When I broke down and got a fancy new TV, I decided to get the Xbox 360 instead of the PS3 because of the sizeable selection of games you can download for a fee directly from the couch. This includes old arcade classics as well as new stuff. A couple of days ago, a game called “Braid” was released, which is a sort of puzzle game done up like a painting. It started blowing my mind about 5 minutes after I started playing it, and hasn’t quit. Since. Here’s what it looks like:

The music fits in perfectly with the look of the game. Here’s a little YouTube action so you can get the full aesthetic:

I usually get frustrated in puzzle games pretty quickly, when the difficulty ramp is too steep, or bored, if it’s too easy. Braid is perfect, right in the middle. I’ve solved 3/5 of the worlds, and haven’t been once tempted to reach for a walkthrough. What’s more, Braid doesn’t have any complicated rules–you learn everything by observation, and so the overall experience is very satisfying. It was $15 and has already paid for itself.

Pretty much the best political ad ever, as if created by Jay of Jay and silent bob. (Has some naughty words, click to see full size.)

The Zombie Scenario Survivor Test. Give it a shot. My first time through I answered truthfully and ended up with 70%. The second time I went ruthless and did much better.

If any of you were like me back in 1989 sitting in front of the TV with your NES powered up, playing Dragon Warrior, then we should talk. Just in case you’re not sure, here’s a Rorschach test of sorts for you:

Does that picture make you twitch? Awaken some dark memory in the recesses of your brain? Then you’re like me, and you should definitely check out the latest iteration of this same franchise, 16 years later: Dragon Quest VIII. Square Enix is still the publisher, and there are still frickin’ slimes!

And drackies! You know you remember the drackies. Apparently Square is doing all they can to cash in on nostalgia just such as this and has actually produced a slime controller

I’m not saying you should buy this for me for christmas. But I’m also not saying you shouldn’t.

I’ve seen many harddrives come and go during my life-long fascination with computers. The first one I used was 30MB, the first one I bought with my own money was an 850MB Conner (remember them?). I even had a classic of HD history, the IBM Deathstar, and mine did end up failing in the classic way.

I stopped stressing so much about storage when I built a 3×120GB array when we moved to California. The idea was to have a bit of redundancy (I used RAID 5 for parity information) and enough storage (actually only 240GB, you lose one disk worth of capacity to get the redundancy). It wasn’t cheap, but also didn’t cost that much and I was able to build an all-purpose Linux file server and router/firewall.

Well believe it or not, It’s been over two years since I built that thing and I was at about 80% capacity with more files coming all the time. Luckily, a hard drive fairy from heaven gave me 4 gently used 250GB Hitachi 7K250 drives. I paired these with a super-cheap four-port SATA card (no fancy hardware RAID or anything) and using the great software RAID setup on Linux, brought the 1 terabyte beast to life:

This pic is from the somewhat painful process of getting my data from the old array onto the new one. Since I only have 3 PCI slots on the board, and they were all occupied, I had to give up internet access by pulling out the NIC while I was doing the transfer. Even better, I had to buy multiple power splitters to get all seven drives going at once. Now the new drives are tucked away neatly and the old 120GB PATA drives are moping in the closet. Of course, I had to sacrifice one drive’s worth of storage to redundancy info, but 750GB is still nothing to sneeze at. Now I’ve got a place to stash all those dual-layered DVDs from netflix until blanks come down in price a bit.

It’s not exactly Mario Drama, but it still tickles my fancy.

Just to let everyone know I’m still carrying the torch, check out this article in the New York Times about what Wal-Mart is doing to help alleviate the health-care crisis in the US (you have to register or just use bugmenot:

An internal memo sent to Wal-Mart’s board of directors proposes numerous ways to hold down spending on health care and other benefits while seeking to minimize damage to the retailer’s reputation. Among the recommendations are hiring more part-time workers and discouraging unhealthy people from working at Wal-Mart.

Also choice: “workers with seven years’ seniority earn more than workers with one year’s seniority, but are no more productive.” Yes! It’s all about loyalty in the end.

I’ve had my eye on the Logitech Harmony 520 for several months now. It’s a universal remote made by a company called “Harmony” that was bought a while back by Logitech. The idea is basically that universal remotes universally suck because they stick you in this paradigm of “press CD, now the remote controls the CD player, press TV, now it controls the TV,” so to watch TV you end up pressing TV, turning on the TV, then switching to your ReplayTV or whatever, turning it on, switching to receiver, etc. And then when you’re watching TV, you decide you want to change the channel, or the volume, and your remote has to be in different “modes” to do these two things. Utter stupidity. Also, to program your remote, you generally have to sift through long lists of manufacturer codes, and god help you if you have a somewhat modern entertainment center that has a game console or PVR in it, because you will not find codes for it. Sorry.

Enter Harmony. Instead of being device-centric, it’s activity centric. So, I tell it that when I watch TV, I turn on the TV, set it’s input to component, turn on the receiver, set it’s audio/video inputs correctly, and turn on the ReplayTV. I then hit one button on the Harmony, “watch TV,” and all of the above happen automatically. Also, it knows that I want to change channels and use the menus on the ReplayTV, but if I change the volume, I want to do it on the receiver. It knows these things.

And how do you program it? You plug it in to a USB port on your computer (it works on my Mac beautifully), go to a website, and tell it all about your entertainment center, what brands and models you own, and it sends everything down to the remote without a single incantation of flashing lights and button sequences. On the off chance that you have some piece of gear or remote that it doesn’t know about (it knew about my Outlaw 1050 receiver, way out of the mainstream), you can teach it any signal from any remote in a nice, intuitive way.

I’ve been using the remote for about a week now. I bought it last Saturday morning, planning to spend the day setting it up and tweaking it. I was shocked (almost disappointed) when it took a total of 10 minutes to get it just the way I wanted. Everything just worked. It’s nice and slim, well-balanced in the hand, with a mix of hard and soft buttons. I really prefer hard ones that “click” when you press them down, and luckily most of the buttons used for our PVR and TV, volume, are of this type. It’s got a nice blue back light, is only mildly ugly (much less so than the bigger, more expensive models), and has totally supplanted our previous four-remote setup.

A couple of small gripes: since when you start an activity (like “watch TV”), it has to get a lot of stuff turned on and set up, you have to sit there for a few seconds with it pointed at your stuff waiting for everything to get going. A couple of times Leslie and I made the mistake of pressing the button then turning away, and it only got halfway done setting things up. But, at the end, it asked on it’s little screen, “is everything working OK?” It was simple enough to tell it that the TV still needed to be turned on (albeit not as simple as just getting up and turning it on by hand). So they have what seems a reasonable solution to that problem. The other little issue is the responsiveness of the volume keys. It doesn’t start changing the volume until a fraction of a second after you start pressing on the button, and keeps changing a fraction of a second after you let off. This can be obnoxious when you just want to change the level a few clicks, which I’m used to doing one-by-one.

Anyway, I’m happy to have finally found something that can kill all my remotes and actually be straighforward enough so that Leslie doesn’t kill me.

Leslie and I recently got this new printer, which kicks ass in many ways, but my most favorite has got to be the ability to print directly on special CD/DVD-R discs. Also I have found a handy repository of every imaginable cover image from CDs and movies. So now my when I make totally legal backup copies of my DVDs, instead of being cheesy-looking blanks with sharpie labels now look more like this:

Home made! I love the age of cheap media production.

I think I was sort of a half-student last year. I commuted several times a week, I got an advisor, I took some classes, but I wasn’t really going to Berkeley. Now I am here. I go to the office every day, I have these hard classes that I’m less afraid of because I can be around for studying. I feel transformed… not back into an undergrad, but at least back into a college student. Our apartment is a beautiful refuge, so much better than the dorm. Remember dorm food? Did that actually happen? Ick. T-minus two weeks to the prelim.

In the long tradition of cool flash on overt, I give you neverendingfall. You can help her with your mouse if she gets stuck.

I’m sure Leslie will cover the events well soon, but in the meantime you can read the bride’s commentary on the event.

So… I just ran 10 miles. Another week, another first. The thing was, 10 was much easier than 9 last week. It must have been the shock last week that made it so hard to finish. The pace was slow again, as I plan to keep it: 10 miles, 100 minutes. The first few miles I watched the US lose a world cup qualifying match to Mexico, played in Mexico city. It was strangely exhilirating. I felt kind of like I was running along with them. Now as everyone knows I’m not the biggest fan of sports, but I found myself, totally alone in the room, muttering at the players on the screen. “Get that ball out of there!” “No! No! No!” “That’s right, that’s the way we do it.” All of this kind of stuff. Pretty crazy. The game ended about 3.5 miles into the run, and I didn’t feel myself tiring at all. I took this as a good sign, and found Rounders on another channel. It had just started, so I figured I was set. At 5 miles I ate a cereal bar (I hadn’t thought to bring something to eat last week). At 6.67 I ate an energy bar, and started to feel a little tired. I took a couple of minutes walk between 7 and 8, then finished without any real trials.

I’ll admit I was kind of scared after last week–26.2 miles?–but I feel much better now. I’m creeping up on half of the distance, and I haven’t broken yet. Still… I’ve only done two long runs, and I’ve got 17 more plus the marathon. I’m really curious to see if I can pull this off.

The semester has worked it’s way up to a gallop. One of my classes, “computational geometry,” has been computationally kicking my ass. My current plan is to stop taking it for a grade for my sanity’s sake. Otherwise things are peachy, I need to restart my research engine after the long burn of SIGGRAPH. Cool things of note:

• I moved into an office with some other graphics folks. This is significantly better even than my already serendipitous office down the hall from the graphics people. I’m also right next to the communal Xbox, which seemed a reason for concern but hasn’t been a problem yet.
• Speaking of Xboxes, I have one now, though I’ve yet to play any Xbox games on it. What I have done is disassembled it, solder a chip in its innards, and put it back together. Why? Because now the Xbox will, at my whim, run any NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, Gameboy, and Arcade game ever. I’m not saying that I have copies of all these games–what blatant piracy that would be! Ok actually I do.
• Going to New York the day after tomorrow. No doubt much posting of pictures and events will be done
• Awesome Valentine’s dinner

I’ll probably write more about the whole process when I get to the end, but for now I give you this and this. Let it be Thursday soon.

snapshot of today’s events:

sleep until 9:30. 9-fucking-30.

hop on the train. actually enjoy the hour and a half commute because of kavelier and clay

feel at home on campus. meet with james’ grad students over free beer and bbq.

enjoy train ride home. ride home through playful, impotent drizzle. what passes in norcal as weather. smile the whole way.

i’ve arrived.

But I can’t resist. With this link, I shall offend (slightly more than) half the country. Thanks, Ali.

no excuses this time. we saw what he did, and we clearly want more. fuck. give the people what they want.

who’s coming with me to canada?

So, I’ve been excited about this new Grand Theft Auto game for a while now. Since February when it was announced, I’ve been patiently biding my time, pretending to be interested in working a job or getting a Ph.D., when in truth all I want to do is play the game. None of you suspected, did you?

The release date of the game is the 26 Oct. As it turns out, there was a leak of the game onto the internet a couple of days ago, and so inevitably I already have a copy. I would like to say I had moral qualms and heart palpitations before burning the DVD and popping it in last night–but that would be a lie. I would also like to say that I’ll run out and buy the game for $50 as soon as it’s available, but I’m afraid that might be a lie, too. Maybe Rockstar Games will find my web page and demand their just desserts–it would be only appropriate. But until that day perhaps I’ll just bask in the irony of having stolen Grand Theft Auto.

In truth, the sum of $50 is negligible when compared to the amount of enjoyment I derive from these games. I probably spent 80-90 hours playing each of the last two, and given that I spend $10 to see a two-hour movie or $65 for half on hour of go-karting, it seems like a true bargain. And I think that’s why in the end I’ll have to buy it. So much of what the giant evil media companies dole out is overpriced for what you get, it’s easy to forget sometimes where the value lies.

So, the video game companies can charge $50 for a game. I can accept that. But I’m holding fast to my upper limit of $7 for DVDs and CDs. Once they hit that mark, I’ll turn in my hook and peg-leg. I promise.

Let’s see… Leslie’s parents and sister arrive Wednesday. We relax, have a simple dinner and watch the debates. Thursday morning we head out early to Big Basin for a bit of hiking and crawling over fallen redwoods. We leave Big Basin and drive to Bonny Doon for wine tasting. From Bonny Doon we drive up highway 1 to Half Moon Bay, where we get a delicious lunch at the Flying Fish, a little hole-in-the-wall connected to a farmers’ market. Then we stroll around downtown Half Moon Bay for a couple of hours, then drive home to rest.

Friday morning Leslie heads to work, and I head to Berkeley along with parents and sister. We have a great tour of Berkeley, lunch at Intermezzo cafe, then drive back down to San Jose to see the last 15 minutes of Leslie’s Friday class, then hang out in her classroom for a while. Then we head to the Winchester Mystery House for what was a suprisingly interesting tour of a sprawling 100-year-old mansion built by a psychotic arthritic heiress. Finally, dinner is had in Santa Clara at Dasaprakash with the whole group + Johanna. We retire.

Saturday everyone else heads to San Francisco, but I stay at the apartment to try to catch up on some work. At noon Doug arrives, in town for the weekend for his Apple interview. We go kart racing in the afternoon with Phil, then hang out at Phil’s place for a while playing Katamari Damacy. Around 6 we head back home for the very end of the Aggie football game (what we were at Phil’s house to avoid), then share Aladdin over a bucket of fried chicken.

Sunday morning Leslie’s family heads out to the airport. Doug and I spend the morning cramming for the interview at Apple and discussing the relative merits of grad school and jobs. We take the train up to Berkeley for a short tour and a Delicious lunch at the Kurry Klub on Shattuck, drop by Amoeba, then ride home. Later we head to Phil’s for dinner–a wonderful coconut curry chicken followed by some sort of traditional Maylay dessert that I can’t remember how to pronounce.

I leave doug there and head home for sleep. As I type Doug is interviewing at Apple for my old job. Time to get cracking on all the work I’ve been ignoring since Wednesday…