Social Networking

As I’ve probably mentioned on here before, I’m the king of nostalgia. I feel like I can remember my pre-college years, all the way back through elementary school, so clearly. I love looking through old class photos, and seeing old friends and acquaintances and wondering what they’re up to now. Occasionally, some random person will get on my mind, and it will be sort of a challenge for me to find them and see what they’re up to, and in rare cases actually email them and say “hey”.

Combine this, however, with my distaste for social networking, and you’ve got kind of a weird mix, I think.

I sat next to Liz last night at a dinner celebration for Baditude’s birthday. She found it PRET-ty hilarious that I denied a friend request from an elementary school classmate that I haven’t talked to in, say, 20 years. I don’t know if anyone on the planet has ever denied a friend request, judging by her reaction. I tried to explain that the term “friend” holds a certain meaning for me, and I’m sorry, there’s no way I can justify having that person on my “friend’s list. Mike Stup’s sister, likewise, issued a “friend request” to me. What? I did a magic show at her 9th birthday, I think, but since then I’m pretty sure I haven’t had a conscious thought about her. And now she wants to be friends? I’m sorry, but that’s just a little weird to me. No disrespect to little Mal, I’m sure she’s wonderful and that we’d be bff’s someday. But we need to work on our relationship a little bit to get to that point.

The only reason I have a thrice-damned MySpace and Facebook account is to spy on people anyways.

My theory on MySpace is that chicks like to hang out there. They like it because they like to post messages to each other, and use the cutesy li’l graphics like this:



And the only reason guys are on there is, well, ‘cause that’s where all the chicks are hanging out. Someone tell me if I’m wrong.

Facebook seems a bit more adult, but I’m still not quite sure what the point is. And it’s far too closed off for a snoop like me to get anywhere. It has those wacky plug-in applications, but I don’t particularly like that those applications are granted access to your personal data. That’s smells way too fishy for me.

In the end, social networking, for me personally, feels like a solution looking for a problem. I’m not looking to meet people, and I don’t feel like I have a problem staying in touch and having fun with friends… What am I missing?

This didn’t mean to turn into a rant. Oh well. :)

In other news, life is good. Little Allie is my absolute pride and joy. My favorite time of the day is coming home from work and her looking up and seeing me come in the door and giving me a huge smile. Melts my heart every time. She’s at a really fun age right now, where she’s interactive, but manageable, and not out of control or totally headstrong and willful. Her newest hobbies included shaking her head back and forth (as if she’s say “NoooOOOoooOOo!”), banging things together to make noise, and making strange guttural noises. Good times.

Grand Theft Auto IV

I bought Grand Theft Auto IV the day it came out.

I honestly wasn’t planning on buying it right away. I knew Baditude was going to pick I up, and I figured I’d let him check it out and see if it was worth it. But then I heard reports on the radio about how huge it was going to be, and read a couple of reviews that were all in the 10/10 or A+ range, and figured I wanted to be a part of it. 70% of my decision was for the game in general. 25% was that I thought the multiplayer aspect of the game sounded really neat, and 5% of it was I wanted to support Rock Star Games, and a cause that I believe in.

When I mentioned this to a workboy, he said (a touch incredulously) “What cause is that?”

“Freedom of artistic expression,” I shot back coolly. (Well, maybe not that coolly, but I meant it).

The unfortunate thing about GTAIV is that there’s simply no way for the two sides to communicate with each other. People who haven’t played the game hear reports on the news that the game generally involves murder and mayhem. There’s drinking and driving and sex and drugs and violence. Not only that, but there’s a huge amount of freedom built into the game, so the player can make some really obscene choices. A popular example is that you can hire a prostitute, drive to a dark alley and conduct your business, and then when she gets out of the car, you can run her down and take your money back. Stuff like that. The game doesn’t direct you to do this, or specifically reward you for it, it just creates a world where those choices are available.

But as I said, there’s simply no way for people who have played the game to communicate with those who have only heard about it. You read the above and are shocked, but we have ALL seen or read fictional depictions of equally depraved acts. I guess it’s the interactive nature of the game that makes it different from passively reading a book or watching a movie. I actually believe that the two are closer than most people think. When a gamer is controlling someone on the screen, it’s not “me”, it’s “him” or “my guy”. We’re in control, but we’re still primarily observers of what goes on. I think non-gamers overestimate exactly how much we gamers actually personally identify with our on-screen persona.

The second major source of confusion is that people still associate the word “game” with “children”. This needs to be addressed somehow. GTA is about as appropriate for children as the movie “The Departed” is – which is to say, not at all. (You remember “The Departed”, right? Oscar winning movie where the whole second half of the movie is people getting shot in the face, but no one blinked an eye about it?) When I bought the game from my local GameStop, I asked the drone if there were any problems with kids trying to buy the game. “We don’t sell it to kids”, he immediately responded. He even went on to say that if a kid did somehow manage to drag his mom into the shop to buy the game for him, they still wouldn’t sell it. So, kudos to that guy. A popular news story on GTA release day was that someone in London was stabbed in a line that had formed of people waiting to pick up the game. This kind of muck-racking journalism really pisses me off. I have to believe that people are stabbed and shot in all kinds of lines all the time (not to mention concerts, nightclubs, etc). Some journalist obviously said “quick, find some associate of real-world violence and this game!” and that’s the best they could come up with.

Another news story going around is that MADD is unhappy with the game because it features drinking and driving.

"Drunk driving is not a game, and it is not a joke," MADD said in a statement released Tuesday. "Drunk driving is a choice, a violent crime and it is also 100 percent preventable."

As the victim of a drunk driving accident, I couldn’t agree more. But it’s clear they never actually saw the game.

I was just playing GTA this weekend. Niko was bumping around Liberty City when his cell phone went off. It was crazy cousin Roman. “Nico, let’s go out and have some fun!” he said. So I (of course, not “I”, but Niko) picked him up and we went to a local bar. Soon after, we were standing on the sidewalk, weaving all over the place. The camera was panning around all over, and it was really hard to walk around. A little message box popped up, and said something along the lines of “You’re pretty drunk. You shouldn’t drive in this condition. Consider walking it off or getting a taxi.” Definitely something pretty strongly worded like that.

Of course, I decided to drive. Why?

I once heard a game developer define fun as “learning in a consequence-free environment”. That quote really stuck with me. Things that I think are fun are always about learning in some respect or another. If there isn’t any learning involved, then it’s just a task (no one plays tic-tac-toe once they’ve figured it out, right?) And “consequence-free” is obviously important. Given the opportunity, I’d love to get drunk and try driving a car if I was guaranteed (magically) that would be absolutely no consequences. I think part of the problem of drunk-driving is that we have no idea what .08 feels like, and can’t judge our own impairment.

So, Niko and Roman hopped in the car and we tried driving a couple blocks back to the taxi depot. The camera was blurry and panning around wildly, and the car seemed to steer on it’s own accord, and I was careening into oncoming traffic and rubbing against parked cars trying to go in a straight line. The car was a wreck, and I ran a couple people over, but we eventually made it back (real-life Adman feeling a little sick to his stomach after all the camera movement).

I couldn’t help but think that some sort of modified version of that exact sequence would be the best anti-drunk driving education ever. GIVE kids a computer game (in Health class or something) that simulates being drunk in the same way (blurry, weaving camera controlling a semi-autonomous car). Let them learn in a safe environment (fun!) about how hard it is to drive drunk. Keep a dollar tally of how much damage you cause, and how many pedestrians you killed. I have to think that that would teach so much more than watching some 1960’s filmstrip about drinking and driving. Anyways, I really think MADD screwed up, and just is trying to ride some coattails.

All that said, I’ve been really enjoying it. I read a review that lauded the choice of using Russian/Eastern European mafia as a theme, saying that it was the only crime culture left that had not yet been glamorized by Hollywood. I thought that was pretty insightful. I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface, but so far it’s been great.

And remember that line about “learning in a consequence-free environment”, and let me know if it makes as much sense to you as it does to me.

On April 30th of last year, we signed up for cell phone service.

Here’s my “before” post:

http://admansblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/so-last-night-diana-and-i-pulled.html (To summarize, I looked forward to the utility of having a mobile phone without becoming “Cell Phone Guy”).

After buying $100 worth of minutes (which came out to 1150) initially, I think I was left with around 300, and Diana had about 500. What’s cool is that once you get up to $100 worth of minutes purchased (which we did in one shot), minutes don’t expire for a full year. Not only that, but they apparently roll over, which was an unexpected surprise. I learned this only after I spent another $100 to get more minutes. On Diana’s phone, I spent $10 to get some small amount of minutes, and rolled over the remaining 500 (which should theoretically last for another year’ish).

Being lukewarm on having mobile phones in the first place, I’m pretty stoked on the pre-paid plan that we chose. $8 a month is tough to beat.

I honestly can’t remember using my phone all that much. I guess it added some convenience in things like calling and ordering take-out food while driving home after a long day out. It made it easier to coordinate with people who have an aversion to making plans in advance. And although it was never realized, it’s nice to know that it was available in an emergency situation. But I can’t think of Big Wins.

So, while definitely didn’t turn into Cell Phone Guy, after a year, I guess you could call me a satisfied customer.

Spam

We've all gotten lots of weird spam emails, I'm sure.

This is the weirdest I've ever gotten.

Head Above Water

Head above Water…

I’ve been working a lot lately. We’re right at the “go live” date for the big Trading Project at work, and there’s been the inevitable last minute push to get things all ship-shape.

One big issue is that we’ve been developing on a special Development environment. This is kind of a sandbox set of computers, where we can code up stuff, try different things, and not have to worry about sending live trade orders to Wall Street. However, this Dev environment only has a small subset of data.

Once we got things working in Dev, we moved the code over into a more official “Parallel Testing” environment. As the name implies, this environment is parallel to the actual live Production environment. So while it’s still a playground, it’s a full set of data (tens of thousands of accounts, instead of hundreds).

We’ve been doing performance testing in the Parallel environment, and uncovered some pretty serious issues. For example, if a certain process (placing an order) takes two minutes for two-hundred accounts, how long will it take for 1000 accounts? Since 1000 is five times bigger than 200, you might say it will take five times as long: ten minutes. That answer is correct ONLY if the processing time scales linearly.

We’ve found some cases were the processing time was scaling exponentially. Things that were perfectly acceptable (a few minutes) in Dev were taking HOURS or DAYS in Parallel (if we extrapolated… we’d killed processes after a couple hours). That was obviously unacceptable.

A small group of us worked pretty hard this weekend and made some really big improvements. Because some of the original stuff was designed so poorly, now that we’ve learned a lot, we were able to really see what was going on (lots of this stuff was designed by contractors who are no longer with us), and come up with some good fixes. What’s really satisfying about the whole thing is with some relatively minor changes, we took processes that were taking hours and turned them into minutes. Or something that took 15 minutes, and now runs in 30 seconds.

To make it a little more concrete: imagine that when you clicked “Send” on your email, you had to wait 2 hours to use your computer again. Now imagine that someone comes and tweaks something, and now sending that same email takes 5 seconds. We did stuff like that.

When the head of the Systems department comes in on Monday and calls you a “rock star”… that’s never a bad thing.

Anti Virus, Schmanti Schirus

After reading an article regarding anti-virus software, I’ve decided that I’m going to disable/uninstall AV stuff on my computer. Anti-virus software that provides realtime protection does so at the expense of performance. Every time you load something up from disk to run it, your AV software will analyze it. This can seriously degrade performance.

Here are other reasons:

1) My computer is behind a well-configured hardware firewall. It’s invisible to passive scans. All ports are closed down, except those specified by me for various purposes. I’m not worried about network worms.

2) I’m experienced (I purposely avoid using “smart”) enough to know when something is fishy. I don’t download email attachments unless I’m damn sure I know what they are. (And no one I know sends me any attachments other than jpgs, anyways).

3) I’m generally a safe web-surfer. 95% of my web surfing is to the same sites over and over again. However, I do like to learn and explore, so sometimes that leads me on wild tangents through the web.

In all my years of being a computer guy, I can remember two virus incidents. One was self-inflicted (an unfortunate side effect of the whole “learn and explore” thing… I wanted to learn about viruses! And I was successful!) The other was similarly stupid (unsafe websurfing in uncharted pirate software websites). Both those were years ago.

So on one hand, I just don’t think I’m susceptible. And on the other side of the coin, don’t put a whole lot of faith into AV software anyways. I just recently watched my dad’s computer recently become infected (remember “smart” vs. “experienced”?) in spite of having up-to-date AV software on it. Even doing a scan with an online virus checker turned up nothing, in spite of an obvious infection. My point being: even up to day AV software is useless against new malware.

Finally, I have a backup system in place. I regularly take an image of my machine, so that if worst comes to worst, I can restore from backup.

So, all in all, I don’t think the dangers require a constant watchdog looking over my shoulder, micromanaging and double checking everything I do. I certainly don’t recommend that the general public uninstall all AV software, but I’m going to give it a shot.

If you don’t hear from me in a week, avenge my death!

Collaborative Google maps...

A while back, I was playing with Google maps, and found that there is a “My Maps” feature. If you have a Google login, you can create your own maps to share publically or privately. I thought this was pretty cool. It was especially useful when the San Diego wildfires were raging… some helpful person created a map and kept it up to date with various fire lines and safe areas and stuff.

The first thing I thought of was that it would be fun to create a communal map. I thought it would be neat to make a map where friends could add favorite places to eat, neat things to see, etc. The problem was that the first round of My Maps only allowed the owner to edit the map.

But now that’s changed. I just happened to be playing around with Google Maps recently, and noticed that there is now a “Collaborate” button when you create a map. You can still set the map as “Public” or “Unlisted” (in which case you can only view the map if you know the direct link to it), and for each setting, you can have the map be updateable either by collaborators you invite, or by anyone who can view it.

That’s pretty cool.

The only problem I have now is that it feels like a solution waiting for a problem. I want to make a cool, useful, fun map, but I don’t have any grand ideas.

On a whim, I created a Publically viewable, publically editable map called San Diego Beaches, with the idea that people could add their favorite beach spots. I wonder if anyone will update it.

Even if I don’t have any great ideas, I still love the concept.


View Larger Map

Click on the "view larger map" link to see a full view (there's not much there now...)

Rock Band Robot Progress

My original idea was to try to drop steel balls from a height in order to simulate a drum beat. I looked quite a bit into stepper motors, which are motors that don't feely spin, but spin at a fixed increment every time you pulse them with a signal. They're a little complicated, but not too bad.

In order to interface a stepper motor with the PC, you need some sort of hardware in the middle to translate the PC parallel port signals into something the stepper motor can use. The easy way to do this requires 4 data pins (out of 8) from the parallel port, which means I could only drive two stepper motors. The hard way required only a single signal line, but some more intricate bridgeware.

I decided to revert back to my ORIGINAL original idea, which was to use a solenoid (which also only requires one signal line). In case you didn’t know, a solenoid is an electromagnet with a metal rod in the middle of it. Turn on the current, and the rod shoots one way. Turn off the current, and a spring pushes the rod back. So it's pretty easy to see how that directly translates into drum beats... just hold the solenoid over the drum, and turn on the current for about 50ms, and it rod strikes down and then released. At a local junk shop (Industrial Liquidators off Convoy), I was able to find little anonymous solenoids for $1.50 for two. What a bargain.

So, I've got software that creates signals, and I've got solenoids. What next? I need a power supply for the solenoids, and then I need a way to turn on and off the circuit using the PC.

I begged an old PC power supply from a workboy, and learned how to get those to run on their own (they need some internal wires connected, one with a resistor to simulate load). The PC power supply outputs 5v and 12v (red and yellow wires), and also has black ground wires.

After lots of research, I learned about a particular integrated circuit that would do exactly what I wanted. It's called a ULN2803a Darlington Transistor array. A transistor is basically a switch. It has an input, an output, and a signal input. You attach voltage to the input, and ground to the output, and current will only pass through it while the signal input is on. And this little integrated circuit is basically 8 of those stacked together.

So, I did a little test using an LED. I hooked up one leg of the LED to power. I hooked up the other LED to this IC, and I attached the signal portion of the IC to my parallel port. (I had to buy a separate parallel port card for my PC... my motherboard didn't have one, and even if it did, I probably wouldn't want to use it. $10 on eBay!). I wrote a little application to output signals to the parallel port. So, just like a lightswitch, when the parallel port pin has a signal, it will allow current to flow through. When the parallel port is off, no current flows, and the light turns off.


Electronics Test - Click here for more blooper videos

It worked!

So I tried hooking up the solenoid in a similar manner. I had no data on the solenoid (I even did a "live online chat" on the manufacturer's support website, and they didn’t know anything about it!), so I tried it with the 5v power supply output. I carefully hooked everything all up, and tried my little test application.

Nothing.

I checked my wiring, and found a mess-up (oops!). I tried again. Still nothing.

I triple-checked everything again, and decided to try the 12v line from the power supply. I started up my application, and clicked the mouse, and the solenoid fired with a satisfying *click!*. It worked!

Shortly after that, I modified my code to send signals on and off to the parallel port with a variable delay time that I could adjust on the fly. I started off at one second, and the solenoid clicked on and off just like it should. Then I bumped it down to half a second, and down to a tenth of a second, and it clicked on and off that fast. Certainly fast enough to keep up with the fast drum rolls in Rock Band.

So that's about where I'm at. One open question is if the solenoid fires with enough force to register a hit on the drums. I'm estimating that it does, but I haven't actually tested that.

So, I need to find a way to mount a solenoid on each drum. Then I need to find a way to actually get video input into my PC (beg, borrow, or steal a video capture device). I think those are the only open questions, and they shouldn't be that hard. All the hard stuff is basically done!

Too Busy to Blog

I’ve been too busy to blog, so here are the highlights.

Allie is doing well. She brings me an immeasurable amount of joy every day.
Work is really busy, and mildly stressful, but generally going well. I’m looking forward to the end of the project.
My Rock Band robot project is actually coming along very nicely. I emailed Norm a big update which will be translated into a full blog post real soon now.

Life is good. Busy, but good.

The Revolution

My boy Fwats recently posted the following regarding his one year old daughter:

“I hereby refuse to continue on with using the month count to tell her age. For the next year, she has four ages, as follows:
-a little over a year
-a year and a half,
-almost two
-two!”

I wholeheartedly agree. Mod 12 math isn’t that hard, but “20 months”? Really? I have to do some mental gyrations for that to hold a lot of meaning for me. “Almost 2”… now that means something.

So I’m joining the revolution. After your first birthday, months are no longer allowed! I’ve even had some workboys join me in the fight.

That said, last night Diana was skimming a book about baby sign language (a subject which I’m not particularly passionate about, either way… anyone have any advice?). She read me this passage:

“In a long term study, it was found that by age 36 months, children who signed as babies were talking at the 47-month age level, putting them nearly a year ahead of their nonsigning peers.”

The 47-month age level? Seriously? Is this what it has come to?

Rock Band Robot

Warning: Extreme geekiness ahead.

So, I’ve picked up a new idea for a project, and it’s kind of taken over my brain.

At some point in the middle of the night, I got this great idea. I was going to build a robot that was capable of playing the drums in Rock Band (I know, but stick with me here). I was going to have a camera pointed at the TV screen, and write a program that would analyze the image to figure out where the notes where, and then trigger some sort of mechanism that would hit each drum at the right time. I had it all worked out.

When I woke up the next day and thought about it more, I realized that it was probably a little more complicated than I initially thought. But I figured I’d still poke around and see what I could figure out.

The first thing I found was that it’s really easy to write an application and interface with a webcam. In no time I had a little application that was capturing images from my dinky little webcam. I was halfway there! Moments later, I discovered multiple reasons why a webcam couldn’t be used. It was simply too damn slow at capturing images. I was getting just a few images per second, where I was hoping for something more like 30-50.

After doing some websearching, I found some smart people who made a robot that could play Guitar Hero. I noticed that they simply split off the video signal from the game (the yellow cable), and did direct video processing. Reading about video signal processing scared me. Video signals aren’t just frames of animation like film. There are keyframes and compression and lots of bits I didn’t understand.

However, I found a really cool programming library that does all the work for me. Basically, you feed in a video stream (webcam, VCR, digital video camera, etc), and it gives you each frame. It even allows you to use a video file as a video stream. So, I hit up YouTube and downloaded a video of someone playing Rock Band drums. I was able to load that up, get each frame of animation as a picture, and could then program against it.

The programming to analyze the frame is actually a lot easier than it might sound. The notes all fall down in the screen in a very regular pattern. Each color notes always follows the same path. So, on each frame of animation, you simply look at a particular point on the screen. I picked a small rectangle, and find the average color across that rectangle. If the average color is black’ish, then there is no note there. If the average color is red (when looking on the Red note track), then there is a note there.

Within an hour or two, I had a program that was able to dynamically “read” the video, and surprisingly accurately detect notes. It was only a proof of concept, but I’m fully convinced that I could do all the software necessary to complete my little project. No problem.

So I started thinking about the hardware side. How would I make something that would bang on the drums? Actually, I can think of a lot of ways. Some sort of motor with a stick on it that bangs down. Or a solenoid suspended over the drum that shoots down at it (like a doorbell, but instead of hitting a chime, hitting the drum). A really cool idea, however, came from a workboy. He suggested dropping a small ball-bearing from some height. I thought that sounded interesting. We talked a bit more about it to see what we could come up with.

The best idea I can think of is a hollow tube suspended directly over each drum. At the top of a tube is a big funnel filled with 1/4 inch steel ball bearings. The inner diameter of the tube is just over 1/4 inch, so the balls line up single-file. Without any intervention, of course, the balls would flow through the pipe freely. The plan requires them to be dropped one at a time (possibly in rapid succession). So, something needs to get in the way of the balls, holding up the train, and releasing them one at a time.

An idea I can up with was cutting a vertical slot in the side of the tube, allowing access to the stack of balls. Into the slot would be inserted the edge of a bicycle gear, oriented vertically. The idea is that the first ball would get stuck on one tooth of the gear. The next ball would sit on top of the first ball, and the second tooth of the gear would nestle in between the two. So, as the gear spins, a single ball is dropped, and the next ball is held in place. Using something like a stepper motor (a motor that moves in very exact steps) to drive the gear, and I really think this could have a chance at working.

And if it didn’t work, it wouldn’t be a big deal. I think there are lots of ways to create a simulated drum hit. I’m not too worried about that.

So, the next big question, and one that I think is interesting in its own right, is how do I interface hardware and software? How do I send a signal from a computer to do something in the physical world (no matter what that thing is… turn on a light, drive a motor, flip a switch, whatever). If I was able to do that, I’m pretty sure I could take over the world. Well, maybe not

Unfortunately, this is where it gets a little hairy. I’ve made circuits by hooking batteries up to light bulbs, but that’s really about the extent of my knowledge.

Lots of websearching later, and I found that there are hobby robot makers that do exactly this kind of stuff. In fact, they sell little kits and parts that make it all really easy. You hook up a little controller board via USB to your computer. Then you hook up various motors and devices to that controller board (motors, etc), and it becomes super easy to drive the motors. The problem is those kits are outside of the budget which I’ve set aside for this project (which is about $10).

So, that’s about where I am. I’ve found some online electronics places that sell little solenoids and stepper motors for just a couple dollars, which is pretty cool. If I could just figure out how to make ‘em go.

Rock Band

Tonight I finally beat "Green Grass and High Tides", the last song I needed to complete in order to beat the Rock Band guitar. It was the only song that was pretty tough, and it didn't make it easier that the hard part is 80% through a 10 minute (or whatever) song.

So, with all songs complete (most songs only played once), I have a career score of about 6.3 million points. According to the online Leaderboard for PS3 players, that ranks me about 1440. The list appears to cut off at 100,000. Not too shabby. I think I'm going to play through the songs again and see if I can nudge up the score a bit.

I also recently completed Drums on Hard, and made the jump to Expert. That's going to be a challenge.

I think it would be really fun to find other Expert players, and form a band and try to post some scores, if not on the full career, than at least song by song. I know Baditude can drum on Expert, and I apparently can do Guitar. We could probably find a workboy between us who can do Bass. Singing on Expert might be tough...

Garfield Minus Garfield

This is one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. Welcome to
"Garfield Minus Garfield".

From the page:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness in a quiet American suburb.

Office Mafia

So we’ve been having a really fun time at work playing a bastardized version of the game “Mafia”, also known as “Werewolf” or other things.

The basics of the game are as follows. A group of players (hopefully around 7-10) sits in a room, and each player draws slips of paper from a hat that describes their roles in the game.

The roles are:
Mafia – there are two mafia members. They are basically one team vs. everyone else.
Investigator – there is one of these.
Businessmen – basically everyone else.

There is also someone else outside the game who runs the whole thing (call him the Moderator)

Once the roles are chosen, the Moderator has everyone close their eyes. He then instructs the two Mafia members to open their eyes and see who the other is.

There are two stages of the game, called Night and Day. At Night, everyone closes their eyes, and the Mafia members are allowed to open their eyes and decide who they want to kill. They then close their eyes. Following that, the Investigator is allowed to open his eyes, and can silently ask the Moderator about a single other player. The Moderator will give a thumbs up or thumbs down indicating if the chosen player is in the Mafia or not. Then everyone opens their eyes, and the Day phase has begun. The person who was assassinated by the Mafia during the night is revealed, and is henceforth out of the game.

The Day phase is simple: someone must be arrested for the crime that was committed. As soon as the majority of the people vote on someone to throw in jail, the Day phase ends and that player is removed from the game as well.

So, in case it’s not obvious: The Mafia members are trying to prove their innocence, possibly by casting suspicion on other players. The Investigator may very well know who one of the Mafia members is, and is trying to get everyone to vote that person out (or, conversely, if he knows someone is innocent, NOT have the person voted out). The Investigator has to be careful, however, because if they reveal they are the Investigator, they will make themselves a prime target for the Mafia the following night. The other players are simply trying to vote out Mafia members and not innocent bystanders.

Days and nights are repeated until both Mafia members are thrown in jail, or everyone else is killed off.

We’ve modified the game to be played over email (and in person), and are using a “Hacker” theme instead of “Mafia”. The email changes the game a lot, since the Hackers can openly discuss their plans and strategies, instead of just silent winks and nods.

A fun little thing that happened in this game is that one of my workboys (who works on a very different level than the rest of us) sent out a pretty cryptic email that seemed to indicate that he was a hacker. I couldn’t think of any real reason why a non-hacker would want to draw attention to himself, but I COULD think of reasons why a hacker might want to openly say he was a hacker (standard reverse-psychology, as well as bragging rights if he ended up winning (“I TOLD you I was a hacker!”)). I pressed him on it further, and was able to get him to explain that he had his message was so subtle that the other non-hackers would understand, but the hackers, because of their mindset, would be biased to NOT get it. As I said, this guy works on a different level, but I am pretty convinced that he is a Developer (ie normal player).

So, I approached him privately, and we had a talk. I said that I was looking for someone to team up with and share information with, and I thought that the Hackers had a big advantage because they could work together, and the only way for the Developers to win was if we formed an alliances. He agreed, and said that was why he sent out his email. I told him that I believed him and would trust him. I said that there was no way for me to prove that I was a Developer as well, but I just wanted him to know that I believed his story.

Of course, being a Hacker, I KNOW that he’s a Developer! :)

So I “revealed” to him that I was a fellow Developer and said I was willing to work together. The fact that I trusted that HE was a Developer I guess was enough for him to return the favor and trust me. In fact, in the middle of our conversation, I left for the restroom. By the time I got back, he said “You know, I think we can logically PROVE that we’re both Developers”. Of course, I was all ears. The proof didn’t exactly pan out, but regardless, I think we’re good.

Of course, I’ve been in contact with the other Hacker about all this. In fact, we MIGHT try to have the other Hacker “reveal” himself to this guy as the Investigator. And the way he could reveal himself is by saying that he investigated ME, and found that I was a Developer (which would reinforce my story). Not sure if that’s a good idea or not, but it’s on the table.

Unfortunately, one of the players is out until Monday (which adds its own twist to the game), so the first actual vote won’t take place until then. That’s left a lot of time for public and private chatter, which has been awesome.

It’s all very Survivor-esque, and it’s been a ton of fun. I’d really like to try it in person some time. Maybe the next game night that has enough people.

Cute

Blu-Ray, PS3, Rock Band

As a recent HDTV owner, and even more recent PS3 (and thus, Blu-Ray owner), I’ve been following the HDDVD vs Blu-Ray format wars perhaps a little more closely than your average joe. I’ve hated seeing competing formats, because I think it’s paralyzed a lot of people for fear of making the wrong decision. From a consumer point of view, a single format should give you confidence that you’re not wasting your money. The beginning of the end was when Warner Home Video (who makes up a significant portion of the pie) jumped from HDDVD to exclusively Blu-ray. This turned a pretty much 50-50 split into mor e like 70-30. They announced this at CES, and shortly thereafter, a big HDDVD press conference was abruptly cancelled. They must have been really shaken by the news.




Within the following weeks, Blockbuster, Netflix, Circuit City, Amazon, and WalMart all announced that they’d offer Blu-ray exlusively, or at least push Blu as the right choice. It didn’t take long for HDDVD to crumble, and within the past week Toshiba finally shut it down altogether. With HDDVD pronounced dead, Universal and Paramount (the remaining big players on the HDDVD side) were released from their contract, and within a few days announced that they were going Blu as well.

I read an interesting (if not conspiratorial) article talking about Microsoft’s angle in this whole thing. Microsoft not only makes the Xbox (which doesn’t come with but supports an add-on HDDVD drive), and I think is also involved with the technology behind the HDDVD software. If HDDVD “wins”, everyone would basically have little Microsoft computers in their living rooms. One report was that Microsoft was “writing $150 million checks” to various entities to keep the format alive.

Today, there is an article that speculates that Sony paid Warner up to $400 million to jump ship (and start the landslide). That’s a lot of coin. Lots of people are comparing this format war to the old VHS vs. Betamax war that our parents fought in. Betamax was the Sony-backed technology, so they may or may not still be smarting a little.

So, with any luck, consumers will all go out and buy Blu-ray players. Studios will start pumping out Blu-ray titles (Lord of the Rings, please?), and we will all watch our movies in glorious high definition (DVD is 720x480 pixels. Blu-ray is up to 1920x1080 pixels. More pixels means much more detail and clarity. To say nothing of the better sound that will accompany it).

Speaking of PS3s, I conquered my Rock Band drum career on Hard difficulty last night. Actually, I only had a few stumbling points (“Don’t Fear the Reaper” (one of my favorite songs) and “Run to the Hills”, notably). RttH required some time spent in Practice Mode, playing the song on a slower speed, and I still never really got the timing down, but was able to fake my way through it. Now, onwards to Expert difficulty!

Part of what allowed me to beat Hard difficulty was I was able to get in some playtime after the ladies went to bed. And part of what allowed me to play when others were sleeping was my little arts and crafts project. The Rock Band drumkit is really nice, but the sticks make a healthy THWACK when you hit a pad. A solution posted to the various interwebs is to take some stick-back craft foam (found in the kids sections of crafts stores), and put that on your drum pads. Then, on top of that, add a layer of felt. So, that’s what I did. I cut the circles of felt and foam at different radii, which I think makes it look pretty sharp. Cuts down on the noise a lot as well, which means I can play without waking anyone up. Good times. I also got a nice metal support and some Gorilla tape (strongest tape there is!) and reinforced the kick trigger, since I could already feeling it warp a little while playing. It was only a matter of time when that bad boy snapped (which has happened to many other players).

The State of Adman

Hello everyone!

At the beginning of this year, my company announced, much to our happy surprise, that they were increasing the number of half days. Typically, the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve would be half days. With the change, we basically get a half-day before every holiday (I think it was six new half-days), including this previous Friday! Given the free afternoon, and that Diana was going to be hanging out with my mom and her mom, it seemed like a perfect time to get away and play a little golf. Thankfully, Iwan and Little Buhr thought that was a good idea as well, so we hit up Lomas for pretty much the best day of golf ever.

Iwan was in charge of the scoring. Since we were playing multiple types of games at once, this was no small feat. We played normal stroke play (with Iwan giving me and Little Buhr strokes), as well as match play. We also played “Bingo, Bango, Bongo”, where you get a point for being first on the green, closest to the pin, and longest putt. We also played “Wolf”, which is too complicated to explain here. Most important to me, however, was straight up stroke play against Little Buhr.

Little Buhr and I have recently found ourselves in somewhat of a Tournament of Champions. On a recent Mammoth trip, we played many games of 9-ball. Over New Years, we played at least a dozen games of ping pong. We recently went bowling. In each of those events, he absolutely creamed me, and I loved it. We even did a Rock Band drum battle (him on Easy and me on Expert), and he beat me there, too! I’m used to being pretty competitive in games like these. At least, I’m certainly NOT accustomed to getting crushed over and over again. So I’ve kind of entered into my own personal challenge against Little Buhr, just for fun. He is now my nemisis (which, I should say, I mean as a compliment).

We talked about this previously, and he said we should hit the golf course and that I’d probably beat him there. And so we did.

We had a ton of fun golfing on Friday. I was putting my shoes off, hitting multiple 15 footers, as well as probably the longest putt of my life, all the way across a huge green. I think I had 3 birdies. When it came to the 18th hole, I did some quick addition and saw that I was winning by two strokes. However, I finished the last hole with a 5, and Little Buhr was putting for 3, and he made it. After he made the putt, I said that I thought we’d tied, but when Iwan added up the scores, I’d actually won by a single stroke. So, a point for me in a long string of losses. I know he likes tennis, so maybe that will be our next challenge. Oh, and we also talked about kicking field goals. I think we need to arrange a field-goal kicking contest, too.

Saturday, we visited my parents who were in town for the weekend, and it was nice to see them. Allison is in a stage where she’s a little leery of anyone besides me and Diana, but she did ok. I met up with Baditude and others for some gaming later that night (Shadows over Camelot and Bohnanza). Both games require a lot of communication between players, which rubs me a little bit the wrong way. I don’t like trying to convince someone what the best move is. I don’t like other people telling me what to do, and why it’s in my best interested to do that. I don’t like seeing people make moves that are “obviously” (heavily arguable) a bad move. So many “I don’t like” statements makes it sound a little stronger than I feel, but I think I prefer games where each player makes his own decisions. A little table-talk is good, but not too much.

The gaming went late into the night, when I got a call from Diana. Little Allison was not sleeping very well, and Diana needed a break. I came home and helped out for the rest of the night while Diana slept, and Diana took over in the morning and let me sleep late. That worked out pretty well.

In spite of some sleeping issues, Allie has been doing absolutely great. She has two new tricks: spitting and sitting. She’s discovered that, like a trumpet player without a trumpet, you can make a pretty cool sound if you purse your lips together tightly and blow air out. There was one night when she was lying in her crib, happy as a clam, spitting all over the place. I took a video of it, just to get the sound.

Her other cool move is sitting up by herself. In the course of a week, she’s gone from not being able to sit up at all (no balancing, just toppling over) to staying up by herself really well. And even if she does fall over, you can tell that she’s trying NOT to fall over by throwing her weight in the proper direction. It’s pretty cool, and fun to see her sitting up like a big girl.

Sunday was a quiet day, mostly recovering from the night before. Diana and I have been watching “Band of Brothers” again, which we’re really enjoying. Monday was a day off from work, and we walked around Encinitas and had a nice family day. We also watched the latest Jason Bourne movie (Bourne Ultimatum?), which I thought was good-not-great. What’s funny is that walking around Encinitas, we went into a bookstore and Diana saw the Bourne Ultimatum The Book. She read the back cover synopsis, and it sounded TOTALLY different than the plot of the movie. The book sounded like David Webb was living a quiet life until some bad thing happened, and he had to “reprise” his role of Jason Bourne one last time. Uh, what? Anyhoo, that was crazy.

Work has been going well. Our mandate of 50 hours a week has been cut to 45 hours a week, so that’s pretty cool. My Rock Band careers are continuing along (Guitar on Expert and Drums on Hard). I’m replaying Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and loving it all over again. I still simply can’t believe how much content is packed into that game.

So, there you go. Did I forget anything?

It’s weird when universes collide.

As you all know by now, Rock Band came out recently. What followed shortly afterwards was a slew of grumpy neighbors and angry wives and girlfriends, tired of hearing the repetitive clack-clack-clack of the drums. I woke Diana up once, so I, like many other players, have been looking for a way to dampen the sound of the drums.

One of the more popular suggestions is using gum rubber, and cutting it into a circle and using glue or tape to stick it to your pad. Apparently this dampens the sound quite a bit, but also provides a good rebound effect (which apparently is important for good drummers… I’m not there yet). Demand for gum rubber is skyrocketing. Unfortunately, you can’t just go to the local supermarket and buy a sheet of gum rubber. It’s typically only sold at industrial rubber supply companies. So all of a sudden, you’ve got a glut of gamers all of a sudden talking about 40 durometer gum rubber and neoprene.

One enterprising rubber company in San Bernardino actually created a website purely as a result in the demand for gum rubber pads.

It cracks me up that quite suddenly, two completely disparate demographics (video game players and industrial rubber suppliers) are finding themselves in bed together. Who’d have ever guessed?

In more important news, life is going well. Allison is growing every day, and getting more and more control of her body. I’m pretty sure that her eyes are changing color. They’ve been a deep blue for the first months, but now are definitely changing to a steely sea blue/green. I think they’re going to turn green like her moms. I hope so. I’d much prefer that to my boring old brown. Her other big thing is standing up. She’ll tolerate lying on her back for a while if the mood strikes her. Tummy time is still going strong. Sitting (who doesn’t enjoy a good sit?) is apparently for suckers. Standing, though, is the coolest. She’ll arch her back and do whatever she can to get upright. It’s pretty funny. She’s just a little squirmy lump, but I absolutely adore her. She gives me a big smile when I come home from work, which is the best ever.

We went to the Wild Animal Park this Saturday, which was a nice morning out. Saturday night was “Rock Band and Ping Pong” night at Baditude’s, which was a ton of fun. I even managed to beat Little Buhr once at Ping Pong. I brought over my Rock Band drums and did some dueling drums, which was awesome. Sunday morning, I woke up with a migraine blind spot and Diana woke up with mastitis (funny how the word “tit” is in mastitis). Thank goodness for good medicine, though, as we’re both feeling a lot better. We headed over to Baditude’s for the first half the Super Bowl, and watched the send half at home. I don’t have any allegiance to the Giants, but I’m still sorely bitter over our loss to New England LAST year, so I was truly happy to see them lose. I was also happy for Mick, a lifelong Giants fan. Good times.

Today is Super Tuesday. I’m not very political, but I have found myself very moved every time I’ve heard Obama speak, so he’s won my vote. And I never get inspired by politicians. He actually won my vote at the 2004 DNC, before he even decided to run for President, and nothing I’ve seen has made me sway that opinion. I see him as young and fresh and able to unite the country. He may be inexperienced, but that’s not always a bad thing. And really, could he be any worse than our current situation?

I just had my annual review at work. Very vanilla, which is a good thing. I got high marks for working extended overtime these past weeks, and satisfactory on everything else. Then we talked about parenting for the rest of the time. Good times.

A Brief Rant...

Ok, I’ve had enough of this.

A huge part of my job is looking for things. Searching code for a particular bug. Searching data files for some little bit of information. Whatever.

Some ass-hats at Microsoft decided that the “Find” function in Notepad and Internet Explorer should be DIRECTIONAL.

So you get the following bullshit:



This is WRONG! This is BAD! This is NO!

Yes, there are workarounds: Jump to the top of the file and search down. Use Notepad2 and Firefox, which is what I do whenever possible. That’s not the point.

50 million Adam Points if someone can provide a rational explanation.

Game Theory

I think my last posted really touched on some interesting game-theory topics.

Then, coincidentally, I check Slashdot and see the following poll (I’ve modified it, removing a silly answer that’s included in every poll):



How’s that for a stumper?

Obviously, 0% can never be the right answer. If someone votes for it, it can’t be true. So we can immediately dismiss that one as the right answer.

100% COULD be true if everyone voted for it, but that assumes that everyone will be perfectly cooperative, which is unlikely. Note that if any single person deviates from that state of perfect cooperation and votes for 1%-25%, they would then be correct and everyone who voted for 100% would now be wrong. So it’s probably unlikely that 100% would win.

If the votes were randomly distributed across all choices, we should expect that 1%-25% would be correct, since 100% divided across 6 choices would mean each choice would get about 17% of the votes. But we can assume that everyone voting in the poll isn’t just a robot, but a rational human being, thinking along the same lines we do. If enough people thought that everyone ELSE would vote more or less randomly, then the 1%-25% choice would grow disproportionately large. But if enough people thought along those lines, they might vote for something else, which could make 1%-25% correct again.

I find stuff like this absolutely fascinating.

This led me to do some reading on game theory (thank you very much, Wikipedia!), and I came across an article describing the “Keynesian beauty contest”. The story is that there was a contest in a London newspaper where 100 female faces were shown, and entrants were asked to choose six faces that were the “most beautiful”. Entrants who chose the most popular choice would get entered into a raffle to win a prize.

If you were in this situation, what would you do? Voting for the six faces you find most attractive might work, but is a little naïve, since your tastes might be sort of individual. A more sophisticated approach might be to try to guess what the general perception of beauty is, and pick the six faces that match that. But, it’s probably safe to assume that others are thinking along the same lines, so maybe it’s better to try to guess what everyone else thinks everyone ELSE thinks of as the general view of beauty. And this can be carried on to the next order, and the next.

So what? “Keynes believed that similar behavior was at work within the stock market. This would have people pricing shares not based on what they thought their fundamental value was, but rather based on what they think everyone else thinks their value was, or what everybody else would predict the average assessment of value was.”

Simple games can reveal quite a lot. Exactly why is it that 100% is a bad choice in the above poll? What does that tell us about human nature? During rush hour, how do I choose the least populated route? Isn’t it possible that others might choose that same route, thereby making it the worst choice? When is the best time to go to the post office?

I think that’s why I enjoy certain board games so much. They are a tiny microcosm of some pretty vast social, biological, and economic ideas. Good, good stuff.