As a pal mentioned here in the comments, I should have the Lair ready by the premiere of the next Batman movie, The Dark Knight. The movie will feature a new Batcave, which you shouldn't underestimate as an influence on Lair design.
So, this year, by July 18th, when the movie premieres, the Lair will be finished. Of course I have no idea what it being finished means, but I will figure it out.
I know, I should be beyond the Star Trek thing by now. The only Vegasy thing I did in Vegas in 98 was catch Star Trek: The Experience at the Vegas Hilton. Loved it.
But Star Trek: The Tour is coming to DC. No way I miss that. Thanks to Wil Wheaton for pimping it on his blog. The more of his stuff I read, the more I like him.
Oh, and on a related note, the Lair is coming along. Still looks like a basement corner, but it's taking shape. When it's done, it will be Lair 1.0 still, but 1.0 is better than 0.0.
A couple months back, I bought a Playstation 3 in part to upscale DVDs to near high def and to play high definition DVDs. At that point, and even now, there has been a format war between HD DVD (Toshiba) and Blu-ray (Sony). Blu-ray has sold more discs but Toshiba has sold more single-purpose players (not counting the PS3, which if counted, hands the player race to Sony). They also had pulled in most of the studios to their side. So I bet on Blu-ray.
Looks like I was right. Sony just scooped Toshiba to sign Warner Bros., the biggest DVD content studio, to an exclusive Blu-ray only deal. It's over.
Some say that this is all moot because we'll all be downloading movies to our TVs and DVDs will go the way of vinyl LPs. Not so fast. The American internet is too slow to handle standard definition TV, much less high def. Video on demand has not taken off for standard def and that is the closest analog to downloadable movies. No one wants to be in the middle of a thriller and then hit internet lag, or worse yet, wait three hours to download a two hour movie.
One of the truths about life seems to be that the world takes notice when someone does something difficult, and does it well. Everyday acts of excellence, like landing a plane safely, or keeping the internet infrastructure operating, are well compensated. Apple and Google have done really well, and it's not an accident. Pro sports performers and entertainers rake it in because they are that good, people recognize it and money and acclaim just flow.
Maybe this is an intentionally constructed feedback loop by human society or maybe it's unintentional. Since it's not always noticeable via financial compensation, the feedback mechanism can be hard to spot ('she's, like, the best cupcake maker ever'). It's still pretty neat to see nonetheless. Whenever you come across one of those really well done things, it's a 'wow' moment.
Reading Charles Stross' science fiction is becoming a consistent 'wow' experience. Like Neal Stephenson and Richard K. Morgan, reading him prompts feelings of both 'wow, this is good' and 'I can only wish to tell stories like this.' He is the cutting edge of sci-fi. Chris Nolan is one of the cutting edge filmmakers and most of his movies are so good that I could easily start from the beginning after each ends (he made Memento, Batman Begins and The Prestige).
In general it takes about 10 years for someone to become an expert at something. They may be unrecognized, even by themself, as being just barely proficient until they make it all the way to expert level, but that doesn't mean that their mastery isn't advancing the whole time. I have seen this happen in my own line of work. Also, I have stared at my own lack of expertise in writing a novel for years and slowly watched myself chip away at it. I can see it happening with Guitar Hero III, which I got for Christmas, and have gained a whole new appreciation for real guitar players.
While it's fun to be at the crest of the learning curve, starting at zero can be very tough. There may be a learning curve restart at work on a project that is daunting considering the 10 year rule. It can be downright terrifying for the early retired or laid off who have to find a new field just to bring home a paycheck.
As a shout out to those who I think are experts in what they do, and who I aspire to follow gamely, this site will now add 'The Pros' links to the people who are recognized as having their expert shit together. Since I use the ToT site myself for interweb-wanderings, it's also a reference section for me, but please abuse it for your own pleasure.
So Happy New Year, and good luck to all who are just starting a new expertise learning curve or are already on their way. Remember, by 2018 latest, people will bow in your general direction.
For those who are procrastinating a needed start at the bottom of a learning curve, remember, the universe loves excellence. And you don't want to wait till 2019 to be an expert, do you?
Yeah, I tried another MMORPG, EVE Online. Fell for the claims that it was different, that it was good, has wonderful graphics. It offers a total sandbox approach where everything is pretty much player created, even bounty-hunter mission assignments, corporate powers and the economy. They offered a 14 day free trial and I, being a total sucker, gave it a shot.
I was done with it in one afternoon.
Okay, it was different. No first person shooter, just you piloting a space ship. Graphics are gorgeous. My big problems with it are: the camera, the interface, the learning curve, the general feel.
The camera: staring at my own ship during combat is annoying. Controlling the camera in space, when in galactic map mode, etc. was difficult and annoying. This is why I gave up on Homeworld: camera issues made combat almost impossible. In the future, there will be some kind of combat schematic optimized to filter the necessary info out of lots of useless data. In Homeworld and EVE, well, can't let info management get in the way of showing off cool nebulas.
The interface is just overloaded with information and trying to figure out which system you're in is a chore. I lost the intro tutorial when I entered a space station, only to realize it was waiting for me to do something before it continued. The learning curve is tremendous: you essentially have to memorize a skill and spaceship parts catalog where every item sounds/looks just like the last one. You have to learn how to navigate through space with warp and jumpgates and nearly impossible to read maps of routes between planetary systems. Plus, you spend most of your time watching your ship fly through space with nothing to do.
It all adds up to not being fun, which is the point. Why would a casual gamer bother? Why would a hardcore gamer make the time investment to figure it out?
In contrast, recently I downloaded MS Visual C# and Sql Server Express Editions to toy with related to an experiment at work. I was up and running, and knowing what I was doing, within minutes of starting each program. My actions produced understandable results and I could see myself improving instantly. Why can't video game designers shoot for the same result?
An update on the continuing saga of Minnie Trackball's math class tracking. If you remember, we were concerned about the frequent cancellations of math class in 2nd grade and resolved to keep a count of how many school days included a math class casualty.
The first two weeks of school, there was no math. They were both four day weeks though. Every day since then, there has been math. And it's been good stuff.
Until today. Math was cancelled for disability awareness day. Wheelchair races, awareness raising, etc. I have no problem with that. But cancel something else. Even reading or language arts. Illiteracy is not the problem in a high-performing school, but there is a chronic math and science lag all across the US, in even the best schools.
So far, there have been 9 days of no math class, a lot less than we feared by this point.
In the past, I've mentioned that I am evolving to a post-food position. Post-food, like post-materialist, means that one is no longer obsessed or possessed by food. It doesn't command a huge amount of attention, or produce a large amount of excitement or interest.
Having said that, I should point out that this doesn't mean that I don't like food or ignore it. Being post-food means that quality is more important than quantity. Which leads me to the three objects of praise in this post: Trader Joe's, Let's Dish, and Wegmans.
Trader Joe's is the much heralded low cost, mostly healthy grocery chain that sells a lot of its own brand food. Everyone who has access to one raves about it and for years I wondered if the hype was for real. We finally got one in Columbia, and it has lived up to everything everyone has said. The food is great, unique and cheap. Plus shopping there is a different experience.
As people who lunch with me know, the Trackballs have been using Let's Dish a lot. Dr. Trackball spends 2 hours a month preparing about 8 meals at their place, which she takes home and chucks in the freezer. The food is very good: usually a meat entree (we favor the poultry and seafood) that is tasty and just needs to be cooked.
Finally, Wegmans. Wegmans is a super grocery store from back in My Shire that has everything. Growing up in the Shire, I disliked the store for reasons having more to do with the upbringing that didn't fit me than anything else. In the land of crappy Giant and Safeway stores, Wegmans is a huge step forward. Still waiting for it to settle in Columbia.
Bon appetit.
Thanks to Ron at Pint'N'Tome for this link to the Nerd Handbook written by Rands In Repose. A must read if you have a nerd in your life. (hey, I wrote a 2 line post!)
For those who have read this blog for some or all of it's 2 year existence, you know that it started with a bit of a bang by bashing Thanksgiving and by laying down a sort of guiding philosophy for life - be true to oneself and it's how you live, not how long you have lived.
Put this all together, and I thought it would be a good exercise to reread that Thanksgiving basher from 2005 and see if it still held true. Had a good Thanksgiving this year, which was more of a dinner party at some friends' house, so I want to stick the hypocrisy meter in the wind and see what happens.
Result: I haven't deviated at all from my earlier take on the holiday. In fact, I've found that as I reread it that I am quite taken the post. I've found this when rereading other posts: I enjoy reading some of them and if it's been long enough, can surprise myself with an idea or a turn of phrase I forgot about.
Some people who review their own creations, whether they be cooking, writing, children, painting or woodwork, always turn away in disgust. Sometimes that happens for me, but I think it's because usually I can tell what of mine sucks or doesn't suck.
So I'm feeling some pride in my ability to self-critique, stay true, and of course, not have a bloat-out on the pigout holiday.
Went and got a PS3 to upconvert DVDs and play Blu-Ray DVDs this weekend. I got the 40 GB with Spiderman 3 Blu-Ray disc for $400. This includes another 5 Blu-Ray DVDs for free as a rebate.
I had been contemplating upgrading the DVD viewing experience on my 1080p Sony TV and this was the right fit. I do a fair bit of DVD watching due to Netflix and it makes no sense to do that in standard def. Tested out the Cars standard def DVD and it looked phenomenal on the PS3. Now I just need to get my surround sound back online.
I don't plan on playing many (for now, any) games on the PS3. The Wii has it beat in the fun factors for a gamer like me. The PS3 games are also a lot more expensive. Supposedly it will take developers years how to figure out how to make games for the PS3, if at all. Currently, the PS3 is a bust as a console, trailing the other next gen models, but it is the best Blu-Ray player on the market. Sony is betting that once the game companies come around that they will have a system that will beat the other two for the next ten years. We'll see. The developers may just slink away and get caught kissing Nintendo and Microsoft's butts.
The PS3 is also a supercomputer, with a chip a dozen times faster than the highest PC processor. You can allow your unused PS3 to help do medical research or if you are an astronomer, use a series of PS3s to do your supercomputing.
ToT has always been a big fan of public libraries. Until I moved from My Shire to Prince George's County, MD, I had no idea what a good public library was. In the Shire, I ended up checking out the same book on the War of 1812 for about eight years in a row because there wasn't much better to be had.
Now that I live in Howard County, MD, I have inadvertently treated myself to one of the best public libraries in the country. It was #1 in 2005 and is #2 in 2006 for areas with between 250,000 and 500,000 people. The parking lots and the shelves are always full and I can't walk out of there with less than three doorstoppers.
Tonight, we hit the central library branch with the little Trackballs in downtown Columbia and I cleaned a whole bunch of books off my reading list. The kids loaded up the canvas bag we use to carry them and Micro got himself into the pajama time story hour. Here's what ToT will be reading:
Thirteen - Richard K. Morgan
Innovation and Entrepreneurship - Peter Drucker
The Watchmen - Alan Moore
Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki
When you come home from the library with an armful of must reads, it's like your birthday - but for free (or, for very well spent tax money).
For the less socially extroverted and networking averse, who shun happy hours, don't carry business cards with them to the grocery store and just don't have time, connecting and reconnecting with people can be difficult. For someone with writerly ambitions, it's even worse. Read, write or gab: guess which one loses out?
And then came the online social networking sites. While some might use them to socialize, for the rest of us, it's a great way of finding people who you have lost touch with. I have joined Facebook and found a lot of people that I know. There's some fun stuff on there and like-minded groups to join.
Yes, it was originally for the college (Harvard) set, but aren't most techy things? It's now expanded to more people (and so has Myspace and others). Even people older than Trackball are signing on in droves. The best part is you can stay within your circle or expand out. No awkward hems and haws or anything.
Who knows what the long term effect of this will be? Equality in networking? Face2face connections resulting from, say a common affinity for Firefly? Maybe an even playing field for this networking-fueled world we live in.
So come one, come all, and join the Trackball's circle of friends.
Thought I ought to report that a volunteer reader of my novel The Crashpoint Cascade has finished it and has started feedbacking. And he is the reader that I knew would be the most detailed and picky and critical, which means I'm happy he finished first.
To all you others out there with a copy, you will no longer be first, but I eagerly await giving you second place. I need contrasting comments - that's always fun! What if First Reader leads me astray? Scifi can be a hard genre because it is a ton of subgenres with very loyal and picky fans. One genre failing is another's shining point (like long breathless dissertations on astrophysics - retch). Let's mix those comments up.
As usual, the comments coming in highlight many things that were nagging me in very quiet voices but I wasn't sure were legitimate. Now I know. So some fixing is underway.
In the meanwhile, there has been one short story and part of another novel (not a sequel) drafted. That may make the ToT sound like a writing machine, but keep in mind that 0 items have been submitted to anyone for publication, 0 things have been sold, and 0 have been published. And so it goes.
Minnie Trackball is now deep into the math groove. So far the number of days of math this school year stands at n-8, that is, every day of school except the first 8.
And it's real math, they're grading it, and progress is underway. Same is true for reading, spelling and a handful of other subjects. Won't be long now until report cards and teacher confabs come up.
As the 49ers go down in defeat in another game where they have no offense, and the Chargers continue to self-destruct, one can only point the blame finger at Norv Turner and his ego.
He's a great offensive coordinator and was making some good progress in SF. He has two bad and badder head coaching gigs and of course, the huge offensive coordinator run in Dallas in the 1990s. During the head coaching moves offseason, he really wanted to stay in SF for a number of reasons.
So yeah, he takes the head job with the Chargers, who were as primed for the Super Bowl as any other team that didn't make it last year. And they're stinking up the place this year, even though they are virtually unchanged from last year, except for him.
Norv Turner's ego has managed to damage or destroy two teams that he works for. Beware the traps of letting one's ego dictate major decisions in life. It's not only embarrassing but it is dangerous to those around you. Please forward this to Fred Thompson, John Edwards, Paris Hilton, and George Lucas.
All suffering 49ers have to wonder how the defense has massively improved but the O is still a zero. Much of the blame lays at the feet of Coach Mike Nolan, who likes conservative, non-existent offenses. Now that the 49ers have laid another egg, this time against Pittsburgh, where only one late game touchdown was scored and Gore ran for less than 50 (50?!?!) yards
The Niners loaded up at receiver last offseason and upgraded probably more at that position than any other team (N.E. did have decent receivers in 2006, mind you, the Niners had squat.)
The conservative, no-show offense was a joke when the team was 2-0 somehow. Nolan didn't give any indication of opening things up. Now, as the losses begin to stack up and the offense continues to sputter, people hopefully will start asking tough questions about the franchise that brought the Walsh Offense to the NFL and used to be considered an offensive powerhouse. Either the coach has to change, or it's time to consider changing who is coach.
ToT is happy football season is back, but as usual, the experience is somewhat soured by two factors:
1. My 49ers are on the other side of the continent, and according to NFL rules must receive only 20% of the coverage that the Jets may get, regardless of how much the Jets have sucked since Nixon was Prez.
2. Fantasy football is back.
Before fantasy football, people rooted for teams in what still is a team sport. But now, the teams have been derivatized so that, as the Couch Slouch has pointed out, people now follow every tackle, sack, run, TD and towel wipe of individual players. This is the equivalent of going from investing in the S&P 500 to investing in just the interest payments from mortgages on houses on Richmond Street in San Diego.
This perversion cannot stand, man.
So let's make it worse. Let's have every fantasy footballer post their standings in a national database. Then fans of fantasy football could create their own fantasy team of fantasy football participants. After enough years of FF, these stat freaks should have reputation, winnings, etc. to keep score with. The FF fans could build portfolios by being able to pick between Chip, the unemployed fantasy seer who always finishes in the top three of the Beerswillers League, or MonkeyAss14, who has a proprietary formula for choosing the most underrated rookie to get the highest fantasy football score.
Why not have fantasy football leagues that aren't player focused, but offense and defense oriented? You could start the Colts offense and the Seattle defense one week, the Ravens offense and the Colts defense. How about an injury league, where you choose the team that will rack up the most injuries in a week? How about a fantasy football league that doesn't follow raw productivity, but productivity per dollar in the contract? You can derivatize everything if there's stats for it, right? You see, we need to have a large amount of investments, so you can diversify your fantasy football investment dollar.
That way, some moron will be rooting for Chad Johnson, Rex Grossman, Manny Lawson, Joe Nedney, the Packers D, the Arizona O, the Ravens offense to score low, the Raiders defense to get blown wide open and have no idea what he's doing. Then he'll have to hire a fantasy football broker to manage it all.
And actually watch the game for once.
After two abbreviated 4 day weeks of school, Minnie Trackball has finally had a math class - and math homework! That's 1/9 for those keeping score.
And unlike last year, it sounds like there are boys in this math class, about half.
We'll see if we actually find out about test scores, get forewarning on upcoming tests and other communications one might expect. We have our fingers crossed.
So starts another year in the public school system for one of the younger Trackballs and the last year of private preschool for the other.
Athena help us.
The problem Dr. Trackball and I have is that we expect too much. Like quality, world class math instruction in grade school. Like some measure of efficiency in public schools. Like hanging on to a dynamite teacher who exceeds our high expectations in preschool. Like not having girls under 10 have to be blatantly discriminated against.
Well, the last one has already failed. And today we are 0/1 for school days of math instruction. That's right, this year, we're keeping count. In a school system that meets the 180 day minimum by stacking half days throughout the year and in a bunch at the end, every day counts, even the first. Not to mention that there are big time standardized tests in Minnie's grade.
What Renee Zellweger's character in Jerry McGuire said, "It used to be a better meal, and now it's a better life," now applies to education. So expecting a lot kind of comes with the territory and we don't see any reason to be reluctant in having high expectations.
Yes, this is a high scoring, well to do school system that is better than a lot others in the country and probably better than most of the rest of the world. We don't care. There are better ones out there, and those kids will have algebra in 9th grade, and plenty of AP and IB courses in high school. In the global market pool for talent, being a step ahead of Kansas creationistic science curriculum is not good enough.
Those who expect less get less, and those who are expected to provide less sense this and underperform a little more each year. That's fine at Giant supermarket (hellooooo Wegmans and Trader Joes!) but not fine with the Trackballs' education.
So, half-assed public school system, (motto: 'We coast on rich kids') you're on notice. Don't make us get involved with the math curriculum. Don't get us started on the lack of science and social studies curriculum. Don't enrage us with a communications blackout because teachers just don't want to communicate about upcoming tests, test grades, or anything at all. Don't make us start getting noisy about how in the early grades, nearly all the girls in a grade are stuck in the slowest math class. This has gone beyond the ability of trying to squeeze some special compensation for just our child when it's more than a teacher, it's the curriculum, the administration, the school board, etc.
Why don't you try to wow us? Just this once? Or as the op-ed in the Washington Post noted today, we might have to consider other options. And then only the lower expectation parents will be left, at least in this particular public school system. That pisses us off too.
It's those high expectations again.
The Trackball family recently went on vacation to San Diego, where we caught the last day of Comic Con, geeked out at Legoland, saw tons of animals at the Zoo and Sea World, and generally enjoyed the super comfortable climate.
This was the first place I had visited in the real world after exploring it virtually in a video game. That was a bit surreal. Poring over paper maps, guide books and even Google Maps is not quite the same thing as racing around a city on the Xbox before seeing it for real. The sum total effect is for one to feel much more comfortable in spaces that are much less new and strange. I imagine this will become more and more common between Second Life type virtual manifestations and Google Maps becoming more and more sophisticated. And having seen several cities visualized in Lego means that those cities will feel much the same when I first set foot in them.
Representative wow points that speak to what excites the Trackballs:
Batmobile at Comic-Con
Lego San Francisco at Legoland.
Coronado Beach (little Trackballs loved it especially)
Balboa Park (this peaceful room in the Japanese Garden is a stylistic suggestion for the Lair)
