but in my second-favorite song In for the Kill it's very, very noticeable. In Reflections Are Protection it's sort of in-between. The beats are pretty well-done, but like in a lot of dance albums, they start to get repetitive by the end.

Looking for a great Mother's Day gift? Look no further than Latin by the delightfully-titled band Holy Fuck. If your mom loves alt-rock instrumental music as much as she loves the F-bomb she'll probably enjoy it. (I'm not really going anywhere with the mom thing; I'm just commenting on the band name.) I found out about the band from the video for Red Lights, which must have had a filming budget of tens and tens of dollars. It's repetitive but catchy. Latin America is probably the best track on the disc, and Stay Lit's worth checking out too. Ultimately it's similar in concept to Ratatat's album, and while I might argue that Ratatat might have the edge on melodic structure or other things that music professors are looking for, Latin has a lot more interesting variation in the sound and is definitely more pleasant to listen to.

News flash

2011-04-20T23:53:00.000-07:00

News flash: Portal 2 is astounding, just like everyone knew it would be.

The writing and voice acting are just perfect, which is especially impressive considering that at no point in the game do you ever actually meet another human being. Even in the best games there are usually times when you can tell that there are actors somewhere reading lines, but not so here. Toward the beginning of the game when the puzzles are easy enough that you solve them rather quickly, I'd hardly have enough time between lines of dialogue to stop grinning. My face was getting sore.

There were a couple parts in one particular section of the game where I spent more time than I'd have liked searching every pixel of the level for white patches to shoot, but besides a couple small missteps, it's about as close to perfect as a game gets, and in a class of its own.

Gaming

2011-04-18T01:57:00.000-07:00

In case you're curious where I've been, I've been playing video games pretty prolifically recently. It's just that a lot of top stuff that I'd been waiting on is all converging at the beginning of this year for some reason or another, and, well, I have my priorities straight.

In one sentence...

Bulletstorm is awesome fun for anyone who thinks that their first-person shooters are getting a little too serious.
Crysis 2 is not as good as the first Crysis but it looks spectacular, the combat is still interesting, and it's very cinematic.
Dragon Age 2 starts off pretty terrible and then becomes rather good with an unconventional story for a fantasy RPG—but it's still obsessed with BLOOODDDD MAAAGGGIC.
Hoard is a fun, light co-op game.
I don't know what everyone's complaining about with Civilization V; I thought it was perfectly amusing.
Might and Magic Clash of Heroes is really fantastic, and anyone who enjoyed Puzzle Quest is going to love it.
You Don't Know Jack is back, and it's even better than it was in the past.
Red Alert 3 Uprising is mediocre: it has similar high production quality to the original game, but many of the missions don't seem to be particularly clever.
I can't believe I put seven hours into The Witcher before I fully realized just how terrible it is.

Oh yeah, and Portal 2 is coming out in like twenty-four hours.

A real relief

2011-03-10T22:27:00.001-08:00

This new shower curtain is "100% guaranteed" not to mildew. That's a real relief. My last one was only 85% guaranteed, and when I called customer service they said they were sorry, but I was one of the other 15%.

Call Your Girlfriend

2011-02-24T21:58:00.000-08:00

The short version:
KT Tunstall—Tiger Suit: 8/10
Hooverphonic—The Night Before: 4/10
Shakira—Sale el Sol: 6/10
N.E.R.D.—Nothing: 4/10
Scissor Sisters—Night Work: 8/10
Jack Wall—Mass Effect soundtrack: 6/10
Newsboys—Born Again: 6/10
Robyn—Body Talk: 8/10

I've been very pleased with KT Tunstall's third album Tiger Suit. Her last album Drastic Fantastic made it seem like she was trying to adapt her singer-songwriter style to more pop sensibilities but wasn't really sure how. She figured out how. Tiger Suit is much more radio-friendly than either of her previous two albums but has all of the charm and fun of her first album: branching out without selling out. It's a good brand of smart pop, and I can recommend it to anyone who liked KT Tunstall's first as well as some people who might not have liked her previous work but might enjoy it now that it's just a bit more flashy. Glamour Puss, Uummannaq Song, and Difficulty are my favorites here.

One of my long-time favorite bands Hooverphonic from Belgium just put out another disc after replacing their lead singer with someone who looks and sounds an awful lot like their last singer. The Night Before isn't that good, though. Their last album was sort of an alternative-rock album which felt weird from a trip-hop band, and this one is even more awkward and bland. I hope they make a retreat and get back more of their old soul and style, because I don't think I want to buy another CD like this. Anger Never Dies, The Night Before (video), and Identical Twin are the best tracks on here, but it's all pretty skippable.

Shakira's got another mostly-Spanish CD, Sale el Sol. It's decent. Generally her voice sounds better in her Spanish songs, but many of the songs here just aren't that strong. By far my favorite on the album is Rabiosa, and while it's present in both Spanish and English I actually prefer the English version simply because the guest vocalist Pitbull is much better than El Cata on the Spanish version. I've listened to one of Pitbull's CDs and I wasn't too impressed (though his song I Know You Want Me as seen on the game Dance Central is pretty good), but there's something very erotically appealing about how he sings on Rabiosa. The Spanish version of Loca and Devoción are both good too.

N.E.R.D.'s got a new album out too titled Nothing, which is somewhere around what you should pay for it. I don't care that much about any of the tracks on it, but Help Me, Nothing on You, and Not-N-Fun are decent. The rest is just like a bunch of B-sides that seem to focus mostly on the sorts of things that I think are annoying about quite a few of their songs.

There's a new Scissor Sisters CD out as well with vaguely NSFW cover art of a basically naked ass, which is adequate preparation for just how unsafe for work most of the songs are on Night Work. I'd be embarrassed if most people came into my office if the excellent track Whole New Way were playing, with more buttsecks innuendo than you can shake a naked ass at. This just has to be the gayest CD I own. Besides the aforementioned track Any Which Way and Invisible Light are both really good, but if you've liked any of the earlier Scissor Sisters songs you're gonna like just about everything on this disc.

Jason got me the Mass Effect soundtrack by Jack Wall for Christmas since I loved the game and the sequel and both had pretty good music. Mass Effect 2 had a more solid score than the first game, but both were quite fitting. As an album on its own it's not super interesting, but it's good sci-fi electronic background music nonetheless. My favorites are Breeding Ground, Vigil, and From the Wreckage.

Ancient Christian pop group Newsboys lost their lead singer since their last album and got a new guy for the appropriately titled Born Again. It's definitely their most rock-focused album so far, which is okay, but there are some pretty cringingly cheesy songs on here—I find them kind of annoying, and anyone who wasn't raised in a religious household is going to abhor them. That said, the title track, a cover of DC Talk's Jesus Freak, and One Shot are all pretty good, and the album overall isn't terrible.

I found out about Robyn's album Body Talk from Rolling Stone while I was in the waiting room for my MRI, and it was rather a fortuitous find because it's a really excellent dance CD. (It's sold as three EPs or a single LP including most of the tracks from the EPs.) It's not complex and it doesn't need to be. Call Your Girlfriend is a simple enough dance song and my favorite on the disc, and I challenge anyone to listen to it from the beginning and not burst out grinning when it hits ~2:30. (I still can't avoid smiling there.) Dancing on My Own (video) and Fembot are both also really good, and there are plenty of good party-friendly tracks on here with only two obnoxiously repetitive songs that Jason makes me skip every time. Definitely worth picking up if you like dance music. I've been through her earlier work and it seems that this is a departure; I wasn't nearly as interested in her past CDs as this one, which is too bad, but I'm still looking forward to her next one.

The Grammys have given me some ideas for stuff to check out soon, but for now I've still got a dozen albums or so to listen to over the next few months.

What it feels like to be elderly

2011-02-13T23:04:00.000-08:00

I injured my back a few weeks ago while lifting weights, and it's been bothering me on and off again since then. It was really, really bad for the first couple days: I couldn't bend over or twist my back at all, and sitting down and standing up was a challenge. I hurt myself on Tuesday and was feeling pretty fine by the next Saturday, but now it's been three weeks and I can still feel a little bit of it. Supposedly it takes at least four weeks to completely heal, and the doctor tested me in myriad ways and is certain I didn't do any permanent damage, so nothing's out of the ordinary just yet. But I imagine that was roughly what it feels like to be elderly—grunting and sighing every time I sat down or stood up for those first couple days, dreading the next time I had to get up to go pee.

Can't wait.

Payday loan or the mafia

2011-02-09T22:17:00.000-08:00

Of the $2,359.69 I paid on my home loans last month, $404.77 went to principal. If I had just told you that 83% of my payment was lost to interest you might have assumed I was talking about a payday loan or the mafia.

Sensors wired to your body

2011-01-17T23:16:00.000-08:00

I had a sleep study done at the end of last year on the insistence of my neurologist. I'd heard they were awful, but what could be more fun than sleeping in a lab with thirty sensors wired to your body under constant supervision of night vision cameras? Anyway, the results came back negative for any noteworthy sleep disorders. I kick my legs more than is typical during the night, but my breathing and heart rate and all of my other vitals were normal. I snored that night, but that might have been due to a stuffy nose that day and the world's most ironically uncomfortable bed.

So with sleep disorders crossed off the list, I'm having an MRI of my head and neck taken in a week or so. I've never had one of those before either, so I'm sure that will be yet another fantastic, joyful experience. I'm also completely off caffeine at this point—not even a little bit. I don't actually care about the caffeine, but being banned from it is annoying for two reasons: first, restaurants don't serve much that's caffeine-free besides water, and water with a meal is just depressing. And second, Coke Zero doesn't come in a caffeine-free version, and I'd mostly switched over to that from Diet Coke. So, I'm hating that.

I'm also on the maximum dosage of my medication. I'm starting to notice the side effects, the most obnoxious of which is weight gain. I've put on a few pounds. The decreased metabolism also means I'm more tired than usual.

All that and I'm still having headaches at least every other day—before, it was pretty rare that I'd have a headache that persisted through the ibuprofen. I'm still holding onto hope that all these tests and trials will figure something out.

Martha Spomer's household tip # 00271

2011-01-17T22:43:00.000-08:00

You can undo many of the effects of cherry Chap Stick being put through a load of laundry by scrubbing the waxy blotches with Dawn Ultra concentrated dishwashing liquid. Oxi Clean stain remover helped to remove some of the pink discoloration, but I had the best overall results with Dawn. Tide and Shout were not effective.

Today's household tip is brought to you by a very sorry boyfriend who tends to leave things in his pockets.

Antidepressant side effects

2011-01-06T11:17:00.000-08:00

Today at the neurologist's:

Doctor: So at that dosage, nortriptyline can have some antidepressant side effects. You're not noticing any, are you?
Me: (confused) What would that even mean? Would I feel, like, extra happy?
Doctor: Well, no, it wouldn't make you happier, unless you already had a mood disorder.
Me: (confused stare)
Doctor: (confused stare) So... no, then.

I'm still unsure what an antidepressant side effect is. But if I've been more pleasant than usual please let me know; I should probably report it to my doctor immediately.

Derezzed

2010-12-25T22:06:00.000-08:00

The short version:
Kid Cudi—Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager: 6/10
Katy Perry—Teenage Dream: 9/10
Morcheeba—Blood like Lemonade: 3/10
Linkin Park—A Thousand Suns: 8/10
Kanye West—My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: 7/10
Conjure One—Exilarch: 7/10
Daft Punk—Tron: Legacy: 7/10
Evanescence—The Open Door: 6/10

I've been listening to music a lot recently—actually, if you judge what I've been working on based on what I'm writing about, you'd think that's all I've been doing, since my last post was also a music post not even three weeks ago and I've finished eight CDs since then. The real answer, of course, is that World of Warcraft 4.0 "The Shattering" has launched and I've been playing the Cataclysm expansion with pretty much all of my spare time. World of Warcraft gets honorable mention from me for including something ridiculous like eight hours of updated and reorchestrated music for the existing game in a patch, not including the several new hours of music for the expansion content. There are twelve minutes just for the login screen, which is a medley of perhaps some of the best music ever recorded for a game. I approve.

Anyway, after loving Kid Cudi's debut album, I picked up the recent followup Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager, and ouch, what a disappointment. It sounds like a disc of B-sides from the first one and the one good single he came up with since then, Erase Me. Maybe that's what it is. Besides that single, Scott Mescudi vs. the World and Mr. Rager are the best here. Much of the rest seems unrefined or boring. The beats are overall still very solid, but the melodies need help. Overall the CD isn't awful, but it does make me a bit sad.

I feel some amount of shame for loving Katy Perry's second CD, Teenage Dream, but it's just too fun to hate it. Some of the lyrics are terrible and some are just fine, and a couple just make me grin and facepalm, like rhyming "ginger ale" with "epic fail." Having not listened to it yet I laughed when I saw that a Katy Perry CD was up for a Grammy, and now I understand completely; it's a masterpiece of cheesy, cheery pop music. It's up against Kanye West's and Eminem's latest albums, and I gotta say, out of those three at least, it's the clear winner for me. Since I typically force myself to pick three favorites I'll go with Last Friday Night, Firework, and Circle the Drain, but this would still be a pretty good CD if all three of those were gone, and there aren't too many albums you can say that for.

And then Morcheeba's Blood like Lemonade. Their last couple discs were excellent, and after being disappointed by one of their sleepy earlier works, I was really looking forward to their latest. But ugh, it's a return to the style of their earlier music! This CD is the official music of naptime. You could dare someone to not fall asleep listening to it and maybe make some money. The best on here are the title track, Easier Said than Done, and Self Made Man, but I could really do without all of them. I wasn't necessarily expecting another amazing CD like Dive Deep, but this one gets a frowny-face from me.

Linkin Park has done something interesting with A Thousand Suns. The marketing blurb for the disc is that "they weren't making an album...", and I'm sure that's all BS. But it's a departure nonetheless. I was actually disappointed at first, but after a couple listens I've come to really like it. The single Waiting for the End is a really great song—a lot lighter than their other hits and a perfect way to showcase "hey we sound a little different." I've noticed that most of my favorite tracks from Linkin Park are the ones that are heavy on the Mike Shinoda, the Japanese rapper in the group, and Waiting for the End and When They Come for Me fit the bill. I also rather like Robot Boy, which features their lead singer Chester, but at no point in the song is he screaming, which is a really nice touch. The band was even kind enough to separate all of the interludes and filler into their own tracks so they (and the hideous acoustic song The Messenger) can be skipped by those of us who like to shuffle their playlists. Not all Linkin Park fans are going to like this CD, but I do recommend giving it a couple chances before you pass it up.

Kanye West's latest is also a departure, and while there are some definite good things to come out of it, the difference is that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy's low points are really low. (It's a shame too, because his previous album 808s and Heartbreak was a departure too, and it was a really good one.) The opening track Dark Fantasy is quite good and gets you on the edge of your seat for the weirdness that's to come. Things go pretty well from there and you're soon treated to Power, another great track. Then things start to get kind of mixed. There are some good parts and some bad ones, and you're starting to get kind of annoyed by the CD when suddenly you hear a lone piano note tapped repeatedly and he launches into the terribly brilliant highlight of the album: Runaway. There's a lot to like in the album, but there are definite parts to hate, and unfortunately those are inextricably weaved into the rest. The biggest WTF is probably Blame Game, which starts out pretty and relaxed and then suddenly switches into an obnoxious and sudden je ne sais quoi from about 2:30 to 3:30, and then the last two and a half minutes are a baffling cavalcade of obscenities ranted by Chris Rock. Why? Some of it comes down to personal preference; I have a personal preference to avoid songs with lyrics about choking women during sex, for example. If you're a fan of rap music you should probably listen to this CD—but be prepared: it gets weird.

A CD that probably could have stood to be a little more weird is Conjure One's Exilarch. Conjure One and Delerium share a band member, and they've put out pretty similar music for like a decade now. It would be nice to hear something a bit more different, but Exilarch is a pleasing more-of-the-same. The opening track Like Ice is gorgeous, and Zephyr and Run for Cover are both great too. The rest is good, but they tread dangerously close to generica, and I honestly couldn't tell you which album or artist several of them were from. Worth picking up if you like Delerium and Conjure One.

Daft Punk seem like the perfect band to score Tron: Legacy—the robot costumes that the band performs in even fit the aesthetic of the film (which I haven't seen yet, so no spoilers). As a soundtrack I'm sure it works fantastically though: it's moody, futuristic, and alternates between grand and understated. It all blends together nicely, which is good for a soundtrack but not usually too great for an album; little about this CD puts me in a "gotta play this now!" mood. The one track that does is Derezzed, which is pretty much exactly what the music for a futuristic video game stadium should sound like. End of Line is rather good too, and you could put the lovely track Recognizer in the background of just about any scene in Mass Effect 2 and nobody would notice the difference. Recommended for Daft Punk fans and fans of sci-fi movie scores.

Finally, I listened to Evanescence's The Open Door for a while, and it's fairly decent. It also all sounds pretty same-y, and similar to their first album Fallen, but I think that's more due to girl-metal not being one of my standard musical genres. Sweet Sacrifice, Call Me When You're Sober, and Lacrymosa are good.

I'm excited about a new Kerli album coming out soonish. The first single Army of Love is interesting.

Pursuit of Happiness

2010-12-07T00:39:00.000-08:00

The short version:
Dragonette—Galore: 9/10
Morcheeba—Who Can You Trust: 3/10
B.o.B.—The Adventures of Bobby Ray: 8/10
Kid Cudi—Man on the Moon I: The End of Day: 9/10
Goo Goo Dolls—Dizzy Up the Girl: 5/10

Dragonette is a band consisting of the instrumentalist from The Bird and the Bee and a woman trying to beat Lady Gaga in a whoriest lyrics competition. If that sounds kind of awesome, then I think that we're in agreement; the appropriately-named Galore is quite a good album. The disc flows well from start to finish, but each song has a little different feel to it. My favorite track is the opener I Get Around, and True Believer's quite good too. Black Limousine, another song about being a filthy whore, has a really great vocal character when she sings about her sugar daddy buying her something that she wanted, and she "wanted pink but got red instead... (sigh) that's all they had..." If you like The Bird and the Bee, or simply don't like it because it's a little too pretty and wholesome, then this may be the disc for you.

Having adored their last couple albums, I picked up some early 1996 work by Morcheeba, Who Can You Trust. I don't really see any reason to own it other than to complete a collection or for a history lesson on the beginnings of trip-hop. The best tracks are Trigger Hippie, Tape Loop, and End Theme, and none of them are that great. You'll fall asleep five minutes in. Definitely pass.

I was pleasantly surprised by B.o.B.'s The Adventures of Bobby Ray. It's some fairly standard pop rap, but it's well-produced. I can't honestly tell whether B.o.B. is above average in talent or not, but whoever he's got working for him can definitely craft some interesting music out of his vocals. The opener Don't Let Me Fall, the big single Nothin' on You, and Ghost in the Machine are all really fantastic. Some of the other tracks are pretty cliché, but for the most part they still sound pretty good.

More than any other CD recently I haven't been able to put down Kid Cudi's Man on the Moon I: The End of Day. It's possibly the best instrumentation of any rap CD that I have, and I can listen to it more than once in a row without getting bored. Pursuit of Happiness (with a fantastic video) is absolutely amazing, and My World and Enter Galactic are great too, but there are still several other excellent tracks on the album beyond those. Definitely worth taking a look for anyone who's interested in hip-hop music, and possibly even for fans of electronica.

Finally, I also picked up the fairly ancient Dizzy Up the Girl by the Goo Goo Dolls. It's okay. Only Broadway (Is Dark Tonight), Iris, and Slide are any good, and I'd heard them already. The rest is quite meh. But, it was cheap, and those tracks are worth having; if you don't like those three high school pop hits, then it's definitely passable.

My phone came with a free month of Zune Pass, so I've been using that pretty extensively to preview albums and weed out the uninteresting ones. So far it has prevented me from buying ten albums already!

Pass:
Bruno Mars—Doo-Wops and Hooligans
Drake—So Far Gone
Drake—Thank Me Later
Missy Elliott—Miss E… So Addictive
Obi Best—Capades
Slang—More Talk About Tonight
Tricky—Knowle West Boy
Yuval Ron—In Between the Heartbeat
Yuval Ron—In the Shallows
Yuval Ron—Tree of Life

Leafy green

2010-12-03T11:56:00.000-08:00

At the gym today I was sort of spacing out and was trying to think of what you could call a mild case of Asperger's Syndrome. I was thinking of healthier alternatives to burgers (since pergers are not a thing). The first thing that came to mind was a burger wrap—a lot of places around here offer lettuce-wrapped burgers for people who are avoiding carbs. That would make it something like Lettuce-wrapped Asperger's or Asperger wrap's or something. Sucks; try again. The next thing that came to mind was a salad, which yields Ass-salad syndrome. Conclusion: not a productive daydreaming topic. Back to lifting.

One might call it overkill

2010-12-02T14:59:00.000-08:00

While I'm at work I'm running Outlook on my main workstation, and I'm also running Outlook on my home machine, which I connect to through Remote Desktop. My new phone (the LG Quantum, which I absolutely adore) also syncs with the server. Now when I have a meeting coming up, I get three simultaneous popups: on my work machine, on my home machine, and on my phone. One might call it overkill. It'd be nice if I could have it set up to stagger: show the notification first on this machine, and only if I don't respond within a minute should it also appear on my other devices. That'd be sweet. But one thing's for certain... I'm never gonna miss a meeting now.

On that note...

Word association

2010-11-30T23:00:00.000-08:00

Looking over the stats for my blog, I can see that one of the top search terms people used to find my blog is "jailbait." Fantastic. Other gems include "urination habits," "900193" (my most commented-on post!), and "get rid of cacodemon." Most of the websites that referred traffic to mine are casinos and link spam sites, which probably do that specifically so their addresses fill up my referrer logs.

Thankful

2010-11-30T22:49:00.000-08:00

Jason and I are back from Nebraska for Thanksgiving, where he finally got to meet the family. Jason is of course very likable, and I think it all went pretty well. School is in full swing so we didn't stay for very long, but everyone seemed to get along. They were excited to see me finally have someone to bring to the table, even if some of the more ultraconservative relatives (as opposed to the simply conservative ones) don't particularly approve of Jason's... maleness.

I wasn't really sure how it would go down. I wasn't exactly expecting catastrophe, but it was a pretty best-case-scenario sort of deal. There was only really a hint of uneasiness in the air; as far as my parents are concerned, having a boyfriend is an ethical violation that reflects poorly on my moral character. After some lengthy talks with my dad on the subject a year ago I'm not exactly certain where we ended up; either he gave up on trying to convince me to see things his way, or he resigned to simply saying "whatever" and absolving himself of it, or something else. But I made it rather clear that things were what they were, and that attempting to change my mind was hopeless, and we just sort of stopped talking about it. It's not as if I weighed the pros and cons and decided to be inconveniently weird and cut my dating pool down by nine tenths. There are plenty of things that I'll argue endlessly, but that one seemed sort of like arguing about me being white or about if red is actually red.

The ethics of lost Skittles

2010-11-19T18:30:00.000-08:00

As a person with a nigh unquenchable thirst for carbonated soft drinks, I am around vending machines many, many times a day, even though I actually purchase things from them very infrequently. Anyone who's used a vending machine is familiar with the situation in which you buy something, the machine whirrs for a bit, and then you receive nothing because it's stuck. Of course, from time to time, the opposite happens: you buy an ice cream sandwich, and you get two ice cream sandwiches, probably because some poor schmuck before you paid for one but didn't get it, and didn't have enough change to buy a second one. I began thinking: is it moral to take the second item that you didn't pay for?

First, that item belongs to someone else. Almost certainly a faceless corporation of some sort, but even that faceless corporation is owned by individuals. On some technical level, the item doesn't belong to you, so taking it is stealing. On the other hand, if you leave the item in the bin, the chances are extremely high that the next person to use that machine will take it, and the net effect on the rightful owner of that candy is exactly the same. One could even perhaps make an argument that since you're at least as likely to lose out due to vending machine errors than to gain from them, you're just balancing out the universe, righting some nonspecific wrong that most likely occurred in the past. That argument is fairly weak to begin with, especially if you consider that the last time you bought something from a vending machine and didn't get it the machine was probably owned by someone else.

It seems to me that for an act to be immoral, then it probably has to be due to a choice that you've made. The difference between murder and killing in self-defense is that in the latter situation, you had "no choice" but to kill the other person in order to save your own life. I put "no choice" in quotes because of course you did have a choice—you could have let them kill you to avoid taking another person's life. But, sacrificing yourself to prevent a would-be murderer from dying is not what most people would call a practical choice, and in the grand scheme of things, not particularly beneficial to society anyway. The vast majority of people would consider murder to be immoral, but I think that most would say that killing purely in self-defense is moral. So then it seems that for an act to be immoral, it has to be a choice you made that had a more ethical alternative. (Of course, things are more complex than that: in my opinion, there are plenty of situations in which you have no moral choices of action because of prior immoral choices that you've made, but I don't think that's relevant to the tasty treat at hand.)

That word practical is what I think makes taking a Charleston Chew that you didn't pay for morally acceptable. Since it's my stance that leaving the candy accomplishes nothing for the righteous forces of good since someone else will surely take it anyway, the remaining course of action is to, what, call the company that runs the vending machine and ask how you can return the candy to them? That's not practical: it's a waste of time for both you and the company given the small value of the item. They probably don't even have a procedure in place for how to accept returns of candy that was vended accidentally anyway. Are there really any other options then? Take the candy and don't feel guilty.

But what if it's not a pack of Juicy Fruit, but rather an iPod at one of those bizarre Best Buy vending machines that they have in airports? The scenario is nearly the same, except that for an item of that value, Best Buy probably does want the item back. The difference is the price. In my gut, it seems that the most moral thing to do if that happens is to take the item and find a phone number, and then either give the item to airport security or call that number and ask Best Buy what to do. That's what I would do. I would feel bad about keeping it and then exchanging it for something else in a store later.

The ethics of lost Skittles seem to score a point for moral relativism.

Reading my mind and the mind of everyone else

2010-11-17T00:33:00.000-08:00

For the past few months it's become more and more painfully obvious just how fractured communication is for me these days. I already have people I talk to through AIM, people that use Facebook chat, people I only email, people who only respond to Facebook messages, and even a few people I have to actually call. Now I have people who want text messages, which actually probably encompasses some of the above people and I've just been avoiding it because my old phone is terrible and it takes an eternity to text on it. I think texting is what made it really obvious for me: I have way too many communication methods, none of them work together, and I have to remember which people want what. It's starting to drive me nuts.

I'd resolved to write a post about it today, and then out of the blue this week Facebook announced a new service they're building that's supposed to somehow combine IM, email, texting, and Facebook messages into a single entity, as if they'd somehow been reading my mind and the mind of everyone else who's desperately sick of it all. I'm curious as to how well it will all work out. I really want something like that to work out. I'd really love it if I could text or AIM or Facebook chat with people from either my phone or any of my computers and not have to care about which one of those things I'm doing, and easily start a conversation on one and pick it up on another. That would be pretty amazing, actually.

Lethargy

2010-11-07T22:15:00.000-08:00

I don't know what it is exactly: either the medicine that I'm taking, or just the effect of being off ibuprofen now, but I've been having a terrible time focusing on anything after eight or nine or so this past week. The past couple days, though, I haven't been worrying too much about my calorie intake, and I've been mostly fine. It seems that I can choose to either work on my headaches or my weight, but not both at the same time, lest my body collapse under the stress. A few nights ago I was feeling like I could barely move, and I couldn't type or really think of anything other than just sitting and watching 30 Rock with Jason. It was sort of like how I feel with the flu, but without the other symptoms. It was strange and unsettling. Certainly my body has been under stress before, whether it be school, or work, or workouts, but this was a new feeling.

This weekend I upped my calorie intake and I've been feeling mostly okay. I'll see how this goes.

Disgust and/or horror

2010-11-07T15:53:00.000-08:00

I should keep statistics on how people respond when they first find out that I'm from Nebraska. But, that's work, and it's much easier to just make numbers up. I imagine the resulting chart would look something like this:

UPDATE: I realize now that this chart also describes peoples' reactions to me saying I play World of Warcraft if you replace shock with "What server?" and confusion with "What class?"...

The collection

2010-11-03T21:32:00.000-07:00

People occasionally ask me about the size of my music collection. Here's how it stands as of now if you're curious:

CDs: about 650
Tracks: about 17,000
Size on disk: 214 GB

Most of those tracks are all ripped from my CD collection, though I have various free tracks, songs extracted from game files, and so on—probably a couple thousand. Everything from my CD collection is now ripped in a lossless format so that it's full CD quality, unlike MP3. I just finished re-ripping all of my CDs to that format; most of them were originally MP3s. I don't recall exactly when I began that project, but it was probably eight months or so ago.

Whatever, I'm not the brain doctor

2010-11-02T17:43:00.000-07:00

One of the more disconcerting things about the doctor visits I've had regarding my headaches is how each doctor has told me very different things about my headaches. Among the things my doctors have not agreed on include: whether or not I have migraines, whether or not it is okay long-term to take ibuprofen all day every day, whether or not the headaches are related to caffeine, whether or not they're related to exercise, whether they're a symptom of dehydration, and so on. Just about the only things that come to mind that they can agree on is that they might be caused by a sleep disorder, and that it's probably not worthwhile to have a head scan.

Right now my new doctor (replacing my old one because his receptionist is intolerably unresponsive and unpleasant) has me on a drug to deaden my pain while I get off of ibuprofen entirely again. I've done this before, and it didn't work, but he thinks that after at least a month without ibuprofen, my pain will be lessened significantly. The new replacement drug (an antidepressant) is a bit more effective than the one that the last doctor prescribed (an anti-seizure drug), but by this afternoon I was in quite a bit of pain again and it's distracting enough that I can no longer really concentrate on anything. I've got vicodin to make up the difference. That's right, he gave me vicodin to cure me of a dependence on a pain killer. I'm having Requiem for a Dream flashbacks. But whatever, I'm not the brain doctor.

So I guess I'll be seeing how that works out shortly. It's either that or stare blankly at the wall for the rest of the evening after I lose the ability to think straight. (I could also go fishing in WoW, which requires approximately the same mental engagement as staring blankly at the wall.)

Move it

2010-11-02T12:22:00.000-07:00

Two days into the week, two people parking in my reserved spot. Pretty sure that next time I'm not going to be in a "fair warning, your car is about to be towed so you'd better move it" sort of mood.

Objective reviews of medical professionals

2010-11-01T23:25:00.000-07:00

New doctor quick review based on first visit regarding my constant headaches:

CONS
Makes me stop taking ibuprofen

PROS
Is rather cute
Talks to me in a manner that makes it seem as if he doesn't think I'm an idiot
Gives me vicodin

NEUTRAL
Is absolutely convinced that I have migraines even though every previous doctor was absolutely convinced that I did not have migraines

Ain't No Rest for the Wicked

2010-11-01T22:47:00.000-07:00

The short version:
Maroon 5—Hands All Over: 7/10
Lady Gaga—The Fame Monster: 7/10
Collective Soul—7even Year Itch: 6/10
Cage the Elephant—Cage the Elephant: 7/10
Massive Attack—Heligoland: 5/10
Wheatus—Wheatus: 4/10
Two Fingers—Two Fingers: 6/10

I picked up Maroon 5's latest album Hands All Over. Realistically, if you liked their first two, you'll like this one, and if you didn't, you won't—the style is essentially the same. The opening track Misery has a neat sort of funky electronic vibe, but it doesn't really signal any real changes to the band's sound. Runaway and No Curtain Call are great too. There are a bunch of good songs on here, including a couple nice acoustic versions, but at some point I'm going to want something a little different after three CDs of fairly interchangeable music. In a few months I'll have no idea which disc any given track is even from.

Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster is sort of like an expansion pack for The Fame. It's more of the same, a little lower quality overall but pretty close. If you have The Fame you should also have The Fame Monster, and if you don't, you shouldn't. It's got Bad Romance, Telephone, and Alejandro.

Collective Soul's greatest hits album 7even Year Itch was a walk down memory lane. I guess I hadn't really realized just how many years it's been since high school until I found that Jason wasn't even familiar with the band or any of the various big hits on here: Heavy, The World I Know, and several others. There are other good songs, including Why Pt. 2, and then a bunch of okay ones. You get a lot of decent pop-rock music for your money, and it's some nice variety for my collection.

I picked up Cage the Elephant's self-titled debut CD after hearing the wonderfully infectious Ain't No Rest for the Wicked, the theme song for the game Borderlands which Jason and I had been enjoying co-op for several weeks. The opening track In One Ear is also excellent, and Back Stabbin' Betty is a lot of fun too. It's very energetic rock music, and I found it a refreshing change of pace. The other tracks on the disc are not quite as insanely catchy as my top two, but it's still fun to listen to from start to finish.

Massive Attack also has a new CD out, Heligoland. Much of their music is pretty slow and dark, and their new work is no exception. I like Pray for Rain, Girl I Love You, and Atlas Air, and there isn't really anything that's particularly bad, but it gets repetitive at times and isn't exactly brimming with musical energy. It probably wouldn't have really been worth it if I weren't already collecting their music.

In a strange mood I decided to pick up the self-titled CD by Wheatus. It's not something that I'd want to listen to very often, but it's sort of amusing occasionally if you're in the right punk-ish frame of mind. I got the CD for Teenage Dirtbag which is quite good, and then Truffles and Hump 'em 'n' Dump 'em are both decent, apostrophe overload notwithstanding.

Finally, I picked up the debut album from Two Fingers, a collaboration between one of my favorite artists Amon Tobin and Doubleclick, producing drum-and-bass tracks that guest vocalists rap on. It's an odd disc. The musical style isn't exactly the same as Amon Tobin's previous work, but it's similar. Some of the rap is questionable, and I'm wondering if I'd have been happier with an instrumental copy of the album instead. But, it's certainly not terrible. My favorites are That Girl, Straw Men, and What You Know. (On a side note, I do recommend Starkey's Universe EP for fans of electronic music. It's free if you sign up for a newsletter.)

Sort of a so-so batch of music this time. I tried out some new bands and styles with mixed results. Maybe next time will be better.

Knee-jerk

2010-10-27T00:22:00.000-07:00

I tend to notice when people are looking at me. Or, at least I think I do. When I feel like someone ia looking at me, I'll instinctively look back at them. I can't help it. Whether it's the first time or the fiftieth time they've looked toward me that day, I am compelled to look back. I can't make myself stop.

I know that some other people do the same, because sometimes I get stuck in this awkward infinite loop where I look at someone, then they look back, and then we both quickly look away, but then they look back again, and then I look back at them, and then we just seem to stare at each other again and again over the course of the day or night. Even though I know it's not just me, I feel very weird whenever it happens.

Cat people

2010-10-19T17:31:00.000-07:00

A friend shared Cat People Are People, Too from the New York Times on Facebook, and I found this quote rather striking:

That’s because their pets’ lack of social need taps straight into our worst fears as the human inhabitants of New York. Cats, after all, don’t have other cat friends. You can’t take them to the cat run. Cats and their owners are on a private, exclusive loop of affection. Thus cats have become symbolic of a community eschewed and a hyper-engagement with oneself. They represent the profound danger of growing so independent in New York that it’s not merely that you don’t need anyone — it’s that you don’t know how to need anyone.

Remove the parts about New York (to which I've never been) and cats (which I do not have), and it's still a poignant few sentences. Paraphrasing myself from a couple years ago when Jason and I broke up—well, temporarily—I realized that until then I had always seen myself living alone, independent, and being happy about it. And before dating Jason I think I would have been perfectly happy doing so. But since then I either learned something about myself, or something changed. I wonder now if I didn't know how to need someone then. Is that what changed?

(I consider myself a "cat person," but I don't have any because I am allergic to them and don't want to clean up after them.)

Make me want to slap you hard across the face

2010-10-14T23:35:00.000-07:00

When I worked at the deli (Russ's Market on 66th and O, Lincoln, NE), some of the people I hated the most were the people who thought that they were clever and then got angry when they found out that they weren't. Every time we would have the 8-piece fried chicken on sale for eight bucks, a few people would come in thinking they were brilliant and ask for eight chicken breasts. I'd tell them that the special was for two of each type of piece and you couldn't substitute, and then they'd get angry as if they (and only they) had discovered this super-secret loophole and I would be obligated to give them the deal they thought they were getting. (Wings were 79¢ and breasts were $1.69, so obviously we wouldn't substitute breasts in place of wings.)

Hand-battering chicken was already the worst, and when it was on sale we'd need someone (that would be me) doing it pretty much non-stop. Asking for a ridiculous deal on top of the sale price is how you make me want to slap you hard across the face.

But at least working there helped train my anger management skills.

Voicemail

2010-10-08T17:07:00.000-07:00

I have learned that setting "Do not leave me voicemail. I will not respond to you in a timely fashion" as my voicemail greeting is surprisingly ineffective.

The healthy range

2010-10-05T15:51:00.000-07:00

On the weight loss front I'm making slow progress. I'm still sitting at about 205, which means that I'm right around where I was four months ago. I did put on a few pounds and then lose them again, but the weight has stayed relatively constant. On the other hand, I've definitely still lost some fat and gained some muscle. It's hard to say exactly how much since I don't have a lot of hard measurements, but my clothes are continuing to shrink, and I'm continuing to increase my strength. So, on some level, I'm trading fat for muscle. I can feel a difference. That's obviously still an improvement, but it's not a flashy one.

I've been dieting rather strictly for a couple months now, and it sucks as much as always. Honestly, with the amount I'm exercising and how little I'm eating, I'm not sure what exactly is going on anymore, unless I'm building more muscle than I think I am. I'm going to meet with my dietitian again soon and see what she thinks is up.

I got my latest numbers taken today along with my flu shot, and they put me at 19.3% body fat, which is finally in the "healthy" range, for the first time ever. Below 10% is unhealthy; 10% would mean losing 23 more pounds. If I gained muscle along the way and dropped my total body weight by 10 or 15 pounds, I think I'd be in pretty good shape. I'll have to see what my dietitian and trainer have to say.

AT&T

2010-09-28T15:48:00.000-07:00

Really soon here I should be getting a new Windows Phone 7. I'm pretty excited about it: from the little I've played with one, it made the iPhone look like a relic. The problem is that Windows Phone 7, like the iPhone, is launching as a GSM-only phone, which AT&T and not Verizon. (Verizon phones will be coming someday, but not for a while.) I'm a current Verizon customer and I really like the service, but I also would really like an amazing new phone. I was with AT&T for a while and it was terrible. The service was abysmal and the cost was far higher than what I pay now. Apparently, though, over the last year they've gotten better—incredibly better—especially in this area. I've decided over the past few days that I'd be willing to give them another chance. Jason's on AT&T and he can actually even receive phone calls, which is way better than I used to get when I was on their network. The problem with giving them another chance is, of course, if I choose poorly and they still suck, I'm stuck with them for a long time.

Of course that's not news. That's just the way phones work in the US. It's awful and plenty of people despise it, though it does result in lower-cost phones up front since it effectively ends up being a payment plan. I think this may just be one of those places where the free market sort of failed. Until all of the major carriers allow people to freely move between networks, they only have to be competitive every two years when peoples' contracts run out. Even if contracts weren't in the mix, carriers' technologies aren't terribly compatible, so I couldn't use an iPhone from AT&T on Verizon's network, for example.

I do wonder how much better the European model works, if at all. As I understand it, the technology there is all roughly the same, and people own their phones outright without lengthy contracts, so it's much easier to switch carriers, forcing them to compete constantly on providing a good service. That's very appealing to me. I mean, that's supposed to be the big benefit of capitalism, right? In the US it seems like it's one of those situations where the free market didn't produce a situation where companies are truly competing with each other. Mobile phone service is just good enough where it seems that nobody can win out by being radically and phenomenally better. If a carrier came out with a high-quality service that cost less than half as much as their competitors, I'm sure people would switch, but if you save five bucks a month or get a slightly cooler phone, most people aren't going to notice. But I really feel that if they were in a situation where people could and would switch for smaller service improvements like that, mobile service would improve at a faster rate than it is right now.

I suppose that as the demand for technology services arises over the next decade, we're going to run into a lot more situations like this where I'll feel like the free market is failing me. I like Facebook, both the service it provides me as well as the UI. But nobody's really competing with Facebook, at least not in their core business. No one can right now. Maybe eventually I'll stop liking them, and then I won't have any other options to switch to and I'll be upset. It certainly could happen. Right now they don't have to let anyone compete with them. Their network is theirs and they don't have to share. I don't think that the government forcing Facebook to open up their social network, or forcing AT&T and Verizon to abolish contracts and share network technology is the best solution. But I do think that a (much) better economist-legislator than me could probably come up with a solution that better encourages companies to behave in ways that ensure future competition without resorting to dictatorship or ridiculous rulings and fines (cough Internet Explorer cough). Getting stuck with a service provider you don't like for multiple years is not good for capitalism.

Intimidated

2010-09-07T20:43:00.000-07:00

But enough about ads and music and all that stuff. The real reason you read this thing is for embarrassing stories about ways in which my brain is broken.
[This is a long post. tl;dr: "I'm hilariously shy."]

This past Sunday night seems like a perfect example that might help you to understand a little bit what it's like to be me: I don't know if it's simply introversion, or something more unusual. Jason and I went to a post-PAX meetup at a bistro in Seattle. Upon arriving, I'm in an unfamiliar place around people I've never met before, and immediately I could think of nothing but finding my ex-coworker there so that I'd be around another person that I already knew. The fact that we all shared common interests—we were all gay men who love video and board games—was not enough to console me. For that first minute I was already in a state of unease. Something in the back of my mind was flooding my thoughts with messages. Why are you here? You know what happens when you're around new people. It never ends well. You should go. GO. You shouldn't be here.

But of course we didn't leave, and it wasn't more than a minute or so until we met up with that ex-coworker, and then I became a lot more comfortable. I didn't really leave his side other than to order a drink for a while. I stood there talking to him and Jason, observing the other people around me playing Rock Band, but not able to start a conversation. Why would you start a new conversation? You don't know these people, after all! I don't know what subconscious thing prevented me from talking to them. Did I fear the rejection of them not being interested in what I had to say? I actually think I'm kinda awesome and smart and pretty fun to talk to, so I don't feel like it's for lack of self-esteem. I went to this event with the explicit purpose of meeting people, but as much as I wanted to, I couldn't do it. It was like I was paralyzed from the brain down. I was trying to talk to these people, but I couldn't open my mouth. Something was stopping me and I didn't know what.

That sort of thing makes me extremely uncomfortable. I'm generally in rather good control of myself. I don't swear unintentionally, I don't become violent when I'm angry, and I can calm myself down or cheer myself up at will. (People who observe me in action behave as if I have some sort of meditative superpower.) The idea that my behavior is not completely under my control is actually pretty terrifying. People talk about how hard it is to quit smoking, and whether I want to or not part of me always thinks of those people as just being weak-willed, but come to think of it, I probably have a pretty good grasp of how even simple and positive actions can be blocked subconsciously for unknown reasons.

Not too long after we arrived, someone proposed a game of Uno, and I countered with Coloretto, which I'd brought with me. As soon as people were talking to me, I could effortlessly interact with them, but if he hadn't spoken up, I wouldn't have either. We got five players and a couple tables and started setting things up. I introduced myself, explained the rules, and the game progressed as if we were all friends. Once we had a purpose—to play Coloretto—my conversational difficulties dissolved entirely.

But Jason and that ex-coworker weren't technically the only people I knew there. I had also talked to one of the other guys before: not in person, only online. When I saw a few minutes after arriving that he was there, I planned on going over to say hi and start a conversation. I planned this for four hours and it never happened. Many times I had completely resolved and decided that I was going to walk over there and talk to him, maybe shake his hand or something; say "hey, I'm Travis, remember me? ...nice to meet you." I couldn't actually do it. I would turn in that direction and tell my legs to start moving, and they'd remain motionless. I was physically unable to go over and talk to him. And this wasn't even someone new: I knew his name, the games he plays, his Starcraft II character's name, and all sorts of things that one could start a small-talk conversation on.

Several factors conspired to bolster my shyness this time. At first he was in a group, and it would have been perhaps rude to interrupt a conversation just to introduce myself. But many people in this sort of social situation will immediately leave one group and join another effortlessly. This was a conscious block: I told myself that if I waited for him to be alone I'd never have a chance to talk, so I'd just have to go mingle and wait for a chance to talk, and that was that. I got over it. I already knew this person and I'd come up with a plan, so it'd be easy to go chat. Simple! Of course that didn't happen.

Another problem was that this guy is attractive. Like, really hot... Mr. April 2011 kind of hot. I have a really hard time talking to attractive people. It's not even solely people I am actually attracted to myself: I was at a party about a year ago with a quite good-looking girl I'd talked with like a hundred times before. She works at the gym and we talk all the time there and she's very lovely and friendly, and at this party it was challenging to bring myself to talk to her. (I don't recall if I ever actually did.) Why can I talk to her at the gym? I don't have to; I could easily just be as cold and rude as the other patrons there. I never had any trouble at all talking to people working at Burger King or the grocery store checkout lanes or the deli or Microsoft. Something about parties and bars in particular must scare me, because I don't seem to have the same problem at a workplace.

It seems that with sufficient willpower, I can overcome a few of my difficulties talking to people (unknown people, unknown places, parties/bars, attractive people), but not all of them, and when that willpower falls short, I end up just standing there, seemingly paralyzed. I try to move my legs to walk toward someone, try to open my mouth to talk to them, but nothing happens, and it starts to freak me out. I have enough weird and adorable little personality quirks that I've come to love and accept, but this one in particular angers and scares me. I hate it. I don't want to be this way.

Advertising credit

2010-09-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

Facebook decided to give me a $50 advertising credit, so I used it to run this ad in September:

The total campaign cost about $46 (so free after my credit). In that time, the ad was shown 172,423 times, received 42 clicks, giving a response rate of 0.024%. Facebook ads work on a bidding system where you offer to pay up to a certain amount per click, and the ads that offer to pay more get shown more often. I offered up to $1.50, and on average they charged me $1.08 per click. (As an experiment, I'm going to try offering only 20 cents per click and see if the ad gets shown at all.) Then, once you get up to your daily budget (I set a whopping $7), they stop showing your ad until the next day, and then people who bid less than you start having their ads shown more often.

They let you target the ad to pretty much whoever you want. I chose to target only English-speaking women in the US between ages 30 and 60 who have at least a bachelor's degree and have "high school teacher," "middle school teacher," "teaching," "youth group," or "youth ministry" listed on their profiles, because based on the emails I receive, those are the people who use my product. After a day I decided to remove the gender restriction.

Overall it's a pretty neat little system. I don't have any prior experience in advertising, but Facebook gave me more than I expected and it was all really easy to understand. What I don't know is how terrible of a response rate 0.024% is. I mean, obviously, that seems really low. I know people barely ever click ads, but still, 1 out of every 4,000 people seems ridiculous. I don't know if I targeted the ad poorly, or if it's just not visually striking or appealing, or what.

The one takeaway was that if I really were paying $1.08 per click, I'd have to charge significantly more than that just to break even on my ad if this were for profit. If I assumed that 1 in 10 people who clicked the ad actually bought something, which still seems generous, I'd have to charge $11 to even break even on advertising, and (just as a reference) depending on who you ask, the average cost of a successful iPhone app these days is more like $4, and the developer gets like $2.50 out of that. Looking at those numbers, I don't see how a "little guy" making a small, simple product can really profit from Facebook ads. Experimenting with a really low per-click bid may change my perspective.*

* UPDATE: After another week or so, the lowest bid that I could find that would cause my ad to be shown at all was 75¢. At the final end of the campaign, my total was 173,962 impressions, 62,519 of which were for unique users. I got exactly 50 clicks, all unique users, so .08% of the people who saw the ad clicked it.

We Are Born

2010-09-04T00:20:00.000-07:00

The short version:
Augustana—Can't Love, Can't Hurt: 3/10
Ozomatli—Coming Up (EP): 5/10
Justin Nozuka—Holly: 5/10
Dynamite Hack—Superfast: 5/10
Gotan Project—Tango 3.0: 7/10
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse soundtrack: 7/10
Sia—We Are Born: 9/10
Gorillaz—Plastic Beach: 4/10
Hans Zimmer—Inception: 7/10

I've been listening to a lot of different CDs recently, partly because most of them aren't that good and it took a while to find things to like about them. I'd picked up another Augustana CD, Can't Love, Can't Hurt, when I got the last one, and I probably shouldn't have, but those accursed low prices enticed me. It wasn't worth it. It's bland elevator rock. The best tracks on here are Sweet and Low, I Still Ain't Over You, and Hey Now, and none of them are that good.

I got an EP from Latin band Ozomatli, Coming Up, and it's decent, but nothing special. It's not very expensive and you get a few worthwhile tracks, but it's not something anyone really needs, either. The best songs are Esa Morena and a live rendition of Ya Viene el Sol, and some of the rest are kind of annoyingly repetitive.

I got the album Holly by Justin Nozuka after a free Amazon MP3 download of the pretty decent single Criminal, but I guess I should have waited until there were samples of the rest of the tracks online, because they're a letdown. Down in a Cold Dirty Well and After Tonight are pretty decent too, but the rest is not really my style, sort of a white-boy blues in a voice that sounds awfully similar to a less perky Jason Mraz.

And then there was Dynamite Hack's Superfast, which was a case of "I'd already heard all the great songs on here"; there were a few other okay ones and the rest were pretty bland. The main single Anyway is excellent somewhat punkish rock, and the weird alternate slow version at the end of the album by a band member's little sister is strangely good too. They've also got a cover of Boyz-N-The Hood that's pretty hilarious and has a great video. But, the rest isn't superb, or at least it's so much not my style of music that I can't find much to be interested in.

The third album Tango 3.0 from a group I really like, Gotan Project, arrived a few weeks back, and it's better than any of those other ones so far, but it's a little phoned-in. Their previous two albums were significantly better (the first one in particular is pretty amazing), but this one seems to be lacking some of that soul. Peligro, Tu Misterio, and Érase una Vez are all fun. I'd recommend this one if you like this tango-fusion music, but it's not an overwhelming recommendation.

After seeing all of the artists that I like on it, I finally broke down and got the soundtrack to The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, and was pleasantly surprised. The songs fit together pretty well stylistically, and there's a lot to like. I'm always annoyed at having to buy some random compilation CD to get a track or two I want instead of just getting that on a normal single-artist album, but this one ended up being worth the purchase. Songs of note include Metric—Eclipse (All Yours), Florence and the Machine—Heavy, Sia—My Love, The Black Keys—Chop and Change, and Cee-Lo Green—What Part of Forever. (Interestingly, Bat for Lashes and Muse are two of the three artists I got the album for, and their songs aren't even favorites.)

The best one out of the bunch was Sia's latest, We Are Born. It's great; it's definitely her most poppy CD to date, but it's just as smart and creative as her previous work, if not more. I love The Fight, Clap Your Hands, and Bring Night, and it's an album I can listen to twice in a row and not hate it. If you like Sia's previous work or just interesting pop-styled music in general, I'd recommend it.

The latest Gorillaz album Plastic Beach is sort of painful. The best tracks on it aren't that great (Superfast Jellyfish, Rhinestone Eyes, Some Kind of Nature), and there are some terribly obnoxious ones like Pirate Jet and Sweepstakes. There are interesting and creative beats and sounds like you'd expect from a Gorillaz album, but whether or not it succeeds as a sound effects CD, it's not good listening. Their first two were considerably better.

Finally, I picked up Hans Zimmer's soundtrack for Inception. When I saw the movie I was in awe at how well the music fit, but I was unsure of how well it would work as a standalone CD. It turns out that it works... okay. The pacing of the album makes it impossible for the whole thing to fit whatever mood I'm in all at once, but yet the tracks themselves make the most sense as a collective. Even if you liked the music in the movie as much as I did I don't think it's worthwhile to pick up the album. That said, Dream Is Collapsing, Mombasa, and Time are all great tracks and sound good on their own.

Could have been a better couple months. I'm going to need to replenish my stock of new music soon.

The Emerald Princesses

2010-08-28T00:45:00.000-07:00

Aboard the Emerald Princess there was a nightly event on the schedule called the "LGBT get-together" to help gay singles and couples meet the others aboard. Overall there were something like sixteen of us that showed up, out of a couple thousand passengers. The event itself wasn't anything other than a place to meet where there would be free champagne, but it was interesting to meet up with other couples, and it was reassuring to have a group of people to keep coming back to each night to contrast with the fleeting meetings with random people throughout the week. We ate dinner several times with the group in addition to the get-togethers, so we got to know each other well.

The group was pretty diverse, with men and women ranging from retirees to businesspeople to students (though strongly tending to the former), from connoisseurs of five hundred dollar shirts to connoisseurs of random anonymous sex. It made for an interesting base for conversation, even if it did drift into the predictable gay stereotypes a little too often (fashion, shopping, sex). I nicknamed our team the Emerald Princesses.

I had pretty low expectations about those LGBT get-togethers. I'm often annoyed by gay people; flamboyance gets on my nerves, vapid and fake people drive me nuts, and I really don't have any interest in talking about shoes. Maybe the experience helped improve my tolerance for gay people, which I realize sounds absurd. After the first get-together I was wondering if I wanted to go to the next one, but by the end I wasn't even considering skipping. After wearing down those obnoxious stereotype façades I got to know the people behind them, and it was fun and gave me some interesting perspectives that I otherwise wouldn't have had. Now I've met someone who's been to the home of Michael Jackson. I'd hardly talked to any retired couples outside my family at length before, let alone any gay retired couples who might have insight into what things might be like for me in several decades. And now I've had the experience of meeting someone who would one moment tell me about the orgies that occur on gay-only cruises with the excitement of a sixteen-year-old boy, only to tell us all how important family and monogamy were to him minutes later.

The fact that he had a very obvious crush on me is not particularly relevant, I think.

Laziness truly knows no bounds

2010-08-27T23:25:00.000-07:00

I get my groceries delivered by Amazon on Saturdays, so on Fridays I move the grocery bins that I keep on the side of my house to the front door so the guy can pick them up. I just went out to put them there and found myself very slightly annoyed that I had to go all the way outside for a few seconds just so I'll have groceries picked out, put in boxes, driven to my home, and delivered to my doorstep tomorrow. Apparently laziness truly knows no bounds. In a couple decades I'll be annoyed when Diet Coke isn't delivered directly to my refrigerator.

#pleaserobme

2010-08-27T23:11:00.000-07:00

I wonder if an efficient way for criminals to easily identify houses where the owners aren't home would be to look for people who left their trash cans out for an extra day after everyone else on their block took them back in. You could drive through a neighborhood and scout burglary targets more quickly that way than actually lurking around and watching for movement.

Then again, I was home almost all day today and my trash cans are still outside, so...

The blind date meal plan

2010-08-11T22:45:00.000-07:00

So, Jason and I are back from a cruise to the Caribbean, which excuses my extended blogging absence. It was fun, hot, luxurious, pricey, and without practical access to the internet. That doesn’t really make a good story, though, so I won’t bore you with every detail. (I’ve got photos of the cruise and ship if you’re interested.)

* * *

One thing about the cruise that I thought that I would detest and actually didn’t mind at all was that I was almost always surrounded by people. There would be the occasional moment when I would be alone or nearly so when I’d get up and watch a sunrise, or when I’d just wander around the upper decks of the ship looking around, but for the most part, there were generally crew and passengers everywhere I looked and every place I went. That’s not even mentioning the swarms and crowds that were present at every port. But somehow this all did not set off any of my introversion alarms.

I imagine that I found all these people unusually tolerable because I didn’t have to interact with them. There were thousands of people on the ship, all doing their own thing. They were on vacation, and I was on vacation, and while we happened to be taking our vacations on the same gargantuan floating city with a population greater than most towns in Nebraska, they were fairly separate vacations. I’d see hundreds of random new people any given time I’d leave my room, and yet most of them I would never see again. I got to know some people from dinners and get-togethers and I’d see them around from time to time, but these cases were an unusual (though fun) exception.

None of that explains why I enjoyed having meals with randomly selected people, an experience that I assume is basically the same as Chatroulette with an all-you-can-eat menu in place of the graphic live nudity. If you’re on the “anytime dining” plan, you show up in one of the fancy dining rooms whenever you feel like it, and you can either eat by yourself or with friends, or alternately with whoever else seemed to be hungry at the time. I found that blind date meal plan to be strangely compelling. It fit the cruise concept of a shared vacation with total strangers perfectly, and while certainly not every person I met for a meal was interesting or insightful, it gave me a less terrifying way to meet people. I met a tattooed and pierced mother and daughter pair from England, an engineer for Ford, a mechanical engineer and his family from just outside Paris who spoke little English, and of course a whole slew of ultrarepublican retired people from Florida who go on a few Caribbean cruises a year. I’ll never see them again or talk to them again, but for some reason I enjoyed being forced to get to know them.

I’ve long assumed that I would find living in a big-city urban environment to be quite distasteful, and this overall pleasant experience has made me question that assumption. I will still, however, maintain for the record that I hate meeting new people and small talk and those sorts of things.

Rebound

2010-07-23T17:49:00.000-07:00

I went to see a neurologist about the headaches I've been having for the past few years. His hope was that my headaches at this point are actually just a "rebound" response to having been on ibuprofen for so long—being on ibuprofen is my normal state, so when I'm not taking it, I'm worse off than normal. So, for a little longer than a week I've been off it, for the most part, only having a couple when my head's been hurting really badly. He gave me some prescription seizure medicine that's supposed to make my headaches less "spiky," but not actually eliminate the pain, and I've been taking that.

So far, no luck. I feel terrible all the time, and I've been absolutely miserable since then. The medication he's given me does nothing or next to nothing, and without the ibuprofen my pounding, burning head makes it nearly impossible to be productive. I've doubled the dosage (yes, Mom, with doctor permission) and haven't noticed any difference. I'm going to continue taking the pills until my samples run out a day or two before I leave for vacation, and at that point, assuming no real improvement, I'm back to ibuprofen, unless he prescribes something new.

As a treatment option, "just be in constant distracting pain for the next couple weeks and see if that fixes things," sucks.

Jailbait car wash

2010-07-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

A weekend ago Jason and I went on a camping trip with some of the guys from his fraternity, and I enjoyed the scenic drive from Seattle to Wenatchee National Forest. One of the scenic portions actually started before we were on the open highway, just as we left the greater Seattle/Tacoma metro area, in Monroe. We were paused at a stop light and I noticed a fundraising car wash on the other side of the road, with a couple of attractive guys advertising it. Jason and I were amused until our other passenger helpfully pointed out that their signs contained the words "youth camp." I decided that "jailbait car wash" was a funny phrase anyway.

It's a nice area, but as a campground it sucks, at least compared to my myriad camping experiences of years past. Almost all campgrounds I've been to on the budget-conscious family vacations of my life have been in places where each campsite is relatively secluded by trees. This place was like an open dirt field with a couple trees here and there, which seemed a bit strange given that it was in a forest. You could hear and see every campsite in the area: every crying baby, every barking dog, and every obnoxious neighbor who loudly bangs pots with what could generously be referred to as "rhythm" over a background of generic Latin music for hours and hours at a time.

I think of camping categorizes it as what you do when a motel or hotel or cabin is too expensive, which is entirely consistent with my childhood experience. Almost all family vacations involved camping, and for the most part, we were just there because it was cheaper, and that money saved could be used toward other things on the vacation. I can see the potential for entertainment value in "roughing it" from time to time, but sleeping in a tent with a cooler of drinks and food, within easy walking distance of sinks or even a convenience store, is not "roughing it" for me to derive any entertainment value, instead squarely situated in what I would just call "inconvenience." For me, the aspects of camping that are fun—mostly, hanging out with a group of people for an extended period of time—are more fun when actual camping is not involved. (I will concede, however, that camping does definitely have the upper hand over cabins and hotels for the fabrication of s'mores.)

But, our campsite was just like half a mile away from the rather pretty Lake Wenatchee, which was nice, if ice cold. The mosquitoes thought it was nice too, and we had a lively discussion that involved me being bitten about fifty times. Our last night there, the sky was perfectly clear around midnight, and the view of the night sky from the lake was gorgeous and memorable. That, and hanging around the campfire for hours at a time talking, are the sort of experiences worth reliving to me, not the sleeping-on-rocks-and-dirt part.

Tootsie Rolls are the devil

2010-06-29T15:21:00.000-07:00

A week and a half ago, Jason and I had a party over at our place. Whilst buying snacks for said party, I picked up a bag of Tootsie Rolls and a bag of Starburst. They were placed in a bowl less centrally located than other snacks, and as a result there was quite a bit left over.

This is a problem. Tootsie Rolls are the devil.

Only having one Tootsie Roll or Starburst or other small candy is restraint. After all, my desire is to eat a ton of them, so only having one or two is self-control. It takes no effort to pick one up and eat one since I can do it on the way to someplace else, and it gives me a small burst of happiness. Unfortunately, it ends up being an issue of exercising restraint a dozen times a day. Few places in my house are so remote that I will not pass by them endlessly, when getting drinks, dinner, going to the bathroom, or whatever else. When you pass by an object of confectionery desire a dozen times in a day, having one or two small candies becomes significant—effectively by the end of the day you've eaten a candy bar.

To pick a fairly round number, 250 additional calories a day is noticeable. That would be a pound of fat gained every other week! We're bombarded effectively constantly by delicious things in easy reach, and doing a really good job of barely eating any of them is still not a good plan. It's not enough to simply exercise restraint, in the same way that putting a 90% effort into losing weight simply isn't effective. Those sorts of occasional treats may be acceptable if you're just trying to stay at your same weight, but losing weight is really, really hard, and it makes little sense to put in 90% of the effort and get 10% of the results. I'm annoyed that I've been doing this for almost two years, lost more than 70 pounds, and I still have to keep reminding myself of these things.

(Luckily, the Tootsie Rolls are gone; there weren't that many. Some evil Starburst are still left.)

To lose weight in a reasonable amount of time, I need to be hardcore about it, and not be "mostly hardcore," which is how I respond these days when people ask how serious I am about losing weight. If I'm to lose more weight, I'm going to have to do what I did when I was really shedding the pounds—eat horrible, healthy food, and make no exceptions or excuses. I'm going on vacation in a few weeks, and when I return, I think it's time to go back to eating leaves and berries and chicken breasts. It'd almost be a good thing if I gained a couple of pounds on vacation—it would be a much bigger motivation to get serious than this general sense of wishing I were losing weight more quickly.

You know the people

2010-06-24T09:19:00.000-07:00

I have a hard time understanding those people who always refer to cats or dogs as a "he" or a "she" regardless of the animal's gender. You know the people I'm talking about. You correct them every time for a while, but they never learn, and eventually you just sigh and give up.

Grace: And this is our new puppy. He's a dalmatian.
Everett: What's her name?
Grace: Well, actually, he's a boy. His name is Rex.
Everett: When did you get her?
Grace: (sigh) ...

I've assumed that these people do it because they had a childhood cat or dog and it was a girl so now they call all cats and dogs "she." I don't know if there's any truth in that; I guess I should just ask them next time.

Expressive

2010-06-14T17:00:00.000-07:00

Jason and I tend to talk about characteristics that we find attractive in people rather often. One thing that I've been pondering recently is that one of the most important characteristics to me is a person's expressiveness—how effective they are at communicating their emotions simply by moving their eyes and cheeks and lips. I simply tend to enjoy the company of people who have expressive faces much more than others. This isn't quite the same as how cheery someone is; a person can be annoyed or exhibit dry, deadpan wit (another quality I admire greatly) and still have an expressive face: for example, I find Michael Bluth from Arrested Development (Jason Bateman) to be extremely likeable in that even when he's frustrated and annoyed (which is most of the show), his face is very communicative.

There's a point where one can be too flamboyantly expressive, and I find that to be extremely unpleasant. I think that it's primarily because at a certain point the expressions lose their authenticity. It's likely similar to the uncanny valley phenomenon, where people respond well to increasingly lifelike depictions of things, but at a certain point of near-life (prosthetic hands, corpses, not-quite-realistic 3D simulations of humans), people are repulsed. Similarly, at some point, it becomes evident that the emotions being expressed are not genuine. It is painfully difficult for me to imagine that someone as ridiculously bubbly as Richard Simmons is not just trying to put on a show. At some level, perhaps it feels like dishonesty, and it causes me to avoid that person.

Perhaps it's a desirable characteristic to me because it's something I aspire to. I feel like I'm rather unskilled at picking up on apparently-obvious emotional and social cues, and I try to be better about providing those cues myself, though I don't think I always do a good job at it. People used to tell me that they thought I was depressed all the time because I usually have a blank look on my face. This always annoyed me, because I'm a very happy person and have a very positive outlook on live, even though I tend to be pessimistic or at least realistic in my expectations of things, which is a conflict that confuses people and is a topic for another day. I don't get that much anymore, so maybe I've gotten better.

So a way that you can become more likable and attractive to me is to make faces. Make your face look silly if you're feeling silly, or sad if you're looking sad. People with constantly changing faces intrigue me, but you don't have to look like a cartoon. In most of my favorite portrait photos that I've taken of people, the subject is not visibly happy or sad, but still has an interesting, intriguing look on their face.

I don't mean "attractiveness" simply in the sexual sense, though certainly if you're already my type, your facial expressions can really make a difference in how I perceive you. Facial expressions can amplify all sorts of positive aspects—cuteness, wit, and good ol'-fashioned sexiness. They can make intelligent people seem smarter. They make me want to talk to you and learn more about what you're thinking.

Battery life

2010-06-12T00:07:00.000-07:00

I guess that you can say a product has good battery life if it lasts for more than three years of continuous use and you didn't even realize that it took batteries in the first place.

(My thermostat)

Mildly delicious

2010-06-11T17:06:00.001-07:00

Weight loss progress has been really slow for me lately. I'm still losing weight, but not very quickly. It's just so hard to lose weight when you're only giving it 90%. I think that I need to go back to putting all my effort into it, and that'll probably be easier now that Jason is off school for the summer. He and I have been trying to eat more healthy, and I think that him being home more frequently will eliminate some of the excuses that I've been making when I've cheated and eaten something mildly delicious, which is of course a no-no.

I'm at 205 pounds now, which is 73 down from the original "starting weight" I was using to track my weight loss initially. In six more pounds I'll finally hit the top end of "normal" BMI, and I'll officially no longer be overweight. There's definitely still more that I should lose at that point, but it would be a great milestone to pass.

Friends of friends

2010-06-11T16:41:00.000-07:00

One of the things about Facebook that intrigues me is how you can see certain activity of friends of your own friends. (In my case, this is extended somewhat by the fact that I often see Jason on Facebook, which causes me to see things that I normally wouldn't see on my own account, but it's a similar situation.) The result of it is that I begin to recognize names and pictures of people that I've never met before. Last night I was at one of Jason's fraternity's parties, and I met someone who I wasn't certain if I'd ever met before. I'd seen him on Facebook, so I knew his name and what he looked like and other small tidbits, but I didn't know for sure if I'd ever seen him in person. (I had a feeling that I hadn't, and that turned out to be correct. Turns out he's a cool guy. I guess it wouldn't have made a good post if he sucked.)

Certainly there have been many times in my life where I wasn't sure if I was meeting someone for the first time or not, but in many of those cases I'm usually wondering whether I truly hadn't met them, or I had and they just hadn't made an impression on me. I guess the most similar preexisting social situation before this Facebook phenomenon is the scenario in which you meet someone's spouse or significant other after having heard of them several times before, but even in that situation, you generally haven't been seeing pictures of them beforehand.

I'm pretty terrible with names and faces, and Facebook actually helps with that too. It tests me with flash cards of a sort a little bit every day. There have been people that I've worked with for months for whom I still can't remember their name all the time, yet certain random people I don't know on Facebook I can recall in a snap. (This is easier at work now because I get photos of people who send me email, right in Outlook.)

For a shy, introverted person like me, this is one of the cooler parts of Facebook. One of the hardest social barriers I have to pass is getting from knowing nothing about someone to knowing a little bit about them. That awkward section of introductory small talk is still very painful to me. But meeting friends of friends is notably easier post-Facebook: I can go to a party of mostly people outside my own circle of friends and already know the names of some of the people there. And, since I've already gotten a little bit past that initial barrier, it's easier to gather the energy to talk to them, and it's easier to remember who said what. For a website often blamed for ruining our society's ability to interact with each other on a personal level, Facebook really seems to be helping me out.

Back in balance

2010-06-06T09:24:00.000-07:00

I still buy some of the things branded by the weight management program I went on a couple years ago, 20/20 Lifestyles. The ready-to-drink protein meal replacement shakes that they sell are actually pretty decent as far as shakes go, though I only have one or two a month. Every time I look at one, I'm a little annoyed: on the front beneath the 20/20 Lifestyles logo is the phrase "bring your health back in balance."

I feel like they don't really understand what "20/20" means. It's not that you have level 20 vision in your left eye and level 20 vision in your right eye and that everything's in balance. Being 20/20 is, effectively, being "as good as other people are," which is really what the program is about anyway. You're fat, and you want to be less fat so you're more like other people. Achieving 20/20 vision is actually a reasonably correct metaphor, but it has nothing to do with balance. The tagline under the logo is stupid and it bothers me when I see it. (Also, it should really be "into balance," not "in balance," should it not?)

Stop for a Minute

2010-06-05T18:10:00.000-07:00

The short version:
Keane—Night Train: 5/10
Ashlee Simpson—Bittersweet World: 8/10
Kutless—It Is Well: 3/10
Katy Perry—One of the Boys: 5/10
Lady Gaga—The Fame: 9/10
311—Uplifter: 5/10
Bat for Lashes—Two Suns: 4/10
Thirty Seconds to Mars—This Is War: 8/10

Not too long since their last full album, Keane put out the EP Night Train featuring a couple guest artists. The two tracks featuring K'NAAN rapping, Stop for a Minute and Looking Back, are good, the other track with a guest artist, Ishin Denshin, is terrible, and the rest pretty much just sounds like B-sides that didn't fit on a full album. Overall it's fairly disappointing. That said, the two K'NAAN tracks are an interesting change of pace, and the EP's finisher My Shadow isn't too bad. It's worth adding to a Keane collection if you're a fan, but if you don't already have their amazing album Under the Iron Sea you should really just spend a couple extra bucks and get that one.

I've also been listening to Ashlee Simpson's album Bittersweet World too much. I had pretty low expectations, but it was cheap so I went with it, and it's just embarrassingly fun. It's poppy dance music I can listen to from start to finish and still want more. Outta My Head, Boys, and Murder are infectious like swine flu at a gamer convention, but you could put just about any track from here on a party playlist and get a smile on your face when it comes on.

I got around to listening to a CD I got for Christmas, It Is Well by Kutless. As far as I can tell it's half new material and half rock versions of hymns. The opening title track It Is Well is actually quite decent, and probably the best rock cover of a song in the public domain I've ever heard. Remember Me is pretty good too. The rest would be okay, though nothing special, except that the tracks are impossibly similar. When I'm deciding which songs on a CD to write about and add to my various playlists, I have to refresh my memory as to which track title is which song, and I do that by skipping to a track, then jumping to about 1/3 through that track, then doing the same for the next in the list, and then the next and so on. With this CD there were three tracks in a row that sounded virtually identical by the third-way point; I could have sworn that the next track button in Winamp was broken.

I also got Katy Perry's One of the Boys quite a long time ago and hadn't gotten around to it until recently. This one's got I Kissed a Girl and Hot n Cold on it, and those are both pretty irresistible, and the title track is good too. The rest is pretty acceptable but nothing to blog about.

My gay might be showing, but I also finally got Lady Gaga's CD The Fame, and goodness, it's fantastic. Every track on the disc is good, and it's a nearly perfect dance album. Just Dance and Poker Face are excellent singles, but my other favorite from the disc, Paper Gangsta, hasn't played on the radio. There's not much I can say; if you like dance music you should already have this CD.

311's latest CD Uplifter is pretty okay. A lot of songs on here are decent, but I think what it really needs are more hooks! The disc progresses from start to finish and the tracks are different enough such that you don't feel like you're listening to the same things on repeat, but many of the individual songs don't seem like they change too much within themselves. My favorites, Hey You, India Ink, and Get Down for the most part don't suffer too badly, but the vocals on some other tracks like Golden Sunlight are just boring. There's just not enough variation in tune or rhythm.

Bat for Lashes' seconds CD Two Suns is too Feist-y. It's airy and full of weird sounds, which I like in the right setting, but it all lacks a punch. Three good tracks on the album are Daniel, Glass, and Sleep Alone, and there's a noticeable difference in how those three are produced and how things like Pearl's Dream are produced. With the same instruments, same tune, same vocals, but different volumes and settings in the recording booth I think it's be a better track. It wouldn't be a great CD if remastered, but I think it'd be better. I think that Enya's latest couple albums could use the same treatment—to make them "sparkle" a bit more, or at least pull them out of the air and ground them.

Finally, recently I've been hearing a lot of Thirty Seconds to Mars' CD This Is War since Jason bought it, and it's a great rock CD. My only prior experience with the lead singer of the band was seeing him as the lead actor in Requiem for a Dream, and it's challenging (though certainly not impossible) to imagine that cracked-out druggie singing on top of a background of music that obviously wants to be described with the word "epic." Strings, children's choirs, military drumming, and guitars lifted to the sky are abound here, and even if it's a little bit cheesy, it works really well. Night of the Hunter, This Is War, and Hurricane are all lovely, but other than an intro track and an interlude, there's nothing bad on the disc. I recommend it.

Speaking of epic, I HAVE NOT been able to stop listening to Storming New Caprica from the BSG season 3 soundtrack recently. The part right after 2:05 is played during one of my favorite moments in all of television. (If you think about the title and the season it's in, you should be able to figure out when.)

This is not a trick question

2010-06-05T00:09:00.000-07:00

Quiz: Which of these folders in your user profile (as in, the folder you open when you click your name on the Start menu) should contain your save game files?

Hint: This is not a trick question.

Highlight the text in this box to find the answer:

[ The Saved Games folder. ]

Did you guess correctly? If so, you're apparently smarter than most game developers, including the developers of the following games currently installed on my hard drive, who all thought it was one of those other folders:

Bioshock 2
Dragon Age
Mass Effect 2
Starcraft II (beta)

For the record, the developers of these games answered correctly:

Command and Conquer 3
Command and Conquer 4
Command and Conquer Red Alert 3
Tinker

(I'm going to go ahead and give a temporary pass to people who at least had the decency to put their save game files in a subfolder of the incorrect location named "My Games," which was a whopping 12 games.)

Workout dinner

2010-06-04T12:19:00.000-07:00

Apparently my mind was someplace else this morning. Here is a note I wrote myself when I got up:

Send workout dinner to Dan

I think that this is a good argument for the importance of breakfast.

Note: Dan is my personal trainer. There is no such thing as workout dinner. This note should have referred to something like "workout info" or "workout cards" or "workout stats."

Giant foam hands

2010-05-25T14:40:00.000-07:00

People often find it odd that I generally drive sockfooted. I'll admit that it is uncommon. I find driving with shoes on to be terribly awkward, though, now that I've gotten used to driving without them. It feels so clunky and it just doesn't seem like I get nearly the level of control I want when I'm wearing shoes. I'd liken it to driving while wearing two of those giant foam hands: you could do it, but it's clearly superior to have more physical contact with the steering wheel.

I recommend trying it out sometime. It's especially easy for me since I wear sandals when possible, and it's much easier to take those off than shoes. It felt sort of strange the first time I tried it (I was 16 or so), but since then it's always felt natural and "right." (Some people I've talked to thought that it was illegal for some bizarre reason, but it is perfectly legal everywhere in the US and Canada.)

Azure wouldn't want to pay that much

2010-05-24T21:48:00.000-07:00

I've got a lot of websites, and they're hosted in a variety of places, partially for cost reasons, partially for convenience, and partially just because what I had was working and it's a pain to switch. I spent most of my spare hours this weekend beginning the process of consolidating my sites to one place, and I've gotten it mostly working on the new server. If nothing else, I've learned several things about hosting.

I spent a while evaluating Windows Azure from Microsoft, and I concluded that while it's a really cool service, it's not priced with me in mind. It's pretty sweet that with a few clicks you can upload a package of files and a server somewhere will create a virtual machine, deploy your changes, and start serving up your content with basically no effort on your part. When you feel like making a new version, it'll start up a second virtual machine, and once you're done verifying that everything works, you click a button and it magically swaps out the servers for you. If your service starts to slow down under heavy load and you want another server, you click another button and a few minutes later you've got a server farm hosting for you and storage distributed across the world. Unfortunately the lowest tiers of service come out to like a hundred bucks a month if you want to just host a simple website, four or five times what I'm paying this new company. I don't need that level of power or flexibility or reliability. Maybe if one of my websites made money, but that is certainly not the case right now.

Even ignoring services on a higher price tier like Azure, it's tough trying the find the right balance between cost and convenience—I could easily have just paid the same company more money each month and avoided spending a weekend working on this stuff, but the difference would have come out to, say, $15 or $20 a month, and that can add up pretty quickly, especially given that I've been hosting these sites for more than a decade. ($20 monthly for a decade comes out to $2,400, if you're not in a mathy mood.) I'll definitely spend a weekend poking at things to save that much, especially if I can turn the experience into something mildly educational. It's a one-time time cost to avoid a monthly dollar cost.

I always have such a hard time putting a dollar value on my time. I've gotten a much better understanding since starting full-time work that my time is a precious, limited resource. When you're young, you have all the time in the world, and especially when you're poor, it's easy to trade time for money. Preciousness and scarcity of money is something that was drilled into my head constantly throughout my life, and now that my financial situation is very different from my family's when I was growing up, I often wonder if I'm making the "right" time and money tradeoffs. I try to strike a balance and use the lessons I learned in frugality while still spending and saving my money in a way that makes me happy.

Limbo

2010-05-24T21:15:00.000-07:00

I've now been in my new team exclusively for a week, and I don't have much to report, really. I'm sort of in team-limbo, where I no longer have responsibilities with my old team, but I do not yet have responsibilities on my new team. I've been using the time to read up on our target customer segments, try out the prototypes, set up machines, and lots of uneventful stuff like that. It's rather refreshingly low-stress.

I've met my teammates twice, and they seem like fun people. I think it's going to work out well. In the meantime, I don't mind taking it easy for a few days one bit.

Holy crap you've spent a thousand bucks

2010-05-07T15:51:00.000-07:00

I was trying a game called Mytheon a few nights ago, and in the game there are vendors that sell things for gold, and vendors that sell things for United States Dollars, which are cleverly disguised as very special blue coins, coins that come from your credit card. (Guess which vendor had the best items!) It's a pretty standard thing for free online games to do, and it's a wildly successful business model in Asia, and growing in popularity here.

I wonder if I'm forever conditioned to hate those sorts of things by Magic: The Gathering. I find the idea distasteful, and I never really knew why; it seems like it disrupts the "purity" of the game, but I wasn't really sure. In Magic, people who spend the most money at the game have the most power. It's not clear-cut; certainly a player with less expensive cards can defeat a player with more expensive cards, but money can directly replace or complement skill. (I guess, similarly, in pro sports, money can buy you skill.) It's messed-up, and strangely addicting. It's only ten bucks, or twenty bucks, and you get yourself a rare, powerful card or a few packs of cards that might suck or might be great. Over time, this becomes very expensive, but you stay focused on the individual cards you want—the small picture—and ignore the big picture that holy crap, you've spent a thousand bucks on this game.

It might not even be the power aspect. Some free-to-play games offer things for sale that are no more powerful than what you would otherwise get without money, but the items that cost money are easier to get, or take less time to get, or are still clearly better than the free items in some way not relating to game mechanics. That's still obnoxious.

To play World of Warcraft I pay Blizzard about $12 a month, and I'm perfectly fine with that. That $12 gets me as much WoW as I feel like playing. It's probably sort of a ripoff because I play way less than some people and waste fewer of Blizzard's expensive human resources as other players who are constantly contacting game masters for assistance and I'm paying the same price as those people, but I think I might actually prefer that to having to worry too much about how much time I spend logged in. (This model probably works best for them because now I have this tiny feeling that I should play more to get more use out of my subscription, and the more you play, the more you have emotionally invested in the game, and the more likely you are to continue to play for long periods of time.) Really, I'm fine with paying that monthly fee because I can easily see that for that money I am getting regular (though quite slow) content updates like new dungeons and quests and game features, and it just seems logical. If the game were financed through small transactions, I think I would overanalyze things, and either be disgusted by the commercialization, or spend way too much money, then realize that I spent too much money, and then quit in anger.

Every time I play some game that tries to finance itself through "optional" purchases, I find myself annoyed by the practice. I place a high value on the quality of my gaming experiences, and I'm very much willing to pay for them (often fairly absurd amounts of money), but I guess what I really want is for real-life finances to be completely and utterly separated from my games. Intrusion of money into the experience ruins the immersion for me.

An offer for a new job

2010-05-05T22:19:00.000-07:00

I've just accepted an offer for a new job within Microsoft, on a team working on a secret project. Now that Office 2010 is out the door, this new team was my top choice of jobs, and I made the cut, so I'm pretty excited about that. It'll be a little annoying to not be able to tell anyone anything about what I'm working on, but I think that it will be a rewarding experience. I've really enjoyed working with my team, and some of these people I've worked with for the whole time I've been at Microsoft, but it's time for me to do something different, and this new team's planning on building something brand new and cool that I'm actually interested in. (As it turns out, I'm not actually that passionate about building workflows that run on SharePoint servers.)

This position was really competitive, and I have a small fear in the back of my mind that it's going to be hard to stand out on a team of superstars, but I do good work, and it'll be easier to do good work when it's something I'm excited to be working on. Should be fun.

Rocket

2010-05-04T19:25:00.000-07:00

The short version:
Goldfrapp—Head First: 6/10
E.S. Posthumus—Makara: 7/10
Air—Love 2: 4/10
P!nk—M!ssundaztood: 6/10
The Who—Who's Next: 3/10

I picked up Goldfrapp's latest CD, Head First. It's a notable departure from her earlier work, and yet still old and familiar. If you have her prior albums you can still immediately tell who's making this music, but you'd wonder who's been lacing her Nalgene with Prozac—the "happy and perky" dial on her synthesizer has been turned way up, and though it sounds cheesy, it's admittedly kinda fun. The tracks are a bit more "normal" than before: no more harsh electronica, and only one track of bizarre, sparse soundscapes. I like Rocket (weird video, yet not nearly as weird as her others), Alive, and Hunt, and if you've liked her other CDs you're going to like this one too, but I was still hoping for something a little better.

I also had anxiously ordered E.S. Posthumus' newest, Makara, and as soon as you start the first track you're going to be overwhelmed. The first track, Kalki, is like the massive crescendo of an hour-long symphony that was already over-the-top to begin with. In terms of quality it doesn't quite match their first CD—it sounds more artificial and forced—but it's certainly better than their second. It's good overall, but it's less an album and more a collection of 15 eXtreme action movie trailers strung together, and that makes it hard to listen to all at once. One of the more eXtreme tracks is Unstoppable, featured in the Sherlock Holmes trailers, and even hiding behind the explosions, it still sounds like it's going to punch you in the face. Only half of the disc is like that, though, and there are several understated gems like Lavanya in there, and some of the over-the-top ones like Kuvera still sound excellent.

It stands in contrast to Love 2 by Air, an album that just sort of alternates between sleepy and annoying. Eat My Beat is upbeat and pretty decent, and then the best of the rest are the tracks that just sort of avoid getting in your way, like Sing Sang Sung and African Velvet. I'm not averse to slow and understated music, but most of this CD is just uninteresting and mediocre.

After great success with her newest CD, I picked up P!nk's first one, M!ssundaztood, and it's a letdown to hear them in that order. Funhouse is far more evolved and, er, fun than this one. Well, that's not entirely fair. It's an old CD with some radio-friendly singles, and I've heard Don't Let Me Get Me and Get the Party Started way too many times already. If I were just hearing them now I'd be much more impressed. There are a few songs on here that are just painful to listen to. Surprisingly, my favorite on here is one I hadn't heard before—18 Wheeler. Besides that and those two great singles, I don't care too much for the rest.

And then going way farther back in time to nearly forty years ago (1971), I decided to check out Who's Next by The Who, mainly because of how much I like the song Behind Blue Eyes. I only know about the song from the terrible Halle Berry movie Gothika, featuring a cover that I like better than the original, by (ugh) Limp Bizkit. I'm sure that more of this record would be recognizable to me if I were more schooled in classic rock, but the only other songs I recognized were Baba O'Riley and Won't Get Fooled Again, both pretty decent. And the rest... was probably pretty popular four decades ago, but it's not my style, and I don't have the context to see what's particularly special about it.

Inspiration

2010-04-28T13:34:00.000-07:00

I've come up with a system that I really like for giving titles to my blog posts. Before I start writing, I try to think of a clever phrase that is in at least some way related to my post. Then, as I'm writing, I look for ways to insert that phrase into my text. If I can, great. If I can't, then I don't worry too much, and I'll generally pick a new title once I'm done from the text that I wrote. But it gives me one little burst of inspiration and keeps me thinking about what I'm writing, and I like that. I feel like it keeps me focused, but not so focused that I become too attached to my original ideas.

(This post was originally called "Clever titles," but I renamed it at the end because I came up with something I liked more. Having that temporary title from the start helped frame what I wrote.)

I think I design a lot of things that way. When I'm doing artistic work like designing a website layout, I tend to come up with a small image that represents the theme and visual ideas that I'm going for, and then evolve that into something bigger, and then continually refine it. (Most of this stuff never leaves my own computer. The design part is the fun part, and turning it into something functional is usually rather tedious, so I never bother finishing it. Usually something is lost in the process due to technical constraints, too, so it's a little more fun to see my ideas in their "best" state when they're just a nonfunctional mockup.) When I write code, I start with small little bits of code with a consistent theme and work from there, sometimes evolving it so much that it's completely different by the time I'm done and the original theme isn't even present anymore. That's fine. It kept me focused, and it served its purpose as inspiration, even if I didn't stick with my original idea.

Elevator software

2010-04-28T13:20:00.000-07:00

At the gym they play three different types of music: upbeat, fast music in workout areas, general pop music in the bistro area, and fairly standard elevator music in the locker rooms and lobbies. While I was changing today, I wondered to myself if it's demoralizing to write elevator music for a living—if perhaps these musicians feel that writing it is beneath them. It's cheap, royalty-free, and the people who buy it probably don't listen to most or any of it before they do. It's sold as music for music's sake, not for its beauty, used in situations where "we need music, but the cheapest music will do." Is that depressing?

Then I remembered that I write freeware for a living. The software that I write doesn't bring in any royalties or directly make my employer any money. People download it because they need to customize and add features to their websites, and there aren't really other options. People don't really download it because it's awesome. I write elevator software. I guess that's not so bad.

(By the way, SharePoint Designer 2010 is available for free download—the first full product I've worked on from day 1. There's not much point in downloading it if you just want to see what I did, though, 'cause you can't do anything with it unless you also set up a SharePoint 2010 server, also available for free.) (Corrected from original post.)

A grinder of sea salt

2010-04-26T19:45:00.000-07:00

Many months ago, Amazon delivered an extra crate of groceries to me that should have gone to someone else. They didn't want them back, so I kept most of the products. Among them was a grinder of sea salt. Since receiving it I've been using it in place of regular salt, wondering if it was worth the cost premium. For the first time ever a few nights ago, I could actually tell that the green beans I was eating were prepared with sea salt instead of regular salt, due to the coarse texture. And indeed, it was slightly better. I'd be wary of believing anyone who insists they can tell the difference between freshly ground sea salt and regular table salt on anything more complicated than green beans, but I'm willing to concede that there are people in the world far more epicurean than I.

Table salt comes out to about 3.42¢ per ounce. Freshly ground sea salt comes out to $1.3632 per ounce. That works out to a 3882% price premium. My perception of the flavor and texture improvement of sea salt versus regular salt was more like about 5%. I think it might be overpriced.

(This assumes that the destructive pleasure one gains from grinding rocks in a device before eating is roughly cancelled out by the inconvenience of having to grind rocks in a device before eating, which is probably also accurate.)

Extremely important, but I guess not that important

2010-04-15T15:34:00.000-07:00

Somewhat regularly I get frantic emails from people who have used my StickyPad program to store extremely important information in their desktop sticky notes, and then decide for some reason or another to reinstall Windows without saving or backing up those notes, and then need my help recovering that data. The first time this happened, I was surprised. The second time, I was sort of humbled and a little scared that people were using my silly little app to store mission-critical stuff. Now I get emails about this every couple of weeks, all desperately looking for help recovering information that was apparently extremely important, but I guess not that important, since they didn't bother saving it.

When originally designing StickyPad, the ability to easily recover essential business information from old hard drives was not one of the features I had in mind. Based on the rough timeframe, I'm guessing that the things that were on my mind at that time included Diablo, Warcraft II, getting my learner's permit, and pictures of naked people. As it turns out, software has a way of staying around longer than originally expected.

(Oh, hey, look, it's almost time for StickyPad's "three years without getting any updates" anniversary!)

Social newsworking

2010-04-13T11:57:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me that my main sources of news about the world around me these days are as follows:

News articles that friends post to Facebook
Four-month-old episodes of Conan O'Brien that I watch while working out each morning (Yes, I'm a bit behind. Apparently this movie New Moon just came out in theatres last week, and teenage girls really enjoy hot shirtless werewolves.)
Hearing coworkers talk about news events that were referenced on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report in a humorous manner the previous night
News topics that people somehow tie to World of Warcraft on the World of Warcraft forums
News headlines I happen to see flash up on the TV in the cafeteria at work (when it is not playing soccer or Jerry Springer)

I'm so informed.

Coke-operated

2010-04-12T16:56:00.000-07:00

Right now I am imagining myself as an arcade machine. I debug for a while, do some stuff, fight bad guys, and then eventually I die and INSERT COKE(S) flashes in the middle of the screen. I get up, go get another Caffeine Free Diet Coke, and then I continue debugging.

Ripping

2010-04-03T14:12:00.000-07:00

Previously I kept my music in 192 kbps MP3 format. A couple years ago I started ripping new music in a lossless format for maximum quality. I also decided to start the long process of re-ripping everything into that lossless format so I'd always have a maximum-quality copy of all my music and never have to rip again. I've got about a thousand CDs, but the process hasn't been that painful for the most part. When I'm about to leave the computer (for work, for example), or I'm just reading Facebook or something else that doesn't require all of my computer's performance, I just pop a CD in, click Rip, and at some point later I run a little tool I made that fixes up all of my playlists that used to include the MP3 versions to now include the lossless versions. It's easy and it takes little effort. I won't finish anytime soon (I'm about halfway done, and I've been working on this since sometime last year), but I'm getting there.

But every once in a while, some artist is the bane of my existence, and right now, it's The Roots. There are a few things that can make the process take five times as long as normal or worse, and they do most of them on each of their albums, of which I own seven.

Include guest artists that aren't credited in All Music Guide. I have to go through and manually add peoples' names to the files. (Example: contributing artists: The Roots; Erykah Badu; Eve of Destruction; Scott Storch.)
Include things that aren't letters in titles. I have to make sure the new track's filename matches the old one or my carefully-crafted playlists won't find the new song. (Example: "Do You Want More?!!!??!")
Include more than one song on a track. I have to split this up an a separate encoder program after ripping. (Example: on their album Phrenology, track 15 is blank, track 16 is also blank, track 17 includes both "Rhymes and Ammo" and "Thirsty," and track 18 is blank. I want to punch someone in the face.)

I suppose I could just not be so anal-retentive about the organization of my music collection, but... no.

And they all look just the same

2010-03-30T15:35:00.000-07:00

As I was leaving the gym this morning I passed three evenly-spaced men in business casual attire all walking at the same pace and all reading things on their smartphones. It made me think of little boxes on the hillside.

Game frenzy

2010-03-28T16:09:00.000-07:00

I've been playing a lot of single-player games recently. There's no particular reason, though if I had to hazard a guess it's a combination of the fact that Jason's been spending a lot of time away playing Final Fantasy XIII on the big TV, and also I don't have a lot of new stuff to do in World of Warcraft right now other than a couple hours on the weekends.

I was pretty excited to get into Mass Effect 2 after finishing Dragon Age, and it was absolutely phenomenal. It's certainly better than Dragon Age in just about every way, and one of the best games I've played. Mass Effect 2 sheds the ideas of inventory and stats and skill points, and might as well get rid of experience points since you basically just go up one level for every mission you finish. I and many other people feared that this would dumb down the game too much, but it hasn't done that at all. Sure, it feels more like a shooter than an RPG in parts, but basically what it boils down to is the role-playing and character development elements of a great RPG like Baldur's Gate, and the strong action gameplay and micro-storytelling of Gears of War. While Gears of War's overall storyline was pretty much the standard sci-fi/fantasy "someone bad is going to do bad stuff to us so we have to stop them" story, it did a good job of keeping you immersed and focused with shorter episodes of a story,. Mass Effect 2 is the same way—think of it as a season of a great TV show, where there's an overall goal and storyline that's always on your mind, but the episodes are mostly self-contained and interesting in themselves. I could go on for a long time about how great Mass Effect 2 is, but I can pretty confidently say that both Mass Effect (1) and Dragon Age were good games, and Mass Effect 2 has everything that was good about either of them with none of the bad. It's a great RPG and it's a great shooter, and very few genre-crossing games can manage something like that.

Torchlight is also excellent, and if you manage to catch it this weekend on Steam, it's only $5, which is pretty incredible for a fairly recent and quite great game, but if you don't, it's still worth the normal price of $20. Basically, it's a nice mix of Diablo and Diablo 2 with a more cartoony art style, modernized a bit with hotkeys and things like that. The gameplay is every bit as solid as either of those masterpieces, and while there's no story to speak of and only three classes, I had an absolute blast playing through it—more fun than when I recently played through Diablo 2, even. The graphics and audio are great, and the music is fantastic, composed by the same guy who did Diablo 2's music, one of my favorite soundtracks to anything ever. It's fairly short around 10-15 hours for a single run through the main storyline, and has no multiplayer, but it has tons of replay value, and it's a top-quality experience.

And ugh, Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight is a colossal disappointment. First of all, both single-player campaigns take only about ten hours, which would be okay if it were great (or even simply as good as the last several C&C games), but it most certainly is not. Almost everything about the game is bad. The storyline is abysmal and makes no sense at all—not that the last couple C&C Tiberium games' stories made that much more sense, but this one is just baffling. It's not even a real-time strategy game other than in the most literal sense. There's essentially no base-building, and there are no real resources to collect or manage. In most missions of the single-player campaign there aren't even control points you have to capture like in Dawn of War or Company of Heroes. You can only have a few units at once—say, six to ten, depending on the mission and which units they are—and they go down quickly. Your entire base has been packed into your MCV (mobile headquarters) or "crawler," which manages unit production, upgrade research, and building production if you're the defense class.

Yep, there are actually three different classes to play as, and they're all almost entirely distinct, and you can change class a limited number of times during each mission, which is probably the coolest thing about the game. You can start out as offense, roll out some tanks and take some territory, and then redeploy as the support class, and start sending out aircraft. (Unfortunately, the defense and support classes seem of very limited use during the campaign, as most of the time you're always on the offensive.) The problem about having a totally mobile base that can crank out another tank or jet or commando every few seconds is that your opponent has one too. Or, in the campaign, your opponent will have like four of them. Every time you try to take ground in the campaign you have to assault another one of your enemy's crawlers, and while you're trying to take down its roughly one billion hit points, it's popping out dudes looking to kick your ass like it's Crawler and Kate Plus Eight. The end result is that in their attempts to make things more exciting and dynamic, they've accomplished pretty much the worst possible outcome, where each and every battle feels like a stalemate.

Oh, and you sort of have to grind XP, too. You get XP from killing things, and when you level up, you get new units and technologies, which persist across missions. But, each mission has an XP cap, and by the end of each campaign you don't even have enough XP to use all of your top-tier technology. You either have to draw out the battles even further so you can kill more stuff to get more XP, do skirmishes in the middle of the campaign to try to level up, or just deal with it, which is what I ended up doing. Maybe that's part of the reason the game felt quite hard most of the time, but excuse me for wanting to sit down and play an RTS campaign without having to stop to grind XP.

Multiplayer and skirmish battles are equal failures. Skirmishes take the same basic small-team-plus-mobile-base formula from the single-player campaign (as well as your level and XP from the campaign) and replace the story objectives with control points, just like the multiplayer and skirmishes I hated so much in Company of Heroes. Sigh. (Control points don't have to suck, but they usually do. They were a pretty decent mechanic in the first Dawn of War game, because you didn't generally have to worry about defending every location on the map all at once with your six little dudes.)

I love the Command and Conquer series. Not even counting the excellent Generals and Red Alert alternate universes of C&C, the older C&C games have all been great, and the original one was one of the great classics of all time. But no amount of fanboyism and rose-colored glasses can make me overlook that C&C4 sucks really, really hard. They removed basically everything that was great about C&C, yielding a crushing disappointment of a supposed end to the series.

Laundrymorse

2010-03-27T22:28:00.000-07:00

Laundrymorse—(n.) The feeling of disappointment in oneself upon putting the last load of laundry in the dryer and subsequently realizing that you're wearing the shorts that you really wanted to make sure got washed.

Fireflies

2010-03-22T02:20:00.000-07:00

The short version:
Flight of the Conchords—I Told You I Was Freaky: quite amusing
Electric Light Orchestra—All Over the World: 7/10
Owl City—Ocean Eyes: 6/10
The Fray—The Fray: 4/10
Bassnectar—Cozza Frenzy: 3/10
Coldplay—Parachutes: 4/10
Shpongle—Are You Shpongled?: 5/10

I've been listening to a lot of music recently, starting with I Told You I Was Freaky from the comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, who apparently also have a TV show—I'm not really sure of the details there. The CD is rather funny, though, and several of the songs would stand on their own perfectly well without being funny, which puts it ahead of most musical comedy. My three top favorites would work well even if they didn't make me smile: Hurt Feelings, Carol Brown, and Sugalumps (one of several songs on there with the general theme of "genitals"). But there's a wide variety of styles (80s German techno, weird Russian... thing) making each song sound fresh and unique. I can definitely recommend it.

Then I went back in time a few decades and picked up a greatest hits album from Electric Light Orchestra, All Over the World. It's got a song I really enjoyed as a kid from Disney's D-TV: Pop & Rock—Evil Woman (warning: loud) the Disney video for which featured Cruella DeVille and other villainesses. I suppose it's not the only CD I've ever bought based on a childhood favorite cartoon. As it turns out, it was a good purchase—I have a soft spot for pop music with pianos and strings, and there's a lot to enjoy on the disc, especially given that I'm not usually terribly fond of older music. Mr. Blue Sky and Don't Bring Me Down are also solid. It makes me wonder how well a lot of these songs could be adapted to a more modern style: they're a bit happier than most of today's hits, but remove the occasional 70s falsettos and add a modern beat and I'd definitely buy the CD a second time.

I also picked up Owl City's Ocean Eyes, with the smash hit Fireflies. That track's pretty fantastic, and the rest is pretty catchy, but it's hard for me to call most of it "good" music. Most of it sounds really lazy. Still catchy for the most part, but I don't get a feeling that it took a lot of effort. It's less creative and interesting than The Postal Service, the most similar band that comes to mind (a friend described it as childish, and I can't deny that). The lyrics are less poetic and simpler, and chock-full of puns ("I've been to the dentist a thousand times so I know the drill"). Nothing on the disc is as awesome as Fireflies; the rest is merely decent, including Cave In and Hello Seattle. If you liked any of The Postal Service it's worth checking out, and most everyone seems to like Fireflies, but I can't recommend the rest of the album to most people.

Merely decent is still a little better than what I think of The Fray's self-titled album, which is more in mediocre territory. The best song on here is You Found Me, and unfortunately the rest is fairly forgettable as far as I'm concerned. It's not bad; it just all blends together and seems rather painfully generic. I'd pick out Syndicate and Where the Story Ends as the two next best tracks, but honestly if I played them right now I don't think I could tell which one was which.

I got Cozza Frenzy by Bassnectar as a Christmas present. It's very bass-heavy experimental electronic music. And myyyyyy goodness it is bizarre. It's hard to listen to the whole album in one sitting; most of the tracks are quite grating on the ears. I can see some parallels between Basement Jaxx (whose music I adore) and this, which is worth bonus points for the giver, but where Basement Jaxx focused on being danceable and fun, this album is focusing on being "big" and loud. Probably the least insane and most pleasant are the title track, a remix of When I Grow Up by Fever Ray, and Window Seat. (That remix is definitely of the "add a heavier beat and call it done" school of remixes, which admittedly does improve it, but it's not a terribly inventive change.) I'm adding about half of the tracks to my main playlist, but I don't think I'll mind if it's a couple weeks before one of them pops up.

But wait, there's more! I also rounded out my Coldplay collection with Parachutes, and it is very much my least favorite of their albums. My feelings toward it are quite similar to The Fray; it's all forgettable and none of it really grabs my attention. This album is a little more artfully constructed, but I don't quite like the sound of it as much as The Fray. The best stuff on here is Trouble, High Speed, and Shiver, but I'm pretty glad that I only spent six bucks on this CD.

Finally, I picked up the first album by Shpongle, titled Are You Shpongled?. I'd heard one of their songs (Around the World in a Tea Daze) many years ago and absolutely adored it, but this CD left me feeling disappointed. It's good background music, but Tea Daze had great sounds and a wonderful melody, and nothing on this album compared. I guess I'm going to try some of their later music to find more of that. Still, I do like Shpongle Spores (with a neat sci-fi soundtrack sort of vibe), Behind Closed Eyelids, and Divine Moments of Truth.

I'm slowly making it through my queue of music, but I'm finding that I'm listening to music less than I was a few months ago. Jason and I have fairly different musical tastes, so I tend to play my music less when I'm at my computer, and when I'm away from my computer I tend to listen to mixed playlists rather than new albums at a time, so I end up going through new music at a lower rate. I'm not sure if it's a problem or not. I'm still thinking about it.

Loot

2010-03-16T17:58:00.000-07:00

One of the things about the World of Warcraft loot system that I think is particularly fantastic is that even if you get unlucky and the monsters don't drop the wonderful shiny things that you were hoping for, eventually, you can still get some sweet stuff. It's sort of like a consolation prize. It's a great mix between that exhilarating feeling you get from RPGs where you equip something awesome and powerful and new that just dropped, and a mitigation of that obnoxious feeling you get from early versions of World of Warcraft (and many other RPGs) where you've been playing for days or weeks and haven't gotten any new gear. This is particularly important in WoW because much of WoW is played at a level cap, where you progress mostly only through acquiring better equipment, as opposed to most other RPGs where either there isn't a level cap, or it isn't practical or important for most players. (Diablo II's is 99. You can beat the game at around level 30. Only the truly hardcore minority ever get to 99.)

Bosses in current level 80 dungeons and raids in WoW drop an item called Emblem of Triumph (or a better version, the Emblem of Frost). Once you collect enough of those babies, you can turn them in to a curator of artifacts in the main city of Dalaran for a piece of powerful new gear. As long as you kill enough bosses, you're guaranteed to eventually get something good from it. If you're lucky, along the way, you got a few other upgrades to your inventory too, but at the very least, you know that after a few more bosses you'll have enough Emblems to buy that shiny new Brimstone Igniter or Bloodshed Band. It's something to look forward to, and it's a powerful motivation to keep playing if you've been really unlucky in your past few expeditions.

In contrast, years ago, before World of Warcraft's first expansion, at some point I would play for weeks to a month between getting an upgrade to my equipment. Since upgrading your equipment is how you get better (other than your own player skill) when you're at the maximum level and XP the game allows, things become stagnant. Multiple times I considered that it was time to quit. (I would have, but I decided to try out another couple classes first with one of my friends.) I haven't felt any desire to quit for a long time. Most single-player RPGs don't have as much of a problem with this because you just keep leveling until the end of the game, but WoW doesn't end, so it has to have an artificial cap somewhere. Blizzard has discovered how to bring back that feeling of constant excitement of improving your character even though it's currently impossible to level from 80, where most players are, to 81.

The stars have aligned and I've been saving up—I'm getting six new pieces of top-quality equipment within the next few days. If I'm lucky, I'll get some more from the bosses I kill. But even if I don't, I know there's a reason to keep playing my 30-45 minutes every night.

omnomnom

2010-03-16T17:42:00.000-07:00

I've been dieting moderately strictly recently. I've lost several pounds—nothing drastic, but enough that at least it's sort of working. It's not quite what I was hoping for, but if I can keep this rate up for several months it might be okay. Losing weight means being miserable all the time, and part of being miserable is unusually powerful cravings for things that are delicious. The delicious things I've been craving recently include:

Blueberry sour cream cake donuts (this particular urge is just bizarrely powerful)
Chocolate mousse
Like, an entire vat of gummi bears
Brownies
Cadbury's Mini Eggs (not the same as Creme Eggs)

There; now you can be miserable too.

Shower

2010-03-10T22:08:00.000-08:00

Well, gee, it seems like I haven't written one of these in like two weeks. It's not that I don't have anything to write about; it's that I haven't had much that's very interesting happen recently. On the other hand, I've got plenty of "rainy day" topics saved up, but I've been rather occupied with working on my World of Warcraft mods and then Mass Effect 2. Really the only thing that's happened recently is that I remodeled my shower.

I didn't really plan on doing it. It was sort of a last-minute remodel, which is a phrase that I don't recall ever hearing thus far in my life, to be honest. I'd suspected that there was a sizable amount of mold growing behind the tiles in my shower, and it behooved me to remove it sooner rather than later. I was beginning to suspect that it was making Jason and me ill, based on feedback from a friend with a similar problem very recently. So, I had someone come out and test my shower, and there was definitely plenty of moisture back there, and it was leaking down to the first floor.

I scheduled a demolition appointment soon after, but I only have one shower, so I needed a new one built ASAP. It turns out that, much like Rome, showers are not built in a day. This little mold problem ended up costing me $6,200 (only $850 of that is materials) and seven obnoxious days of not showering at home. (Luckily several Microsoft buildings have showers, along with the gym.) But, the new shower looks really nice and feels more luxurious, and I was planning on eventually redoing the bathroom anyway, so it's mostly just the timing that sucked. Even with my tax refund arriving around that time, I didn't have that kind of money just lying around.

It ended up costing a couple thousand more than I was planning, but I'm glad I didn't wait. I do feel a little better, whether that's due to the removal of the mold or just variance in seasonal allergies. And, it'll be paid off soon enough, and I can get back to finishing off New Car Number Two. (Now I already have a construction contractor picked out for that.) Then maybe sometime next year I can look into fixing up my nightmare kitchen like I planned back in 2008.

Pictures of the work are on Facebook.

Pretty screenshots

2010-02-24T12:25:00.000-08:00

I've made my first post to an official Microsoft blog. It's not likely to be interesting to anyone who reads this, but it does have a lot of pretty screenshots. It's basically a tour of the main feature I built for SharePoint Designer 2010, so if you're interested in what I do for a living, maybe it's relevant after all.

SharePoint Designer’s new workflow editor: introduction

I've got another work post coming up this week, and really soon here I'm going to tell you an enthralling story about my shower remodel. It'll have pictures too.

Dragon Age

2010-02-09T18:27:00.000-08:00

I finished Dragon Age about a week ago. It's a fun game, but after all the extreme hype, I was expecting something a little more. It's basically the same game that I've played a dozen times. I don't mean that I've played a dozen RPGs or even a dozen RPGs of the same style—I mean that basically every RPG written by BioWare plays almost exactly the same. For the most part they feel like they could all be sequels. Dragon Age plays basically the same as Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and a host of other extraordinarily similar games. You talk to people, kill an occasional monster, talk to more people, talk to the people in your party, and then talk to more people. If I didn't like story-driven games with a ridiculous amount of dialogue I'd be upset.

I thought I'd be getting something a little more with Dragon Age, but it's still a bit behind the times graphically, and while the story is well-written with not many exceptions, it's nothing really any better than their previous efforts. I don't have any right to be upset with the game, and I'm not, but I still managed to be a little disappointed.

I think I liked Mass Effect (from the same group) better. Mass Effect is in the same vein of talking-focused games as Dragon Age, though the combat makes it the most different than the rest, as it's an RPG-esque shooter instead of a more standard pause-and-give-commands RPG like the rest. There is attention paid in certain crucial parts of both games (more than their predecessors) to make sure that it's a more cinematic experience, and that's done pretty well (I didn't even notice that Dragon Age switches seamlessly between prerendered cutscenes and in-game graphics until the very end). I cared about the people in my party more in Dragon Age due to their very strong personalities, and in Mass Effect I cared more about my own character and the decisions I was making. But Mass Effect was visually so much more appealing than Dragon Age that I can't even begin to explain it, given that Dragon Age came out a couple years later. People look like people in Mass Effect, but for the most part in Dragon Age they're so far into Uncanny Valley that they've set up a castle there. Both games suffer from bafflingly tedious and bland optional side quests in cookie-cutter identical locations, distracting from the very well-written and well-presented entrees. Dragon Age did do an exceptional job of making early choices in the game integrate with the story later on, be they your choice of class and race (which chooses which of a half-dozen unique stories will start the game for you), or simply who you befriended and who you killed. I can easily imagine playing through the game a second time would have a very different feel to it, and I'd run into a lot of interesting twists in the story I wouldn't be expecting simply due to playing a different style of character. They're both great games, but for whatever reason, Mass Effect ultimately just made me feel happier.

I guess I'm just disappointed with BioWare because I already know they're capable of more. And, from what I gather from reviews, Mass Effect 2 is that "more." I am anxiously awaiting starting it very soon.

Horribly uncomfortable glasses

2010-02-09T17:43:00.000-08:00

I don't get this whole 3D movie thing. I saw Coraline in 3D and the 3D-related gimmicks were slightly amusing, but it was hard to watch. I don't mean that in an "it sucked" way; it was a great film; it's just that seeing it in 3D was physically taxing. It made my eyes sore and very tired, and for those few slightly amusing gimmicks it wasn't even close to worth it, even if the 3D version were the same cost as the 2D version (which it was not) and you didn't have to wear horribly uncomfortable glasses.

I saw Avatar this weekend, and despite my inclinations, I saw it in 3D, on the raving recommendations from friends. My experiences were the same as with Coraline. There were a few neat effects, like sparks and ash that seemed to float in front of the screen, but it just looked awful and blurry, as if I had my contacts in the wrong eyes, and I had to keep looking away for a few seconds every once in a while to "reset" my abused eyes. I was even in a prime seat near the center of the theatre. One movie in 3D like that in my lifetime was enough, I think. I'd rather just see the 2D versions of things. If either Avatar or Coraline weren't quite as interesting I'd have just left the theatre and asked for my money back.

I'm willing to believe that there are people with certain eye characteristics for whom the 3D effect just doesn't work properly—there are, after all, many people who can't see a "Magic Eye" (autostereogram) properly no matter how hard they try. I don't taste artificial sweeteners the way that normal people do. And the sound of that a CRT TV that's turned on but just displaying blue makes drives me mad but inaudible to most people. Maybe some people just aren't meant to find the 3D effect enjoyable.

Demon's Souls

2010-01-20T18:16:00.000-08:00

A while back I got the game Demon's Souls, the only game I have for the "holy crap it has a game now" PlayStation 3, and the only game I expect to have on it for the foreseeable future. I don't know if I've ever been as conflicted about a game before. It's very clever and innovative, and sometimes it's an action RPG, sometimes it's a platformer, and sometimes it's a puzzle game.

And it's hard. The word "hard" here is an understatement, regardless of how many times I put the word "really" or various expletives in front of it. It's hard as if the entire Blu-ray disc it ships on were made of diamond. But for brevity, let's just say that it's really, really, really damned hard for now.

And that's the flaw with Demon's Souls, but it's a flaw so great that it overshadows all of the other brilliance in the game. It is not merely hard in that the difficulty level is extremely high even on the lowest setting (which, indeed, is is)—I've played games like that, and I've tried out various games on their hardest difficulties before. It's hard in that it delights in your suffering, and inflicts that suffering on you at a rate I am unfamiliar with. Every action you perform in a manner that is not perfect yields punishment. Oh, you turned a corner without facing the corridor with your shield up? For that grievous sin you are punished with an axe to the face. Oh, you used your attack button too many times in a short period of time and are now too weak to block? For that sin you shall have your exhausted body cleaved in twain. You die. You die a lot. In fact, almost the entirety of the game is expected to be played while you are dead, in "spirit form"—temporary restoration of your corporeal body is a reward for doing something particularly special, like killing a boss or helping another body kill a boss.

This might not be so bad, but there are no saved games, or even checkpoints to speak of. When you die, you start over the level from the start, but all of the enemies have respawned, and now you are dangerously low on healing herbs. A few hours into each level there will be a lever that will open a door or activate some sort of shortcut that can let you get back to later portions of the level after your next death, but that's it.

Oh, and you lose all of your experience points and money every time you die. All of them. (You do, at least, keep your items and equipment.) You have one chance to go and retrieve them from the location of your death, and if you die again in the process, they're all gone for good. You can entirely lose an hour of progress in a couple minutes. After all, you're being incredibly careful all the time because you have to be, and if you're incredibly careful and still manage to die in one spot, there's a pretty good chance that you're going to die in the same spot when you make it there again, and that's only if you managed to do everything before that point perfectly and avoid dying even earlier.

And that's what's wrong with the game, at least as far as I'm concerned. You can play for a couple hours and be worse off than when you started, logging off having made no forward progress at all, now with damaged and broken equipment, no money, and zero experience points. It's demoralizing to say the least. At best, you got better at playing the game in that time. But that's just not enough. After many, many hours into the game I managed to finish one zone of the game and kill its final boss, and I finished two other zones and got TO their end bosses, but couldn't kill either brutally painful boss. With nowhere else to go other than perhaps grinding out a level or two (which would take several hours) or just beating my head against the bosses (for several hours), I was done with that game. I'm a PC gamer. I have higher standards than this. Console gamers, as far as I have been able to tell, enjoy brutal masochistic punishment. (Some of them reportedly even enjoy using the horrible PlayStation controller!) I do not.

What kills me, though (pun somewhat intended), is that with a savegame feature, the game would be miles better. I would enjoy it thoroughly, and I'd have made much more progress or even finished it by now. A simple F5 key could have fixed the game if they were unwilling to tone down the ridiculous difficulty.

There's a lot to love about the game, though, and that's why it makes me angry that the game is so close to being great. Combat is interesting, and it's about player skill more than stat points on your weapon. Enemies all have their own attack styles, and equippable weapons all have different strengths and weaknesses. Polearms have a nice range and do great damage, but taking a halberd out in a narrow hallway is a recipe for failure. You can learn that those guys on the ramp do a very powerful vertical slashing attack that's strong enough to hurt while you're blocking or even one-shot you, and you can counter by rolling out of the way, flanking, or using ranged weapons. There are lots of secrets to discover, and multiple paths to follow. And, while it's primarily a single-player game, it has an insanely creative multiplayer component. Other players exist in their own copies of the worlds, but when you get near other players, you see their spirits fighting up ahead, perhaps even giving you a clue to watch out for an ambush or trap. Dead players leave bloodstains that appear in all copies of the world, and you can touch them to see their last few moments, so you can watch what tactics they tried and failed at. You can also leave notes on the ground for others—"beware the next enemy's fire attack," or "don't miss the treasure behind you," or "watch your step." You can also inscribe runes on the ground that, when encountered by other players, allow them to summon your spirit into their world to help them defeat the area's boss, giving you a chance to practice on the boss without suffering harm yourself, and rewarding you with resurrection if you successfully help out another player. There were so many things about the game that I found very refreshing and unique, things that I wished were in other games I play. (Oh how fun it would be to have medieval hand-to-hand combat this interesting in a great single-character PC RPG like Oblivion.)

It's just a pity that I only saw 10 or 15% of Demon's Souls, because I'd really have loved to play more of it. But as long as I have a job and a finite amount of time to devote to a game, it just doesn't make sense for me to play the same levels again and again for hours on end, each time making slightly more progress than the last. I'm going to play something fun. I know that there are people who find that sort of slow progress and extremely high difficulty very rewarding, but that is not fun to me.

UPDATE: For a much more entertaining version of my negative comments about this game, check out the Zero Punctuation review. In typical Zero Punctuation style, he doesn't really say anything nice about the game, like how well-done the combat is. But he's a lot funnier than I am.

Made for You

2010-01-19T18:19:00.000-08:00

The short version:
OneRepublic—Waking Up: 9/10
P!nk—I'm Not Dead: 6/10
Shakira—She Wolf: 8/10
The Roots—Rising Down: 4/10

I've been listening to OneRepublic's second album Waking Up rather incessantly since it came out, and for good reason: it's irresistible, and the sort of CD that seems to be over far too soon. The opening two tracks Made for You and All the Right Moves work together perfectly to introduce the album with a grand sound and intoxicating percussion; they fit so well that while both songs stand on their own, hearing them back-to-back increases my opinion of each to the point that I'd rather not listen to just one of them alone anymore, like listening to just half of a song. (I heard All the Right Moves before the album was released, and my feelings were pretty lukewarm initially; I don't know if it was due to the low quality audio or having not heard the lead-in track, but my opinion has changed completely since then.) That sort of care to the ordering of the tracks and the flow of the sound from one song to another is evident in the whole album. Soon after the two-track opener is my third-favorite, Everybody Loves Me, which lyrically probably would have fit best with the first two, but was probably pushed back a track to make it not start to seem repetitive. While the best songs are in the first half of the disc, like many others, the ones toward the end are still more than acceptable, and balance out the mood of the album nicely. I can recommend Waking Up to just about anyone, but if you like Keane or other piano-focused pop-rock, this CD is definitely for you.

I picked up P!nk's I'm Not Dead, and it's not quite as essential, but it's okay. The more upbeat tracks are good though not as intriguing as the best stuff from her last album Funhouse—Stupid Girls, the unfortunately-named U + Ur Hand, and 'Cuz I Can are the highlights, and all very fun to listen to for lack of a better phrase. There are quite a few slower songs that are really tough for me to stand, though, such as Dear Mr. President. They emphasize the qualities about her voice and lyrics and style that annoy me, and all that in addition to just not really catching my interest makes them unappealing. The disc is sort of split down the middle, with several tracks I really like and several that I really don't. So, overall, I'd say it's a mediocre album: but more accurately, it's half a good one and half a bad one.

Shakira's latest CD She Wolf is another step in her multi-album transition from fairly-slutty to super-prostitute... but at least it's pretty good. The video for the catchy and amusing first single She Wolf would be softcore porn if it weren't so weird, alternating between "wait, was she even wearing any clothes in that last shot? go back!" and some robotic twitching that makes the Fembots from Austin Powers seem everyday. My next two favorites are the less dirty Mon Amour and the tamer Gypsy. And, it's not quite as good as those, but Give It Up to Me (with Lil Wayne) is practically designed for the radio and I assume it's going to be the next single. It's high-quality Shakira-flavored pop music consistent from start to finish, and if you liked her previous CDs you're going to like this one too.

Finally, I've had the latest CD Rising Down from rappers The Roots for months now, but I just haven't been able to bring myself to listen to it all that much. It's just not that good. Unlike most discs the best parts don't even start until track #7, but even the best aren't exceptional. There's one memorable song, Criminal, and it's quality, however while I Will Not Apologize and Singing Man are the next best, even they are forgettable, which doesn't speak well for the rest of the disc at all. I don't know what's up; the Roots have put out a lot of raps that I really love, but this CD isn't even worth the purchase for anyone but the most hardcore fan. They're the house band on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and at first I thought that being associated with him was incredibly insulting to their talent, but now I'm not so sure.

Worst phone feature

2010-01-18T12:16:00.000-08:00

By far the worst feature of my phone is that there are buttons on the side of it for changing the ringer and using the camera, and they can't be turned off. I can't imagine a practical scenario where someone would want those buttons so badly that they would be willing to put up with the constant inconvenience of randomly changing ringer styles and taking pictures of their pocket. My preferred ringer style is the one right before "Silent," so once or twice a week my phone decides without me that I shouldn't know about incoming calls.

I expected more from my pricey zero-dollar phone.

Gift cards

2010-01-17T14:53:00.000-08:00

A decent amount of my net worth at the moment is tied up in gift cards—about $600 at the moment. That's a lot of money that can only be spent at specific stores! Gift cards as a gift idea are great, but as an incentive or reward they are pretty obnoxious. For one, gift cards are really about the only useful reward I can get from my credit card rewards program, so I've got some there. And then I've got some from incentives, like a $100 Wal-Mart gift card I got during Black Friday. And then there are all of those pretty good deals that I tried hard to resist, like "buy a $50 gift card at this restaurant that you go to frequently and get another $10 gift card free." Those are the obnoxious ones, because I know that financially they make a lot of sense for me. They're essentially just a discount since I'm guaranteed to spend money there anyway—in the previous example, it's a 17% discount ($10 off a purchase of $60). But for that free $10 I'm paying a definite price in inconvenience. To save ten bucks I have to carry around one or two more pieces of plastic or paper with me at all times, or even worse, remember to pick them up before eating there from some out-of-wallet storage location.

What I think is most annoying about the existence of these offers is that I don't feel like that inconvenience is the intent of the promotion. The intent, as I see it, is twofold. There's the actual gift-giving case, where someone gives a gift card to another person. If the recipient is already a customer, no harm is done; the gift card has incentivized and reminded them to come to the restaurant and spend at least $50. If they're not, then the restaurant just got new customers that they didn't have before, and possibly repeat customers. And if the restaurant is really lucky, they'll just lose the gift card or forget to use it before it expires. All of those are profitable—enough to make up that $10 that they gave the buyer if the buyer doesn't also forget to use their incentive gift card (which will likely expire in three months or some short period of time).

In none of those scenarios is the restaurant making profit on my inconvenience. The closest thing is that they're making money on the fact that this gift card is "burning a hole in my pocket," making me want to eat there and spend money. I'm good about using gift cards and sending in rebates and those sorts of things. I'm going to use that card; I wouldn't have it if I didn't plan to. It ends up being this weird system where I can choose to take on additional inconvenience for what is essentially a small cash payout of $10 or so. So far I've decided that my precious wallet space is not worth that $10 of free money, but I'm tempted each time. I feel like normally when marketing promotions are involved, one person's inconvenience benefits another, and I think it actually makes me more annoyed that in this situation my inconvenience doesn't help someone else (even the restaurant's investors) out.

Let's Play World of Xeen

2010-01-12T18:23:00.000-08:00

Someone on the Penny Arcade forums has started a long thread titled Let's Play World of Xeen (click "show spoiler" to show the content—or go back to page 1 to start from the beginning) in which he plays through one of my favorite classic PC RPGs, takes screenshots, and adds a narrative. He's not finished with the game yet, but reading through the article so far overwhelmed me with happy nostalgia. Having played and adored the original game (technically a pair of games that you could install together and play simultaneously), reading through this is like candy.

It got me thinking that this basic formula, even without the completely made-up character interactions the author has added, would work pretty well for game reviews. Looking through something like this, edited to remove spoilers and focus on early-game content, would be a lot more useful to me than most game reviews. This format is most similar to a video review, I guess, but video reviews for games that I've seen so far in my life have all been pretty inexplicably terrible, even with my very low standards and expectations for reviews of video games.

This guy's trip down memory lane is precisely what I would have liked to have seen before buying the game in the first place. From a few screenshots and basic descriptions you can get a pretty detailed picture of a game, and from there you should be able to know how much you're going to like playing it. A walkthrough of the first hour of a game is far more useful to me than the opinions of the reviewer who might like be looking for completely different things in a game than I am.