Shane's randomness

Hulu ads double in 2011

2011-12-17T15:38:00.000-08:00

In my last post I finally shared some Ad data around Hulu and shared my belief that despite Ads Hulu Plus was still a great deal.

All of my data was from early in 2011 so I decided to start the data collection again after that post and it looks like Hulu has doubled the amount of Ad time in shows since then. Here's the data

	Feb 2011	Dec 2011
% View Time	5.5%	12.4%
% Content Time	5.8%	14.1%
Ad Len	23.4s	26.5s
Break Len	24.5	49.5
Ads per Break	1.1	1.9

I still think Hulu in general is a good deal, and if anything I see this is it becoming a more viable platform as it's obvious there's more interest from Advertisers.

Pay for Commercials! Say what?

2011-12-04T17:38:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest complaints I hear about Hulu Plus is that there are still commercials despite paying for it. I'm not sure why people think it should be commercial free when Cable costs money and still has commercials; however, being a data oriented kinda guy I wanted to try and compare the impact of commercials in these two mediums and perhaps try to determine if the benefit was really worth it.

To do this I basically kept a spreadsheet for each show I watched, tracked how long each show and commercial break was then did the numbers.

The results are basically that on Hulu you spend 5.6% of your viewing time watching commercials. Compare that to cable tv where you spend 28% of your time watching commercials and to me at the least Hulu offers a large value at only $9/mo compared to cable's $60+/mo. Now consider you get all that for free really, and that the $9/mo for Plus is for additional benefits, like "streaming" to non computer devices, HD and back episodes for a lot of shows.

An argument for cable is that with a DVR you can skip all the commercials, reducing them to a few seconds. Towards this I'd say that cable would prefer you didn't and would likely stop you if they could, where Hulu's default offering is pretty good. Also the commercials do pay for the content your viewing on cable so it's arguable if you're doing your show any good by skipping commercials, but that's a discussion for another time.

Perhaps the only other stat that comes out of this data is that he average commercial length on Hulu is 24s, not too bad really.

(Note: This data is from earlier in 2011, I just didn't get around to writing about it. I also wasn't incredibly stringent on the exact number of seconds in each break since they are off a little from each other, and you can argue whether those couple second PSA's are ads, but for comparison purposes I think the error amounts aren't significant.)

The Writing on the Wall

2011-10-05T19:03:00.000-07:00

This is draft 1 of a story I wrote a long time ago. I wanted to actually write more of late so might as well start sharing at the beginning. It's rough for sure, but I like it.

-------------------

Line up, then across, now down. A squiggly bowl to cover it, and finally a line across the bottom to connect it all. Stepping back, he eyed the tiny beginning to his mural. It was perfect, the beginning, exactly how the cave entrance looked. It was precise, it was gone.

The world plunged into darkness. Humid and heavy, the hand placed over his face pulled back and down he went.

"Unh," the interloper grunted.
"Unh, indeed," he thought.

From the ground he was helpless as his older, hairier brother looked closely, dimly at his art. He sniffed it, he tasted it, he smeared it with his sweaty palm, and let out a delighted sigh. Elated with himself he began jumping, arms flailing widely, grunts coming at will. A few more of these and he left the way he came. He was gone, gone like his picture, with his picture.

Leaning back he surveyed the damage. Black was smeared on the wall, a nasty rendition of his work. Sighing, his only thought was that it was good he had not started with the colors.

-----

Dejectedly he went through the stone doorway his brother left through. In the next room the sun shone in more directly illuminating every crack and crevasse. The room was empty save his hard headed brother who was currently rubbing his blackened hand on anything he could. He left a trail all over the room which apparently has started with his own ass where the darkest of the splotches were. A small grunt escaped his throat and led into a snicker; just a light one though as the tide of fortune could change at any time again.

"Not as good as his brother," he thought to himself. If being good meant being like that then he'd just have to continue to disappoint his parents. It was true he wasn't nearly as big as his brother, and even then his arms were still too short to drag on the ground as he walked. Along with just the slightest smattering of hair on his body was a sight that he was a late bloomer, if he had bloomed at all.

Fortune had again changed, and his brother's behavior was not going to snap him out of it. It was time to make an escape. His brother had found a patch of sand along the wall. Discovering that it removed the black best he was busy rubbing his hand roughly along the ground. This would be a good enough distraction.

Outside it was a hot glaring day. The kind that would tan hides quickly, both the animal ones laid out on rocks and those of the ones tending them. Wiping fresh beads of sweat from his eyes he walked out a little and turned to survey the front of the family cave. He'd done a pretty good job this morning, at least as good as he could do without making anyone too suspicious. He knew he'd never be able to do his best work at home and he'd learn to accept it. His master piece was hidden away where it'd have to stay for a long time. Someday he hoped he would be able to show everyone else and have them appreciate it, especially his family. For now he would have work in secret, occasionally leaving decoys for grog so he wouldn't become suspicious and go looking to make trouble.

A trail of sweat poured down his brow and the saltiness strung as it diffused into his eye. "Right, it's hot," he thought again. He really wanted to go to his secret hide away and finish the campfire scene he has started the day before, but he knew heat meant that the berries on the outcropping would be dried up a little making them perfect for his needs. He was almost out of red coloring and today was looking to be a prime time to replenish it.

The first time he tried to use the berries they were nice and fat. Bitter on the tongue at first, then followed with juicy sweetness. The juice inevitably ended upon his hands and as he attempted to lick it off all he had managed was to turn more of himself red. It would last for days, marking him more similar to his brother than he preferred. However this was all assuaged as the thought dawned on him that he could somehow use this to give more reality to his otherwise black and rock colored drawings. His first batch was simply horrible. The ripe plump berries that worked so well in his mouth were the worst to use. The new found paint did nothing but run down the wall and pool on the ground. Much like bison dung to hunting, the berry juice was toxic to his art. It ruined the piece he had labored on. It ruined the wall, and if you were not careful a splattered bowl of it ruined you for a week.

For an entire day he went around squishing berries and rubbing their insides on rocks. The perfect berry was one he could squeeze to about half of it's otherwise plump size before it split open and oozed out its red insides. It was liquid enough to actually impart its color on a rock but it would not run beyond where it was placed.

The next trick was to find a good source of these berries. It was out the hottest of days that he could explore without fear that grog would suddenly appear and pummel him. Worse yet, if grog were to find him somewhere that he was especially enjoying, then he would never be able to return. grog would remember and come back if he were ever looking for a toy to beat on. After much meandering through the day he suddenly realized his path would take him to the rocky out cropping them women used to dry hides out on.

The out cropping had very little of anything on it when it was first found. The small bits of vegetation were worthless to any but the animals, so the ancestors took the rocks which were useless to any but them. Due to this, the smallest rock to be found was unliftable. They had taken any rock that they were able to carry down to the pebbles which could be used as smoothing stones. The majority of the heavier stones they had tried to carry back to the village had ultimately been dropped over the edge in hopes of breaking them up. This also ended up being the source of all the animal pelts they had come upon one random day later. A whole extended family of deer were taken out while they were sleeping at the base of the cliff.

The outcrop was a weird site. Years of weathering had been removed by the cavemen in the name of survival. All that was left was the largest of rocks all perched out on the largest rock of them all. As he reached the top he saw none of the women, but there were hides laid out in various stages of dehydration. The women had either recently left or were soon to return. He had little to fear from the women other than some secluded humiliation. They liked to touch him and cradle him as if he were somehow still a baby hanging from their back hair. He knew it was because he was the only one his age who would not yell deep grunts and hit the women. He felt sorry for them, their children growing up, becoming brutes. He would only tolerate it so much though and did his best to not be present in front of his peers in these situations. For now though, that was the the least of his fears, anyone who saw him up here was someone who might give him away.

He did his best to cross the open expanse and get to the berries that grew on the edge quickly. With a sigh he flung himself from the bushes and lopped across the expanse. His arms were a bit stubby so he was constantly keeping himself from falling head first into the ground. He caught himself with his knuckles, then flung his legs forward to start the next round of falling. Lucky for him, his knuckles were as hard as any others, so the whole jerky act caused no pain.

As he arrived at the edge he conducted a quick survey to make sure he was still alone. Seeing no adversary he went to his task behind a medium sized boulder. Normally he would have brought one of the bowls made from palm fronds and dried clay to carry the berries back in. Today he would have to make due with what he could carry. As he picked with his right hand, and held with his left hand cupped, the berries began to mash into each other. By the time there were too many to hold onto individually, it was no longer necessary to contain them but instead he only needed to hold on to the gooey mass that had formed. He looked down into his hand, focused on one berry in the middle, traced along its edge overlapping. His mind and eyes could not hold on and both snapped out of focus. The red overtook his vision, dark and light spots floated around in front of him. Thoughts of the fear the berries used to give the tribe surfaced followed by Mungog the elder following the birds, eating what they ate, and living despite the evil colors.

He was standing up straight, mesmerized by what he held when the women came around the corner. It was time to check on the hides and turn any that needed it so that they would not harden in the shape of the rocks. The women had not seen him, but that did not matter. At the first sound of them he dived straight down catching some of the bushes branches and drawing blood from his forehead. Had they seen him? It didn't seem like it. No one came to investigate. Their grunts were the grunts of ones set to a boring task on a horrid day, not the grunts of one exploring, one hunting a quarry. Finally pulling himself off the ground into a squatting crouch behind his boulder he crafter a plan to survey the situation.

Enacting his plan, he began by turning towards the rock that was hiding him and rested all his weight on his right foot. He extended his left foot to just the left edge of the rock and his head to the right. It was time. In one deft move he stretched out. Left foot straight out, toes wiggling so they could be seen and distract anyone who might be there. His head poking out to spy upon any his toes had tricked. He stood there for a good minute, toes wiggling, until he saw the back of a head. At this he snapped his body in so he was covered by the rock. A quick twist to the left and he took off with a low stature so as to keep hidden.

Back along behind the rocks he lopped along, this time more haggard by his left hand that he held guarded close to himself. At each boulder he performed a similar stealthy look out for any sudden on lookers. This time though the hastiness of the situation only allowed for him to quickly wiggle the fingers of his right hand out one side and then quickly poke his head out the other. At each boulder he performed this dance and at each boulder he was equally alone. Near the end, his confidence overcame him and he rushed tripping over his own feet. He fell out from between the two boulders. His arms stretched out in front of him on the ground, his chin hurt, his eyes followed the glob sailing through the air away from him. His eyes grew bigger in shock. He now cared as little about the women as they did of him. He jumped to his feet and ran after the glob. It landed on the rock, slowly sliding down the curved edge into oblivion. Loosing all fear he scooped it up from the edge quick and ran straight from the outcropping.

The glob of berries was oozing between his fingers. The heat from his hand had loosened up its structure and made its aroma finally noticeable. His mouth began to water, and he was forced to think of this canvas left empty but his stomach full.

He did his best to control the situation with just the one hand but ultimately he needed the other. Interlacing his fingers he brought the berries back into harmony. He stared at the lengths of the fingers on his right hand, they were stained red along with all the hair which would certainly spread the dye despite his best efforts. He hated to not have a respectable hand to conduct himself with. The left was a necessary sacrifice, the right was just tragic.

The sudden coolness of the path under his fee distracted him from the disappointment. He must have been more annoyed than usual by the mess, he thought. He was much closer to the cave than he realized.

He first discovered the cave during a game of run away from grog. It was unusual for these games to last longer than a couple feet before grog caught him and began the pummeling. This time there was an extra amount of terror. He had started the game by bumping into grog, which made grog drop his dinner into the campfire. Dinner was grog's favorite thing. It was terror that let him elude grog's initial lunge, and it was terror that took him in the direction of his eventual refuge. He had never made it this far away from grog, and had never had to make a plan for evasion. Hiding seemed the better route. grog would certainly catch him if he tried to out run him, so he chose the crowdedness of the dark overhanging trees over the cleared path that would eventually lead to the outcropping and further away. He quickly began to regret his decision. Burrs that normally mode you only wince, dug in even further as his feet pounded on them. Dead branches that would otherwise simply crack under foot, now broke into spears from the force of his feet and shot pangs up his legs. His arms could not avoid the dense trees and created new debris that was quickly picked up by his hairy body. He was well under the thicker branches which would surely cause more pain if they did not simply known him over. This would have made the whole endeavor bitterly disappointing when grog found his unconscious body. Nothing makes a better punching bag than dead weight..

It was after several minutes of these encounters with the forests past and present that he finally came to the end of his fearful running. He arrived suddenly at the dark entrance of a cave looking like a ferocious jungle monster. Branches bulked up his body while giving him a dangerous prickly demeanor. Leaves grew all over his body like feathers on a huge bulking bird. Any animal present on his arrival would have frozen in fear at the site of him, not knowing if he had seen him or was simply deciding which part would be tastiest. He however felt miserable.

With his best effort he removed the largest of the branches. These were only barely attached, and attached more to everything else than him specifically. The medium sizes pieces began to take hair with them but their weight was noticeably gone. the smallest pieces were the worst. They had worked themselves firmly under his hair, as if it were the tendrils of a vine holding tight to its prey. These would have to wait.

The weight of his journey had preoccupied him when he had first been stopped from his escape. It was not until he was finally free of his burden that he noticed the hole in the rock. he surveyed to his left then right. Both were blocked by a merging of the forest and the rock wall. Looking back he could see faint hallucination of grog tromping immediately after. With this inspiration he ducked down and entered what he hoped was not the lair of something worse than grog.

His first impression was that is was dark and that perhaps grog was not so horrible of a brother after all. His second impression was that he had probably just broken his nose on the wall he just walked into. This was apparently going to be a very shallow cave. Finally utilizing his hands he followed the wall to the left until it opened into nothingness. The darkness had faded slightly into haloed black like that comes from staring at one point in the dark too intensely. This, however, was every where. He decided following the path of safety was the best route and rounded about to follow the other side of the wall back in the direction he came from.

He turned around and all he could think to do was to let his jaw drop. He had some how managed to come upon a completely untouched cave. From the top of the cave a bolt of sunlight struck the ground with such strength that it resonated to every edge of the room. Throughout the air a light haze danced around in the dust as if children of the beam. He scuffled into the room a few steps while his eyes adjusted. Branches lay scattered around. Leaves were everywhere. Their multitude of colors reflected a halo that made everything less real; he could have been dreaming.

It was rare to find a pristine cave. As it was there was already a pecking order for any cave that became vacated due to death or ostracizing, and here he had a cave at least as large as his families all to himself.

In the debris he noticed a couple of the black rocks he used for his drawings in the beam. He slowly walked over to the pile and as he reached into the beam he could feel the strength of it pressing his arm down. It was not as hot as he expected but some additional force gave credence to its power.

He grabbed the rock and went to the closest section of wall. He raised his hand with every intent of drawing, but nothing was there, his mind was blank. He looked around, a little in every direction; he could feel the light beam on his back. The cave was intimidating him; so he bowed to it. The rock hit the wall and he drew numerous pairs of vertical lines, each with the bottom slightly further apart than the tops, and curved slightly. Along each he made light wisps with a rounded knot here and there. Above the trunks a canopy of small swirls and short sticks appeared. In the middle was an open area where he drew the rounded-edge texture of rock. At the bottom he placed a low dark opening.

He stepped back to observe what he had just done. It was nice, one of his better pieces so far. He stepped back again and to his surprise entered the light beam. It had changed to a soothing warmth and it pressed down on him slightly less. A reassuring hand on his shoulders.

It was in this way that he came to find his sanctuary in the woods. It was here he would spend his days hidden away from grog's hand. It was here that he hones his skill on the rock walls. He would wile away for days, and at the end he would wonder how it was he had not covered every section of wall.

The cave was naturally divided into two sections by the main entry way and by a section that was always covered in a light dew at the back. This part was cooler than the rest, and the light did not quite make it far enough to illuminate it. It was on the left section that he had done his first piece, his devotional to the cave. The mural had slowly spread along the wall accumulating pieces of his life as it grew. The right section contained individual pieces. One was of him, as he saw himself including a girl onlooker. Another was of a herd of buffalo grazing, to which he added himself hunting one day after being beat on by grog. In another he drew some of the children that were usually kind to him. He embellished a little on their nicer features. Below them were the nastier cave children, their ugliness was extra apparent. Amongst these were items of otherwise normality, a deer running through the forest, a tree with fruit ripe for the picking, the sunrising on a hazy morning. In this fashion he brought life to the ancient cave.

One day he had noticed a piece of his original mural that was lacking detail. He searched the debris under the light beam but could not find a dark rock to draw with. Looking up he caught eye of a jagged edge in the dark corner. He retrieved it and went to work filling in the trees. A couple scrapes was all it needed, but something unusual happened. Instead of the dark marks he expected there was green. Looking at the tip of the rock he saw that moss had grown on it, he loved it. He went along his forest following his previous marks and brushed them with mossy greenness. The darkened corner proved to be an endless source of these mossy rocks, and it was quick to replenish the ones he used up. He used the color sparingly to highlight the occasional item. He knew it would be to easy to go over board and quickly ruin his hard work. He moved over the forest scene, surveying and marking the perfect leaves, watching as it bloomed under his hands.

The discovery of the moss's green led him to discover other colors. Brown would come from bark flakes mixed with water and formed into a paste. Yellow and blue he found from the soft petals of flowers. Collecting them was of particular difficulty. During picking they had to be cupped between his hands so they would not blow away, and taken back to the cave in similar fashion. Not something easily done with gangly arms such as his. Orange was found in the clay near the outer edge of the forest. Red was from the berries on the cliff, the berries he was holding a glob of in his hand.

He came to the cave entrance and easily navigated the low entranced followed by the winding darkness. He entered the cave and crossed quickly to the darkened corner where he had made a table by dragging a flat rock into the cave and propping it on top of some branches.

On the rock he had mashes of each color, red being the smallest one. With a plop he fixed the shortage. He did his best to clean his hand on the cold dark moisture of the back wall. It would do. The damp walls were a pleasant feature of the cave. It allowed him to clean up in this fashion when needed as well the moisture kept the paints from drying out. He had gone as far as licking it once when he was particularly thirsty.

With his hand clean enough, he picked up one of the frayed brushed he had made by gnawing the ends of a stick. It usually did not take long until the individual fibers separated into a relatively soft tangle. This one was stained red on the tip and with a light motion he renewed it's color. Going over to his mural he found the top of the outcropping and dotted several berries into existence. He thought it appropriate to give back to what he took from.

He stared through the berries for a second thinking about what he should work on next, when everything went dark. The darkness was hot, and humid, and heavy. It pulled him back and only gave back his sight when he was splayed on his back in the sand. His eyes could see only one thing, a monster before him, grog.

The beast had found him! There was no way, grog was incapable of quiet. Even now he was emitting a low huff and shifting sand underneath him violently as he tried to make sense of the wall. He always stopped at the entrance of of the woods to watch and listen for any one around. grog was obvious from afar; he could always be heard before seen.

He always checked.
He always checked.
... had he forgotten?

Dammit!

He let out a deep grunt with his anger. He was sloppy, he deserved this, he might as well have led grog down here on a nice sunrise jaunt. Damn him! Damn grog!

"Get up," he said to himself.
"Do something," he whispered inside, but he just sat there frozen.

grog also appeared to be at a loss. He was not quite sure what had happened on the wall. He could not figure out how so many little colored marks could get on a wall. He sniffed at it. The greens were earthy, the blues light, almost not there. The browns were bitter. The reds were enticing. He had sniffed out the berry bushes. With a lick the newly placed berries disappeared. A pleasant look on grog's face showed that the berries were good after all. He could only hope they still proved to be poisonous. Having taken out the new berries grog applies his tongue to the wall with more force trying to remove the older hardened ones. He managed to do this poorly, seldom licking the same spot more than once and eventually just pressing his cheek tot he wall and licking sideways. He must have gotten tires. This unfortunately brought his gaze in the direction of the table of paint.

grog made it quickly to the table and he immediately went to the fresh glob of red. Snatching it up he took a quick lick and grunted with glee. Suddenly self conscious grog looked around and remembered his little brother. They locked eyes. He frozen on the floor, grog standing with the mash of berries in his hand. grog's face turned mean and then sinister.

Without turning his head, grog threw the red berries. He followed the mass through the air. Time slowed. He yelled at himself to move, to get up and do something, be he again could not. The berries reached their target and landed on his mural at the entrance of the cave and then smeared into the forest. His heart stopped; he died inside.

grog saw the look on his brother's face and was pleased, but not yet done. grog ran both his hands along the table, each coming from the sides to meet in the middle. An unnatural mix of colors formed in his hands. He brought them back, each with a fistful of paints, and went to the mural. His right hand relandscaped the outcropping with a mudslide of unnaturally colored mud. His brother audibly winced behind him. His left hand brought down a multicolored fire storm on the forest. His brother was now crying.

The monster had no right to do this. It was all gone. There was no way to fix any of it, and even if there was grog knew of the cave now, nothing was safe. He was surprised to find that he was now on his feet, eyes wet and firsts clenched. grog's hands were both on the wall, his fingers making small twitches to spread out the destruction. he ran at grog, his first poised and released into grog's back. His first hit just as his dreams had hit rock bottom, hard and painfully. His hand ached and the only response grog gave was to kick backwards with one foot, laying him out on the ground once again.

He was up on his feet quickly, fists clenched even tighter, his nails digging into the palms of his hands. His anger grew, and then broke. His eyes let loose a torrent of tears and he felt small again. grog won, he owned the cave, the pictures. He did all he could. He turned and ran out of the cave.

grog had momentarily lost himself in he squishy paints his fingers were moving along the wall. He was brought back by the renewed crying and subsequent leaving of his brother. He was not done with his brother yet and left the wall to pursue him. The brother raced through the woods to the main path, and then along it back towards the family cave. grog was always just barely behind his brother. grog could usually easily catch him, but his anger was fuelling him now. He just wanted to be alone, to be away from grog. he ran into the house through the main room where his mom was and into his room. grog was right behind him. In his room he stopped running only to find grog on top of him. He dropped to the ground and grog stooped right over him, that same nasty sneer on his lips. His anger built back up, and with all his might he pushed off the ground and piled into grog's chest. He was on his feet and grog was knocked back a couple feet, a look of surprise on his face. Empowered, he started jumping around with his arms flailing high in the air, deep grunts booming from his chest. He wanted to attack grog while he had the upper hand, but he knew he would never win a fight, so he fought with the only weapon he had.

He grabbed a drawing rock from the ground and began drawing on the wall. grog's surprise changed from surprise that his brother was showing such levels of aggression to surprise that he was trying to get away with a drawing right in front of him. grog thought that it would be better to let him finish so he could destroy a completed piece over a partial one.

He drew grog, but not big strong grog. He drew grog with line thing features. A squarish body with pointy triangular shoulders. His arms and legs were sticks. He drew grog holding a stick and in front he drew a stubby miniature sized buffalo about the same size of grog. He stopped and enjoyed his effigy of a weak thin grog using all of his might to take down a tiny buffalo. "Take that," he thought as he walked away.

grog was on him quickly, but to his great surprise grog was not attacking him. Instead, grog turned him around and pushed him back at the wall. He looked back confused, and grog pointed at the mocking drawing and clapped his hands together. He liked it? Had grog's stupidity make it so he could not realize this was a mockery of him? Were his standards so low that he could only appreciate this rudimentary level of art?

He tested his theory by drawing several brothers of the tiny buffalo. As more appeared, grog began to get more excited at the scene of his heroics. He added a circle for a sun, and v's for the birds and grog ate it all up.

-----

In the days that passed grog, in his own way, commissions several more pictures. They were all of , and in some way depicted him as being better than something else. A couple were of hunting, a few of grog beating his friends at some activity, and one of just grog. Soon grog's friends found out and cajoled grog to make him do pictures of them, and so he did. He was depressed with is fate for a while, but soon found pleasure in being able to openly mock those that had always picked on him, right in their own caves.

Cutting My Cable: pros, cons, economics

2011-01-16T18:25:00.000-08:00

Despite being a software programmer I'm not much of an early adopter at home. I didn't have a remotely smart phone until the second iPhone came out for instance. However I recently got annoyed enough with Comcast, and cable companies in general really, to actually cut my cable and ditch my DVR and it's going pretty good so I wanted to share how I did it, some pros and cons and the economics if you're considering it.

My Setup

One caveat to this is that I don't get a good digital broadcast signal so I can't really employ an antenna and DVR. Everything I watch has to come from online.

Basic Setup:

Hulu Plus: Has most shows you'd want to watch for $8/mo.

Content Add ons:

Amazon Video on Demand ($3/ep HD, $2/ep SD):

Has shows Hulu doesn't like Leverage and shows you can't get online for free at all like Mythbusters
Has HD versions of shows Hulu or the Internet only has the Standard Definition of.

The Internet:

Some stuff still isn't on Hulu like the Daily Show and Colbert Report.

Viewing Add ons:

Roku: Small $80 box that lets you stream content from Hulu Plus, Amazon and Netflix on your HD tv.
Laptop with HD out and a $8 DVI-to-HDMI cable: Lets you watch non-streamable content on your TV.

So basically Hulu Plus is serving most of the content you'll watch with Amazon as a backup when it doesn't have something. Also Hulu Plus doesn't have most stuff in HD so if you really want something in HD you can go the Amazon route.

A newer laptop and a Roku box help put everything up on your HD TV. The Roku is nice but only works for some Hulu content (see Cons section), where the laptop will play everything but ties up the laptop.

The pros, the cons, the money

Cons:

Let's start with the bad stuff,

You lose convenience:

By far the biggest downside is that everything isn't in one spot, and you have to see where the best place to get something is, or just remember that a new episode is available.

Hulu let's you maintain a queue with email alerts, and Amazon let's you buy Season Passes, though you can't start mid season and only buy the remaining episodes. However there's nothing to keep track of say the Daily Show for you which can only be watched on Comedy Central.

With the laptop too you now have some cables laying around to deal with.
Hulu Plus is very fragmented:

The advantages to Hulu Plus are:
   A. Access to some shows which aren't on regular Hulu
   B. Access to previous seasons
   C. Streaming to Roku, Tivo, PS3, and other devices
   D. HD on more content

The problem is that you don't necessarily get all of these. You get at least 1, and sometimes all, but it is seemingly random which show has what and it's inconsistant by station too.

The only pattern I've noticed is that HD and Streaming go together. You either get both or neither.
You won't get everything in HD:

Unless you are willing to buy a lot on Amazon you're going to end up watching a good deal of stuff in Standard Definition. For me this wasn't a big deal. I get to pick what's worth the extra money so that's nice too.
You'll still get ads:

I don't care about this much myself but others do. There are still going to be ads on Hulu Plus or a shows own website. Some pluses are that the ads are usually only 30s long and Hulu has a limited Ad Tailor system so hopefully the ads are more relevant, as well you can say if some ads are relevant or not.

Basically if you don't pay to watch a specific episode like on Amazon, you're going to get some ads.
No Sports:

I don't watch sports much but my understanding is it's hard to get them online, this seems to be why some people don't cancel. I do know that Roku will let you stream an MLB.tv account though which should satisfy baseball fans.

Pros:

Ok now the good stuff.

You have choice over what you pay to watch:

The big problem with cable that I see is you have no choice in what you pay for. What is even worse is that not every station gets the same amount from your subscription fee. For instance, you pay $6/mo to ESPN and Fox Sports and those are the most expensive channels. As well according to that article 40% of cable fees go to sports. So if you don't like sports, or even as 40% of your viewing, then you're paying for a lot of what you don't want.

Hulu Plus is a subscription system but they don't have tiers and they have most all the regular shows, so things are more level at least.

Even better, if you buy stuff on Amazon then you are directly supporting a show. I don't know how much ad revenue a cable show gets per viewer, but even if the show gets $1 of the $3 you pay on Amazon that has to be pretty good.
You'll save money:

See the economics section below.
You aren't supporting the cable system:

If you're reading this, let alone to this point, then you probably don't like cable system for some reason. Not supporting something you don't like is great.
You'll probably watch less:

Part of my choice to switch was a long desire to watch less, and watch better, however this was hard with cable. Once you turn the TV on it's hard to turn off. You could almost consider the convenience Con above as a Pro for this reason. The harder it is to 'just watch TV' the less you're likely to watch and the more discerning you'll probably be.

Economics:

Ok, now for the money.

My monthly Comcast bill for basic digital cable and internet was something like this

	Cable	Internet	Total
Before	$61	$43	$104
After	0	$58	$58

So I saved $61 on cable but paid $15 for Internet because I didn't have a bundle anymore. Overall I save $46 a month.

When you factor in $8/mo for Hulu Plus that leaves you with $38/mo savings.

However you then have to account for what you'll buy on Amazon. At $3/ep, $38 buys you almost 13 episodes on Amazon a month, however it's not good to think about this on the month level because the longest shows are only only airing for less than half the year.

$38 * 12 = $456 saved a year

$456 / $3 = 152 episodes on Amazon / 22 episodes a season = 6.9 shows.

So your savings can buy you 7 seasons on amazon and you'll still break even. It's even better because most shows don't have 22 episode seasons, especially new ones, so you'll either afford more or save more.

Selling Equity Stock vs. Options

2011-01-01T16:28:00.000-08:00

I have a very fortunate problem. For the first time I work for a company that gives me equity stock and options and I had no idea how to manage them.

Just recently I wanted to sell some of it to help buy a house but I ended up making the wrong decision on which was best to sell. I imagine I'm not the only one in such a situation so I wanted to share something I learned.

The short answer is, Options are more volatile, their value to you will go up or down more than the stock will

I was basically told by a friend to always sell stock first because options only get more valuable ( assuming the stock went up in the several years before your options expired). This didn't really make sense though, I didn't see how a share of stock was different than an option. If the price goes up $1, I get $1 more regardless of if I sell an actual share of stock or if I exercise the option. (I'm going to assume anyone reading this is a regular employee and will do a 'sell to cover' exercise so that you just get the money right away )

The idea that $1 is $1 in this situation probably seems true because we're focusing more on the past growth of the stock or the current value compared to the future prospects.

So here's the simplest example I had to think of before any of this made sense.

Imagine your stock is trading at $200, and you have options with a strike price of $100 and some stock grant too.

If you need to come up with $200 by selling your equity, you have two options: Sell 1 share of stock or exercise and sell two options. You either lose 1 share of stock or 2 options.

Now imagine the stock goes up $1. If you sold the share of stock you just earned $2, if you sold the options you only earned $1.

It works the other way too, if it went down $1 you lost $1 from stock or $2 from option.

So options are simply more volatile, and which you sell depends on where you think your stock's price will be when you want to sell whatever you keep in the future. If everything is going up and to the right in your view then sell the stock, if you think the economy and your stock is going to go down for several years then get rid of the options first.

Alternatively just hedge your bets

If you have no idea where your company is going you can always hedge and sell some of both so that you're balanced between the two going forward. In this case you'd sell whatever combination such that you were left with the same number of shares of stock and options. Your options would be worth less than the stock, but their earning power would be the same.

Or just diversify and sell it all

There's a strategy with equity that you should just sell everything and put it in a different investment because you're too invested in your company. Your equity, salary, 401k and even your job are all based on your employer's success. If things start to go bad for them, it's likely all of those thing will suffer. So pull out as much as you can to diversify.

There are nasty details

you have to deal with regardless of what you sell when. The main one of these if you have a high salary is the Alternative Minimum Tax which I'll leave you to research. The other one is the simple tax rate. If you just want to get cash from your Options you'll end up paying your normal tax rate on them. However with Stock if you manage to wait a year from when it vests you could pay much less as it'll be considered Long Term Capitol Gains.

Free Ideas: Netflix Instant for Everything

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

Netflix Instant is awesome but the biggest issue is still that so much content is missing, and even worse, somethings get removed from Instant! ( I'm looking at you Star Trek remastered first season, grrr ) Instant was a godsend to combat the Renter's Remorse we all felt when we didn't want to watch the movie we had a home, but it's so far from being perfect with the large swath of missing content.

I'm not completely certain why everything isn't on Instant but it would seem that one of the main reasons is to spurn on DVD and Blu-ray sales. If you can watch something on Instant than why would you ever want to buy it? Fair e-nough.

The great thing about Instant is that it's instant (duh), well more specifically that you can decide what you want to watch, then watch it right away with no snail mail delay. Instant gratification, renter's remorse is dead!

So you want it right now, and the copyright owners want you to painfully wait long enough that you eventually get fed up and buy your own shiny disc to love.

I think there's a beneficial compromise - here's my idea.

Create a new category of Instant content, call it Instant-less, and put in there everything not currently in Instant, then just stream it like Instant. Now everything is streamable to customers, and it's available right after they decide they want to see it. Yay for NetFlix users!

Ok, to make the copyright owners happy what we do is add a delay before you can do this again, a delay that mimics the physical constraints of returning a disc and waiting for another, the part I can only assume the copyright holders like. I don't know what this would be, but for me I can turn a disc around in 3 business days in the mail, so let's err on the side of caution and say 5 days, heck make it a week I'd be quite fine with that and so would my two week old copy of Sherlock Holmes. Yay for Copyright holders!

So, you decide you want to watch something that just came out on dvd, find it on Instant-less and enjoy it. Then 5 days later, come next weekend, you repeat it all again. All the while the current Instant content is still there to fill any other watching you want to do.

The Good

So here we have a way for users to have an even better NetFlix service where they no longer have to worry about renting something they don't end up wanting a few days later, and rights holders can still maintain the delayed gratification which they believe helps cause us to want to buy actual discs.

But there's more. This is even better for rights holders because it gives watchers the ability to impulse watch their content which they couldn't do before because the activation cost of putting something in your queue is a lot higher than simply clicking Play. If something goes in your queue it can unknowingly and accidentally end up in your mail box, so it has to be good to end up in your queue in the first place.

The Hard Part

Alright, now while that all seems fair there's the whole streaming part. Netflix doesn't have the rights to stream the content so they'd have to convince the rights holders that this would work and they can manage the delay lock out correctly so as to maintain the bottle neck in users getting content. It could be tricky, but maybe some studios would go for it, at least for a test.

The Details

There are now three ways to get content.

Disc
Instant
Instant-less

The first two don't change you still get all the current Instant content you want, but we add Instant-less as an alternative to the Disc option. So if a user is on a 3 disc plan, they could make that 2 Discs and 1 Instant-less watch

For each Instant-less watch a user gets:

1. They can't watch another Instant-less movie until 5 days have passed.
2. They can choose to rewatch the previous movie at any time in the 5 days but the 5 day period restarts again when they're done.

So if you have 2 Instant-less views you could watch a new movie on Saturday, then on Sunday through Wednesday you could watch episodes of a TV series from a single disc of that series. Then on Friday ( after your movie view's delay is up ) you could watch something new again at your whim. And if you also had a disc in your plan your kids could be watching Dora in the van the entire month long.

House buying! WTF?!

2010-06-06T16:18:00.000-07:00

So I recently bought a house and being mostly settled in I wanted to recap the crazy process that is house buying as I discovered. While I hope this exposes some of the less discussed aspect of home buying for those considering it, it is also a bit of a rant, though hopefully a well constructed one for everyone else. ( oh and it's a tad not edited too )

I'll also add foremost that a lot of these issues are trying to be fixed by new companies like RedFin. Being my first home purchase and that I was completely ignorant, I just went the typical route; however, I'd seriously consider RedFin et al. when I buy again.

The Looking

MLS listings are annoying!

So when your realtor sends you listing to look at you get a fairly junky experience, in my experience at least. MLS is a listing system everyone uses and the format is ok, though the features are 1999. You're effectively given a single screen search-result list of places. So for some broad searches you have to scroll through a very long page. You also can't link to a single listing, and getting additional images beyond the first opens a whole new page.

You never meet or talk directly to the sellers

This kind of really annoyed me. Everything you do with the seller is telephoned through your realtor, who telephones it through the sellers realtor who then conveys it to the seller. This makes asking any question an lengthy process with responses nested three deep if not more.

Also, you have no idea what kind of people owned the house before hand. When you buy a used car you get to see who the people are selling it and through that get some idea of how the treated the car. But nope, not with a $100,000s purchase.

The Buying

You have no real idea what your closing costs are until you have to pay them

Closing costs are basically all the things you have to pay for on top of the house and it turns out no one really knows what that value is until pretty much when you have to pay for it, and even then it might be a little wrong.

The problem isn't that the exact value is unknown, it's that any estimate you get will be wildly off. My actual closing costs were just under 2% however my first estimate was something like 5%, and my 'mostly correct' estimate was still several hundred dollars off.

I ended up using all the money I was comfortable spending on the house almost on the nose after closing, but the huge variance that has happening easily could have forced me into spending money I didn't want to or for some people don't even have, and at that point you only have a day or two to come up with it.

Closing Costs make NO SENSE

There are two related problems with Closing Costs which make the above variance in value more understandable.

Closing Costs (CC) are mostly just a necessary annoyance with the process. There are roughly 8 million entities involved in you buying a house and they want money for different things from different people. Closing Costs actually serve as a convenience to handle all of that in one place [ a convenience which you also pay money for in your CC too :) ]. This is basically what Escrow does.

The main issue though is Escrow enters the process at pretty much the end, for me it was the week of closing. So up till then it's all wild guessing because no one else owns this process. For me my Lender tried to fill this role, but ended up doing a poor job at it. I assume all lenders more or less step in for this too. Your lender really wants you to buy a house and they don't want you to realize you don't have enough for CC later so they VASTLY over estimate all the costs. They pick the high end for every sub fee I'm guessing. So for me my initial Good Faid Estimate ( GFE ) from my bank was 5% of my house value. that +3% over what I actually paid, which makes it a completely useless estimate. If I'd actually used that value I wouldn't have been able to afford closing, or I would have had to only put 10% down which would have required changing my loan terms late in the game when I realize I could actually do 20%.

So your lender is trying to be nice and help you out, but they end up kinda failing. What facilitates this even more, is that a lot of the costs they're estimating aren't actually paid to them, so their estimating costs for other companies. It all gets worked out when the big legal guys at Escrow set things in stone, but it really should happen sooner.

So basically it's like you half assing your taxes, thinking you owe $5000 then going to a tax preparer on April 13th to realize it was only $2k. You're happy, but it hurt getting there.

Another wonderful thing here is that your HUD may include severl $1k fees which are then just paid to you by the seller but they still show up as money you owe. yay!

The second issue here is then that your HUD ( the official version of your Closing Costs ) is effectively unreadable and what you're paying for makes no sense. My Closing Agent actually told me he's never seen two HUD formats that look the same. I'm 100% sure they're so confusing to warrant paying people having jobs who can read the forms.

The wonderful thing on mine was in each sub section on mine was summed up to the first value in the section, and it wasn't named something like "Total". Instead is was like "blah blah blah fee" with each following item in that section being "blarg blarg blarg fee". AND, wonder that is wonder, some of those were and some weren't in that first item sum! Ahh it's great :)

Loan terms are poorly conveyed

You have a few ways to tweak your loan based on your personal preferences and circumstances. This is great! But it's kinda hard to really see the dimensions offered or eyeball a change etc. Often times I see a static listing of rates for a single situation then a run on sentence describing how you can change that rate by putting more down, or simply paying a higher fee up front. This is something that doing a little studying on what all terms mean will vastly help. LTV, what a 'point' actually means to your lender, etc etc.

Whose who?

This is probably one of those areas where you should just not try and figure it out. It turns out the Real estate market is fairly incestuous and has multiple personalities.

When you buy you'll end up having a Title Company and a Title Insurance Company. In my case they had different names and seemed to serve different purposes, yet as it turned out they were effectively the same company. I actually got mail from one on letterhead from the other for instance. Oh and it turns out all the Real Estate companies in the area owned a partial interest in both also.

The missing Nexus

To round out why the Closing Costs make no sense you should understand that there's no single central information Nexus yet there are at lease 10 different entities involved in your home purchase and it's never clear or certain who is or will communicate with who.

A great example of this is my home appraisal. The appraisal was only just ordered a month before closing and in WA state Lenders can't ask about the appraisal for at least a week. I was told it could take up to a week to schedule the appraisal, then who knows when it'll be scheduled for, then a report has to be created and then the Lender has to review that report. It's 4 weeks out till closing and I can see a worst case scenario of my Loan not being official for 3 more weeks. But oh..., actually the Appraisal already happened and my realtor was just never notified about any of it, and the bank will get the report in a few days. fun...

Ca Ca Condo!

So as it turns out my place is actually a Condo as far as people who charge you money are concerned. From what I can tell this basically means: I don't own every single part of the property, and that an HOA controls the rest. So I'm in what we'd call a TownHome, 3 floors with units on both sides. So I own the walls in and the HOA owns the roof, lawn etc.

The reason this matters is that your Lender is all about risk as they technically own the property until you pay off the loan. So they care about your financial risk in paying back the loan and the property risk in your ability to keep up the property. Ah, but when someone else, the HOA, controls part of that, your loan is riskier.

This meant two very annoying things for me.

1. My loan terms were worse. I had to pay, as a fee, 0.75% ( 3/4 points ). I guess it's effectively a one time insurance fee from the Lender's perspective. I called around too and this is fairly standard. The really annoying this is, I've never seen this kind of restriction on any rate forms. So if you're going to buy, let your lender know if it's a Condo early on, or ask about this if you aren't sure what you're buying. They were nice enough to waive the fee if you put down 40% though....

2. The Lender wants to know a lot about the HOA and community. This is quite reasonable, but from what I can tell HOA administers are on level with Payroll companies, not as sophisticated as they really should be. In the end I had to pay some company $120 for a sheet of questions with yes/no answers, and then $30 for them to copy those answers onto a form from my Lender. Oh and only 1 of 4 faxes they ever sent out made it.

Reserve Report

I won't say too much about this as it's more about the place you're buying, but if you're going for a condo, look into the Reserve Report and how 'healthy' the reserve is. An unhealthy reserve seems like the best signal that the HOA dues will increase. I say a tad more about it at the end of this too.

In Conclusion

It occurs to me that I may have been just a tad more hands on than the average home buyer. I at least skimmed every word of every document, and ended up understanding every cost on my HUD. I can't say actually reading any of the documents mattered. You have no real choice if you find something you don't like; Your options are buy or don't buy. I guess I at least wanted to have some idea of what things might affect my loan etc, or if something does happen, some quick idea of if it's something covered in those documents.

Understanding my HUD was likely also pointless in that I didn't find any errors, but it did help me realize that a decent bit of what I paid during Closing were things I'd just have to pay soon anyway if they weren't in closing, so they felt less like arbitrary fees and more just pre paying stuff. Some examples are: First two months of HOA dues and property taxes and the interest-only part of my loan for the rest of the month which I closed in.

The one thing I'm really glad I did read through though were the HOA docs. These are likely the things that will have the closest effect on you. They let you know if your potential neighbors had complaints against them, what repairs had already been done, what construction things had to be fixed after the fact for some reason, how much your future-repairs Reserve is funded and so forth. If you pay HOA fees you should get a good idea of where it goes, and the current health of the Reserve will give you some idea of if it'll likely go up.

The Reason Behind the Seasons

2010-03-07T16:24:00.000-08:00

I've become pretty curious about the seasons lately. Like a lot of scientific things I know enough to have a mostly informed conversation about the seasons, but for whatever reason I really wanted to understand all the levels of what was going on and I learned a few things which I will now put in bullet points ( sans bullets! ).

1. The earth is closest to the sun in January and furthest in June.

Periapsis is the closest point, Apoasis is the furthest.

So the orbit is elliptical but only barely so, the furthest point is only ~3% more than the closest. Though that is still 3.1 million miles which is 400 Earths. You'd think that would matter for something, but nope. The closest point is much colder than the furthest for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere

2. The tilt is the main reason for seasonal differences.

The tilt of the earth is 23.5 degrees which at it's extreme accounts for a distance difference between Summer and Winter of at most 3200 mi at the poles (Assuming I did my trig correctly. )

So a straight distance of 3 million miles further from the sun doesn't matter but a tilt difference of 3200 miles apparently does. gees.

It turns out the reason for this is that the energy the sun transfers to us doesn't degrade much with that 3 million mile distance when it hits the earth directly ( i.e. around the equator ), but the tilt causes the energy towards the poles to get to be spread out and have less effect. Wikipedia gives us a good example of this.

So with a 30 degree tilt the energy is roughly 50% less compact meaning it's cooler per unit of area.

Now this made mathematical sense but it didn't make physical sense. How do you make energy less compact exactly? After thinking for a while I realized energy is conveyed as particles and by having one particle travel further ( due to the earth being at an angle ) than it's neighbor means the energy it imparts to the earth will be more spread out and less dense.

This made a bit of sense for say the US which is in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere, but what about the poles? Shouldn't they get a ton of heat in the summer and as much non heat in the winter? Such that you'd expect all the ice to completely melt in the summer?

3. The North Pole ( Arctic ) has weird days and warm waters.

Aside from the fact that the North Pole has 24 days in the summer and 24 nights in the winter, the key piece of info is that the sun is never directly above the pole, so it's always hitting the pole at an angle so the energy is always spread out. In addition the energy is in the form of radiation and snow and ice reflect around 70% of that away in the spring; though it does go down to 20% in the summer, however there's often cloud cover in the summer and that energy is still spread out and less 'effective.' So basically it's 24 hours days are just mediocre. The Arctic even has fairly warm oceans that never get much cooler than -2C and the sun still doesn't have a huge effect. (Wikipedia once again.)

4. The South Pole is very very cold.

Antarctica has much of the same properties though it is notoriously much much colder. So while the Arctic has large fluctuations in it's ice pack, the Antarctic doesn't. The South Pole gets a lot less love than the North Pole, so the best I can figure is that it is so much cooler due to a constant cold current (wikipedia) that circles the continent and keeps warm water away. This lets the ice persist which feeds back and causes the air to be cooler. I suppose if the North Pole wasn't surrounded by a lot of land it to might have a similar feature.

This pretty much satisfies my curiosity. There's a lot more going on at each level of this but digging through the layers goes a long way.

Seattle Area Board Game Stores

2010-01-24T18:40:00.000-08:00

One thing I love about Seattle is how usual the unusual is. One of my hobbies is euro/german style board games and after some hunting I found at least 13 stores in the area that sell them, as well that we have our own Pac NW chain Uncle's Games. One annoying thing though was I could find an inclusive list of them, so I made my own!

Making this map paid off nicely for me as I only had about 6 stores until I solicited for others online, and one of them had a copy of Manila which I've been looking for for a while as it's out of print. This is one of those games that I'll want to hold onto for a long time.

View Seattle Board Game Stores in a larger map

inFamous Static Cling

2010-01-17T19:22:00.000-08:00

In having finally finished inFamous I feel the need to rant about one more aspect of the game; Cole's inFamous case of static cling. First however, I feel like I've only been conveying bad things about inFamous after my last entry which went after its broken morality system. So I just want to say it's a good game, it lasts a lot longer that Prototype and not in an unnecessary manner, as well it has a flushed out story with well done cut scenes. As far as sandbox games go it keeps you focused and makes the side missions accessible and even fun.

However. Apparently being electric has its down sides, and not one which can easily be solved with drier sheets, or perhaps there are no more drier sheets in this post apocalyptic playground! Cole has an annoying tendency to stick to everything and I really do mean everything. Cole doesn't have super jumping powers so he has to scale buildings, telephone poles, train support beams etc to get around. The problem is for him to scale buildings there have to be realistic things for him to grab onto and climb on and there are almost too many: pipes, floor ledges, intermediate ledges, window ceils, window tops, pillars, grates and random little knobs I'm sure were installed just for him.

This is super useful when you're trying to get up a building but almost infuriating when you're trying to get down, which it turns out is kind of necessary from time to time. It's even worse if you are even slightly near something when you're free falling. Your awesome static cling ability kicks in automatically and you get sucked onto anything you can possibly grab onto! A case in point.

The blue thing below is a blast shard, basically if you collect enough you can hold more power which means you can do more power moves before recharging. I think there's about 350 in the game. Now in this case Cole is climbing up and it's easy enough to get, but if you're on the top of the building coming down, you'll grab onto every damn thing along the way. In this case I think you end up having to 'drop down' 3-4 times, and this is one of the easier ones to get to.

This really isn't that bad though, you hit the drop button a couple times and you're there. I also discovered a bit too late that if you hold the drop button you don't grab on to thing, though I found that kind of annoying to use also.

Let's address the next situation though! In this case the shard is hanging over the edge of the pier. No worries, we'll just walk up to the edge and drop off, only in this case this is as close to the edge as you can actually walk! I imagine this has to be a bug, but damn if it isn't annoying. So here you do a jump and just nudge yourself to the edge to find that Cole now won't just hop off and grab the edge, you have to push against the edge and hit the drop down button, only in a lot of cases it actually will not let you in these situations. I can only imagine this is the games false sense of helping you out.

So now what we do is jump and nudge ourselves off the edge a tad near the shard and hope we grab the edge. And we do! but the edge we end up grabbing is somehow of that white pillar. Say what? So yeah, we jump off that, nudge ourselves a little further away and end up just falling in the water. :(

This wouldn't be so bad except for the part where water kills Cole. Thankfully not too many shards are in this kind of annoying predicament, but it is very frustrating to simply have to give up as dying ends up reviving you at a whole different part of the map.

In Conclusion: In a sequel I would highly recommend Sucker Punch ( a local company in Bellevue! ) to revisit this as an area to polish. Additionally, towards the end of the game I often found myself walking through some of the more oddly shaped environment pieces and in the above example I think the engine thought I was at the edge already. I realize these things aren't easy to do, but sometimes not making the user deal with the worse of these situations (shards which involve jumping around right above water) is the better move.

Water Really?

I have quite a problem with water killing Cole too. I think you could argue that the water is draining Cole of his electricity and he needs it to survive except this isn't stated or reinforced anywhere else. When his body is in the water it never stops sparking electricity, and he doesn't die if he grabs his own head or ties his shoe so it's not a completed circuit thing. When you exhaust all of Cole's electricity he doesn't start dying he just can't use his power, and when he's being shot being full of power doesn't help you live any longer. Further more, if anything it's electricity in water which kills other things ( which it does in the game )

But whatever :)

p.s. It is theoretically possible I mostly wrote this just for the title.

It's Bad to be Good by being Bad

2010-01-03T17:10:00.000-08:00

Another day of the long weekend and being a tad ill resulted in more game playing. In this case I remembered I still have Infamous and picked it back up. I've also played Prototype and while I think it might be slightly more enjoyable to me, Infamous is still good and likely better to others. It however fails in it's morality system.

Despite the issues Bioshock had with following through on its morality system, it did make a good incremental step in actually applying morality to games and having the consequences matter; however black and white they may be. Infamous though is just bad in its attempt, and perhaps only helpful in what not to do.

The game is basically you quarantined in a large city with superpowers and stuck between a bunch of cultist anarchists and the Police. The basic morality system is you can either fight of the evil force of the game taking your fellow citizens into account or ignoring them wildly as you tear through the city. You can't max out abilities unless you make a distinct choice in either direction and stick to it. This is thankfully furthered by the game locking out one mission of the other direction each time you finish one.

The execution of this is horribly flawed though which is unfortunate because the story is more filled out story than in Prototype. There are missions through the game and some are 'good' some are 'evil'. These are the main way to advance the degree of whatever morality you choose. Supplementally, there are neutral missions which simply let you get more experience to actually buy power ups.

The flawed part is this

Those neutral/story missions are usually in favor of the citizens, but they can make you more evil! I disabled a couple boats and rescued a few citizens and I become less liked!

Another embodiment of this is that you can 'clean' sections of the city from the cultists by doing missions in them. Some of the missions though specifically force you to choose which moral compass direction you're heading; however the end result is still that that section is cleaned. I let a bomb blow up a police station, and somehow that made the anarchists afraid of that section of the city! Normally you have to take out a local gang of them or remove some poison they're putting in the water.

In hopes of learning from Infamous

Black boxing this, it would look like the developers suffered from tacking on their morality system to a game mechanic which is unfortunately biased in one direction already. In the first case it seems that your level in your moral choice is experience point based so doing a neutral mission can bump you up. The broken part is that the neutral missions are almost always in favor of the citizens, so the end moral shift ends up making no sense if you're evil, and unfortunately hurts an otherwise good story.

The map cleaning falls into this problem also. The game wants to reward you for completing missions by making it easier to get around the city and, given the game's citizen bias, making it safer for the people, but they didn't disable this for those distinct instances where you can do a bad thing.

While I like the morality idea, I do really feel like they took it all a step back by it not only make no difference, but actually have backwards outcomes. I played 'evil' because I only plan on playing once and it was suggested it's more fun. I hope playing the good route only works out better.

(Full disclosure: I haven't finished inFamous, though I'd be really surprised if that somehow changed all these backwards consequences)

Demos in Review: Dante's Inferno, Bayonetta, Trine

2010-01-01T15:59:00.000-08:00

Unlike last year I have no awesome game to play through the New Year long weekend. Last year I had Bioshock, but this year I just managed to finish Uncharted 2 on Wednesday which left me with only a slew of demos I'd yet to play through on my PS3. ( Uncharted 2 was pretty good. It's no Bioshock, but if you liked Uncharted then this is a good follow along true to the original. )

Two of the demos are kinda crazy awesome and somewhat similar: Dante's Inferno and Bayonetta. Both of which I really only have heard of from when I went to PAX this past year. Both are out soon and amazon's discounting them a few bucks. Dante's Inferno is out February 9th as well Amazon's giving a $10 coupon for a future purchase and Bayonetta is out January 5th.

Dante's Inferno makes me think of the Kingdom of Heaven movie in visual style and maturity. It's rated M though I dunno if it's for the gore or the nudity. Having not followed the game the story from the demo appears to be this: Bad ass crusader Dante did some bad stuff, gets stabbed in the back ( literally ) then refuses to die and kills Death/Hades making him some sort of in between demon christian. He return home to find his wife dead and some sort of mystery surrounding that as her soul is taken by a shade. Dante is not the type to give up and I can only assume descendes through the levels of hell to get her back. So there's your R rated movie plot to facilitate this over-the-top button mashing hack and slasher.

I'm fairly impressed in the movie quality of this game. The graphics are well done, it has a fairly adult plot that could actually have some story depth to it, as well it's the first game I've personally ever seen with frontal detailed nudity, in the demo no less.

The game play is pretty awesome too. Every button invokes some kind of attack and you can get pretty far just button mashing and watching the carnage if that's all you want. ( You should learn how to block though, it seems pretty important with the bosses ) However, there are also combos you can 'buy' and then use if you like. The system for this is what's become a standard light/dark set of abilities in a ladder organization. To further push the light/dark choices you can make there's actually one ability that lets you impale an enemy on the scythe you stole from Death and either punish or Absolve them.

I highly recommend this Demo if you don't mind some bloody hacking and slashing; and nudity. I'll likely GameFly this one and play through it.

The next demo I played was Bayonetta.

The best way I can think of describing this is a girlie version of Dante's Inferno, as if it and Final Fantasy X-2 got married. It's a button mashing hack and slash like Dante. A bit dark and kick ass, but with a distint girlie aspect.

Bayonetta looks like a model and shows some valley girl tendencies at times when she isn't channeling a sexy librarian vibe, glasses and all. I think your current target is marked with huge red lips, and some of the special attacks involve your very large high heal shoe coming through a portal and either stomping or kicking your enemies. Oh also, the heel of her high heel shoes are guns which she can shoot a la Chun-Li's whirlwind kick. So it's a bit lighter as well there's no actual nudity. When it would be there, bits are covered; such as when Bayonette channels her, magical?, clothing into an extension of her hair to beat down a boss.

There's some back story about a secret enclave of which she's an outcast or something, and there's a vague WET like cut scene mode which utilizes film strips so it does have some pretty good visuals. The game play is much like Dante too, combos you can use, but don't have to, though you'll likely invoke them on accident anyway.

I might end up playing this though given Dante's availability I'd likely choose it first. The girlie tint to it is perhaps a tad overdone for my liking, but I highly recommend the demo for how somewhat bizarre this game is.

For an added bonus I'll also share Trine. This is a cute side scroller pseudo-puzzler with neat visuals. The basic premise is a thief, wizard and knight all get trapped in the same body after touching a mysterious jewel and being transported to a new world. The story is light hearted and humorous and the game play is pretty light in a good way.

on Love, Semantics and the Law

2009-11-08T17:59:00.000-08:00

Washington state voters recently voted to approve Referendum 71.   That is, the legislature decided to grant full and equal rights to Domestic Partners (a legal term), a group petitioned to block it pending a vote, and the rest of the state backed the legislature.

Despite the law passing being important, what the law actually did was even more important in the long run.

Let's step back for one second.

I believe there are two key points in this whole thing.

1. Denying same sex rights IS discrimination.   It may be discrimination you believe in, but it is discrimination. (I'd even argue it's illegal for the simple reason you are discriminating based on sex which is illegal)

2. The word marriage means a lot to a lot of people.   There is almost certainly more people who really care about the word than those who don't.

What Washington State did differently is it did not touch the word Marriage.   It simply said that those who register as Domestic Partners have all the same legal requirements. The actual affect of the law was to effectively take every instance of the word "Marriage" and add "and Domestic Partnership".   Given how many attempts to actually legalize gay Marriage have failed or been overturned, Washington has shown that this is a much more tenable approach. In fact, a gay marriage provision has never passed a public vote before. Read that again. Never.   All the existing ones have come from legislatures which have not been challenged.

I have long said the only route for gay "marriage" is to focus on the law and not the word.   The word simple means too much to too many people that it will never work as a step toward the concept. In fact Referendum 71 only barely passed with 52% acceptance.   With that little of a margin, in a state with a large liberal bias, I think it's clear that "Marriage" is simply a non starter in our nation.   Ideally, governments should only recognize 'civil unions' and churches and society can do what they like with the word Marriage, but I think Washington has done a good job with this step.

on Better Video Game Playability

2009-11-02T20:57:00.000-08:00

An open letter to game developers:

This letter stems from a recent issue I had playing two games, Fear 2 and Mirror's Edge, though I have no doubt it applies to many others.   The issue was that my PlayStation 3 went belly up and would no longer boot. The short of it was that the data was unrecoverable and while Sony replaced the system under warranty, they would not recover the data for me.   I had in effect lost all saved progress in all my games.   Of particular interest to me though, I was half way through Mirror's Edge and almost finished with Fear 2.   The issue with the PS3 was certainly not the game's faults, I hope..., however I believe they very poorly recovered from this increasing issue of hardware failure.

Neither game would in anyway allow me to restart where I had left off or anywhere else in the middle of the stories despite my best efforts.   I tried finding save games online only to find that the games would simply reject them. I tried finding cheat codes and came up with nothing.   I was left with two options, abandon the games, or restart them.   I choose to abandon both games.   Before I list the reasons this is bad for you and for me, let me provide an instance of a success in this area.   At the same time I was also playing Half Life 2: Episode 0 and also lost my save game for it too.   However, with very little work I soon found a cheat code that allowed me to start at any chapter. I was thankfully able to finish my game where I left off and as well have gone on to play Episodes 1 and 2, as well anticipate 3.

So onto why this failure scenario of Fear 2 and Mirror's Edge is bad.   The obvious consequence is that for me to finish these games I must waste my time to recreate the achievements I had already gained.   I don't know about you, but I do not like repeating things.   I decided it was not worth my time to replay many hours of these two games, let alone effectively reread the start of a story and as such simply put them down. Unfortunately, the best case recovery scenario for me was to simply eat the time and money spent on these games and move on.   While this was the worst case scenario for you, you unfortunately made it the best case scenario for me.    But it gets worse. The hidden consequence is that not only did I waste my time and money on these games and not actually get to finish the stories, but you have now effectively prevented me from buying and enjoying any of your sequels or add on content.   This is certainly a loss for you, though given the annoyance incurred so far, I'm unsure where it ranks for me.

So that's where we are right now; maybe try and learn from this.

Having no actual discussion with you, I can only assume that since a number of games, such as Half Life2, do provide a way to start in the middle, that someone made a distinct decision to not allow it on these games. (If that is wrong, well then problem solved I hope.) While it doesn't make much sense to me, I can only speculate that the reason to specifically disallow this is somehow rooted in the 'hard core gamer' mentality of core gamers, or simply in hubris of developers.

For hard-core gamers, a way to skip through a game is a way to skip some challenges and reap the rewards of boss fights, cinematics or perhaps trophies on the PS3 without actually doing the work for them.   If two people have beaten the same game then they have gone through the same trials and tribulations as each other, there is something here to bond over.

For developers, this ability is a way to skip your well crafted story and interaction elements.   There was the pit with awesome fire that shot up to get past, the balrog that required precise button hits to defeat, and the tricky puzzle that required assembling items from around the island to solve.

Unfortunately all these things are pretty much already skippable in some various form. As for the challenges, games already allow for different difficulty levels so there's little in common with the challenge of an easy run through and a hard one.   As well there is no end of pay and free walkthroughs everywhere.   There is no more challenge needed than reading if desired.   As for experiencing your content in full, people very frequently record full game plays and put them online, so you can not only get a visual cheat guide you can simple watch the pieces you might want if you desired as such. I can understand the trophy/leader-board issue, but how about just disabling them completely in these situations?

Additionally, video games are pretty much the only entertainment medium that locks people into a linear progression. Movies, books, music do not prevent me from jumping right into the middle of them or even just experiencing the ending if I really want. A play even lets you come in in the middle if you really want, so why maintain such control over how someone who has paid you good money experiences your content? You're creation is not that amazing. While it's true that it would really suck to jump past that pretty awesome scene in BioShock and have no idea what's going on in the game, do you actually think people really want to skip random pieces of content if they haven't been forced to, and is it really going to hurt you if they do?

Let's talk about how you might be missing out by requiring people to play in traditional ways though, and why you might instead want to embrace it over simply allowing hidden cheats.

The wii has shown that casual games are a huge market, and further more Prince of Persia has shown that you can successfully create a game in which the player never dies or has to give up important progress they have made.    Embrace this.   Most modern games are simply elaborate Interactive Fictions. They are linear stories which the player is immersively experiencing.   There is no reason that gamers of all skill levels should not be able to participate in your stories.

A game could implement a movie mode where it simply walks through for you. If the story is that good some people may actually want to just watch it if you make it interesting enough. ( probably not too bad for those late night parties where you want to replay some gorefests and are perhaps not quite capable of doing it yourself at the time)   For players who still want some interaction, games can also offer walkthrough mode where you are hard or impossible to kill, enemies die really easy, and puzzles call out to you with assistance.   Just because some people are too young or old, or didn't develop excellent straffing technique when they were 14, doesn't mean they don't want the viceral enjoyment of walking in, and then out of a firefight.

Take the simplest case though ( aside from my tradgic hardware issue ). Your game rocks, and on a bored sunday night years from now, I want to go back and relive that final boss fight.   Guess I should have kept all my save games around after all.

(I'll be mailing a copy of this to the creators of Fear 2 and Mirror's Edge)

PAX 2009

2009-09-07T23:03:00.000-07:00

I managed to attend PAX 2009 this year for the first time. I say managed because it actually sold out completely, the first time it has ever happened too. Luckily someone at work was selling a three day pass and I got lucky enough to get it. score.

I really had no idea what to expect. I knew it was somehow based around Penny Arcade, and had "video game stuff", some presenters, and other "stuff". It seemed likely to at least be an interesting experience so I wasn't much worried, and it was only $50.

I won't boringly enumerate everything here, but I will say the main stay is the expo. I'm kind of quite surprised it actually fit in the convention center, it is simply massive. I didn't actually play many games due to lines and well nothing really grabbed me, but it was quite amazing to see all the different set ups as well simply the number of people.

So instead of being boring I'll just point out some specific things I learned about attending PAX:

Pax is mostly about video games

I know Penny Arcade is a lot about games too, but I really was expecting it all to me somehow mostly about the comic, but it is not. The main focus is video games, console and computer alike, including even hardware vendors showing up. There was actually a stand in the expo just pushing 3D setups, which apparently will work with any 120Hz display.   It makes HUDs a little more life like.

It wasn't just video games though. There were table top vendors and CCG vendors in the expo area too, as well a whole floor was just for pick up board gaming.

Pax is for and by gamers

Pax is pretty much made by gamers for gamers and not by the gaming industry for better or wose. I don't think there'll be a ton of surprise announcements like E3.

Pax is pretty cool

During the 3 days the Omegathon occures. This is a 5-6 stage elimination gaming competition.   The games however are quite random, and the final game is secret and done during the final closing show of PAX. This year it was Skee ball :o)

Also, they even Pax 10 awesome small games and both feature them in the printed program, but also let them demo.   One of GAMBIT's games, CarnieVale, was there and I got to meet some of the Singapore co-workers of Marleigh's.   As well there was a new game called Machinarium from the makers of Samorost. If you haven't played Samorost you should go now.

Wil Wheaton gets to do whatever he wants

Wil Wheaton isn't known for gaming, but he is a gamer and therefor I think he gets to do whatever he wants. He was on the Pitch Your Game panel, he got his own Talk, and was just in general wandering around on stages and with other guests doing stuff.

There are smarts at Pax

Pax isn't just about playing games, there are also several rooms in which talks, movies, etc are going on.   There were a few on interesting subjects like: Female gamers; sex, drugs, murder in games; designing for failure, etc.   You can still see the schedule online with descriptions.

Seattle is a good place to be for such geeky things

I learned there are a lot of geeky things in the area I didn't know about. First, Penny Arcade is homed up in Capitol Hill ( Mike and Jerry live here ).   I hear Scott Kurtz of PvP is thinking of moving here, I can only imagine Wil is next.   Bungie is in Kirkland, Valve is in Bellevue, and apparantly 5th Cell, the makers of Scribblenauts, are in Bellevue too, who knew.

The Seattle Convention Center is huge

PAX had complete use of the convention center from what I saw, well floors 2-6. The convention center looks big from the outside, I mean it's a convention center, but it doesn't feel like the insides should fit.   The expo and main hall areas were simply massive and I think they were on the same floors.

Games

Since there are games at PAX so here's some I ran across that caught me.

Uncharted 2: Looks neat, nothing special but that should be quite fine.

BioShock 2: Only a teaser walk through but pretty awesome, can't wait.

Scribblenauts: This personally isn't doing a lot for me, but I like the idea and I'm glad everyone else is jazzed.

Dante's Inferno: Looked pretty cool and the game play with fighting big monsters was somewhat Prince of Persia like which is good. I'm told it looks pretty much like God of War, so I'll have to check that out too.

WET: At first it looked a bit typical but I think some of the game play will be pretty neat. The parts where you were riding a moving vehicle down a highway and attacking others looked well done.

Diablo 2/Star Craft 2: More of the same with somewhat newer graphics.

Batman Arkham Asylum: I saw this in the free play room since it's already out, but it made me want to give it a try. After playing the demo today it's on my gamefly queue.

---

I'm glad I went to PAX, and more so I could go for the three days.   I'll likely go next year and make sure I go to the Saturday night stuff which I skipped this year ( no Jonathan Coulton for me ).

Things of our Children's Fathers

2009-08-09T18:57:00.000-07:00

We remember people in various ways, but when they've left us it is their things we have left. These things give us a physical hold on them through time, and through this we can maintain a grasp on our emotional ties too. This is perhaps even more so with our parents. We spend the most pivotal years of our lives with our parents and they ingrain themselves in us ways even lovers can not. Most of these things will be new from parent to child, we don't plan on our children making these connections to something specific, it just happens. The things that do persist from generation to generation become heirlooms, some even forced down through history; the jade statue perched on the corner of the mantel waiting to be set free.

The things children cling on to will be of their own choosing, for reasons we likely will never realize, especially at the time. However we will certainly try to influence them. Give them things we think they'll like, hopefully cherish, and even better if it's something we have an interest in. Heirlooms persist themselves, some as sand worms, through history but what about when we want to pass things down, and what about when those things may not exist when they're old enough to care?

This all comes to me from one of my interests. I'd almost call it a hobby though that seems wrong, a hobby feels like you should necessarily be creating something. I play board games on a somewhat weekly bases. These aren't typical American board games, but derived from Europe and somewhat dominated by Germany. They feature interesting game play, unique physical pieces, and usually nice artistic images. Carcassonne is a decent though perhaps simplistic example. One problem I have though is that most games I'm interested in are already owned by other members of the group I play with, and I don't tend to play with other people, so there is really little reason in me owning any games myself.

This is where we come back to the first bit. I realize however that some of these games I'll still want to play years from now, and some I will distinctly want my children to play; they're kind of like the Montessori of children's games, but furthermore they're so unique to what we usually experience. However, if and when I do ever have kids, some of these may not exist anymore. Games like these have fairly small markets and are to a large degree necessarily physical. While they do exist digitally and mostly online, they loose a lot in it, and there's nothing to say the electronic version will persist even then. The internet is fickle. So what do we do with things like this?

I certainly can't buy everything, but I've decided to actually buy games I think I'll still want to play in 15 years, even if I never punch the pieces from their cardboard holders until then. I'll have to lug them around until then, but I think it's worth it. The first one I'm buying is Thebes, a fun Archeology type game. It's got some interesting game play around how it handles digging over two simulated years, and I think it's probably pretty educational. My kids probably won't remember it, and I hear they tend not to like what you think they will or should, but all you can really do is try right?

I do wonder where else this kind of issue might lie; the niche market that doesn't lend itself well to digitization.

Pay Me Less, More Often

2008-03-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

With my not so recent job change came a change in how I was paid. At my last job we got paid at the end of the month, all at once. It was nice and made my accounting easy. Same amount of money every month on the last day of the month. When I tell people in "the industry" about this they actually chuckle a little. I'm told monthly pay checks are a sign of an unsecure company as they could potentially get a month of work out of you, close up shop, and not have to pay out; also I imagine it's a little more trouble for a small company to do irregular pay periods. I like to turn this around and say that companies that pay bi-weekly are basically saying they only have enough certainty that they'll be open for two weeks, but I digress.

I got used to the odd pay periods pretty quickly, I still get the same amount each month by the end of the month, it just comes in in smaller amount and more often, but the same amount. However I then started to notice some benefits from this.

I usually do all my money changing at the end of the month, pay bills, transfer to savings, done. But now that I get a pay check in the first half of the month I realized I could transfer money to savings earlier and earn a bit more savings on it. If I know I can put a minimum of $500 in savings at the end of the month then, on average, I can put that money in savings 3 weeks earlier. It's not a huge extra amount of interest, but it's an extra 5.7% of your interest rate. At the end of the month I just then put in whatever extra money is left over into savings as I would normally do.

The other thing is that if you look at paydays on the calendar you'll notice there's two months with three of them! That's right, twice a year you "make" 150% your normal pay! These occur during May and October. What this means is that you make "less" most months than you would if you just divided your salary by 12. This is effectively making you save 8% a month. This has two very nice side effects.

1. This 8% less you make means you must tighten your belt in general and therefor spend a little more wiser than you might. Most people may realize they should do this anyway, but this is actually making it a reality.

2. You have effectively been forced to save a months worth of money. This mimics setting aside money each month for a particular purpose, say a vacation, or a new HD TV without the headache of actually doing it and having to account for it in your monthly budget, which is a big barrier to entry.

So go out and find a job that pays bi-weekly and enjoy the benefits.

Magellan Maestro 3100 GPS: $250

2007-08-06T21:27:00.000-07:00

he Maestro 3100 is the entry level unit offered by Magellan, which is exactly why I chose it. This is my first GPS and as I've learned when entering a new technology area, start on the low end and learn what you like about it and what you want in your next one. I may have taken this a little too much to heart with this unit, as I've certainly found many things that are lacking, but in general I think it's a good device for what it does. My review follows.

The Basics
This system does it's job well, it just doesn't do a whole lot more. If you give it an address, it'll find you a way to that location. Its nice feminine voice will guide you with with helpful voice prompts and should you stray from your path it will auto reroute. The system has a decent 750,000 entry Points of Interest database though not as large as the Tom Tom's > 1M. It tends to know big chains, but don't expect it to find you many coffee shops other than Starbucks. It comes with a suction cup mount that works nicely on my windshield and a battery that lasts a few hours on a recharge.

The Good
The Maestro 3100 is the cheapest name brand system I found. It's $250 retail but at the time Amazon offered it for $200, ( however it is currently listed at $250 ) this made it $60 cheaper than the cheapest Tom Tom and it was sold from Amazon directly, always a bonus in my book. It performs it's basic task of knowing where you are and getting to elsewhere well.

The menu system is flat and fairly discoverable in general. The Address book is the deepest of the menus, but I quickly was able to navigate to a saved location in just 2 or 3 seconds. The system is responsive for the average case and tends to only slow down when it's acquiring a GPS signal which usually only happens when you first start up the system.

The system automatically changes it's color scheme to reduce the brightness of the unit at night. This is a must have, you'd be blinded otherwise.

The Bad
The main bad items are in what this unit is lacking, which I'm sure more expensive units cover. So I will be specific to this units offerings

2D is the new 3D
The map offers both 3D and 2D views. The 3D view is nice to look at, however it is impossible to do anything interactive in it; moving the map around is simply slow and it's usually not possible to actually navigate enough to see what you want. The 2D view is almost preferred in all cases just for ease. Another sorely missing feature is the inability to see an entire route easily, there really should be.

Wasted Space
The Maestro offers a 'Plan a Trip' feature, however this amounts to nothing more than a list of way points. There is no special navigation, or hand off between points. You could easily just put each point in the Address Book and just choose the next one to navigate to on your trip.

Nagging Features
This unit comes with a 'preview' option that you can turn on where, when you start a route, it will ask if you want to preview it with a fly over. The problem with this feature is, any time it recalculates the route it prompts you if you want to see a preview before you can get actual directions. So any time you take an access road instead of the highway, or turn earlier or later than it wants, or take a slightly different route, you gotta fiddle with the box. That is just annoying and simply unsafe.

Also, the preview fly-by feature is useless. It doesn't go fast enough, and is a poor substitute for a full route view.

The Review
This unit is a good buy overall; you can get it with a warranty for less than a Tom Tom. It'll get you where you're going for the cheapest you'll find a name brand unit. The mount is very useful and aside from a few initial drops from my windshield it's held fast. The battery should last long enough to get you around the city for the day if you use it to get your bearing when your lost. As well, it even fit in my blue jean's pocket. Maybe not the most comfortable, but it works.

Amazon.com Links
This Item:
Magellan Maestro 3100
2 Year Warranty

Other Units:

Magellan Maestro 3140 - "SayWhere" functionality says street names in addition to directions, Bluetooth, 4.5 Million Points of Interest

Magellan Maestro 4000 - 1.5 Million Points of Interest, AAA TourBook integration

Magellan Maestro 4040 - "SayWhere" functionality, 4.5 Million Points of Interest, AAA TourBook. Additional Costs: Voice command, Traffic aware

Magellan Maestro 4050 - 4.5 Million Points of Interest, AAA TourBook. Additional Costs: Voice command, Traffic aware

The Memory of Things

2007-07-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

There was a recent Radio Lab about memory and one of the ideas in it really stuck with me as being very interesting, equally very sensical, almost in an obvious way. Not obvious in the 'I could have thought of that' way, but in that 'ah that explains a lot' way.

The bit of information was about what happens when we remember something. The basic idea is that, when you remember a memory, you destroy it, gone, poof! The only way to be able to remember it again is to resave it. So there you go, read from memory bank A, experience, write to memory bank B. Only, you didn't write it exactly the same, you've changed it a little, you have just lived inside your head a little bit.

The ahhhh part of this for me, is that this is very powerful, and affects us in very powerful ways. The more you think about something, the more you change it to the way you perceive it. Every little thought about it is a little more oomph behind it. This I believe is the power behind wishful thinking, behind downward spirals, perhaps behind fear and eternity.

The more we really really want something the more thinking about it justifies the thought to us. The more we worry about something, the more the fear it drives builds. This is what makes Joel in Eternal Sunshine want to forget. The flip side though is, the more we remember pleasantness, the more pleasant it becomes. The more pleasant the memories we make about something, the more it becomes eternal. This, is what makes Joel want it all back.