Don't Cry for Me ...

I was just listening to this song "Don't Cry for Me" and I swear I thought the words were:

Don't Cry for Me
If your NUTS are cold and lonely

but apparently it's

Don't Cry for Me
If your NIGHTS are cold and lonely

© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Mark Regnerus' Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers. - By Hanna Rosin - Slate Magazine

Mark Regnerus' Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers. - By Hanna Rosin - Slate Magazine: "Evangelical teens today are much less sheltered than their parents were; they watch the same TV and listen to the same music as everyone else, which causes a "cultural collision," according to Regnerus. "Be in the world, but not of it," is the standard Christian formula for how to engage with mainstream culture. But in a world hypersaturated with information, this is difficult for tech-savvy teenagers to pull off. There are no specific instructions in the Bible on how to avoid a Beyoncé video or Scarlett Johansson's lips calling to you from YouTube, not to mention the ubiquitous porn sites. For evangelicals, sex is a "symbolic boundary" marking a good Christian from a bad one, but in reality, the kids are always "sneaking across enemy lines," Regnerus argues."

All this is that: "Who has killed more, God or Satan?"

All this is that: "Who has killed more, God or Satan?"

What could be a more appropriate question on Memorial Day?

It's about time ...

Education: Getting Your Freak On Just Got Harder (Seattle Weekly)

I was wondering when teens would do a proper job of inventing behavior that would be repugnant to their parents.

They've finally done it!

I know there was the tongue splitting thing ... but let's face it, hardly anyone did it.

But now there is "freak dancing" which basically simulates sex while dancing. (See picture near top of linked article.)

Now we're getting somewhere. And apparently everyone is doing it!

So many kids are doing it, and getting kicked out of school dances, that there is no one left at the dance when it is supposed to end!

Thank God we homeschool our children and they aren't exposed to this stuff. (You don't suppose they read my blog, do you? [Actually, they don't. Not interested.])

[I re-read this and it sounds like I'm a prude which I'm not. Heh. It's not so much that I'm against grind dancing as I am pro childhood. Childhood is a precious thing and kids are pushed out of it too quickly. That's one of the premises of unschooling - let your kids play! They'll learn to explore and have fun and it turns out (in general) they'll actually retain the information they do learn. Imagine that.]

Mozilla Firefox - Smart Keywords

Mozilla Firefox - Smart Keywords

These are so useful and I always forget how to set them up. The built-in help in Firefox is useless in this regard.

Why I still don't have Hi-Def

What's the Matter with HDMI? — Audioholics Home Theater Reviews and News

I don't have hi-def because it's easy to buy a hi-def TV but to really enjoy TV these days requires an entire ecosystem of support. In the early days of DVD it was necessary to tell your tuner/amp what kind of audio signal it was receiving and if you screwed up you got a blast of noise that would hurt your ears.

Today, you can buy a decent up-converting tuner/amp for $450.00, with a modest number of HDMI inputs (two or three). In the long run, this is no where near enough inputs. And since there's potentially copy protection to deal with, the entire food chain from your hi-def source to your TV needs to obey some obscure and poorly implemented rules in order to reliably produce a picture you can enjoy.

The whole "standardization" situation right now is a cluster fuck - you know that's true when HDMI cables have version numbers.

If I was a single guy with one TV and an Xbox 360 or PS3 and some other Hi-Def source (cable box or even over-the-air antennae) then it would be easy to buy the right equipment and it would work tolerably. But if you want the same flexibility you have now with standard-def then I think waiting a couple of more years until things settle out is a good idea.

Certainly waiting until now has been a good idea, as most hi-def TVs weren't "Full hi-def" (1080p) and didn't have anywhere enough pixels to even display a reasonable "hi-def" picture.

So I'm waiting a couple of more years. Eventually the S3 TiVo (with more disk space) will be cheap, and oversampling LCD hi-def TVs will be cheap, and the cables will work, and the tuners will work, DVD burners of some type will exist and be cheap, and so on. Then I'll consider upgrading the whole house. Until then, I'm enjoying the fact that standard-def keeps looking better and better as a result of the overall video pipelines converting to hi-def and then downsampling for standard-def.

(Update 2007-11-24: I have Hi-Def now, a year ahead of schedule. It's 1080p, it looks great, and even standard def looks pretty good. And supposedly the fluorescent lights that power the backlight won't get dim for 22 years. At least, that's the hope.)

GameSpot - Roads to Victory

Game Rankings - Roads to Victory:

There are a few other issues that keep the combat from being fun for more than a few levels. Although the controls are pretty good, they're still not on par with those on a console or PC. To compensate for this, enemy artificial intelligence is quite poor. Sometimes you'll be just a few feet away from soldiers, but they won't have been "activated," and they'll stand next to you, staring off into space. Even when you shoot them, they'll stand out in the open and take fire. The poor AI, combined with frequent respawning of soldiers, makes it feel as if you're playing some sort of WWII-themed shooting gallery at times. Enemy AI might be poor, but that doesn't mean you won't die. Getting blown away by unseen fire is commonplace thanks to enemies that shoot at you from offscreen and kill you before you're able to turn and locate them. While the levels typically take about 15 minutes to beat (if you don't die), there are no midlevel save points, and the game saves your progress only at the end of the level. This would be a mere inconvenience if it weren't for the fact that you must replay entire levels when the game crashes. We experienced several freezing-and-crashing issues, particularly later in the game. Roads to Victory's multiplayer is also a letdown. Up to six players can play deathmatch, capture the flag, king of the hill, and a few other modes via an ad hoc connection, but there's no online play to speak of, and there's no game sharing either.

Go Michael!

(Maybe it's time for David to optimize things again.)

What happened when I followed The Secret's advice for two months. - By Emily Yoffe - Slate Magazine

What happened when I followed The Secret's advice for two months. - By Emily Yoffe - Slate Magazine:

So, I vowed to follow Byrne's simple rules for abundance and see what happened. The book encourages one to start big: "It is as easy to manifest one dollar as it is to manifest one million dollars." But I thought starting with the million-dollar manifestation was like saying, "I love you" on a first date; I didn't want to scare the universe into not taking my calls. I came up with three things I thought the universe would find reasonable: a kitchen floor, unclogged sinuses, and a new desk.

At this point I should add that The Secret is not only drivel—it's pernicious drivel. The obvious question that arises from its claim that it's easy to get what you want, is: Why do so many people get what they don't want? As Byrne writes, "Imperfect thoughts are the cause of all humanity's ills, including disease, poverty, and unhappiness." Yes, according to The Secret, people don't just randomly end up being massacred, for example. They are in the wrong place because of their own lousy thinking. Cancer patients have long been victims of this school of belief. But The Secret takes it to a new and more repulsive level with its advice not just to blame people for their illness, but to shun them, lest you start being infected by their bummer thoughts, too.

The Secret is Christian Science all over again.

Why do so many people get what they don't want? As Byrne writes, "Imperfect thoughts are the cause of all humanity's ills, including disease, poverty, and unhappiness." Yes, according to The Secret, people don't just randomly end up being massacred, for example.

I was raised a Christian Scientist, until I was 20, so this is familiar territory. I had horrible acne in High School. After praying over it for 2 years, it finally went away. Although I suspect it had less to do with praying and more to do with washing my face once a day with clean non-soapy water. I had Chicken Pox when I was about six; it went away after three weeks of praying.

To be sure, our thoughts affect us a great deal. The brain is the biggest gland in the body. My one healing in Christian Science was when I was stung by a bee and my hand was swelling up. My Dad came in and said, "That's not necessary!" He said it with such authority and I was so afraid of him that the swelling went away. But that's actually just hypnotism and suggestion and/or perhaps activating some glandular part of your brain.

Also, to be sure, when a person with great personal power like Steve Jobs says, "I'm going to dominate the digital media world," it comes true. Now Jobs is saying, "I'm going to get rid of our lame copy protection system and sell unprotected MP3s!" and it might come true. But if Joe Blow says that, not much is going to happen.

I think the problem with Christian Science and books like The Secret are that they overstate the case. Positive thinking is good. Focusing on what you want is good - shit, even figuring out what you want is good. But deciding the universe is at your beck and call is bad. Even Gates, one of the most powerful people on the planet, chooses his battles. His company dominates in a couple of areas and as far as the big money goes, that's where Microsoft focuses. Everything else is a dalliance, and the chief owner knows it. Now Gates is focusing on certain medical issues world-wide. He's not just throwing his money anywhere. Likewise with Oprah - she's focusing her charitable work in places she cares about. Then you have Al Gore standing up for global warming but since he's not quite focused and has errors in his presentation he might end up doing more harm than good in the long run.

"As a man thinketh in his heart so is he," (Proverbs 23:7) I believe the author was talking about character, not control of the universe.

(BTW, I recommend, Christian Science, by Mark Twain.)

Sadr: Spreading Havoc to New Parts of Iraq

Sadr: Spreading Havoc to New Parts of Iraq - Newsweek - The War in Iraq - MSNBC.com

Drive-by shootings are nothing new on Baghdad's streets. But petty murders like Ibrahim's are a sign of a more worrying development. Weeks ago Sadr issued orders for his fighters to lie low as thousands of new U.S. and Iraqi soldiers deployed throughout Baghdad. For the most part they've obeyed—and the resulting drop in sectarian killings was the best news that U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus had to report last week, as he pleaded with congressional leaders to give his security plan time to work. Now individual gunmen and sometimes whole units from Sadr's Mahdi Army are breaking off on their own. The militiamen "are under a lot of pressure, so it's natural for them to shed pieces," says a Coalition official familiar with the group who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive material.

The freelancers add a new dimension to Iraq's already brutal kaleidoscope of violence. In Baghdad, after an initial dramatic drop, the number of corpses being found each morning is on the rise again. Outside the capital, fighters fleeing south have linked up with local Mahdi units; their presence is upsetting the uneasy balance of power struck between various Shiite groups in the region.

Well, duh. So much for the "surge."

Reid: Bush in denial over Iraq

Reid: Bush in denial over Iraq - Politics - MSNBC.com:

Reid: ‘The failure has been ... presidential’
He did not repeat the assertion in his prepared speech, saying that “The military mission has long since been accomplished. The failure has been political. It has been policy. It has been presidential.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid might be my new hero. I don't know anything about this guy - but statements like this are awesome.

It's hard to imagine a greater failure of leadership than the current President Bush.

I've been reading about these neocon bastards and they are pathetic.

It turns out the World Bank, which the US funds to a large extent, has been doing the same bullshit around the world that the neocons tried to pull in Iraq - forcing a free market economy onto countries that don't want it - and worse - the "free market" economy they force on these countries is controlled by US businesses. It's not free at all. And who is head of the World Bank right now? Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz.

Bush talks freedom but walks oppression. It's not good.

Endless summer - Salon

A nice article on unschooling.

Skymall

A close reading of Skymall. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine:

The ad for the SnacDaddy® chicken-wing array tray—headlined 'Where the wings have no shame'—appears in the Late Spring '07 issue of Skymall, which I found in the seat pocket on a Delta flight. This was just pages from an ad for 'the world's largest write-on map mural,' probably useful for keeping an eye on the fast-moving global catastrophe that will make your many handcrank devices the envy of your crank-deprived neighbors. And a few pages on, we find the 'crank-powered walkie talkie.' (The crank, handbred in Vermont, is sold separately.)

The issue also features the 'upside-down tomato garden,' the 'remote controlled robotic hammerhead shark,' the 'pop-up hot dog cooker,' the 'million-germ-eliminating travel toothbrush sanitizer,' the 'window-mounted cat porch,' the 'world's smallest indoor remote control helicopter,' the 'Turbo-Groomer® COBALT' nose-hair trimmer, the 'Sudoku glass tabletop set,' the 'Solar-powered mole repeller,' (what, no handcrank in case of nuclear winter?), the 'versatile mock rock in five sizes.' (For those unaware of the purpose of a 'mock rock'—since real ones are not in short supply—they are designed to 'hide problem areas in your yard or garden.')

Back when I was traveling every other week it was normal for me to flip through these magazines. I wanted gadgets - lots of them! The ultimate gadget for me was my Sony Clie - camera, web browser, PDA, music player, photo viewer, etc., all with a pretty big screen for a small handheld device. Eventually the camera died, and the Bluetooth ecosystem I had set up that allowed me to browse or send email anywhere collapsed, and the Blazer browser quit working because it required a proxy system that shutdown, but it's still, several years later, a cool device. (I now download my news to AvantGo in the morning and read it later if I'm in the mood.) I had little cameras, my phone that talked to the Clie, a laptop, various music players, and so on.

But now that I haven't been on an airplane for three years I find I don't care very much about collecting gadgets. When I was traveling, I felt like a "man on the move", and that required me to have many clever portable gadgets.

I enjoyed traveling but now that I'm not doing that (no trade shows, no E3, no GDC, no 26 hour trips to Atlanta and back) and I'm not a "man on the move" I'm just a guy who wants to listen to music in the car or when I want to block out the noise at work.

Life is simpler, in my relatively gadget free world. I still have the Clie, and carry it around, because it keeps my appointments, although my appointments are linked at work and at home via a network, so I'm not really sure why I carry the Clie around. Mostly habit, I guess, and reading AvantGo is cheaper than buying a newspaper.

I also carry around a stupid number of memory stick and/or itty-bitty hard drives. I'm not sure why. The Clie has room for a multi-gig memory stick. My iPod generally has several gigs free where I can park stuff. I guess I have some kind of compulsive pack-rat mentality for dragging data around.

I thought it would be cool to have a sample of every kind of computer media I have used over the years, from paper tape, to cards, to 8" floppies for the Terak machine, to data cassette tapes for the Apple and Kim-1 computers, to the 20 megabyte hard disk the size of a washing machine, to various tape formats (including 7-track and 9-track tapes, and DEC tapes! [they were awesome], zip disks, memory sticks, DAT drives, and so on. But instead I think I'll try to track down pictures of them.

And maybe store those pictures on my Clie ...

Time for Plan G in Iraq? - By Phillip Carter - Slate Magazine

Time for Plan G in Iraq? - By Phillip Carter - Slate Magazine:

But defining the current surge as a 'Plan A' is a dangerously dishonest move that ignores the history of the Iraq war to date. In fact, since 2003, we have run through at least six plans, none of which has succeeded. The Petraeus plan is something more akin to Plan F—truly, the last Hail Mary play in the fourth quarter. And if it fails, then we better start considering Plan G, also known as 'Get out of Iraq.'

The article goes through all the different "plans" for ignoring and/or occupying and/or subduing Iraq. It concludes that if the current plan doesn't work, then the last option will be to leave.

Since the current plan isn't working, and won't work, because Sadr and his forces can trivially reposition themselves wherever the troops are not, and so the bombs will keep exploding in different, seemingly random places, plan G will be to replace the Iraqi government with our own guys. The rhetoric will be, "These people had every chance to govern themselves and chose not to, and so we're in charge now."

Plan G - the one I describe - probably won't work either, but I think it's more likely to be the next plan than withdrawal. Bush won't admit defeat and he equates withdrawal with defeat; he would rather stress our military to (or beyond) the breaking point than admit defeat.

'Tired' and 'Drunk' Lily axes US tour - The Money Times

'Tired' and 'Drunk' Lily axes US tour - The Money Times:

I have been on tour with this album for a year now, I have fulfilled every commitment up to this point. I am tired, but more than that I don't think I have been giving my best performances recently. I have been getting really drunk because I've been so nervous about doing bad shows, and I don't want people spending money on a going to see a show that isn't the best it could be,” the 21-year-old star wrote on her blog page.

Now thar's some straight talk. I think her album is one of the best things I've heard in years. I remember listening to a free version of one of her tunes, probably from her MySpace page. The quality wasn't very good - it sounded overly compressed and even - ack - a bit noisy (unusual in this digital age). I was looking forward to getting the real album which I ordered from Amazon but when it arrived I discovered that the sound quality was the same. The album - which is still great - sounds like it was recorded in a garage on a four-track cassette tape machine.

But anyway, she admits to getting drunk from the stress... very unusual behavior, and actually quite refreshing (the admission, not the drunkenness).

Vista Shutdown

As the proud and fascinated owner of a new Dell Vista Laptop I can honestly say that Vista is "interesting."

Here's a story about the shutdown button that makes Vista more interesting.

My favorite part of the article is the notes at the bottom about edits made to the article:

edits: fixed link, removed some strong language, fixed math

It would be an interesting project to improve the build system for a project the size of Vista. I suspect a little Web 2.0 mashup action with a database and some heavily linked HTML and comments interleaved with the code would probably make things a lot better.

Cross disciplinary management is always tricky. In games, the disciplines range from sound effects, music, art, animation, effects, programming, level design, story and some kind of "big picture" control. It's possible Microsoft doesn't see the Vista shutdown button as cross-disciplinary - after all, it's all code. But I would say that Kernel programmers are totally different from UI programmers and Tablet PC UI programmers are going to have some fairly specialized concerns as well, and that techniques used in games to get such disparate functions as level design and sound effects working together could probably be used to make the Vista build process a lot better.

© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

WP: McCain stakes bid on success in Iraq

WP: McCain stakes bid on success in Iraq - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com:

McCain's rosy assessment of safety on Iraq's streets after his recent visit to a Baghdad marketplace was mocked by many, prompting him to tell a television reporter that he 'misspoke' and now regrets the comments. But, in the interview to be broadcast tomorrow, the senator sticks by his defense of the overall war effort, predicting that failure in Iraq would be 'catastrophic.'

Obviously McCain doesn't really want to be President.

I think he continues, as does Bush, to misspeak. We have already failed in Iraq and it is already catastrophic. There is no need for the future tense.

But anyway, I think we can safely write-off McCain as a credible candidate.

GameDaily BIZ: Supreme Commander Annihilates Competition

GameDaily BIZ: Supreme Commander Annihilates Competition:

Supreme Commander Annihilates Competition

After creating Total Annihilation in 1997, Chris Taylor is back on the RTS scene with Supreme Commander, and publisher THQ couldn't be happier. The game is off to a hot start, consistently in the PC top ten week after week.

I couldn't be happier for these guys. My son quickly finished all three campaigns and is now working his way up the Supreme Commander online ladder.

"Supreme Commander is doing things that no other RTS has done before, providing a completely unique experience that goes beyond RTS games," commented Kraff. "Anyone who's dreamed of commanding legions of tanks, jets, battleships and massive experimental units across enormous battlefields will want to get their hands-on this game."

Atari, who now holds the original TA license, told me (when I was a studio director at Amaze) that this kind of thing wouldn't be fun and that all RTS games need to be like C&C: Generals.

They were wrong. Anyway, congrats to GPG and all of my friends there.

Disneyland Paris

Disneyland Paris

Here's another Disney Theme Park web album. This one is Disneyland Paris where I took quite a few more pictures than I did in Tokyo. (My camera was brand-new in Tokyo and I was still figuring it out.) I'm still building out this photo album. I'm using Picasa and it is pretty cool to use. I know lots of people love Flickr.com and it may be better - I don't know. But the thing that blew me away in Picasa was real-time photo-straighening. Have you ever tried to rotate a photo a little bit in Photoshop? It's hard to do - you have to type in a number - and it's dog slow. With Picasa, it's real-time and simple. I assume they use Direct3D or OpenGL to access the hardware on your video board.

The Google screensaver (available from Google Pack also recently received a major upgrade and it's very cool. You can connect to RSS feeds such as the ones from my Picasa web albums (and I understand Flickr is supported too.)

It's all good fun.

ThinkGeek :: The Lonely Guy Dream Vacation Digital Photo Frame

ThinkGeek :: The Lonely Guy Dream Vacation Digital Photo Frame

Brilliant.

Peter's Evil Overlord List

My son brought an important list to my attention. Here are some samples:

If my advisors ask 'Why are you risking everything on such a mad scheme?', I will not proceed until I have a response that satisfies them.

I think some regular managers might do well to try to follow some of the rules in Peter's Evil Overlord List. I worked for an Evil Overlord once who was convinced our company should have 100% of the market we were attacking. He made this mistake by convincing himself that the 100% of the market we wanted was only 5% of the larger market, so why couldn't we do that?

Amusingly, Steve Jobs made this same error when he announced the iPhone. "There are a billion phones sold each year! We only want 1% of that!" Sadly, the iPhone is properly categorized as a product for the smart phone market, which is not a billion phones a year. It would have been more honest to say what proportion of the smart phone market he planned to grab.

This one has practical everyday value as well:

Any data file of crucial importance will be padded to 1.45Mb in size.

Sadly, the data file rule is out of date, and any version of it will be out of date within two years, because the storage capacity on the planet Earth appears to be growing without bound. Interestingly, I worked with a guy once who thought it would be brilliant to sell a CD online which could be burned (of course) onto your own CD ... and make it 80 minutes and 30 seconds minutes long. (In case you don't know, the maximum time limit for CD Audio is 80 minutes.) He was quite distressed when I crushed his evil plan by removing an uninteresting 1 1/2 minute piece of music. (It's not a great idea to go right up to 80 minutes, either, as frequently a couple of seconds of gap are put in between each tune.)

Finally, to keep my subjects permanently locked in a mindless trance, I will provide each of them with free unlimited Internet access.

Well, everyone has unlimited Internet access now, so this isn't really an actionable item.

I will not use any plan in which the final step is horribly complicated, e.g. "Align the 12 Stones of Power on the sacred altar then activate the medallion at the moment of total eclipse." Instead it will be more along the lines of "Push the button."

Also good advice. One time in high school I was the video tape editor for a student director's project. He expected me to start a tape rolling, edit, let the source tape roll, rewind another machine, edit, pause, jump sideways, and then do another edit. It was clearly impossible. He didn't believe me until the teacher, the great Mr. Fred Cutler, came by to see what we were arguing about. (Where are you, Fred Cutler? I learned a lot from you.)

I will see a competent psychiatrist and get cured of all extremely unusual phobias and bizarre compulsive habits which could prove to be a disadvantage.

Well, it kind of goes without saying that everyone should do this, but unfortunately only Evil Overlords can really afford this kind of counseling.

Before employing any captured artifacts or machinery, I will carefully read the owner's manual.

Ha! That's not gonna happen. Nobody does that. If people read instruction manuals, then instruction manual writers would have to actually do a decent job, and the whole market economy would have to be reorganized. It's just not gonna happen.

Commentary (C) 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson. Evil Overlord excerpts Copyright 1996-1997 by Peter Anspach.