The-Agent.net

Five Minute Slices: The Pizza Wars

2008-05-30T18:45:00.000-07:00

I had often wondered if anyone would ever displace Papa John's.

Not that I was asking for the sturdiest contender in modern life's most unsuspected covert corporate war to wink and take a fall, but - well, maybe I've just been feeling nostalgic lately.

Let's back up.

Earlier In My Life, ca. 1996

Your Author with Father

My God, what was I wearing? Anyway.

At this point - an obvious high-water mark in my life - I had a considered favorite in competing delivery pizza chains. Of the two actors in a then-smoldering pizza vendetta that was only about as post-adolescent as I was, there was really only one that got my business: Dominos.

I wasn't drawn by corporate sponsorship, gimmicky ads, "technology" such as the now-rigeur and oft-copied "HeatWave" box, or even promises of punctuality - sure, I'd bitch if it didn't get there soon, but come on, man, you think I'm really going to waste my time watching the clock? I was playing Pilotwings!

The Dizzying Heights of Modern Technology

Like all good business classes will tell you about corporeal profiteering, the answer lies in location. How big is your world when you're fifteen? About as big as a five-block radius around:

the highschool
the library (nerds only)
Patrick's house (because he had the Super Nintendo)

I remember there was a Nickelodeon show back when that tried to explain that very concept (starring Scarlett Johansson's now-beau Ryan Reynolds, of all people), a modern equivalent is generously provided by Family Guy's version of One Tree Hill.

As I was saying. Dominos had the virtue of being there. Sure, I could have called anyone, but do you remember phone books? (Seriously, do you?) Thanks to an earlier, terrible experience trying to call "N. Atkins" for a date in junior high, I no longer tolerated those giant, raw dripping slabs of area code listings and plumber ads. It was local or bust: to this young, impressionable, sofa-bound soul, they were not merely a choice in a sea of readily-available competitors - they were The Italian Connection.

Anyway, feed enough pizza to a guy and he'll start to like it. Years of this and upon each move to a new locale, not only did I gravitate to nearby Dominos in a sort of eerie balloon-to-sweater relationship, but I do believe I was physically repelled from neighboring Pizza Huts.

But the politics of mobility were undeniable - and I wasn't the only one being influenced.

A quick chronology:

2001

Papa John's introduces online ordering. Dan S. is the first in my circle to try it. I announce my skepticism to Jennifer, and then to the world via LiveJournal. I then call Dominos on my cell phone to order a familiar pizza, and go back to listening to Steely Dan.

2002

Jennifer moves out. My feelings on pizza don't change, but I'm eating a lot more of it, suddenly.

2003

In a dark room, isolated, in secret, I try Papa John's online ordering. Nobody questions my topping choices. Nobody overhears my credit card number. The pizza arrives, perfectly prepared.

I dismiss this as beginner's luck.

2004

I try Papa John's online ordering again, this time for a party. Everyone is satisfied and happy, and no phone calls were needed to accomplish this. Numbers, prices, and toppings could be confirmed visually (drunkenly).

Papa John's is crowned new champion, and Dominos is solemnly, reverently, laid to rest and completely forgotten.

2005

Is my hair falling out back here? Anyway.

Everquest II integrates the /pizza function.

Encouraged at this news, I still refuse to try Everquest. In an attempted compromise, I enter a Pizza Hut. A sneak breadstick attack repels me out of the front doors and into traffic.

2006

Nothing happened.
I'm serious.

2007

Papa John's unveils SMS ordering for pizzas.

Pizza Hut offers a free mobile phone with pizza purchase.

Finally, Dominos allows online ordering - six years after Papa John's.

2008

Papa John's and Pizza Hut both announce one-click desktop "widgets" for ordering pizza.

And Dominos announces this: the Pizza Tracker.

The last of which I discovered only today, by complete accident.

I watched, entranced, as the bar filled up, refreshing every few seconds - as "Thomas" prepared, baked, and boxed my pizza, then handed it to "Todd", who later arrived at my door.

A prompt later asked me to rank both of my server's performances from one to four stars. I ranked four stars all the way across, not only because I got my pizza on time and hot, but because the Pizza Tracker predicted it.

I feel myself falling in love with Dominos again. I feel the ghosts of old, creeping up behind me, full of reminders of glory days and spring showers, of the halcyon days of youth and...

What the hell? Aw, Jesus, I forget they cut their thin crust into those little squares. Why do they insist on doing that?

Man, I hate Dominos.

XNA Community Games and the Skinner Box - Rewards in Games

2008-05-22T14:50:00.000-07:00

By now you've heard the news - the XNA Creators Club Online web site is back with the all-new Community Games Beta on Xbox LIVE. I'm proud to have contributed and prouder still to see that games are already coming in from dedicated creators.

I wanted to offer a perspective on why I think community games are important. It's not for the reason you think.

Let's get the obvious out of the way. There's been plenty of discussion about the Democratization of Video Games, and while I like the term and its implications, let's be honest: it's been difficult for the industry to justify so many "pipe owners" on the publishing side with Steam and other digital distribution networks barging in on the space...it was only a matter of time. Distribution isn't the part of the equation that's got me excited.

And, if you put your ear to the ground, you'll hear that everyone's talking Retro. The old new thing, the platformers, the puzzle games, the "casual" space - of course, we're conflating generations; mixing the old with the new. Retro is Casual, Casual is Retro, it's all cool and there'll be a lot more Atari 2600-themed bands playing at the Triangle in short order, I'm sure. That's great, but that's still not it.

I'm scratching these off my worksheet. We've all talked 'em to death. Digital distribution is the future, and Retro is a generational hiccup. As we grow and as we change as a culture, we're hungry for the same things, and community games is the key to getting them faster.

I'm talking about rewards.

Pipe Dreams and Plumbers
If you remember the old days of gaming, you'll find your own examples of games that are timeless. Play them today and they'll appeal. They'll challenge you, they'll enchant you, and considering that they were probably made before you were two feet tall, it's not on account of the graphics.

It's not the quality of the visual or audio elements that defines a game's lasting value to a gamer. Remember - games differentiate themselves from movies and music not just by rolling them together, but by being responsive to user input choices.

In the simplest (some would say Skinnerian) analysis, that it beeps when you press the button is more important than what the beep sounds like.

The beep, the explosion, the squashing the bad guy when you stomp on his head is reward, it is interaction. These moments are what we dream about when we dream about making games that appeal. We are in the business of creating reward experiences, from the simplest user interface rollover graphics to the most elaborate explosion effects.

It is less an academic science in the fields of both the what (a sound? a graphic? a controller jiggle?) of the rewards and the when of the rewards (when the player jumps? when they get a hundred coins? when they build a skyscraper?), than it is an experiential exercise - a trial-and-error usability study of the messiest, most disorganized order.

Why? Because games are fantasy. Any one element that ultimately contributes to a game being a rewarding experience runs the risk of sounding silly on its own.

Let's listen in on an early, one-sided conversation about a popular video game.

...Jerry, Jerry, just hang on and listen. No, don't put it on speakerphone, that makes me feel like you're laughing at me.

...So I got a game idea.

...So there's this guy, alright, he's a plumber...what? No, what does it matter who he works for? The Italians, okay?

...I know you don't know how to speak Italian, Jerry. It doesn't matter. Anyway. Anyway. He hits bricks.

...What? No, they're not on the ground, they're in the air.

...Floating.

...Yes, they float.

...I don't know, about twelve, fifteen feet up, they're pretty up there.

...No, he hits them with his fist.

...No, I don't know if that would hurt. Probably, Jerry.

...Yes, he can jump fifteen feet!

...No, no rocket boots or anything.

...No, the bricks, they - kind of bounce. Like they were made of rubber.

...No, they're real bricks.

...No, they just act like rubber, Jerry.

...Who cares how much that'd cost in real life, Jerry, they're not real, it's a video game, don't you remember?

...No, no, no, see, if he's big, then they don't act like rubber, they break apart.

...Well, he - uh - has to eat a mushroom.

...A mushroom.

...A MUSHROOM, JERRY!

...No, I don't know what kind of mushroom. A magic one, alright?

...Yes, magic out the ying-yang.

...No, look, see, if he eats the mushroom, then he gets bigger!

...Bigger.

...Yep, ten feet tall.

...I don't know, about four-hundred pounds?

...Look, Jerry, I don't know how much lasagna he'd have to eat. That's so racist I don't even want to talk about that. Look. You just have your art guys draft the little Italian man and the bricks and the mushroom.

...Yes, you can call him Mario.

...And remember, he needs to jump in the air and hit the rubber bricks until he grows ten feet tall when he eats the mushroom and then he can break the bricks, okay? You got all that?

...Yeah? Good. Oh. Wait. Unless he eats the flower. Then he can throw fireballs.

...

...Hello? Jerry? Hello?

So, barring that, I have no doubt that some very capable designers can visualize these interactions abstractly, no matter how externally silly. They can weave the web before they lay in one line of code.

But I have even less doubt that we all have the capacity to create these interactions through experience. Through playing around, through quick code and easy prototyping, we can all tap into the feelings we have when playing the games we like. We can identify them, mimic them, and help them evolve into great gameplay that keeps us coming back. We don't have to dream them - we can create them.

New School, Old School
Some of the best designers of the "old days" (and I'm looking at you, Sid Meier), were programmers. They visualized and moved into prototype as quickly as possible, to pour the foundations of their games and each reward system into an experimental mold to play with - to bring it out of the mind and into the world where it could be poked, prodded, and revised.

Big teams with lofty designers have, I think, lost much of that connection, and experimentation costs valuable dev time. First or second-round gameplay tweaks are lumped into horrendously-short "fit n' finish" milestones. The result is little to no experiential reward tuning, no prototyping, no tactile assurance that the game is going to be "sticky" to that spot in the brain that all the great games continue to ping unfailingly.

Community games, by placing prototyping power into the hands of smaller teams, even single, independent individuals, brings the inventor/craftsman mentality of game development back from oversized teams, and the experimentation and reward designs that will be forged by these new, agile developers will, I believe, stand the scrutiny of not only the seasoned early gamers, but the brand-new generation of gamers. The mobile gamers, the Xbox 360 gamers, the cinematic gamers.

Sure, they'll look weird. Yes, they'll be simple at times. But the gamers of yesterday, today, and even tomorrow won't have to call them "Retro". They won't have to call them "Casual". They won't have to call them anything.

They'll pick them up. They'll play them. And because the games reward the players, because the creators could be close to their game, to tweak it, to get it just right, those same gamers won't be able to put them down.

They'll be hooked, and those games that get it right, no matter how small, will live forever.

It's a great time to be a creator.

Games in order: Cannon Fodder, Armor Alley, Airborne Ranger, Inner Space
Graphics courtesy: fabricoffolly.com, abandonia.com, sdispace.com, lemonamiga.com

Fewer Words, More Feeling

2008-03-20T14:22:00.000-07:00

Lemme tell ya a story.

Late in my young development - probably later than most - I began to realize that systems of deep-seated belief remained so only by tenuous virtue of masses of people remaining heavily and personally invested in their continuation.

This did not excuse me from explaining physical systems; planes do not fly because people believe they do, but it brought into question social machinery; organized patterns of behavior, starting fairly early, with reading.

I read as a child. I read now. I don't know why I do it, other than to learn that which would be painfully slow or unbearably laborious to learn in practice. History is a fantastic example of a lesson better learned by written analysis than by structured re-enactments.

And, I read for enjoyment; every Sherlock Holmes story, the Sprawl books by Gibson, a few by Stephenson, a few by Clavell. Catch-22. A bunch of others. They melt like wax now and combine and get on my fingers and it feels weird.

But something then - and now - ate at my brain as I ate at the books.

What if this isn't the best way to learn? To enjoy myself? To gain insight?

Part I: Don't Know Much About Science Book

As a young man in school, I knew that sitting on this fear would be the best thing to do. To attain any hope of scholastic success, not to mention respect from adults (whom I already knew were my only chance of gaining any influence over the course of my young life) I knew that demonstrating a lifelong fealty to reading was paramount.

I knew that to survive, I had to tow the party line and insist in lockstep with my peers that "books equal knowledge", that the publishing mechanisms that brought us bound and set type were the wellsprings of human evolution and greater good, and that the defense of every piece of printed material sanctified by a publishing mark was my overriding and irrefutable life directive.

Certainly the only option for a young man struggling through the public school system and trying to attract the attention of an erudite crowd was to be literate. After all, if you're not literate...you had might as well be illiterate.

It was stressed as well that readers had better capacities for abstract thought. The goal, of course, was to attain powers of imagination and visualization. I think. Nobody ever said outright that the goal was to try to get to the point that you could levitate stuff with your mind and get psychic powers, but you kind of got the idea that's what everyone else was hoping would happen if they read more than the kid across from them.

Even in my perusal of children's TV, the particular self-righteous tone of Baby Piggy from Muppet Babies is still vivid now as I recall her speaking proudly of her i-mag-i-na-ci-on before diving through the closet into another matted clip of French Dadaist pie fights.

And if I thought I was going to be safe discarding the standard talisman of scholastic achievement and stubbornly go my own way - learning minus the University system (shocking!) - I was wrong. Apparently, there is no autodidact in anyone's memory that has ever survived more than two seconds in open air without a book. They shrivel up or get a rash or something, I don't know.

I couldn't escape. One way or the other, I had to merit any successes I had to books. Reading them, writing them, lauding their authors, collecting them, comparing them, analyzing them, spending my life worshipping them. Words. On pages. Printed out, stuck together with glue, jammed between cardboard. Like it or not, this was to be my religion. I liked books. But this was a cult. And I wasn't a believer.

I went for years agonizing over which track would cause me less pain. College, or surviving on my own. I was in grave danger of spooling out the rest of my teenage probationary years without clinging to either liferaft: books, or severely overpriced books. Textbooks, I think they call those.

An Aside

I mention this because it's now over a decade later and I remain very skeptical that there is any God-planted flag in the ground that declares every victory in the war of human progress as belonging to the Nation of Books. I scrapped and climbed up to the current ladder rung I inhabit now watching system after system declare itself self-evident, much in the same way books do.

Every system had the same thing in common. A group of people, several million truckloads of resources, and a mountain of money, all sworn to protect a continuously paying investment.

But what kid ever figures that out? Back then, there was no fighting. There were no great epiphanies that tore open the shroud hiding the grand machine. There was only acquiescence if you wanted your freedom, A's if you wanted your allowance (or your Nintendo).

There was no reward, no personal profit in declaring a tautology a tautology, nothing behind the door of great discovery of the whirling cogs and escapements of the world's massive, silver-age clanking mechanica than another dismissal for being "young and passionate".

So.

Having not declared my allegiance to either the staunch collegiate or independently didactic track, there was despair in everyone's hearts as I took to my first few years of highschool unsure of myself or my future as a someone-who-has-to-start-thinking-about-paying-for-his-own-Nachos-Bell-Grande (hey, the concept was a lot more frightening back then).

But something was changing. Something about the way I was going to receive, send, and process what books were all about: information. A change in information was playing out that would lead to a new path for me and for people like me, stuck in the middle.

It began the first day I heard the crackle and shriek of a healthy modem reaching out to touch an open circuit, thousands of miles away.

Jesus. If only my mother knew the long distance phone bills she was about to receive.

To Be Continued...

The XNA Game Studio AI Challenge (or, The Art of Doing a Thing)

2008-02-20T20:51:00.000-08:00

Think arrangement. Coordination. A Thing. You're with me, right?

Qu'est-ce que c'est? You're right – I'll explain.

Seats. Computers. Network cable. TVs. Signs. Hundreds of spectators. It wasn't that long ago that I looked at these elements in a disparate way – took the glue of the thing out, factored it right out – and saw instead a discrete point where I fit. Where the specific set of skills met a specific criterion for applying, it glowed, it said plug in. Beyond that, it was silent. No pushing beyond, no coordination to bigger, better things.

That worked for about two years, maybe three.

It started simple. I planned parties at my place. Made notes on the whiteboard about who was bringing the "lite" beer, the bratwursts, made question marks by the people that were tentative – I ended up with best-case worst-case counts and food arrangements for my own birthday party, because I wanted that kind of organization. No cracks, no places where people would run into a problem they couldn't solve and look around with that lost expression that just screams out that they're just not feelin' it.

I knew it then, I was talking about putting together a Thing. Let's step back and define this.

thing (ˈthiŋ): noun. a matter of concern what takes a certain size (t) of what-have-you, a length of time beyond x whenever, a given critical whatszit (y), and z wrangling of human beings to Make It Go.

Examples of a Thing: Shuttle launch, ladder badminton tournament, three-family Christmas, rock concert.

Examples of Not a Thing: Calling your masseuse, planting a flower (single), sending a Thanksgiving card, drawing a dragon (poorly).

So, sailing: that's a Thing. The instant I stepped into the O'Day 27 with the kitchenette you just didn't want to touch, backwards and missing instruments, smoky outboard engine, I knew something was going to happen with me. I imagined bigger boats, week-long treks, meals, and unforgettable evenings under the spell of sunsets. I spent money, I spent time, I passed tests, and before a year was out, I was hip-deep in self-made Visio charts, planning Bahamian cruises, San Juan adventures, and every single one of my one-hundred cruises since that day was officially a Thing.

And there was last year's GDC, and Europe, and all the workshops in between with their kickoffs and their checkpoints and their post-mortems, these, they were Things.

Today, it's a brand-new challenge, two months in the making, for this year's Game Developers Conference here in San Francisco. And I'm pleased to report that, once again, we're talking on the order of a Thing. The XNA Game Studio AI Challenge.

In Closure in Copenhagen, I alluded that it was the power of consensus that drove it home for me; XNA had earned its stripes by the gauntlet of the Community – through fire and flame, XNA had been stretched, torn apart, beat into every shape, rolled flat, and ultimately came out a winner – a genuine What People Want.

The XNA Game Studio AI Challenge was a push forward on that concept – what can we bring that leverages XNA that's got appeal – developer appeal, crowd appeal, something for everyone?

Without taking too much of your time, I'll tell you that they called me up on this one. Told me to go be a PM (Program Manager) on this for a while. Today was our first competition day at GDC, and it's been an amazing ride so far. Our first day we had hundreds of visitors, thirty-two competitors, and eight finalists with amazing AI bots that drove the crowd wild. And, we now have a full slate of competitors signed up for tomorrow – all remaining thirty-two spots are completely booked.

I figure I'm posting this as not only a plug for the continued success of XNA as a platform, but also as a personal touchstone as I realize that a PM's mantra – for me, anyway – really comes down to being the person that coordinates, administers, and seeks constant improvement, and their unit of currency – that atomic count of what they live and die by – is a Thing.

Can I put together a Thing? Can I Make it Go? While the jury's not in on the endgame – there's still all day tomorrow and the Finals tomorrow night – this Thing does indeed Go. And that makes me happy, it makes me confident, it makes me want to continue to reach higher, broader, bigger.

To all that made this first day spectacular – including our competitors and spectators – thank you! See you tomorrow!

2008 Game Developers Conference

2008-02-17T10:49:00.001-08:00

All those in San Francisco this coming week for the Game Developers Conference, listen up:

Stop by Booth #738 in the career expo area on Wednesday, Feb 20th, or Thursday, Feb 21st during the day to participate in the XNA Game Studio AI Challenge!

This real-time coding competition is your chance to show off your coding skill and win some great prizes. I'll be there running the contest on both days, so stop in, sign up, and say hi!

You can also say hi at the ISM Poker Invitational on Tuesday. See you there!

My Life with Games: Introduction

2008-01-02T16:31:00.000-08:00

Note: In light of the New Year, I was giving consideration toward a kind of retrospective, maybe a word or two about where I've been yielding to more recent exploits - something like the traditional Christmas letter.

I realized that there's more here.

Something about where I have been has recently been nagging at me; I am at a crossroads, and taking my life's work further means an exegesis of my past pivoted around a central point, in this case, games.

There are many stories to tell, all for different reasons, all contributing to the person I am now and what I can be in time.

I hope you enjoy these memories - this is the first in a set I hope to expand as the year plays out.

January 1990

I am nine years old.

It is cold, but very little of me – save the tops of my ears – seems to care. I am on a mission at the back of the playing field. I am in fourth grade, and in my hastily-assembled kit bag are the gadgets of high-tech spydom. A stocky, blocky semi-automatic pistol. A grenade. A basically-round thing that’s supposed to be a tracking device. Even a little listening device that goes in my ear.

The devices are all made out of construction paper. The gun is purple. The grenade is yellow. The bag is constructed from two sheets of paper stapled hastily together on the edges. This departure from reality matters little to me.

I have discovered Covert Action, a game developed by Sid Meier and released earlier in the year on those big floppy five-and-a-quarter discs. I am acting out the game. It is spying, surveillance, and sabotage, all for the good of the free world.

I am at that critical age that homogenization gives way to the diversity that will define subgroups in later years. We are giving way from being "just kids" to being kids in one group or another. This type of child, or that type of child. Readers, athletes, debaters, scholars, troublemakers.

I don't know what I'm becoming. I am aloof, almost deaf in a way. A year ago, I was running around the playground with my arms outstretched, channeling my innate desire to fly. The slipstream wind over my hands was almost enough for a breath of barely-discernible lift, and with that buoyancy, I fancied being sustained, weightless, forever.

At nine years old, I have a vague sense that, as a child of my age, that sort of behavior is unpopular, even touching the tangent of the symptomatic. My mother and father fight about money, about work, about time. I feel a desire to stay disconnected from their worldly problems, but I am losing the earliest comforts I had - I can no longer fly.

I turn toward video games, by no means a new pursuit, but one recently having gained some social prominence through the development of new VGA graphics, and so, for being there when the need arose, I settled into the simulations of the surreptitious, the underhanded, the camouflaged.

I would become a spy.

One student - Matthew - stays with my evolution. He watches me cut my functionless gadgets from multicolored paper. He listens as I outline plots against world targets, fed by descriptions of nefarious shadow organizations.

And, at his most devoted, Matthew faithfully tags along. Along to the playground, along to the playing fields. We imagine stalking targets in the sewers as we walk in the shadow of the bleachers. We climb fences and pretend to jump building rooftops in pursuit of shadowy masterminds.

Not one tracking device beeps. No grenades explode. I do not shoot any bullets from my gun, because it isn't real. We don’t know how to make guns that shoot. We are children.

But something sticks, something at the core of what we imagined we were. Maybe someone saw us. Maybe Matthew talked - certainly a punishable offense in the clandestine service - but word got around.

I know this, because it is January, 1990, and there sits atop my desk a rolled-up tube of red construction paper. I did not put it there. Matthew did not put it there, yet there it sits. It is adorned with the letters TNT - a child-sized stick of trinitrotoluene. Dynamite. Somebody had made pretend dynamite, for our pretend game.

Someone else wanted to play, too.

XNA European Tour 2007: Videos from Belgium and Finland Available

2007-12-11T17:20:00.000-08:00

To those that didn't get a chance to attend the XNA Game Studio European Tour, never fear. Our partners around Europe are finalizing and uploading the recorded sessions so you can view them and learn all about XNA as if you were right there.

I'm proud to announce two such sessions are now available for you to view; the first comes from our partners in Belgium, the second from our partners in Finland.

Belgium

The Belgium sessions are available in Silverlight format only, and require a few clicks to subscribe to MSDN Chopsticks.

Democratization of Game Development - Dave Mitchell
Build a Game in 60 Minutes - Charles Cox
XNA 2.0 Deep Dive - Charles Cox
Future View and Call to Action - Luc Van de Velde
Benelux Game Initiative - Tommy Goffin

Finland

The Finland sessions are all available in non-Silverlight format, however: the coding sessions are available in a Silverlight-enhanced format that seperates out the code and the speaker (that's me). I highly recommend the Silverlight version.

Democratization of Game Development - Dave Mitchell
Making Games for a Living - Jyri 'Jay' Ranki
Build a Game in 60 Minutes - Charles Cox - Watch in Silverlight!
XNA 2.0 Deep Dive - Charles Cox - Watch in Silverlight!

Enjoy, and I'll be bringing you more as they arrive!

XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007 - Photos Now Online

2007-12-09T20:32:00.000-08:00

The collection of photos I and others took for the XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007 is now available on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/agentcox/collections/72157603421195725/

Enjoy!

Europe, Day 8: Closure in Copenhagen

2007-12-04T08:31:00.000-08:00

My mind’s reflection centers are rapidly closing down – the event is over. From its start in Dublin, Ireland, and now closing the last two days in Helsinki, Finland and Copenhagen, Denmark, the XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007 has been an unprecedented success.

There are blogs and forum postings detailing community reactions in almost every venue. We are headed to Tivoli Gardens to celebrate this evening, and tomorrow morning at 10 AM I board a plane for London, and then for home.

It's not unlike me to get reflective at times like this.

Helsinki, Yesterday

We are standing on the steps of the cathedral. Helsinki is under a gray sky, a grainy colloid of old mixed with new. Gravel sprinkled everywhere melts the recent snowfall.

I am awake. After Dreamhack, it has been almost impossible to regain any strength to pull through, but I finally have what I need – fresh air, and the proximity of a culture that’s more than just the here, the now, the digital.

It was years ago, early on in my career in Microsoft that I began to realize that I could live only short sketches of life surrounded by the sterile triumvirate of glass, black, and chrome designs that signal the apogee of the modern age. For the first time in what felt like years, I stepped out among the trees and saw them not as resources, but as symbioses, variables in an equation owned not by us, but by the larger structure.

I realize the same feeling is upon me – and satisfied – on the steps of the Helsinki Cathedral. We are games, games are us, but it is more than we’re concerned with at the moment.

We work long hours. We suffer intolerable crunches. We are prone to shortsightedness. Too often, we make ourselves – or others – victims of our inability to see integration in everything we do; how what we create today may affect so many tomorrow.

The cathedral’s insides are handsome, sparse, functional. They bring with them not the unstructured sketches of early worship, or the gilded, dyed tones of later hierarchical religions, but a sense of form and scale. An engineer’s cathedral, perhaps.

Mathematics, logic – these things intersect the planes of belief and culture – perhaps no more visibly so than in games. As we look forward to a day of free expression in interactive form, for all, not just through the filters of top-down production, it is on my mind to understand that games have a point.

It’s not that they didn’t before. It’s just that more people are listening.

Helsinki-Vantaa Airport

The snow is blowing sideways. Deicing vehicles are spraying down the waiting aircraft, including our Avro jet to Copenhagen.

I remember the social atmosphere at the University of Helsinki. The scholastic home, of course, of Linus Torvalds – the driving force behind Linux. We, as Microsoft, were an orthogonal concept – the very definition of an enemy force, well behind their lines.

The students were open-minded. They did not jeer, they did not shout us down, they did not reject us. There have been so many ideas I have seen – and some that I have worked on – that have short-sighted goals in mind: goals of domination, offense, position-jockeying, gamesmanship. These, I feel, would have been called out and rejected, and rightly so. But I feel that what I am doing now represents a belief in something that transcends these short-sighted tactics and focuses on serving a new and emerging need that people genuinely want – if only in small baby steps.

XNA Game Studio was not for everyone. It was clear enough through this tour that not everyone wants to be a game developer, and in the group of those that do, not everyone wants to use XNA Game Studio. This is good, this is normal, this is healthy. This does not scream the needle’s far-right peg of quackery, nor does it seem a deflated and uninteresting concept when played in front of the European stage.

I can say then, that XNA is building and moving a resource that will become part of the larger ecosystem of games, and of the larger world we live, work, and play in. It is growing its own legs now, and the community is allowing it the space to continue to thrive.

For that, for the reception I have received in every country, in every venue, and for what that courtesy indicates – an acceptance of a product that is on the way toward passing the global metric for what we believe to be genuinely good for our future – I thank you; it reinforces that this product is worth working on, worth tweaking, worth restructuring as we learn more about the world around us, both digital and corporeal.

As one of the many messengers to bring the news and teach the platform: Ireland, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Denmark – thank you for everything.

Now let’s get to work and build some games!

Europe, Day 6: The City of Lost Children

2007-12-02T06:32:00.001-08:00

Sweden’s capitol city reappears quickly. It’s one of those kinds of places. Routes on the E40 surface a variety of cleverly-lit almostcities so that a sleep-deprived brain might mistake a cluster of off-highway business conference centers for their hotel, or at the very least, call the occasional disorienting lights of a petrol station a temporary home. Before you can decide on which error to make, you are rapidly boxed in on all sides by the brick rises of old canal-hugger buildings repainted and fresh with adaptive neon and you realize you’ve made it – you’re in Stockholm. You’re just not quite sure when it happened.

Nearly midnight, and we’re in Stockholm again. This is two days of Sweden, seven hours of driving, forty-eight hours without sleep.

Alright, back up.

Stockholm, Earlier

“I’ve got good news.”
Oh, great.

Jonkoping, Later that Night

There are 12,000 people here. Elmia, the conference center, looks like the remains of an old cold war air base that cracked on one side and let commerce flood in. Hotels, gas stations, electronics stores and other unidentifiable businesses bloom outward from the central conference hangars and hold an uneasy perimeter against the assault from the main city of Jonkoping, in southern Sweden.

It is one-thirty in the morning. We have driven three and a half hours from Stockholm, through dead-dark forests, to reach this, a European technological Mecca – a retreat for the reclusive, a worship for electronic wanderers. Inside Elmia’s vast structure is Dreamhack, a twice-yearly gaming party with over ten thousand attendees.

In eight hours, I’m supposed to get up in front of them – all of them – and talk.

About what?

Earlier, at the KTH College in Stockholm, we had an audience of one-hundred, and they were awake and interested. Now, I can’t guarantee anything. We’re in territory we do not understand, with people that did not sign up to see us. We could be chewed up and spit out by this thing.

9:00 AM

I’m on stage. A widemouth camera is pointed at me. My laptop is wired into a million different sockets and my head is clamped tight by a viselike boom microphone headset.

I don’t think about the watts. I don’t think about the screens and the PA systems wired into the single microphone that’s listening to me breathe, listening to my stomach growling, listening to my nose whistle in the dry air.

The lights are blinding; there’s no data left to gather. Thousands are in front of me, spread out in the main hangar, their computers stacked and shoved together in three-by-three foot spaces on giant wooden tables. Tens of thousands of cans of Jolt cola, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, millions of watts of power, billions of BTUs of heat, trillions of bits of information being sent every second, all for these kids.

Who are they?

Stay, Don't Leave Me Mama

They’re doing push-ups on stage. It seems like nobody cares, but the Swedish military is having a push-up contest. It’s broadcast on every screen.

They’re having a Guitar Hero competition. There are shouts. Hollers, snatches of songs, bawdy shanties and cat calls, yelled by someone on the far end of the hangar. A reply, bellowed out from the other side. Someone builds a tower of Jolt cola and attaches a blinking beacon.

There are no lights in the hangar spaces, just the glow of thousands of computer screens. World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike, file sharing, movies, porn. The arrangements of pixels on the screen average out over distance, and provide a constant ambient color to the world bounded by corrugated steel and concrete. The color is blue. It’s just between the gray slate of an Atlantic swell, and the indigo of a late afternoon clearing sky, and it reflects off of everything, off of everyone. Everyone’s skin is blue. Everyone’s eyes are blue.

I’m walking by an impromptu rave. The speaker is shouting in Swedish.

“They want to get on YouTube,” Michel says to me.

The hangar crowds pull out their cell phones and wave them in air. Glowsticks join in. An air horn goes off and the crowds dance in the view of the camera, bouncing up and down. The music is heavy, unyielding, at heart-resetting frequencies and jarring volumes. It surrounds everything and claws at my ears, my eyes, my skin. I look to my left, and a gamer is asleep, headphones cradling his ears, his face cradled in his arms, resting atop his keyboard.

As I walk through the hangars, I remind myself of what I was – and what I thought I was – when I was younger. These children are seventeen, fifteen, even younger. I don’t feel old enough to talk to them with any authority, not young enough to join in. But I know why they do it. And I realize I would never want to take this away from them.

There is a replica of a Saab Gripen jet at one corner. Kids line up a hundred deep to eat at an Army mobile kitchen trailer. Booths line the lit hallways between the hangars. Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft – they’re all here. But these are incidentals. In the hangars, all of the games they play on the network – many I haven’t seen in years – the bits they stream every second, are the stars. They are the fabric of these three days, the reason and the meaning for everything.

I think of the network traffic.

playerOne:move:left.playerTwo:move:right.playerTwo:kills:playerOne.

This language says more than any of us could about the event. And as I see it in front of me, it becomes obvious: this is not for us. They came here to get away from us.

But I’m here to talk to them. It’s going to happen whether they – or I – like it or not.

As I think about it, I ignore a caution sign and duck into another dark room, expecting a hangar full of computers, but something strikes me strangely about it. Before I realize what it is – I’m not hearing music, not seeing blue – I am surrounded. Quietly immobilized. I stand and look around me.

The hanger has no computers. No desks. No booths. No lights. The hangar is full of sleeping bags, air mattresses, blankets. There is no sound but the rain on the metal roof. On every side, stretching out for a quarter mile, lay thousands of sleeping children. Two teenagers embrace atop their blanket. Another, asleep holding a fading glowstick. A woman pushes a baby stroller around a circular path marked around a set of mattresses. We pass each other soundlessly as I step over the bodies of the sleeping.

A Gestalt

I am on stage. There is nothing left to gather now. There is nothing left to say. I won’t even explain my source code as I type it. I have a game to make in thirty minutes on stage. It will be broadcast to ten-thousand teenagers.

I plug in my iPod, wired to the sound system, cue up my own music, and begin.

There is applause. It’s all done, all on camera. I turn off my iPod and back away.

There is a contest afterward. Faces, handshakes, smiles. I give away an Xbox 360. When it is over, there is nobody around. They are busy. I am left to my own. I am tired. I have not slept for two days.

I go to the dark hangar and find an empty spot between the mattresses in the field of sleeping children. I take off my shoes, place them under my head, and fall asleep.

Europe, Day 4: The Stockholm Retrospective

2007-11-29T15:12:00.000-08:00

Midnight again. I am in Sweden. This fact is not lost on me; it drifts about, echoing with bass tide, thumping from the techno lounge downstairs. I am in a tiny room of all black and red and silver things – I am swimming in a steel martini.

Cold blues and abrasive chromes flirt with cigarette smoke and procedurally-painted pressboards and the result is City, version one-point-one. For some reason, I have no desire to know this hotel any better than I already do.

The literature about light and colors, filled with professional “edgy” photos and quotes from designers I’ll never meet is not comforting. I’ve seen this motif before. It is hiding something.

“Part of it is,” Dave says on the taxi ride in, “I go to these places and it feels like home. I don’t want it to feel like home.”

He’s right. The road corridor up ahead has familiar lighting – the lit sky paths curve in familiar ways as the road takes gentle turns past semi-commercial zones, residential areas pulled just beyond the crest of the greenbelt and away, leaving off-exit fast food and Suzuki dealerships as the only evidence of life.

It is the geometry of home. Why can’t I feel at home here?

Just hours ago I was in Belgium, in a hotel very similar to this one. Modern. Small. Hotel Ve, in Mechelen. And yet, it was very different. A converted fish-smoking factory, the smell is still there if you take the stairs. The hallways are cramped. I even scraped a chunk of my hand off on the unfinished door jamb –the wood splinters left over still irritate whenever I find them.

And yet I felt genuinely at home there. I felt a compulsion to spend the rest of my life in Mechelen, Belgium. It was a city that kept history – kept itself – and still made room and time and respect for the modern and contemporary, and for that concession to both the past and the future I felt grateful enough to want to pack up my belongings and stay forever.

Still, paradise has a price. Today’s session felt difficult: the Belgian audiences are sharp, reserved, and difficult for a person like me – me who feeds off of the energy of the crowd – to integrate with. Each session was an attempt to win new hearts and minds, and while I did not get the outward response I was hoping, ala Milan or Dublin, the evaluation forms coming in are indicating very good news.

So, it’s cultural.

“You must not be happy with how your dollar is doing,” Hans says as we try to check in. The Nordic Sea Hotel’s Ice Bar is well-known. Cyan light refracts through the open window into the icy room and cracks across the floor. I study it, and wait for Hans to finish. He’s not done yet.

“I travel to the US quite a bit,” he says proudly. “It’s so cheap there.”

In Belgium, as now, I realize, sometimes in a harsh way, that I am just a visitor here. I do not live in these countries. I am not afforded the rights of those that do; I am at the whims of the host countries and their inhabitants first and foremost, and it is their attention – positive or negative – that makes for my success, or my failure.

In a nod to Hans, it’s like this: my cultural currency doesn’t buy much here. I am an American, and that’s an outsider, and as a Microsoft employee, a potential technical enemy. It’s frightening to consider it from that perspective, and in microcosm, it’s humbling to see both ways, cultural differences aside: either the group fosters your growth in them and accepts you – or they don’t.

And I consider all of that, here in my temporary bed in Stockholm, and realize: these past four days I have been fortunate beyond fortune to speak to some of the warmest, most welcoming, most excited and inspired people I have ever met. They didn’t have to give me their attention. They didn’t have to give me their time.

But they gave it anyway. In Ireland, in Austria, in Italy, and now in Belgium, they listened. They opened up, they gave up their time and their pursuits to give me a chance. I was thrown to the mercy of that crowd, and they set me – an American and a first-timer in Europe – down gently.
For those that are reading this, and I know there are a few – I’ve even gotten comments from some of you – I’ll say this, as I said it to my Milan audience:

Grazie.

Danke.

Merci.

A million times over. Thank you.

Halfway there.

Europe, Day 2: Midnight in Milan

2007-11-28T01:47:00.001-08:00

The roads are still full at midnight – our driver is speeding up, hugging the center lane to scare off motorists thinking of merging in. He has good reason – we’re traveling at over 160 km/h. Working it out on my phone, I realize that’s about a hundred miles an hour. We’ve been driving for a half-hour already, after the hour-and-a-half flight from Vienna. I need a distraction.

I sit back and think of almost seeing the Alps. It was dark – we fly at night – and they could have been mistaken for clouds on the long, cautious approach to the Milan airport. They played Strauss, and the attendants – red skirts, red jackets, red tights with a blue chiffon – served a midnight meal.

If there’s advice I could give to business travelers, it’s this: eat whenever you can. As the (admittedly early) days go on, opportunities to eat remain far away and few between. So far it ends up as a simple binary choice during a break between talks:

Eat
Answer Questions

In a scenario of pure numerical outcomes, the choice of mortal refueling versus knowledge dispersal is easy enough – you need to take in order to give, and the maneuver of presenting should be giving enough to warrant calories paid back to the presenter.

But for me – and maybe this is something endemic to the setting, or to the product, but when people, many of them young people, have not only the courtesy to indulge your teaching style and presentation material –they respect you that far – but that they then have the fortitude to question something they have seen or heard – they worked it into their conscious minds – it becomes the priority to be responsive. Answering their questions is the right choice.

Thus, I remain forever grateful to the small tokens presented by the busy, for the busy; it feels as though in the small silverware and serving dishes of the airlines, in the leftover sandwiches from the conference caterings, and from the snuck-in meals from cafeterias after hours, there is a shared respect for the sanctity of basic nourishment, and it engenders within that culture an ideal – one of courtesy.

It is in the faces of the servers and the served. The same feeling I felt working those early months at the neighborhood hotel, a few miles from where I grew up. Food, beds, showers, souls in need of recharging.

“A hot meal?” she asked. The smile on her face was genuine, warm. A small glass of Riesling. A Swiss chocolate. When these things are readily available, we might refuse them. But I refuse nothing in these hectic days, and learned something in that moment, eyeing the food placed in front of me: I travel, not to increase my isolation, but to learn to be grateful for it, and for the moments that I return home and appreciate it for being there, and unchanging.

Don’t refuse a chance to rest and refuel when traveling. Eat whenever you can. It helps you remember home. It helps you stay human.

Europe, Day 1 Midnight: Vienna

2007-11-26T17:12:00.000-08:00

The phone is ringing. It’s ringing, and I’m taking a shower.

I know why it’s ringing, of course. I also know, because the bathroom I’m in is a futuristic, clinical one-wash all in white tile with integrated shower, toilet and sink, that the phone on the wall of the bathroom will be waterproof.

I really don’t want to answer it, because I know why it’s ringing. They think there’s trouble. They think there’s trouble because I saw a long length of cord wired to a switch on the wall, and I pulled it. Curiosity got the best of me then, as it does now, as I pick up the phone.

“Room 212,” I answer. Maybe the guy on the other end will be fooled by my professionalism and, instead of telling me what he’s going to tell me, he’ll go “oh, you’re the guy in room 212? Let me tell you, you’re alright.”

Instead: “Hello – this is Stephen at reception. Is everything okay? Your alarm has just been triggered.”

Earlier

Vienna strikes me as a chemical city – in the midnight nearness there’s really only the forests of great industrial gas pipes and hulks of liquid storage tanks along this stretch of highway. There is a materials-processing smell that hangs about.

We are driving under blue neon-lit underpasses, while I scribble notes in my notebook in the dark. One day, I realize, I’d like to get really superb at writing in the dark. Right now, it ends up listed off to one side like a badly-drawn ship in child’s crayon seas.

Long stretches of grassland along the highway sprout wind turbine stalks occasionally – the European kind with the three blades that never spin faster than you could do by hand. Well, if it were smaller. These are a few stories tall.

With the city looming ahead and the background sparse green and farm, I realize where I’ve seen this before. Fort Worth, Texas.

I’m in Fort Worth.

Panic Room

I shake the memory and realize I’m still on the red phone to the front desk, talking life and death. Not thirty minutes ago I met Stephen for the first time. Tired from a long day, but jovial, he offered us free airline miles when we checked in. Now, he’s wondering one of two things as he waits for my response:

God, I hope he’s alright. Did he fall? Is there a burglar? Can he speak? Maybe he’s being held hostage...

Those goddamn Americans always pull the alarm cord.

But he can’t say those things. He just tells me my alarm has been triggered, and waits for me to make the next move in the conversation.

Note the tone and the inferences here – your alarm has been triggered. Nothing accusatory here even though I did the boneheaded American thing to do and pulled on a rope for no discernible reason other than that it had the bad fortune to exist within arm’s reach.

As I explain down the situation to Stephen and try to keep dripping water and shampoo out of my eyes, I look down and notice that the cord just about reaches the floor, where someone – if they had fallen down during a shower, would be able to crawl, and with their last vestiges of strength, pull down the cord and trip the tiny switch. A lifesaving device – and I fiddled with it.

Don’t blame me – I’m an American, and life-and-death stuff is always painted red. This was white cord with a black knot. And who the hell expects an alarm cord?
I pull on things, press things, try things.

Hell, there was no way to have known how to turn on the lights in the room by any amount of reading, and I would have been reduced to exploring the minibar in absolute darkness if I hadn’t looked at the little black box by the door, my keycard, and felt like it might be interesting to put one inside the other. The screwer-abouters influence never dies; Et in Arcadia Ego.

“You can press the green button by your door to deactivate the alarm.”

Very staid. Adopting the stance myself, I assure with Stephen the non-emergency nature of the emergency, hang up, shake off the excess water and resolve to turn off the alarm immediately and save good-natured hospitality rescue teams from destroying their own double-peepholed door.

As I step naked out of the bathroom and cross to the door, I freeze. My feet, still wet, are making a cold pool underneath me, but I’m motionless, as if tracked by a Tyrannosaur; my eyes catch two red lights that weren’t lit before on the head of my bed, and below them, the unfeeling diode eye of a camera.

I have just activated an alarm-based closed-circuit recording. I am naked. In front of the camera. And in the interests of litigation that may ever rise from even trivial or false alarms, I know instinctively that this footage of me, frozen in horror and naked, will be stored forever.

At least I got a shower.

Europe, Day 0A: Aerial Farming

2007-11-25T14:35:00.000-08:00

The Club World section of a British Airways 747 looks a little bit like a corporate cubicle outlay – gut-high partitions separate alternating bow-and-stern facing seat arrangements in a sort of transverse Air Force kind of way – pilot never notices navigator, and so on – dividers ensure you don’t have to see your one-hundred and eighty degree neighbor if you don’t want to.

I am amazed at the brilliance of the design of the cabin – the seats themselves contain a startling variety of things-that-hinge-out-from-inside-other-things, and lit panel arrangements yield to curious fingers to discover the entire seat arrangement is on electronically-actuated motors that flatten, raise, or otherwise contort the seat in ways that can really only be described by eigenvectors, perhaps more easily visualized as your grandpa’s recliner on Superbowl Sunday.

Footrests and snap-out remote controls for the television screen – on-demand video systems showing the latest movies and absolutely nothing starring Ben Stiller. Power plugs and a miniature travel kit with revitalizing eye cream (I have no idea where or when to apply revitalizing eye cream).

Even the overhead compartments mesmerize in some geometric way that fixes my attention until I can figure it out: the oval forms of the storage spaces are rotated, they lie horizontally amidships, flat in the vertical direction unlike the tall, big-brother storage spaces of the short-hop aircraft; it evokes in me the zero-angle zaftig-visions of 50’s UFOs, when things were curvy without apology.

I think my grade-school teachers would call this flat-across arrangement “the hamburger way”: orthogonal to the “hot dog” way, you see, where the long axis is up and down. I’ve been trying for years to explain this concept and it’s clearly still not working. That’s public education for you.

The silverware is weighty, though the lack of serrated edges on the knives reveals a flaw in the so-far sparkling stone; it is the reality of a recently-conflicted world. Another conflict to resolve is my own issue with airline gourmet; they serve antipasto for starters, and halfway through my consuming something beyond my food pay grade – a mushroom pate, I‘m assuming – my palate screams back to my more Virginia-agrarian roots, and I sink my teeth into a warm dinner roll. Ah, there we go.

My purposely-dulled knife is unable to score the skin of the tomato I’m served, and I’m left with a smashed seedy pool on my plate that looks, if you arrange the artichokes the right way, vaguely like the remains of a car crash. Screw you, 9/11.

Finally, the main course is out, and again, nods are made to air security. The steak – or more appropriately, short rib – is sirloin-ish, easy to cut. Sort of meatloafy. You get the idea. The gravy, however, forgives all transgressions, and the whole of the thing is sensible while somewhat sensuous. How did they do that?

All this, note, while we passengers retain only the vaguest of senses around being transported somewhere else, somewhere that’s expensive enough to justify eye cream and miniature glasses of Chardonnay (serial-numbered to avoid theft). In this reality, with a service crew and little to no word from the flight deck, the mechanics of the journey are the afterthought, not the primary. The service crew is careful to shut any open windows to maintain a running illusion that we’re actually in someone’s house and they – with apologies – simply have the vacuum cleaner running.

I mention this not to emphasize or elevate my own station, but to indicate that there remains something worthwhile about air travel. I have previously pointed to my love of airplanes and the travel culture surrounding them, and maintained, in the midst of the screaming babies and foil-wrapped meals in coach that there was something still redeeming about civilian consumer flight. Dignity aloft.

Europe Day 0: Lounge Lizards, Duty Calls

2007-11-25T09:54:00.000-08:00

I decide to head to the lounge restrooms (because I prefer doing my business at sea level – I have nightmares about being the one still in the toilet when they need everyone seated and that means you, guy taking a dump). They have the sinks that detach the basin from the faucet, the style that always to me feels vaguely Roman, though I have no idea if that’s accurate or not.

As I leave, I realize the logos on the restrooms are backwards. The guy in the wheelchair is supposed to be pointing to the right.

Speaking of duty calls, I’m thinking about some of the elements of games I’ve played recently on Xbox 360, including Call of Duty 4. Others include Rock Band, and Ace Combat 6. Each has its own flavor.

Thinking back to Thanksgiving: CJ is maybe six, seven. He’s telling me about From Russia with Love on the Playstation. Exploding barrels, falling chandeliers – he even mentioned that the chandelier thing would be possible in real life – the pantheon of shooter cheap-tricks that I’ve seen in just about every game since Duke Nukem 3D. I try to explain Rock Band to him. He’s not excited about it. Playing instruments doesn’t do it. Explosions make more sense to him.

There has to be a connection between Russia and Rock Band that’s more core than its eventual expression – mellifluent sounds or mauling shrapnel converge on the same limbic response – they have to.

I turn to an unlikely source of inspiration. The snack bar in the lounge has chilled mini-slabs of Cabot Creamery Monterey Jack cheese. On the rear of the package, I read the ingredients. A simple list: pasteurized milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes. That’s it. And yet, there’s satisfaction in the “tear here” packaging, the shape of the cheese both in and out of the package.

When you’re selling curdled milk, it’s not the ingredients, but in the structure of the thing where you make your imprint.

And the relationship goes from cloudy to clear. Reward. Regardless of the method of implementation – AC6’s lead-off missile trails and trailing glittery explosions, Rock Band’s last-second overdrive band member rescues, Duty's sweep-leg full-auto takedowns; the games unify around the concept of rewarding the player at nearly every opportunity, certainly with acceptable hurdles along the way, but never leaving the player unsatisfied for unforgivable stretches.

I think this particular ethos of design is a favorite of mine, perhaps a culprit in my latent but resurging interest to find work in the almost-field of Hedonics. And I think it’s a big part of making these presentations at GDC and in Europe. If there’s any advice I can give to up and coming game developers, it’s this – focus on reward. The player is taking valuable time to play your game. Even though it comes down to a series of button presses and clicks, do something engaging – reward your players. They’re hoping, praying that you will.

H4x0r Economist: You Only Think It's Over

2007-11-12T13:00:00.000-08:00

It was just another day of guilty pleasure on the Internet - I mean, what are Mondays for, AMIRITE? - spending a few minutes with Strong Bad, the cast and crew of YTMND.COM, and, in a rare half-nelson of nostalgia, I looked up Dan Weaver's perpetually-poignant politinomical perodical: H4x0r Economist.
Or, at least, I tried.

Try it yourself.

Yeah. It's closed. Empty.

It's gone, the man says, a fair ship of comic economics, now digital detritus, left floating only a black placard stamped with a dismissive, plasma-screen green, street tribute to Ben Bernanke.

There was once a site. Then, he killed it.

Weaver, I may be the only one to go on record to say this outright, but I will not stand here a man convinced he has done his diligence, without delivering my assertion to you that what you have done, sir, is no less than horrific.

And it will also stand on the record that, if you had read my blog post on digital continuity, you would have realized the simple fact that you can't get away with that shit on the Internet.

What man is it that could purport to plow anything under that's made of simple text and pictures, when storage is so painfully plentiful, bandwidth so wantonly wide, and when entire fields of servers exist solely to catalog every piece of the Internet standing from point-to-point, guaranteeing a pristine copy of your comic for all eternity?

The dramatic reveal:
Wayback Machine's Copy of H4x0r Economist from August 2007

It's clear that the world takes some goods as public from their inception. Web Comics are one of them. Let it be known that We have your comics, and We will always have your comics. And to those that would have me cast off H4x0r Economist as the residue of a dead administration, I say Bernanke be damned - we are still in The Age of Gr33|\|$P4|\|!

Phear!

Updated: Charles Cox at Microsoft XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007

2007-11-12T09:30:00.000-08:00

UPDATED: Final tour links posted (Ireland is sold out!)

Well, I suppose if you see it on the web, it must be true - I'm headed to Europe for a couple of weeks as part of the Microsoft XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007.

While there, I'll be presenting information on the newest version of XNA Game Studio, and doing that trick where I put together a game in an hour.

Here are the dates, locations, and sign-up links (if you're the international type):

November 26th - Dublin, Ireland (SOLD OUT) link

November 27th - Vienna, Austria link

November 28th - Milan, Italy link

November 29th - Mechelen, Belgium link

November 30th - Stockholm, Sweden (At the Swedish Game Awards) link

December 03rd - Helsinki, Finland link

December 04th - Copenhagen, Denmark link

We're looking at nearly twenty seperate presentation sessions, a couple thousand people, constant travel and questionable (read: negligible) amounts of sleep. I'm sensing a lot of macaroni and cheese. If you're in the area and get a shot of me looking like a half-dead raccoon, just remember that it's for a good cause.

I'll be posting what I can, from where I can, when I can. That may be never. Wish me fair tailwinds and benevolent Wi-Fi.

See you on the road!

Flags by markfennell.com.

Kaua'i Reflections, Day 4: Dead Lizard

2007-10-16T01:22:00.000-07:00

"Aloha."

It's only the millionth time I've heard that. Sonia, dressed in a long, floral dress, motions for us to bow our heads, and we receive leis around our necks. These leis are not the general welcoming color of orchid purple that we received on our first day to the resort. These leis are green.

We are here for the timeshare lecture.

A representative works us down to the bottom floor of the resort - shallow stairs and dim hallways with low ceilings. There is the smell of baking cookies. Ahead, like a near-death experience, a brilliant light shines through the glass doors, and we pass through to a dozen hotel portraits, stalwart and proud, looking over a luminous, angelic view of the cresting waves of Hanalei Bay.

This is where they will try to sell us property.

12:00 PM

"I'll compress my usual 90-minute sales presentation to seven minutes."

Covertly, I set my stopwatch.

12:20 PM

He's still talking.

Over a flurry of satellite photographs, artist's conceptions, blueprints, price sheets, whiteboard drawings, value propositions, room layouts, trading option sheets, and hotel point exchange brochures, his ninety-minutes-now-seven-minutes-now-twenty-minutes presentation drags on.

I'm scratching out my own figures on a piece of paper. Every once in a while the agent looks over to see what I'm writing. Selfishly, I shield my work.

12:30 PM

I stop the timer. He's done.

Thirty minutes.

We don't buy anything.

1:00 PM

"How's it going, man?"

I look back. It's the bellman, heading by with a cart full of luggage.

"Not bad," I answer. "You?"

"Pretty good," he says, his voice fading away. "Better if my wife wasn't cheating on me..."

1:30 PM

The sand reminds me of Johnny's Seasoning Salt. We are leaving soon. The clouds obscure the easternmost point of the island; the weather is changing. A rising wind is tugging at my shirt; I watch the surfers slip the lashing waves that rip back against my feet, digging holes around them, leaving a slime of salty wet sand on my toes.

There's no plan today. I feel like having an ice cream cone - it's a far cry from sailing four-foot waves in Na Pali, or dangling at thirty-six hundred feet. But desires are just that ephemeral; nowhere in the social contract does it say we need to make our inclinations match our surroundings day after day.

It still feels strange. I constantly question myself in times like these, standing, watching others move themselves in time and space. I ask what right I have to hang onto silence, stillness, storing up my entropy. Some never quit running.

8:00 PM

Nobody sits inside at the Cafe. Rain, shine, day or night, everyone sits outside. Dad and I sit down at a balcony edge table and order. Seven ounces of tenderloin in a thin wasabi sauce so minimal it looks like it was drawn on the plate in colored pencil. Miso-marinated prawns perpetually ready to burst.

Hanalei Bay is invisible, just a stretch of negative space in deadblack until the next shore's lights. Past the balcony, it looks like there is literally nothing. By morning, we will see the verdant crag again, looming massive and fog-enshrouded. We will see the same schooner, beaten by bay waves, shoved first to port, then to starboard, tugging against a firm anchor.

I regret not being able to sail these islands. For reasons concerning outcomes of history, legality, and profitability, it's not a circle I can hope to close for some years yet - Hawaii simply isn't friendly to private sailing charter, not least for the situation of the weather, which can turn temperamental without warning, damning sailors to double-digit waves and gale force winds suddenly and without safe harbors.

Later, I walk poolside, navigating by gas-fed tiki torches and cyanotic underwater lighting. The beach disappears into the same nothing I saw from the balcony; proximity is no aid. I take a step and my foot drops into muck. I chance a look at the resort. It is a terraced fortress. It is a mammoth of beige lego pieces. A light burns in the penthouse on top - the bay's only lighthouse.

I'm not sure whether it's okay to want to go home now, but home is what I want.

Kaua'i Reflections, Day 3: Whale's Teeth

2007-10-14T00:15:00.000-07:00

5:30 PM

"It's like portals, man, coming down from Princeville; it's like every bridge you cross is a portal to another world..."

"What about these bone carvings?" I asked.

"Those? Those are just made of cow bones, man."

Oh.

Rewind to 7:30 AM

They pack us on the boat. No shoes, they said. Some are dressed to impress, some are dressed less. Half an hour ago, we were all standing around the lobby of Captain Andy's Sailing Adventures. Nobody said hello to one another, even though we'd be inhabiting the same boat for about six hours.

Dad and I stared at the sextants and talked chronographs until loadup.

The sign said dolphin spottings were possible. Reading the weather numbers, sailing looked possible, too.

9:00 AM

It's still early. Breakfast was two pieces of blueberry bread. The rest of the gang is snorkeling. Sea turtles pop up occasionally, and the swimmers bounce between sightings, eagerly flapping flippers in front of the boat, then behind the back as someone makes a new sighting. Dad and I hang back with Captain Bernard, a native with a chiseled face, dark skin, and a floral print shirt. He's proud of this boat - the Akialoa - but speaks even more emphatically about the future.

"They're gonna get this new 65-footer. Real slick. Being built right now in the U.S. Virgin Islands - we're going to take people on all-day tours, and guess who gets to drive it." He gestures excitedly toward himself.

I ask him if he's going to get to charter it on its maiden voyage from the USVI to Hawaii. His face falls visibly.

"I don't think I can get anyone to cover my shift," he admits.

10:00 AM

The dust cloud from a white Bronco streams over the top of the dunes at Barking Sands. Naval security. Barking Sands is a missile test range. The Bronco simply drives back and forth all day. We keep time with our sister ship, the Spirit of Kauai. The boats race at twenty-two knots, making around the southwest edge of the island for the Na Pali coast.

Flying fish erupt ahead of our bow wake, blasting forward ahead of the spray on dragonfly-like wings, skimming only inches above the surface. The crowd, jubilant, watches a superior specimen fly for several hundred feet before giving up. Cheers erupt.

No sign of the frigate from Day One.

10:30 AM

We are surrounded. Off the Na Pali coast, spinner dolphins begin to chase and dodge our boat. A group of twelve or more orbit us. I watch and film a dolphin with a clipped fin, keeping an eye on him. He switches from one pontoon, to the other. As we pour on the speed, the dolphins keep up, jumping and twisting.

Everyone is crowded around the bow. I look back for Captain Bernard. He is at the wheel. He is smiling.

We pass rock formations, waterfalls, secluded beaches. Na Pali, the southwest coast of Kaua'i, is being eroded faster than any other coastline in the world. The shear rock cliffs face swells of fifty feet in severe winter storms, that scrape and slough the igneous rock to powder.

The water is an unimaginable shade of blue. Reefs are everywhere. The waves are picking up, as is the wind.

11:30 AM

We finally sail. The boat, a fifty-five foot Gold Coast custom catamaran, isn't made for sailing.

"We realized the rudder was too long," Captain Bernard explains, hand-over-handing the wheel as we steered up to a reach, "It was so long that the prop wash - just the force of the water coming off the props - was bending the rudder."

"What'd you do?" I ask.

"We chopped it in half," the Captain explains proudly. "'Course, it doesn't sail as good as it used to, but -"

By the numbers, all of the gear is there. Mainsail, jib, yards of line, tackle and stoppers. But the jib is cut at an oblique angle, more for sightseeing than sailing, and we're only making seven knots downwind. We won't get home on this and the Captain knows it.

For now, though, I enjoy. Someone gets sick - the soda crackers come out. I thank my lucky stars and open another Heineken.

Kaua'i Reflections, Day 2: Caves and Canards

2007-10-13T00:44:00.000-07:00

3:00 PM

"So this is a constant-speed propeller, right?"

My father - ever the pilot. Not far from the dead fields and gray slate frigate of yesterday, we're standing on dry, red clay. Dad is inspecting a propeller. I'm watching the windsock. Fifteen knots - good to sail on, but I have no idea whether it's good to fly in. In fact, secretly, I'm hoping it's not.

Because I'm scared.

Let me back up. We're standing on a beach, father and I.

12:00 PM

"You know what I think that is?"

I'm watching the riptides crumble sand into brackish khaki water, curling it back with monstrous force. Warning signs, again. Caricatures of drowned swimmers, human geometry swallowed by water geometry. I'm watching the riptides and I have no idea what he thinks that is.

"I think that's a tsunami warning system."

I look back and see four green saucers on a pole. At the top lay a crown of solar cells. The system looks new, freshly painted, speaking of recently-released government funding and academic zeal, merged together in a single, unholy product with a shape only true utility could produce. Even cell-phone towers were prettier than this.

"There are sensors out in the water."

Indeed there are. Well - there are now. Tales of a mountain of black, boiling water surging through southeast Asia seem to be the stuff government proposals are made of; private or public, we find our inspirations in storytelling. There were numbers before. Probabilities, calculations, and risk mitigation routines. Now, there's tragedy.

I have my eyes on the riptide, and my mind on the sky - we're going to be up there in a few hours. We signed on to try something new, something dangerous, something interesting to both of us. They're called ultralights. A hang-glider, strapped to a little cockpit with wheels, strapped to an engine. Space for two. A way to see the island. A way to experience flight.

Experience flight.

3:21 PM

I'm five hundred feet up in the air and my stomach is like a puppet on a string - various pieces of it are being yanked up and then dropped earthward as turbulence rattles the little cage I'm buckled into. We are climbing rapidly - five hundred feet a minute. More and more land drops away as the propeller behind us chews up the sky and bellows wind under the huge cloth wing. We are flying, and an old familiar sensation creeps up on me, rising from the historical muck of my very youngest days of flying. The feeling of fear.

Jim, my pilot, follows Cole, the pilot in my father's ultralight, and we race for Waileau crater. As we do, Jim guns the throttle and follows a current up; I look over his shoulder to see the digital readout peg at 3,600 feet. Below me, everything is ants. Ant people. Ant cars. My nervousness kicks in, and I suddenly can't control the shaking that takes over my legs. As Jim eases the throttle, my control returns. Take a breath.

I have no idea what I'm doing up here. I had the same confused feeling exiting the Grand Caravan at 10,000 feet two years ago on a tandem skydive.

They say my old man has air in his bones - that he's made for the business. Maybe I'm trying to figure out if I've got it, too. If I did, maybe that'd just be another way to get closer to him.

Or maybe I just have no idea what I'm doing up here.

3:40 PM

Thirty-six hundred feet, and we're closing on the crater. Helicopters below us fly a counter-clockwise pattern past waterfalls, dropoffs of over a thousand feet. Jim brings us up to the crater, exposed up to craggy green scraping the bottoms of clouds. The turbulence worsens, drops of rain appear on my face mask.

"Wettest place in the world," Jim says, pointing to the green slice at the top. "Right up there."

Maybe that's the point of this. Places. People. Best-of. Jim and Cole have been in the business over thirty years, with an attitude and local knowledge to match. You don't find extraordinary people doing ordinary things. You don't become an extraordinary person doing ordinary things.

It's my turn to fly now. We bank the contraption over the water and he hands me the controls - you steer with a big metal bar. Up is down, left is right. Simple. And then he turns on the iPod, leaves the controls to me, and begins to dance in the cockpit.

I really have no idea what the hell I'm doing up here.

Kaua'i Reflections, Day 1: Intraisland and Interisland

2007-10-12T13:27:00.001-07:00

3:00 PM

There are whole fields - owned by the Agribusiness Corporation - where nothing grows. Perhaps it's only the season, but they look dead. Parched, desolate, they dot the western sweep of Kaua'i - the dry side.

I'm driving back from the Wailaeua lookout - thirty-five hundred feet of canyon dropoff cinder cones slashed through the green hills, when I spot the dead fields.

We've passed U.S. Navy missile ranges, NASA radar centers, and narrowly avoided crashing through the gate of an Army ammunition dump. Every type of warning sign, every cautionary insignia, all manner of symbolic attendance has been thrown our way as we circumnavigate the island. It seems everyone has a stake in this little dot of land in the Pacific, and as the fiefdoms battle for control of the land, the sea, and the skies, the signs sprout up like weeds, directing tourists and the island's residents back and forth, bouncing among the remaining free zones, ricocheting off the bounds of corporate farms, missile sites, and naval no-sail zones.

And in the middle, scorching in the heat leeward of the Kaua'i hills, are the dead fields. They pass on our left, our right, flocked by those same signs - Do Not Enter. Restricted Area.

I'm picking out something on those fields now - something that stands out against the dry, the brown, the lifeless. Tall and curved, striped - it's a sun umbrella stuck in the dusty ground. Below it: a man, a chair, a cooler. His toes touch dirt, his hand reaches in the cooler. In the middle of the field, he sits, waits, watches the waves on the west shore.

The man sits at his station, guarding the field. Behind him, in a nearby field, another umbrella, another man. They sit, they wait. Umbrella, chair, cooler. Sitting, waiting, leisurely guarding the dry, lifeless ground from a little tropical outpost. There are dozens of them, one in every field for miles.

In the background, silently surgical, lurking off the west shore, a Navy frigate turns south, showing her broadsides. The string vibrates, tension holds against the island.

Drive on.

7:30 PM

We're on the seawall, dangly legs catching spray on the south shore of the island. Over beers, my father and I alternately discuss love, life, and the island.

There are constant whispers of a Superferry - an inter-island transport for cars and people - in the papers, on the lips of the hotel workers, and in signage around the island. Behind us, an arrow proudly points the way to the loading dock - the site that the new supervessel will dock to take on cars and passengers. But not yet. The Superferry didn't make it. Protesters jammed the harbor, and turned it back.

Three lights in the dimming sky suggest an aircraft on final approach, coming our way. Sailboats dance just off the harbor, using navigational buoys as impromptu race markers. Dozens of kayakers and surfers bob and slip the waves a few hundred feet away.

I feel Kaua'i as a beautiful place resistant to overdevelopment. They say it's what the "normal" islands used to look like twenty years ago, and perhaps it's only through the outcry of the citizenry that things haven't become more corporate. Signs of it are everywhere. Hardly a building over three stories. No investment banks. Real estate offices that still sit next to t-shirt stores.

The sun is going down, and the spray is becoming more pronounced as the land breeze scrapes pressure off the land and distributes it back to the sea. Behind us, a gate opens, and cars drive off in a quiet procession, emerging from the proud future site of the Superferry.

It's the next morning's paper that brings the news of furloughs at the Superferry site, carried through the day previous. Our day at the seawall, at the site of the Superferry, was their last. The cars we saw leaving were the exiled workers.

Drive on.

Kaua'i Reflections, Prologue: In Defense of Simply Tasty

2007-10-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

Now tastier, it says.

Tastier than what?

This particular turn of advertising phrase has baffled me since its inception. The epithet itself was pioneered, I think, sometime during the New Coke phase of the post-Vietnam era, but had its roots in earlier efforts to push food upgrading, when the model of edible obsolescence needed to be sold to the American public as a legitimate way of thinking.

By the way: hi. I'm Charles Cox. I'm at the airport Wendy's, just off the security line, and they're telling me some biscuit sandwich is now tastier, and I'm going through mental anguish trying to figure out what that means. That's my current situation. My now. My gestalt. How's your Wednesday?

You know, they're putting advertisements at the bottom of those TSA search bins now...

I think being displeased with the ordinary food item was initially a postwar concept; rationing and scrap drives and air raid drills left on the last train out with Hitler, to be replaced with what must have been the first sigh of post-atomic disappointment at opening a tin and finally realizing that for all of the war-effort smokescreen literature, you were eating goo. Formless, vaguely pink and alimentary.

Food romanticism was born in those days, really, and I don't blame anyone for that; it's a natural response to Hormel. Epicurean equity theory poured into the void that used to hold warm, yeasty, brewing anti-German sentiment. What was tasty if it wasn't at least tastier than zero-state? The American palate calibrated itself on civilized C-rations, which drifted an appropriate distance toward being just like Our Boys Over There without ever actually touching hardtack. I think that's how we got creamed chipped beef, incidentally.

It's about 8:00 AM on an airport Wednesday. I'm waiting for a flight to Hawaii, and the October sun is just starting to peek out over the trees and gray slate flats of the tarmac, poked up in places by squat, pyramidal bunkers with flashing red lights.

Outside, visible through the three-paned armored Lexan bowing inward on steel cable trusses, a stout little truck is passing by a row of planes. Made by Volcanoes, the truck proclaims. It's bottled water, and while it's my understanding that we probably had water before we had volcanoes, I have to admit a little bit of awe at the concept.

Water. From Volcanoes. Goddamn.

You know, they cool submarine nuclear reactors with mercury, not water...

"What do you want for your side?"

I pull back from my daydream, and she's behind the register, looking at me looking at the menus; enthralling in green and yellow wake-up advertising plumage. I try to clear my head.

What do I want for my side? You know, they even tried to power an airplane with a nuclear reactor once...

I ordered french toast sticks, and now I get to choose a side. You know - to go with french toast sticks. I get to choose a cinnamon roll, a blueberry muffin, or hash browns. I sputter, perplexed. None of those make any sense. It's not that they are unworthy food items. I'm sure they're tasty. Hell, I'm sure they're tastier. But how can any of those go with french toast sticks? It's starch-on-starch. It's not sexy at all. I don't own a single starch-on-starch DVD in my entire mental food porn collection.

I'm having a Monty Hall moment.
I don't know what to do.
These are terrible choices, terrible days of indecision in which we live...
Stop speechwriting, just pick something...

"I'll have the hash browns," I hear myself say.

Hash browns.
Seriously. You picked hash browns to go with french toast sticks.
Way to go, Cox. Great start.

Job Opportunity

2007-10-09T15:54:00.000-07:00

Now that we've all gotten our Mondays out of the way, I'll step in for a quick note. It's been busy around here - actually, that's what I want to talk to you about.

http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/details.aspx?JobID=7D92A555-1821-4381-8F08-C1F54E60C903

We're looking for someone. Someone who knows their game development technology and isn't afraid to write about it.

If you work with DirectX, Xbox 360, or Games for Windows, now's your chance to share what you know and build a world-class knowledge product for game developers. Step up and show us what you've got! If you are interested and qualified, send a resume with a writing sample to gdocjobs@microsoft.com.

Games, Dreamstates, Etc

2007-09-17T00:31:00.000-07:00

I don't think it's been the first time I've realized it, but perhaps the first in context - the video games I play influence a particular portion of my wind-down and sleep cycle to the point that I consider them - their challenges, outcomes, surprises - in the course of the day's recollections and recap prior to setting the alarm and settling into a comfy alpha-wave.

At this point you're probably in one of two camps: either you're feeling sorry that a human being can have their "normal" functions sliced into this way by electronic entertainment and feel the usual bit of disconnected sympathy, or you've already been down this road and could probably write your own article about it.

But for both of you, I have a proposal, a vision, a hope.

Setting The Stage

I was playing the World In Conflict demo earlier today instead of heading out for the usual airsoft skirmish in the woods, which was looking to be a rainy proposition.

World In Conflict is a tremendously promising real-time strategy game that has what it takes to be Game of The Year, not least for its immersive sensory experience - you feel you're there - accomplished by a variety of clever audio-visual effects.

It's also a fairly complex game with a variety of strategies and tactics to implement in the hopes of victory. There are an endless number of ways to play, and, if you're like me, an infinite number of ways to get beat up and leave the battlefield thoroughly embarassed.

Point is, I take these defeats to bed, not necessarily in an emotional way, but in a semi-rational semi-visceral mix that ends up being a series of "replays". I might find myself imagining the smoke from an oncoming rocket, or visualising the glowing red chevrons that indicate the fatal flight path of an oncoming airstrike. These feelings, these ideas, feedback on themselves for a while before sleep comes around.

What strikes me is that these revolving scenarios and their constant replaying and reassessing starts to feel like how I approach scenarios at work - my brain is doing the same basic cycles when handling what is ultimately a completely fictional, fabricated situation.

Electronic, yes, entertainment, yes, but to the thinking brain, the line is growing blurry.

Enter Zoolander

I start to understand better why so many people enjoy "mindless" activities, and I'm starting to wonder if we might not consider the same direction for games - a new type of game that can influence mental "cool-down" activities in a new way.

Could we, for instance, devise a game that has an external sense of appeal, but has internalized benefits as well? Something that, instead of manifesting stress or worry in dreams or pre-dream states, can pave the way toward easier, more relaxing, more stress-reducing sleep?

A goal in this endeavor might be to engender certain dreamstates or dream scenarios that the user would like to have. We believe dreams to be metaphorical expressions of conflicts, questions, analysis, and other mental processes, and while they aren't under our control, games may be a conduit to "prime the pump" by introducing the necessary challenges or situations to build a desired dreamsequence.

Want to have a "flying" dream? Play "Game A" for one hour before bed.

The Why and The How

Perhaps this is as simple as introducing games that have no "skill" involved - the idea of "non-game" interactive experiences, such as digital gardening, touch surfaces, and electronic sketching experiences seem to be more in this category - but I think there's a subtle shift on the horizon that may move us toward "cool-down" games in evening activities, even if we don't openly admit - or realize - that we're gravitating toward them.

I'd say as even just as an escape valve for the future's ever-increasing stressloads, transitioning, at least at certain points, from common gunplay catharsis to a more theraputic model of games may be not just recommended - it may be necessary.

Wow.
A switch from blow-shit-up games?
I knew one day I'd say something like that.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm getting old.

San Juans Sailing 2007

2007-09-03T10:24:00.000-07:00

I'd like to make it a habit of at least one week-long sailing trip every calendar year. This year brought two - one to the Bahamas in March, and one just recently to the San Juan Islands, right here near home.

Ever since my first trip there in 2006 I've vowed to come back as a captain and lead my own voyage.

Just this past week, I did. Here's how it went.

Languages - Desire versus Utilization

2007-08-22T15:53:00.001-07:00

A highly unscientific look at languages people want to learn (as pulled from various searches on 43things.com) versus the worldwide usage of those same languages, as pulled from some kind of About.com page.

The rank diff column tallies the results:

All numbers south of zero (black dots indicate extremes) indicate languages that are underrepresented, Hindi being the most greivously short with only 453 supporters on 43things.com despite being the 5th most popular language in the world.

All numbers above zero (red dots indicate extremes) indicate languages that have a disproportionately large number of potential students - French hits the highest mark here; the third most popular language on 43things.com is only the 18th most popular language in the world.

Spanish appears to be as close to dead-on as can be expected.

Update: I realized I labeled the columns for 43things as "42". I have no idea why.

The Space Shuttle Convergence

2007-08-06T19:04:00.000-07:00

I suppose some would say blogging is easy to do if you can get yourself in the habit of slicing out the time for it each day. I've heard novelists say the same thing about their books.

While I've been busy on a project I hope to reveal to you soon, it's really no excuse to stop sharing my ideas and discoveries with you - and here's one right now.

Massive Data
I ran across a demo of Microsoft's Photosynth displaying the Endeavor launch preparations (you'd think I'd be more plugged into this stuff than having to hear it on MSNBC.com; still, it's a big company). The convergence of several flavors of technology spread across several organizations has come up with something rather inspired - a 3D walkthrough of notable places created using a photo scanning algorithm that picks out notable "points" of an image - a technique that produces a 3D feature called a "point cloud". See how they do it here.

Early speculation on the "how" of this project had me and CarlJParker (hey, after that Zippies post, I had to get you one back) wondering just how it might work.

The Nerds Talk It Over
Special cameras, we figured, might have been able to combine GPS location data with laser rangefinding to approximate the 3D points, then tie them to the photograph using metadata that specified the viewport of the camera (focal length, direction the camera was pointed, etc).

As it turns out, Photosynth doesn't even need that data - it extracts the point cloud directly from the image itself. Any camera can be used - no special hardware required. I continue to be amazed at the human capacity to extract meaningful information out of seemingly incomprehensible data.

Charles Makes a Discovery
The Photosynth site had me looking around the space shuttle Endeavor from multiple angles for quite some time. Not simply looking, or analyzing, I found myself marvelling at it.

The Space Shuttle is an amazing feat of engineering. I remember an old post from about two years ago marvelling at the Shuttle's SRB separation procedure.

About the time I realized I'd been hooked on this Space Shuttle thing for some time (remembering, too, that I was a Space Camp kid), I realized this: I have never been to a Space Shuttle launch.

Fortunately, I had discovered just the place to start the remedy - 43things.com. At this site, you can list your own personal goals and desires, as well as your accomplishments - perfect for a listmaker like myself. In fact, here's my list.

It's a site that works on multiple levels; the gamut of human achievements listed on the site runs from my own rather academic desire to build a dyson sphere, to my buddy Tyler's more grounded goal of wanting to have sex on a pool table. (Whatever works for you, man.)

But I knew that my dream of seeing a launch couldn't go unheeded, so down on the list it went.

Watch a space shuttle launch

There. Step one completed. The rest should be easy - you can find out the launch schedule here, and buy tickets here. I'm thinking about going in either October or December of this year.

So the only question remains - who's with me?

Mainstream Media, Oh Noes!

2007-07-05T14:41:00.001-07:00

I'd expect to see this phrase on Slate, maybe. Not on MSNBC's front page.

Losing Butch

2007-07-02T18:45:00.000-07:00

Do I delete him from my address book?

I'm asking the pieced-together electronic etiquitte god this question, hovering over the name in Outlook - a block in the silent gray wall of contacts: friends, ex-friends, business contacts, family, people I don't even remember.

Butch is a mentor of mine - an old grayhair, a Harley man, a music man. An ex-lawyer man back from the days when he still called himself "Bruce", but I never knew him that way.

I know him as Butch. Knew. He's dead.

I can't delete him yet - maybe I still need his address. He won't pick up the phone if I call. That doesn't make any sense. He's got to pick up.

He died sometime in the last 120 hours; we don't really know when. The medical examiner isn't done with him yet. Hell, they probably haven't started - Butch is probably on a cold conveyor belt somewhere.

I always saw him at Christmas - one of those folks your family has along that they never explain. Back then, he needed an explanation. With Grecian Formula black hair and those button-up shirts, he looked like a mushroom trying to play in the PGA.

I really began to know and respect him after he retired: when he grew his hair out, grew a Father Christmas beard, and put on those little spectacles that seemed to say "If these were any smaller, then I'd be an asshole."

He changed his name from Bruce to Butch, and it worked. No more explanation needed - you looked at Butch, and you knew him, and you liked him. He had a collection of knives, a few guns, a truck with those silly balloon sand tires a Honda cruising bike, and a car he was never going to fix.

I just can't get rid of him yet. He can't be dead yet. We were going to go down the old fire road and blow up some watermelons with his Mac-10.

If you're in software - or hardware - you'll know what I mean when I say your family needs you. They need you when they can't send an email. Or when they can't see the family pictures on the web. Or when they can't "play an mp3.com".

That was Butch. He'd rebuild an engine, but he couldn't take two clicks on a computer without tripping over AOL and landing face-first in his caffeine-free Diet Coke.

And that's where I came in. Maybe twice a month, Butch had a complaint - possibly a slow or nonexistent Internet connection, or maybe Office "decided" to put his files somewhere where he didn't want them. All manner of geekworthy things were tasked to me, marked "Urgent", and paid for in pizza and cash.

It wasn't just that, though - that old man and I became friends. I taught him about the Xbox 360. He taught me about the connection between man and machine that comes with a motorcycle and a rider that knows it, inside and out. Every time we got together was another chance to teach each other things - a connection from the old world to the new, and right back again.

And now he's gone. It won't happen anymore.

I've got to leave him here - just to remember. I'm not deleting Butch, it isn't right.

He died alone, in bed. Nobody should have to go alone. Maybe that's what I'm afraid of. But I can't spend my days that way. Butch wouldn't dig on that.

I miss you, man. Maybe we'll still get the chance to blow some shit up with that Mac-10. Let me just finish up here, and we'll see what's on the other side.

Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles

2007-06-29T17:13:00.000-07:00

In the recent frenzy of news reports about "Things That Begin With The Letter 'Terrorist'", "Why We'll Be Reporting About the iPhone For Two More Months", and "Please, God, Stop With the Paris Hilton Already", the story placers just couldn't find any room to put this:

J. Craig Venter Institute Publishes First Bacterial Genome Transplantation Changing One Species to Another

Yes - you read it right. Read it again.

Changing One Species to Another

Admittedly small, Mycoplasma capricolum is nonetheless a known - if somewhat despised - bacteria, known for producing arthritic symptoms in sheep and other livestock.

By a process that the JCVI hasn't entirely explained, they were able to transfer into this Mycoplasma capricolum, the DNA of another bacteria: Mycoplasma mycoides Large Colony (LC). Within several rounds of cell division, the capricolum's original DNA blueprint had disappeared, and the newly-divided cells contained the phenotypical characteristics of mycoides LC.

A series of tests, including an antibody test, indicated that the transfer had taken place, and held. Mycoplasma capricolum had turned into Mycoplasma mycoides LC.

One species, to another. The JCVI team indicated several reasons for working with the Mycoplasma strains: small genomes, lack of a cell wall, among other reasons.

Interestingly enough, though, Mycoplasma mycoides is the etiological agent of contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP), a highly destructive disease in cattle.

From painful joints in goats, to a destructive pneumonia in cattle. Still, it's not as if the path of progress has ever not been just a bit crooked around.

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.
Max Born (1882-1970) German Physicist. Nobel Prize, 1954.

A teacher of mine once listed the three most important fields of study and progress that will grow beyond the "computer age" (Given the kind of people you run across on MySpace, the "computer age" is well behind us now):

Biotech
Materials Science
Space Travel/Tech

Venter's latest development indicates that the pace of progress is moving swiftly on within the biotech sector. The relative quietness of the media about the discovery indicates to me that we are not yet in "the biotech age".

But consider that we could be. Consider that as early as 2004 the Biotechnology Industry Organization proposed using genetically engineered organisms (GEOs) to clean up pollution.

Consider that 70-75% of all processed foods - stuff you'd pick up at the supermarket - contains at least some genetically modified ingredients.

Consider that companies such as Midland have been providing synthetic DNA for over twenty years.

And consider that today, someone has just succeeded in implanting an entire genome into another organism. And, implanted, that organism changed. Combined with synthetic DNA, we may well be on our way to the beginnings of true genetically engineered organisms, that may hold vital answers to questions of increasing pollution, waning energy reserves, food shortages, and more.

But I guess the major news outlets don't think you'll be excited. They don't think you'll be interested in that.

You'll be more interested in Paula Abdul's reality show.

Mercenaries - Everything Old is New Again

2007-06-22T17:53:00.000-07:00

If you don't scour Joystiq continually - or happen to bump into knowledgable managers at GameStop, which I do sometimes - you might have missed what I consider one of the best pieces of game-related news this year.

No, not the Manhunt 2 thing.

The original Mercenaries, one of the best - if not the best game for the original Xbox (there, I've said it), has just been added to the Xbox 360's famed Backward Compatibility list.

Break out your copy - or do what I did and go buy a pre-owned copy for ten bucks at the local GameStop - and get ready to fall in love with North Korea all over again.

Mercenaries is Back!

Use the Airbrush to Draw Such as a Hat

2007-06-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

You know, it even bothers me when I post this infrequently, which is why I'm standing here in front of you (metaphorically) right now.

Honestly, I haven't even surfaced to see the light of day in a month, and it's looking tragically similar for the next month or two as I get a few things at work wrapped up for the benefit of you XNA fans.

The only notes from the field that have really struck me (I have nothing to say about Cucumber Pepsi) have been two particulars in that big lethal cross-marketing net we call the local Safeway:

I'm sure you've already seen the "new" Betty and Veronica; this lays to rest my theory that the Archie series has long been ghostwritten by the same machines that send you conversational spam. It's amazing to me to think that anyone still identifies with a highschool that doesn't have drugs, Glock 19s, or metal detectors prominently displayed in the hallways. Are we that nostalgic?

Second item up for bid - the Shrek The Third cross-marketing machine injected barely-relevant green ogre merchandise into brand-name cereals across multiple companies (man, that must have cost a bundle), but it's not the fact that Mike Myers was able to scratch up this role from the dirt for a third time, but that the items in the boxes are lights shaped - get this - like bluetooth headsets. They're lights, but instead of conjuring nostalgic images of ghost stories and reading comic books under the covers, they scream "overpaid consultant".

I'll stand by and watch adult America turned on its ass any day of the week - notice I haven't said a word about Paris Hilton, Iraq, or that douchebag Duke DA - but it's when they aim the cannon at the kids, using those familiar tools - comics and cereal - that I know someone's got their finger on the carotid, and going hard until there's no pulse left.

At least Veronica still looks hotter than Betty. Someone at Archie HQ still has their head on straight.

I just invented Photoshop,
-Charles N. Cox

Shoot at Me? Not Anymore.

2007-05-25T18:50:00.000-07:00

About three days ago, I wrote this on my whiteboard at work:

Get a USB missile launcher

I was talking about this USB Missile Launcher.

While I thought momentarily about pairing it with my VX-6000 and some .NET webcam stuff to make a remote sentry gun for my office, I quickly had a better - perhaps more artsy - idea.

I quickly scribbled the following on my board:

ShootAtCharles.com

Exactly - a web-powered shooting gallery that's got a camera pointed at me, and all the viewers can click to aim the USB missile launcher and shoot it at me from the comfort of their own basement. Or their mom's basement.

I don't know why I thought of it, or what purpose I hoped to serve, other than to continue to feed my mammoth ego.

But sure enough, there I was, hand over my wallet with the Sergio Leone thing going and about to drill a hole right through the Intarwebs to get my slot in the WHOIS when

SUDDENLY

Art Project Lets You Shoot Iraqi

...you know, the idea doesn't seem all that fun anymore.

Industrial Espionage on a Budget, Apparently

2007-05-23T12:45:00.000-07:00

Everybody's heard about Joya Williams, the 42 year-old former secretary to Coca-Cola's global brand director, and her conviction and sentencing.

The short story is, she conspired to sell some of Coca-Cola's trade secrets - apparently, information on as-yet unreleased products - to rival Pepsi. Industrial espionage, some backstabbin', the stuff that John Grisham novels are made of, right?

And, apparently, it was a hell of a blow, because the judge in this case thought the dirty deeds done here were worth overriding both prosecutor's sentencing recommendations and federal sentencing guidelines to put Joya away for eight years - 18 months longer than the maximum federal recommendation.

Sez the judge:

"This is the kind of offense that cannot be tolerated in our society...the guidelines as they are written don’t begin to approach the seriousness of this case..."

And so I think - well, she must have gotten away with a hell of a bounty. Then I see the number.

Joya's price on the secrets: $1.5 million.

That's it? That's all?

Cracking Open The Files

Somethin' ain't right, but to know what ain't right and how right it ain't, I need data.

I take a look at the numbers we're talking about. Just a quick pull-off of the '06 10-K's filed by both companies: Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Part II, Item 6.

Operating Revenues for 2006 For Coca-Cola: $24.08 billion.
Operating Revenues for 2006 For Pepsi: $12.73 billion.
The Price Joya was Selling Her Secrets At: $1.5 million.

What the hell?

Doing The Math

Let's say that this secret product, the one that Joya wanted to sell, could tip the balance of revenue just one percent from Coke to Pepsi.

Just one percent.

We're talking about an operating revenue drop for Coca-Cola of $240 million dollars.

For her secrets package, she bid out only one-half of one percent of that number. Talk about lowballing the goods - what the heck happened here?

There's a clue in relativity - and pay scales.

It's All Relative

How much did Joya make as secretary? According to PayScale.com, Executive Secretaries like her make $40,000...if they have 20 years of experience. Even if they paid her 20% above the median, she'd still only be taking home $48K.

At that salary, looking at a figure of $1.5 million would be irresistable.

But just to drive it home, remember Pfizer's CEO - Hank McKinnell? No? Well, he's the guy that got $200 million in compensation for stepping down as CEO of the company in December of 2006.

Yeah. He got $200 million dollars for being fired.

The office where secretaries work for peanuts while their bosses clean up massive golden parachute packages are natural places for this kind of compensation tension to reach a snapping point, as was the case with Joya and Coca-Cola.

A Smell Worse Than Greed
But it's not just that this was a case of honest-to-God Price-Is-Right underbidding, but the worst part is that Pepsi didn't bite. The secrets sale fell through.

Let's recap.

Joya Williams arrested for conspiracy to sell secrets.

Sale of secrets never actually completed.

Sale would have been for cash value of only one-half of one-one-hundredth of Coca-Cola's operating revenues for one year.

Judge decides that this crime is so heinous and damaging, overrides federal sentencing guidelines and marches Joya off to jail for eight years.

My read: This absolutely stinks. This isn't justice - this is a message.

My advice to future corporate spies: Read a 10-K before bidding. And maybe watch Boiler Room.

Ice Cream, Liquid Nitrogen, and Cinco De Mayo

2007-05-07T19:45:00.000-07:00

May 5th - 1:00 PM

What am I doing?

That's the third time I've asked myself that question - third bump I've hit, third time my heart's nearly stopped dead at the thought of spilling this stupid canister out the back of this Home Depot rental truck.

"We can't put that in a car", he says.

Everything was going perfect - give him a Visa card, tell him I don't mind the $500 deposit, I survive the blue-collar terrorist-check staredown, and control the conversation. He didn't ask why I wanted it. He didn't ask. I don't have to tell him.

I don't have to tell him that I need ten liters of liquid nitrogen because I'm making ice cream.

Because if he ever knew that was the real reason I walked into a professional welding gas supply company, pulled right up like I knew what I was doing, and asked for liquid nitrogen - supercooled, life-threatening, maddeningly dangerous gas, he'd laugh at me until I shriveled up and died.

And he probably wouldn't give me the liquid nitrogen, either.

Liquid Nitrogen?

Yeah, nitrogen. Cooled down to -320 degrees fahrenheit, it becomes a liquid, and subsequently the stuff of scientific legend. You can do anything with liquid nitrogen. It shatters flowers like glass. It beads up and skids along the floor endlessly like little hovercrafts. It makes huge clouds of Ridley Scott fog. It scares people if you drop it near their feet. If you have a lot of it, you can shatter Jason Patrick into a thousand pieces (but that's been done before).

It even makes ice cream. In five minutes of pouring and stirring, some milk, eggs, sugar, and salt becomes a gallon and a half of ice cream. Ice cream in three-hundred seconds.

And once you've seen it done, you have to do it yourself. Nobody can stop you, nobody will ever convince you that it's dumb, dangerous, or petty.

You just get the liquid nitrogen and all the ingredients and you don't tell anyone why, especially not the guy at the company that sells you the nitrogen. You don't tell him. You just let him load the dewar - that's what they call the canister - on a little hand truck, and bring it outside.

But then he carts it outside, sees the car, smirks, and pops the policy pill. Can't put it in a car.

"If ya get into an accident", he says, "It'll spill all over you, and -"

And he doesn't finish his sentence because life gets kind of random in a closed vehicle with ten liters of spilled supercooled gas all over you, bleeding into your lungs and skin and expanding to about 7,000 liters of gas in a 3,000 liter cabin.

You could go all sorts of directions with an "and" when you're suffocating and frozen and parts are blue and falling off like a leperous smurf and -

He just doesn't go there. He just stops at "and". And then he turns the little hand truck around and the liquid nitrogen - my liquid nitrogen - was gone.

Well. Time to go to Plan B.

B is For Bad Idea

Need a truck. Where do I get a truck?

"One hour," I tell him, real slick-like.

I'm filling out forms and talking tie-downs at the Home Depot. Someone's trying to fix a diamond-carbide-tipped whatchamacalit and I realize I'm really bad at this "doing things that involve things" thing. I don't even know how to use these stupid ratchet tie-downs they give me, but they trust that beautiful gold Visa card and dangle a key ring in front of me.

The truck is orange, slapped with blatant Home Depot logos on every available square inch, and there's no way to hide what I am - a guy without his own truck, without any legitimate reason to have liquid nitrogen, and no idea what he's doing.

Screw it, I already paid the money. Let's go get my nitrogen.

Half an hour later, I'm back at the gas company and my dewar is tied down in the back of my rental truck. Nobody says a word about the truck. They just hand off the gas and get far away from me. I ratchet, tie, and twist, and eventually, I think I have it.

I tense the dewar, push it, try to see if it'll fall over when I'm driving, and spill minus-three-hundred-degree liquid nitrogen all over the back of the truck, the road, other cars - I see the truck cracking in half, I see windshields shattering, cars skidding on newly-iced pavement, somehow ripping a hole in the space-time continuum, wondering what the repair bill on that would look like...

No More And Then

Alright, so the short story is, I made it home, and whipped up a tasty batch of ice cream for my friends at this year's Cinco De Mayo party. You want to see the video? It's fun and instructional, too!

There's also photos from the party, here.

Apparently, I Killed The Virginia Tech Students

2007-04-20T16:50:00.000-07:00

That's right - according to Jack Thompson, I'm responsible for thirty-two deaths and a suicide in the worst school shooting in United States history.

And it's eating a hole in my soul.

Let me explain.

Monday, April 16th, 2007. Seung-Hui Cho kills 32 people at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Friday, April 20th, 2007. Jack Thompson, a medical malpractice attorney who's recently taken up the fight against video games, declares that it's the video game Counter-Strike that caused Cho to massacre 32 innocent people at Virginia Tech.

His tirade is documented on MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18220228/

He goes so far as to write a letter to Bill Gates, the Chairman of Microsoft, in which he states:

Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill.

And while MSNBC got it right that Microsoft didn't actually create Counter-Strike, I must confess, Mr. Thompson caught me in a loophole.

You see - Microsoft Game Studios did publish an Xbox version of Counter-Strike in 2003. And what's worse - my name is on it.

I wrote the manual for that game.

Me. An educator - of death.

I can say now, without fear of doubt, that I have gained a sworn enemy in this world. In the eyes of Jack Thompson, I am the man that trained the Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, how:

To shoot with deadly accuracy

To gain money by killing the opposing team members

To not shoot hostages (he sort of ignored this rule)

To buy weapons by standing in the "buy zone" and pressing X

And to defuse the bomb by standing over it and holding X until the bar fills up

Yes, if only I hadn't done such a good job on that manual, maybe this would never have happened. But I did. I trained Cho to kill. He read my words and became a stone-cold killer.

Of course - there is hope.
Hope that I can get free of this prison.
Hope that I may somehow have my sentence of guilt and shame commuted.
Yes, there's hope.

There's just one simple thing you have to do. But I need you to all do it.

Believe me, it's simpler than clapping your hands. Quicker than clicking your heels together. Even easier than believing in fairies.

It's this: Don't listen to a single word Jack Thompson says.

While I can't say that Thompson is a liar, because, you know, he's a lawyer and he'll sue me for evilness, just use your heads.

Did a game make the choice for a man to kill? Or did that man make the choice himself? Thompson would have you believe one way. The simple way. The way that's easiest to explain.

And yet, all of your reason, common sense, and gut feelings would have you think the other. I'm telling you: believe what you think is right.

We'll see who comes out the other side.

Read More About Jack Thompson

Virginia Tech: The Answer is Active

2007-04-18T18:48:00.000-07:00

My brain works differently than many, I guess. The question I posed as I read all about the recent school shooting at Virginia Tech was not why. It was how.

How did someone kill thirty-three people with a pair of handguns?

What makes me furious is that the aggressor was incredibly successful at his attack. Nobody stopped him. He killed two, mailed off a quick package to NBC, went right back to killing, and then stopped himself via suicide when he was all done.

Something is just incredibly inhuman about how linear the progression was.

Which is why it was a decidedly different voice that I noticed in sifting through the massive media barrage on this most recent tragedy.

Security Consultant Allen Hill: Teach Students to Be Aggressive

Said Hill: "There are things that you can do to take the initiative away from the bad guy, to disrupt their plan and to create a situation that’s winnable for you."

Exactly. Hill's statements are on target here. It is the people who refuse to cower under their desks, who refuse to line up to be shot, who take decisive action, that not only survive, but we award with the title of "hero" anytime we have a tragedy like the one at Virginia Tech.

So why aren't we teaching these "hero" traits?

It saddens me to hear this:

At Virginia Tech, Cho Seung Hui walked into classrooms and simply shot people. There are reports that he even lined up victims to shoot them one by one.

Lined up victims. This makes me the saddest of all. The fear of a possible death leads us to accept an assured death.

There's a self-defense point of view that goes under the simple name of "never get in the car". Don't trust an attacker, don't cooperate with an attacker, always fight.

We may not be able to avoid an aggressor. But we can sure avoid being lined up one by one to be executed.

One student turned the tables.

In one Norris Hall classroom, student Zach Petkewicz led his classmates in barricading the door, saving all inside.

That makes me breathe a little easier. A little.

I know that this isn't the last we'll hear of school shootings. And I don't think it's reasonable to wish for the day that we'll all be nervestapled enough to never know aggression ever again.

But I can still be satisfied and feel safe. When will that be? When I hear that the latest rampaging psychopath got away with zero victims, because the victims refused to submit to the almighty gun, knew their lives balanced on their ability to act, and did so, decisively and without hesitation.

I want to make it clear - the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, was responsible for the horrible outcome. Not any of his victims. Nobody can say for sure that what any of the victims did was right or wrong, because each was acting in their own best interest with what they knew at the time.

I think that's the most we can ask from anyone.

I also think that, starting now, we can give everyone a better chance to know more, do more, and save their own lives and the lives of others. We can turn potential victims into survivors. We can teach this. You can help. Start with yourself and your family.

Read up, train up, fight back.

Start here.

Published

2007-04-11T21:15:00.000-07:00

Now that it's gone live, I can spill the details - I'm published in MSDN Magazine. The hard copies are going out soon, but the electronic version is available now, in 11 languages.

Check it out!

It's me and Michael Klucher, a fellow freedom fighter, introducing the world to XNA Game Studio Express. A great primer if you'd like to know exactly what this XNA Game Studio Express thing is all about, complete with source code to get you started.

Just personally, it's been an interesting crossover - sure, I've gotten plenty of words on paper, bits in the stream, what have you, but something's milestone-worthy about this, maybe because so many technical giants have contributed to MSDN Magazine, and it's an honor just to get in with the same folks, even if it's just an intro article.

I'm proud to have contributed, and happy that XNA Game Studio Express is going to get even more exposure. Check it out and see what you think.

Thanks to Stephen and the gang at MSDN Magazine for this opportunity!

Abaco Nights - The Bahamian Lesson

2007-03-26T18:44:00.000-07:00

A page from my Abaco vacation journal:

Mar 23rd

It's such a love-hate affair with these Bahamian breezes.

With the dregs of midnight showers still dripping through the portholes, we blearily switched the VHF to channel 68, waiting for the morning coffee to percolate, and listened hopefully for news of a break in the weather.

It doesn't matter beyond the academic - I'm going home. Time's up.

I've seen so much here that I appreciate - eggshell white sands and raspberry kool-aid waves and boats, everywhere boats, tended to by smaller boats and dwarfed by bigger boats, knowing I was among the crowd where "boat" was at once the single measure of currency and a way of life.

Still, it wasn't a perfect setting.

Weather tempered much of our available sailing time, as towering clouds sprayed up the Atlantic wall; viscious rain gods, with their thirty-knot winds and breaking ocean rollers, they held us fast to our moorings for too many hours.

And at eight in the morning, I was up, lurking around the boat in bare feet, trying not to wake anyone, waiting for the report like a kid at Christmas - waiting for the good news - that there was finally a break in the beating we were taking and I could turn to my crew with satisfaction and say that the beast was slain, that we would emerge from the dark land caves of bollards and AC power cables and be back in it, with anchor chain and sun and swimming - God, give me swimming.

Those clouds, that wind, the rain squalls, they haunted us from anchorage to anchorage, and both the VHF and our own eyes bore witness enough to the consequences - broken anchors, lost dinghies, and boats hard aground, stark and sunken white flakes against lead sky. It still stirs my stomach to think of the grounded sailboat we passed, awaiting the storm - it could have been our twin. She was a Beneteau, rigged like ours, painted like ours. She was us but for a few thousand yards.

Nor were we particularly invincible - it hurts my new, still-soft captain's pride to recall a horrible pullout from the dock at White Sound that involved a snagged anchor, a bent stanchion, a punched-in bollard post, and our boat, wrenched off ninety degrees, out of control. Wind is a menace, and all too often, a mystery that commands my attention in devious, destructive ways.

There was so much to demotivate and depress a guy who just wants to show everyone a good time, almost to seeking out the inevitable conspiracy at the highest levels of climate that had gotten together just to teach this new skipper a lesson.

What a bunch of jerks.
And yet.

It was about one in the morning when I decided to go for a walk on the piers that ringed the south edge of Marsh Harbour.

I passed boats in quiet seclusion, peered down at the strange yellow power umbilicals flapping astern to the beat of the waves, and followed the little umbrella dock lights until I reached the end of the finger pier. From there, the next step led off into the water, black with nightfall.

When I looked out, I saw a field of stars low on the horizon, and so close they beckoned for touch. I sat down and let my eyes adjust, and I could then pick out the little toothpicks they stood on - a swarm - hundreds - hundreds of sailboats anchored in harbor with their white lights on, signaling their sedentary position for the night, picking out and announcing their place in the universe, the white alight, saying "here I am".

Here I am.
And I smiled.

As I've found out time and again, cruising by sailboat is no exact science, and the loose tolerances in the whole human mechanism of the thing often lead to a type of fluid, carefree action; that is what refreshes me so much about sailing and cruising. You go and you stay and you drop the hook as you please, and it's you and your reason and sense to determine what's right for you, your boat, and your crew.

I look back and realize my eyes saw beauty that I didn't recognize until that moment that the man-made stars aligned and showed me the lesson I was waiting all this time to learn. The next step.

Take a chance. Brave the wind. Trust yourself. Strike the light. Say, "here I am".

Sure, it had to be on the last day of the voyage.
But better late than never.

What a beautiful trip.

See the Photos from the Abaco Trip

GDC 2007 - Finished

2007-03-09T21:15:00.000-08:00

My work in the City by the Bay is done. Fin. Beendet.

Overall, the workshops I came down to do went incredibly well. These were XNA Game Studio Express Hands-On Workshops: designed for people to sit down with a PC and an Xbox 360 and make a game, following my instruction up on two big screens. Two hours in length, I had originally intended them to go for one hour of guided instruction, then an hour of self-directed exploration.

One hour and one hour. Of course, 50/50 is a concept that always works well on a slide deck. Seeing anything wrong here? Maybe a case of expecting the universe to bend to fit in the little box I made for it because it fits on a PowerPoint slide better?

And, of course, you can convince yourself of anything. I wanted this thing to be an hour. Seriously, I timed it out. Used my little iPod stopwatch and everything. It went one hour. I ran it three times, sitting in my hotel room, annoying my shared-wall neighbor with my endless going on about "Vector3" this and "MathHelper.Lerp" that.

I half-expected to get a note under my door that said:

Dear Mr. Cox, Developer Educator from Microsoft, who is going to teach me all about XNA Game Studio Express (whatever that is): Please stop saying "lerp". That is totally not an okay word to use; it's really creeping me out. -Your neighbor

From start to finish, 65 minutes; I had it down to a science. But like the days of old when our ancestors did their meticulous calculations and forgot to carry the one, I missed a step.

In a rare blast of pure optimism (I'm not used to whatever they put in the water down here), I forgot to apply the first rule of program management: whenever you think you know how long something's going to take, or how much it'll cost - always multiply it by two.

Needless to say, it was about twenty minutes into the first presentation when someone in the front (and God bless him for this) said:

"Hey. Can you slow down?"

Man, did everything change after that. It's a slippery slope when presenting; if the audience loses you once, you run the risk of never getting them back.

Fortunately, I designed the presentation with built-in crumple zones, so I threw the switch and we went to the full two-hour guided tour. I'll say this: after two hours of standing up and coding and talking with no breaks, I am fully convinced of the power of adrenaline.

Knowing the necessary speed going in on the second day, I was amazed at how well the presentation flowed the second time around. We even had a few folks venture out on their own and make their own unique game while I was talking. It was incredible.

Both sessions were completely booked at fifty attendees, two per computer. The energy was great, the questions were thoughtful, and the students even caught my code bugs. XNA Game Studio Express is just one of those big deals that's changing the world, and I'm thrilled to be a part of it.

Thanks to the crew at Microsoft for making this happen, and for those folks (they know who they are) for giving me this opportunity. I suppose we can all wait to see the instructor evaluations, but I think it's safe to say we all made a big impact this week.

See you back in Seattle!

GDC 2007 - XNA Game Studio Express Sessions and Feedback

2007-03-08T18:03:00.000-08:00

If you're an XNA Game Studio Express user or an GDC 2007 XNA session attendee, let me ask you a favor.

XNA Game Studio Express has hit something pretty huge. Today's workshop session was packed, and tomorrow's repeat session is shaping up to be similar.

People want to make games. Whatever makes it easier for them is a big plus. The word I've been getting after my first session was along the lines of "Wow, this is great stuff, XNA Game Studio Express is making game development much easier."

Good - Phase I accomplished. Now, I and the combined XNA Game Studio Express documentation and education teams are looking for ways to make it even easier, through tutorials, great reference documentation, samples, and more.

Some of this work is already making its way to the new creators.xna.com website (check out the samples, video tutorials, and more!), and of course, the product documentation continues to be updated and expanded with more examples, tutorials, and reference documentation.

While it's looking like today's session did good for the attendees, I want something back: specifically, feedback on our current education efforts.

What's hard to learn with XNA Game Studio Express? What doesn't make sense? Where did you get stuck? Comments, please!

San Francisco, Day 0

2007-03-06T10:11:00.000-08:00

10:11 AM

I've been in this airport fifteen minutes and I'm already in a cubicle. They've taken to stripping out all of the power ports around the airport and consolidating them in for-rent cube farms, paid by the minute.

So I rented one. There's even a little hanger for my jacket.
The staffer on duty is courteous and smiling.
"Can I bring my coffee?" I asked her.

I want this cube to be darker - I'm switching off all the harsh fluoresecence I can find around the tiny room, but there's no roof; no matter how hard I try, there's no skipping off the surface of the reality that I'm in a crowded, busy human transportation hub.

Fine. iPod time. A thought: The airport could catch on fire, I'd never know it. A shrug: Acceptable risk.

I'm in a warm coccoon of sound. Nobody is snoring next to me. No babies are crying. No humans exist but me. Well, me and Howard Jones, and he's singing just for me, so we're cool.

Irrespective of whether or not the 'pod-inspired New Selfishness movement is ultimately bad or good for our human race, it sure does wonders for an only child.

Kill This Guy, He's Taking Our Money

2007-02-27T22:46:00.000-08:00

It was pretty clear when the moods at the poker table changed. 2:30 AM, with seven players. In the fifty-four person tournament, only seven of us were left, seated around the single table. An LCD on the wall read back the good news: win or lose, all of us would walk away with more money than we spent to buy in to this double-stack, no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em tournament. We were, as the casino regulars say, "In the money".

I'll admit it – I'm new to Hold ‘Em. Honestly, I've only been playing recreationally for a year or less. So Sunday's tournament, starting at midnight at the Auburn Muckleshoot Casino, was my first. I just wanted to know what it felt like.

And somehow, I ended up at the final table, after two and a half hours of bluffs, mucks, and gut-wrenching showdowns.

Here, in this intimate little setting among seven people and their chip stacks, I realized that the normal competitive behavior I expected to see out of the tournament players was about to take a turn for the communal...and cannibalistic.

2:30 AM. Seven players. A new line appears on the LCD. A figure we haven't seen before now. It's called "Chop Value". And it changes everything.

See, the way these tournaments run on TV, it's a big bloody free-for all until the last two players, then they duke it out until one person walks away with the bracelet and book rights. But in this tournament, and I'm sure in many more, there's a different option, called "chopping".

If we followed the tournament all the way to the blood-soaked conclusion, the top dog would walk away with about $1000. Second banana, $500, third, $250, in your standard inverse power curve down to 7th place, who got about $150.

But – if we decided to split it equally among the seven of us, instead of trying to kill each other, we'd each get $325. That's chopping: splitting equally.

It's a nice concept, and many of us wanted to do it. After all, we bought in with $65; the chop value was already way more than any of us expected to make.

But there was a dissenter. Then, two dissenters. Then, three. They wanted to go further. One wanted to go all the way. In a way, it made sense. If they could just knock out one more person, the chop value went up for everyone. Dividing a sum seven ways gives less individually than dividing it six ways. Surely, this half-altruistic, half-antagonistic behavior was interesting enough, but then, it got even creepier.

The four of us, myself included, who had every desire to walk away with $300 more than we started with, started altering our play to assassinate the dissenters. Didn't want to chop? It didn't matter what the rules were before, we were taking you down.

I confess I felt a heavy impulse, and gave in. Something about my internal logic said it was better to fight for the good of the community by taking down the most vocally dissenting players, than to do what I should be doing, and working to eliminate the overall weakest players. Balance, then, meant not necessarily taking out the easiest targets for the good of all, but the most vocally strong players. It was as if by making the decision to fight, each of the dissenters was directly attacking each of us.

The strategy of the dissenters was simple – to take out the weakest players first. What we all should have been doing in the first place!

Here's where I get off : Really, both sides of the camp would benefit best by attacking the weakest players. Until both sides eliminated the weakest players, neither the choppers nor the dissenters should have cause to attack each other.

That's classic economic theory.

And yet – the choppers ally with the weak to attack the dissenters, the dissenters get to play Germany in World War I and fight a battle on both fronts.

That's behavioral economics.

Rational choice agents we ain't. Emotional, we is. Proud, easily offended, easily scared. It was nice to learn that.

It was also nice to win $500 when we finally decided to chop at the end of the night.

GDC 2007 - Parties, Poker, and XNA

2007-02-25T17:59:00.000-08:00

It's about a week away: The 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, March 5-9. I'll be there on the 6th through the 9th, working and partying. For those that'd like to know more about what I'll be doing and where I'll be going, here are the events so far:

March 6th, 9:30 PM
Starlight Foundation ISM Poker Tournament
San Francisco Mariott

March 7th, 6:00 PM
Massive GDC Party
101 4th St

March 8th, 12:00 PM
XNA Game Studio Express Hands On Workshop
Moscone Conference Center, Room 2011

March 9th, 2:30 PM
XNA Game Studio Express Hands On Workshop
Moscone Conference Center, Room 2011

Yes, I was able to weasel into a charity poker tournament even while on the road. But it's for a good cause: even if I lose, the Starlight Foundation makes sure that kids in need still win.

If nothing else, any GDC'ers out there had better cut a two-hour hole in their schedule on the 8th or the 9th to come play around with XNA Game Studio Express at my workshop.

See you in San Fran!

Oh, and one more special guest here at home:

March 10th, 9:00 PM
Lebowski Fest
Kenmore Lanes, Kenmore, WA

The dude abides.

She-Tox? Not For Long, Big Fella

2007-02-21T14:41:00.000-08:00

Social convention is a big deal. On the short-term slice, usually the big deal. If they do something, you generally do it.

Take as a case in point, "She-Tox". The seven-step plan guys are supposed to go through to get over an ex. This guide on MSN makes it clear that there's a ritual way to do this thing, with the snapping off pigeon necks and the burnt offerings and the whole lot.

See, for example, #2. Bag and Burn, it's called.
They recommend: "Go all CSI on her, bagging every bit of evidence of her existence. Toss it or burn it."

I've always had a problem with this, fundamentally. I think it's a sham to believe that destroying visual evidence of a person will make them go away. That kind of imaginary juxtapositioning is as close as I think MSN's ever gotten to saying "hey kids, voodoo works!"

No, it doesn't. You dated her. And now you'll live with it. Because that's reality, not the relativist utopia you think you deserve when you break up with her and feed the picture of the two of you into the office shredder.

And there's something orbiting now that's making it even harder to disappear your former fling into the caverns of never-was. The digital overload. Cheap storage, plus easy interfaces, plus offsite, always-on servers, plus ubiquitous Internet access, equals digital continuity. Your life in the timestream, as a whole package.

Who would have thought that Web 2.0 would force us to own up to the fact that life is one continuous production, not a series of disconnected community theatre skits? (Oh good, it's Something Happened On The Way to The Forum. Again.)

Well, that is what life is, no matter how many pieces of content you want to pretend to throw away.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but there are pictures of me, of my former girlfriends, of me with my former girlfriends on my Flickr page. On my MySpace. On their MySpace pages.

With the spread of the Creative Commons (and even less restrictive) licensing policies around digital photography, especially with the implied freedom to share on sites like MySpace, and the relative unavailability of digital watermarking technologies, I no longer own that picture of me with my girlfriend on the net. Everyone does.

We're talking about a rapid growth in the shared memory space. Who uses "my" memory, where, and why, isn't up to me once I hit that "send" button.

Am I mad about it? No, I've been in the continuity camp since I could make the decision for myself. I'm sure some people are very upset about it, and the opportunity exists for them to withhold their precious photos from the web, or slap them with the restrictive licensing trout until they're black and blue and bloody and nobody wants to touch them. That works too.

But, it ain't the future I imagine. I see storage getting cheaper, access getting more prevalent, and ownership growing hazier. And pretty soon, holding your hands over your eyes really won't make anything you've done, anyone you've dated, anywhere you've been, ever go away. Sorry.

Okay, I'm not sorry. You got me on that one.

For the pour-bleach-on-it crowd, is there hope? Well, in the short term, maybe. Hell, you could go ahead and delete those 200 pictures from 20 different events you spread all over the net - if you still have access to the servers they're stored on, all of the accounts of the other people that reposted them elsewhere, all of the copies stored on the Wayback Machine, et cetera, et cetera...

But get ready to always find one more memory. Like fueling up at the gas station, you can shake that pump handle all you want when you're done, but it always has one more drop of gas to leak onto your shoes. It's difficult to delete memory, and that difficulty is trying to tell you a secret.

The secret, of course, is that all of this memory never really went away before. We all just sat around the campfire and pretended it did.

It's just a lot harder to pretend when everyone around the campfire sees the photos.

Shared memory. Finally - some accountability.

Ending Sesame Street: Come On, Folks

2007-02-08T14:48:00.001-08:00

TV Week ran the usual "Reps Want to Cut Funding for NPR and PBS, and as a result, I get an alarmist letter from MoveOn.org in my inbox (hey, sometimes I like getting email from Barack Obama; I can pretend he's talking to me, okay?) spelling doom and gnashing of teeth for PBS.

But listen to how they spin it.

According to PBS, the cuts "could mean the end of our ability to support some of the most treasured educational children's series" like "Sesame Street," "Reading Rainbow," and "Arthur."

I realize 25% isn't peanuts. But to tell me that Sesame Street, with 109 Emmy Awards, and 8 million daily viewers, and over 4,100 episodes under its belt, is going to just curl up and die because of some partisan budget katana practice, is just pure pablum.

I don't care what you think corporate sponsorship will do to the program - it's already sponsored by AOL, how much lower can you go - even if the budget gets whacked, and by some herculean misstep they actually decide to let Sesame Street die, it'll get picked up. Can you imagine any of the big networks looking at Sesame Street and saying: "forget it Jimmy, there are better bets in town, save your money"?

So, what do I figure when I look at it? I see the twisted reality curve. PBS says it "may" cut Sesame Street. And it won't, we all know it. If they get a 25% haircut at Bush's budget barber shop, are they going to cut Sesame Street? Cut it? The longest-running, most successful educational children's program in history?

Please. Shame on PBS for using scare tactics like this when it's their decision who to cut. Come on guys, you know you'll cut Red Dwarf long before you cut Sesame Street.

Why don't you cut Mark Russell? I can't stand that guy.

The Mooninites Land in Ballard?

2007-01-15T22:18:00.000-08:00

Saturday, January 13. Mike Tyson is born. The Wall Street Journal prints its first cover photograph. And, on this day in 2007, aliens are among us.

And they are the Mooninites.

Made of lite-brites and taking their cues from the uncivilized, middle-finger-philic inhabitants of the moon - according to the gospel of Cartoon Network's popular Aqua Teen Hunger Force series of TV shows - they have arrived and acknowledged our presence with theirs. In Ballard.

The Canal is a newly-renovated event establishment, catering to what the technophiles would call "scalable" dining - for events such as weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and corporate functions. It sits on the Lake Union exit of the Hiram Chittenden locks on the Seattle Ship Canal, built on the ruins of the old Hiram's restaurant.

It's beautiful, well-staffed, impeccably furnished, and replete with a fascinating view of sea foam churning through the locks, complete with Corps of Engineers rotating red lights near the big sea doors. It commands an air of good taste.

Which is why the strange multi-LED pattern displaying the Cartoon Network-created alien with anger-arched eyebrows and a raised middle finger seems all the stranger for being there, anchored just underneath The Canal's tasteful fancy-script sign.

The character is unmistakably a rendering of one half of Aqua Teen Hunger Force's angry moon residents, the Mooninites, the purple, cigarette-smoking, property-vandalizing half-pint, Err. In addition to being a semi-permanent resident of the moon, Err also bothers the Aqua Teens in their native habitat of New Jersey, often setting fire to random forests and vandalizing the house of Carl, the Aqua Teens work-at-home neighbor.

Identity confirmed, answers to other questions fail to appear. Who put him here, and why? And how?

I myself saw the angry alien art upon my arrival at The Canal on the 13th for a company function, and instantly scrambled up for a picture. A detailed shot of the underside reveals at least a semi-professional job with decent mounting and rudimentary weatherproofing. The final result, some ten feet up in the air, would have required a ladder to mount. Midnight vandals are a possibility, but with the weather being unseasonably cold, a new question forms. Who would bother?

A couple glasses of red wine later, I attempted to ask the intruder himself. Basking in his purple, obscene glow, I asked him from whence he came, and his purpose.

With his middle finger raised, as if to insult me for eternity, Err, our Ballard visitor, remained silent, contented merely to stand above all, godlike, and flip them off.

Which says a lot about a guy.

Any information on this little piece of parasitic art would be appreciated. Send any and all info this way. The art may or may not still be visible at:

5300 34th Avenue NW
Seattle, Washington 98107

Charles Cox and XNA Game Studio Express at GDC 2007

2007-01-15T12:39:00.000-08:00

Just dropping a quick note: I'll be presenting an XNA Game Studio Express hands-on workshop at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this year.

If you're interested in trying your hand at game development with XNA Game Studio Express, and are planning on attending GDC this year, come on by for this introductory session and I'll show you how to get started! No experience necessary!

I'll be giving the workshop twice - once at noon on the 8th, and once at 2:30 PM on the 9th. Each session is two hours long. See you there!

Link to Event Details

XNA Game Studio Express Hands-On Workshop
Thursday, March 8 - 12-2pm
Friday, March 9 - 2:30-4:30pm
Charles Cox
Come see XNA Game Studio Express in action! Try Game Studio Express and see your creations come to life on Windows and Xbox 360. This workshop will include step-by-step instructions to get you up to speed on Microsoft's most recent game creation tool for casual and hobbyist game developers.

Inherent Bias: The Service Industry

2007-01-05T10:36:00.000-08:00

Scrolling through MSNBC.com, I read the latest uptick on jobs in the U.S. as reported by John Schoen.

A choice quote:

Friday's report should help dispel concerns that the economy is replacing high-paying factory work with low-wage jobs like manual laborers and burger-flippers.

Instead, John reports, we're seeing an increase of healthcare services, business and professional services, and education services. New jobs in all of these areas are replacing lost manufacturing jobs, not burger-flippers.

So why does the graphic for this story show two burger-flippers taking the lid off the meatball station at a Quizno's? I said pepperjack cheese, kid.

Call me sensationalist, but I smell white-collar/blue-collar bias. Come on. You could have easily shown an office job. A nurse's station. A classroom. No. Apparently, when we hear the word "service", we immediately think of that thing that goes between two buns, lettuce, and tomato.

I'll admit it, I think that way too, perhaps as the common denominator of all of the "service" industry, but to me that means someone, somehow, somewhere, got their brand identity into the national unconscious, right in cell A46, between Mariah Carey and Do-It-Yourself Dry Cleaning.

I'm not sure I like the way that plays out - to me, it means the notion of a "service" industry dies a death in obscurity by ubiquity. What's a "skilled" service versus a "non-skilled" service? Do we know? With so-called "product" industries in this country suffering a cruel psychological blow with the recent "Bold Moves" at Ford and GM, most of what remains is service.

But the best image we can conjure up from our blessed media is two junior-highers short stacking the pastrami bucket before the lunch rush. I'm not trying to be mean to protectionists, but if we're going to spend all day screaming "save U.S. jobs", maybe we need to take a good long look at whether we really respect - or even understand - the jobs we're asking for.

Horrible Advertising: Clorox

2007-01-02T12:36:00.001-08:00

I'm not sure what disturbs me more.

A: A little girl considers the bathroom the best place to put on her fairy costume and practice flying lessons right next to the creepy large-intestine-looking-waste-tube toilet. I mean, this is where Uncle Waldo comes over and sits down with a Boater's World and plays Meet the Press every Thanksgiving.

B: The advertisement ending with her flying and waving her magic wand right over the toilet as the shot fades to a placement of new Clorox Wand Cleaners, as if to imply that she's actually in the bathroom so she can dream of cleaning the bathroom. In a fairy outfit.

Both scenarios are scary, and the unfortunate part is they're both in this ad.

You know what else irks me? It's one of those toilets with a push button on the tank top, rather than a handle. Does any house you know have one of those? This kid and her family live in an office park.

Found in an in-line ad in this article.

Saddam's Execution Runs the Media Blockade

2007-01-01T17:17:00.000-08:00

MSNBC won't tell you where to get the "pirated" cell phone video of Saddam Hussein's execution. They didn't even touch the story before more than two million people had already viewed the grainy, one-megapixel video that showed Saddam's last minutes and subsequent execution, limp body, snapped neck, and all.

Now that they have, they go on about more troops, a policy shift for the White House, and so on. Great. (MSNBC Article)

Here is a country in turbulent crisis, trying to head off full-scale civil war (am I allowed to call it that now?) - according to your view, already embroiled in it - and the last thing they need is any sectarian views on what should have been an impartial execution, they say.

Ignoring for a moment my contention that there isn't such a thing as an impartial execution, step back and ignore the talking heads for a moment. To me, the understanding of the impact of this video "leak" means more global impact than it does sectarian or national - Shiite, Sunni, American...

A man with a cell phone just held the United States and Iraq as PR hostages with a crappy VGA video.

Compare with the recent realization that Russia's entry to the WTO could be denied by the existence of a popular MP3-downloading site hosted in that country. An MP3 site, "AllofMP3.com", is holding trade policy in Russia hostage.

The power base is shifting.

Look at it this way.
No more barriers to content creation. Easy access to cheap video, audio, and text hardware.
No more barriers to distribution. Podcasts, YouTube, and Blogs.

To me means - why are the big media groups continuing to put the majority of their pressure on content creators? Answer: they aren't.

While we've all been tortured by in-theater "don't steal from the movie industry" ads, suggesting a shift to consumer scare tactics, and live under constant fear of what are seemingly random RIAA lawsuit-fests (really, you're alright if you're over 20 or so, the RIAA seems to like to prey mostly on children), what's really cranking in the gears of industrial K-street policy pushing is increased pressure on the last thing they've got control of: pipes.

And here's your first warning shot. U.S. Music Publishers Sue AllofMp3.com, the Russian MP3 download site mentioned earlier, for $1.65 trillion.

Read that again. No, I mean it.
Read it again.

One point six five trillion.

No longer in control of limiting supply, big money is on limiting flow of the existing supply through the pipes. In keeping with the strategy of "distributors are responsible for the content that goes through their pipes", the grand strategy seems to be to put rubber bands around each information vein until it dies and crumbles away.

But, as you can see quite simply, without blanket policy (which hasn't yet been successful), the number of distributors will grow faster than the number of lawsuits piling up on the table. And with that, it's obvious that there's only one real move left.

To go to Big Telco and plead their case.

And that's happening right now, and I'll bet you on it. Sure, the RIAA hasn't said one word about it. But why would they? The only way to restrict the flow is to gain access to the pipes. Right now, those pipes flow free. And they're going to stay that way if we do our jobs as global citizens.

One more reason to write your Congressperson. Now, of course, this issue is so hot the legislature won't even touch it yet, but that had ought to be another red flag.

I know there's a huge battle to be fought. But what the Saddam Hussein execution video tells me is that there's only one direction this thing will go as a matter of philosophy. Information will be free. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but it's a matter of numbers.

As two million people watch a video the politicos in both Iraq and the US didn't want them to see, I can take something good out of even this most gruesome spectacle. We are becoming informed. Information is getting out. It is getting to those that want it. It is getting to them over the protests of institutions that have long expected their major power - secrecy - to last them far longer than it did.

We are no longer debating if our global access to information will be a possiblity. We are now simply debating how, and when.

And yes, I watched the Saddam video. You can too.

Decision Time - 2007

2006-12-31T14:03:00.000-08:00

I'm pouring a drink in the silence. They say you can do two things with your brain: take input, or process the input you've already got.

Charles just needs his alone time.

Time to what? The vodka cracks the ice cubes it pours over, splitting continents and driving icebergs aside. Ever since I started drinking, vodka has been the lonely man's drink.

I'm processing what I've got, trying not to take in any more. I remember the Gulf War from the strategist's table, and how they had all been so proud to get inside John Boyd's OODA loops, surrounding and crushing Iraqi tank battalions before they could react.

The Iraqis couldn't process fast enough. They couldn't come to a decision on what they saw. Agility over raw power, they say. Fine. But I'm getting bogged down - there's too much to process. How do you hit a moving target? How do I reach the level of tactical and strategic snap-analysis and decision-making I need?

Part of it, they say, is age. Wray Herbert's Mind Matters column on "Why Teenagers Do Stupid Things" puts it in context for me - as you age, you go from detailed risk analysis to simple axiomatic decisions. Those simplifications are tremendous time-savers, but I fear them; I fear covering my machinery in cement. How will it act?

No. No way. There's another way. We don't have to collapse into ape-man grunting over what's "good" and what's "bad". Herbert's column advocates teaching teenagers just that way - get them to enclose their head-gears in quickcrete early on by driving 1984-esque images like "school good, sex bad", probably through horrible posters all over the schools and subliminal ads during morning announcements.

I reject that line of thinking; it's reactionary, sensationalist, and patronizing. The axioms will only help you survive - they don't help you make accurate sense of the world; its nuances, paradoxes, and mountains of overflowing, contradictory data. Who's going to help us interpret that when we've all made a driveway out of our frontal lobes? A government brochure?

We've got to do better than this.

Can I really see the world for what it is? William Gibson spoke at a gathering I was at - he said, roughly, that people generally like to believe the world is what it was about ten years ago. Shapes in my mind, ten years past. I know it can't be. The vodka is getting watery.

Decision time. Everything is waiting on the fence. Victories lined up. Evidence in hand. I have to decide if I'm going to jump into this whirlpool. 2006 is a memory but for a few more Pacific Standard hours.

I have in front of me every opportunity, and every signal to do what it is I feel I've been training myself to do. What this blog has been about. What my work has been about. What I've been about.

I'm here to identify. To strategize. To educate. I vow now to keep the machinery running. To not fall out of the loop. To not pave my brain. To not sit back and pretend.

I vow to read the future. And to tell the future. And to be the future.

Finish the drink.
Start the clock.
The New Year is here.

CharlesNCox.com - Coming Soon.

The Vanity Gaming Experience: Your Face in Rainbow Six Vegas

2006-12-09T11:53:00.000-08:00

Vanity gaming is nothing new. The concept of putting "you" in the game is as old as Ouija - which is more like putting "your dead uncle" in the game...and when I say game, I mean horrible screaming as the game board levitates, spins, and cuts somebody's head off.

Thank God for technology; we no longer have to rely on the deceased to supply our nightly entertainment. But ever since the days of the Atari 2600, when people struggled to make out squiggly lines and chunky pixels in search of the beauty of the human form - in such classics as Custer's Revenge - there's been a never-ending chorus that, to my mind, was screaming "opportunity"! Or maybe it was "go get your dad another beer", that's a popular one.

We're talking about the opportunity of seeing yourself as a character in a video game. We've gotten a huge wake-up call in the gaming business with the advent and subsequent mega-popularity of MMORPGs (you know, those online things with the gold and monsters and Leroy Jenkins, I'm not gonna spell it out); people want to create online versions of themselves. Superheroes, mythical figures, Janet Reno - whatever, they've got your fix.

But something's been missing. While you can strap on as much armor and buy as many daggers and swords and Potions of Your Mom's Basement as you want, that character will never truly represent you in the game - until they have your face.

Putting faces on characters has always been a dicey proposition, even with professional models. Remember the pain we all went through looking at Sean Bean's ugly mug in Goldeneye for the N64. It looked like Prince Charles' 11th grade yearbook photo pasted on a grapefruit. The technology just wasn't there to make it work right.

But with the release of the Xbox Live Vision camera and the new Rainbow Six: Vegas game for the Xbox 360, the possibility now exists to allow you to create your own multiplayer game character using your own face. Unlike the Sean Bean School of Face Mapping we saw several years ago, which just maps face detail onto generic three-dimensional face shapes, the system that creates the face in Vegas actually uses the contours it identifies in your face to mold the three-dimensional mesh that your face details are mapped onto. Bottom line - it got my nose right. That's impressive.

Still, I have my skepticism: as anyone in the industry can tell you, the history of this enterprise in general has been - less than inspiring. And I have to say, the current incarnation of the thing - and maybe just the principle of the thing itself - has been vaguely creepy.

I mean, you can't put your finger on it, but even if your character isn't getting mangled or hacked up - they could be just picking flowers and making shroom tea, whatever - it's very strange to see the bits of yourself you don't normally see, in anything that resembles a human form, doing human things.

And as it turns out, the individual who is being represented isn't the only one that's weirded out by it. Two members of my own squad were killed by snipers while staring at my digital mug. Later, to massage their wounded egos, they blamed me, and I quote: "Your face got us killed."

Your face got us killed. You know, if I was a younger man, that might be kind of traumatic.

Still, I hold high hopes for this technology, even if for the next several years it occupies a "gee-whiz" sector of gaming technology. We've broken the first ground by including this technology in a retail-available game. And to be fair, the version that ships in Vegas is the most impressive demo of this technology I've seen yet.

I just wish it hadn't given me a bald spot.

See the Pics

Resetting VGA Resolution and Screen Format on Xbox 360 Blind (Without Video Output)

2006-11-27T08:50:00.000-08:00

If you ever have to reset the display resolution/aspect ratio settings on an Xbox 360, and only have a VGA cable and monitor to do it with, you may find yourself in a bit of a quandary, as the monitor may not display the Xbox 360 menu, making it very difficult indeed to reset the display settings!

Never fear. Here's the sequence of controller presses to reset the VGA settings to standard aspect ratio, 640 x 480, which should work on almost any monitor. You will want sound for this, it will make things easier.

Once the Xbox 360 boots up:

HOLD D-Pad RIGHT until blade selection sounds stop, or 3 seconds (You are now at System Blade)

HOLD D-Pad UP until menu selection sounds stop, or 3 seconds

PRESS A (You are now in Console Settings)

HOLD D-Pad UP until menu selection sounds stop, or 3 seconds

PRESS A (You are now in Display)

HOLD D-Pad DOWN until menu selection sounds stop, or 3 seconds

PRESS A (You are now in Screen Format - If you get a "bonk" sound, skip next 2 steps)

HOLD D-Pad UP until menu selection sounds stop, or 3 seconds

PRESS A (You have just selected NORMAL Screen Format and have returned to Display)

HOLD D-Pad UP until menu selection sounds stop, or 3 seconds

PRESS A (You are now in Screen Resolution)

HOLD D-Pad UP until menu selection sounds stop, or 3 seconds

PRESS A (You have just selected 640 x 480)

You should now see the screen. Proceed to set your display settings as normal.

Missing Sailing

2006-11-20T21:15:00.000-08:00

I took a minute to myself at the boat the other day. It was one of those rare autumn days that the sky splits open and doesn't bleed wind. Everything just waited for something.

Passion was weathering the coming cold well. A few splinters from the flooded log booms still hung around the harbor, occasionally finding their way against her hull, but still she sat, silent in her chains, rocking, asleep.

I climbed aboard, fixed a cup of coffee below and had a seat. It was one of those days I didn't x-ray the boat with my mind, one of those days that what I saw was what there was. No cleverly-hidden water tanks, waste receptacles, electrical panels, just wood and fabric and the occasional metal trim.

A house, she is now, a home, just looking for a roam, but I couldn't give it to her. "Sorry, old girl," I said, as I tripped the engines and idled up to heat her fluids, "Not today." The prop never got to spin, no lines cast off. She sat, snorting in bondage, smoke and fury and not a knot made, not a yard of headway or sternway to call the day's score. I felt it - almost adventurous enough to cast off and - and what? Discretion gets the better of me all too often.

I slipped under the dodger to see her lines; the most neglected of all lay in constant tension - her spinnaker strings. So much rope, and for what? The spinnaker winches stood unused, a fine coat of dust already forming. A couple quick turns satisfied me that they were at least not broken, but I felt bad, and went to find a wash bucket.

She's been through tougher times than this, certainly. Her original owner found her in disrepair, bilge full of muck and paneling stripped to the glass. The boat's name, Passion, we kept, not just in deference to her own clean lines and racing sentiments, but to the owner's committment and tireless service to a boat that once was, then wasn't - then was once again.

Was I letting him down? I loosened the spinnaker lines and looked underneath where they lay - a long, black line, like Satan's sidewalk chalk, lay along the length of the line's bed on the fiberglass; one big dark highway of disuse along the deck where nobody could see. I filled the bucket, added soap, and washed the deck under the dodger. I erased the lines, I cleared the dust from the winches. I didn't make a promise then to give her spinnaker back - but I made a promise to think about it.

Because I felt the pull. I coiled the lines, replaced the covers and finished my coffee like a proper gentleman, but all throughout I felt her pulling, tugging at me. If you sail - cruise or race - you get that feeling from a boat you care about. She's not meant to stay in once place, you say to yourself. She wants to move. To move, to go fast, to go somewhere, to be up and gone and tensing at her lines and breaking through the squall into open day.

I shut off the tanks, the seacocks, the panel, and sealed her up. "Not today," I said.

Not today.

Playstation 3 Fails The Five-Minute Test

2006-11-20T12:13:00.000-08:00

The New York Times just had a weekend with the Playstation 3. The results? Damning. Far from the exultation Sony was hoping for, the NYT reporter instead blasted the electronics giant for an unpolished experience that just didn't stand up to the Xbox 360.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/arts/20game.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

In particular, I was interested to see this:

In the PS3's online store (which feels like a slow Web page) you can access movie trailers and trial versions of new games, but when you actually download the 600-megabyte files, you'll be stuck watching a progress bar crawl across the screen for 20 or 40 minutes. Astonishingly, you can't download in the background while you go do something that's more fun (like play a game).

What bothers the reporter in this instance is not a lack of content - certainly the trial versions of the games are there to be downloaded for free onto a video game console, something amazing that we've only been able to do in the last couple of years, but that the experience monopolizes his time - it takes 20 to 40 minutes he cannot get back.

What he wants to do in those 20 to 40 minutes, he cannot do. I would venture a guess that even if it were five minutes, he would be annoyed, and rightly so.

We are now moving rapidly into a market where the only currency left to bargain with in terms of innovation is time. Much like the predicted breaking down of Moore's Law, we no longer can get away with faster serialization of silicon. Until Gigabit DSL fulfills its own fiber-optic dreams of faster Internet delivery, we as a gaming populace - and beyond that, just as a data consumer populace - have hit our own Moore peak.

And in this world where you just can't make data transfer any faster, the only bargaining chip is time, and the key is parallelization. What can you do while you're:

Waiting for your flight at the airport?
Waiting at your doctor's office?
Riding the in the car/plane/train/boat?
Waiting for your 600 MB game demo to download?

If the answer is "nothing" in any case, there's a leak, waiting to be plugged by somebody. We've seen magazines plug the leaks in the old days, rapidly becoming outmoded by phones, game boys, Nintendo DS's, PDAs, laptops, palmtops, even integrated entertainment systems onboard airplanes, integrated DVD players in cars -

Waiting is the big game. And it's coming closer and closer to five-minute frustration. Companies need to continue to think about consumers waiting, and they need to realize that now, more now than ever, they just aren't going to wait very long. And now, just to end it right - someone overdubbed Michael Jackson dancing with Hey Nineteen from Steely Dan. Bizzare.

Related Tags: charles cox, ps3, playstation 3, xbox 360, xbox, sony, microsoft, xbox live

XNA Game Studio Express Beta 2 - The Educational Experience

2006-11-01T19:15:00.000-08:00

Finally, the next phase is here - Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express Beta 2 has launched.

I've written about it, given talks about it at Seattle Code Camp, and now have a chance to see it reach its audience.

This product is a pre-release. It's not "done", but you can download it and play with it and make stuff with it for free. And you're going to want to. Why?

Because you can make video games with it.

XNA Game Studio Express Beta 2 lets you make games for your Windows computer easier than ever before. And, the full release, due out this holiday season, adds Xbox 360 capability, so you can make your own games for your Xbox 360.

This is the next phase of content creation, folks. Blogs and podcasts and video broadcasts, all good stuff. Consider it, though. Your chance to make video games.

So why here?

Because I'm a documentation writer for the product. I took it upon myself to help shape some of the educational experience around XNA Game Studio Express, and I want your help to make it the best it can be for release this holiday. You can help. This product is going to reach millions. Help me out here.

Here's what you need.

A computer running Windows XP SP2, a decent graphics card (Shader Model 2.0), and a broadband net connection (some big stuff to download).

Here's what to do.

1. Download Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and install it.
2. Download XNA Game Studio Express Beta 2 and install it.
3. Run XNA Game Studio Express Beta 2 from your Start Menu, and when it starts, press F1 for help.

Now you'll see the help documentation. Click on the "XNA Game Studio Express" node on the left and check out what we've got. Never made a game before? Open "Getting Started" and try the tutorials.

I'm especially interested in what you think of the "Going Beyond" tutorials. I want to know your thoughts on them. Leave comments. No holds barred. Did it work? Do you like? Can't tell? Whatever you have to say, get it said so I can help make this thing even better.

I'm excited about XNA Game Studio Express and want it to be wildly successful. A huge part of that is education. Try it out, get it working, try the tutorials. You are the front line. I'm counting on you!

Related Tags: xna, beta, game development, microsoft, charles cox, education, sdk, gamedev

The Moorings

2006-10-31T11:00:00.000-08:00

"Mister Cox," she said.

It always starts like that. Dog died, prostate cancer, no more copies of Steely Dan's Greatest Hits at the store, it's always "Mister Cox" when Mister Cox has bad news coming.

And it's not some heartless numbers game I've got on the phone. I'm trying to book a trip through The Moorings to The Bahamas. The Moorings is the big name in charter boating. You call them up when you want to rent (okay, charter) a boat in some beautiful place you're going to be flying to.

Bahamas, Virgin Islands, Tahiti, Greece, Baja, France, Croatia - they're everywhere, and their signature two-swipe "M" logo adorns practically every third boat in sighting distance in any place that's got enough water to get your toes wet.

And they're not all that exclusive - it's not like you need to know the Vanderbilts to get in; you just need a little cash...and, if you're like me, a guy who wants to be his own captain...a sailing resume.

Which is what Samantha and I are talking about right now. My sailing resume. "Yes sir," she'd said a little earlier. "We have sailing experts that go over your resume and..."

And. And they pick it apart. Hey, I understand, we're talking about me being in charge of several hundreds of thousands of dollars of boat here. Yeah, there's insurance, but there's nobody to cling to if it goes wrong. I'm asking for a lot, so I'd better have a lot to give. I think about what I can say for myself. These past one-and-a-half years have racing, chartering, teaching, a little bit of everything. But is it enough?

Enough. When the rubber meets the road. When what you've worked for meets the critical eye. When all your fancy ideas either make the cut, or they don't. The rewards for getting this right? I drown out a bit in the sweet imagined sounds of the surf. I'm going in March, hoping to see those blue waters and feel the anchor dig into sweet sands, under my command. No charter captain at $100 a day, just me and my crew.

"Drop the hook!" I hear myself say. Captain's call. My call. Rum for everyone. A steak dinner, straight from the ship's stern grill. Then, snorkel right up to the beach, dragging my waterproof bag full of beer...

"Mister Cox..." Back to reality. Oops, there goes gravity.

Ah, when the critical eye starts squinting, getting nitpicky...I strain to wonder at all the reasons there's going to be a problem. My mind thinks up all kinds of scenarios. We need to see your logbook. Were you really captain on that catamaran? You sailed ALL these boats? You've done almost 70 sails in a year in a half? We're just not sure you're all that good at anchoring out... Think fast, what's the name of those things that the dinghy sits on? Time's up...

"Mister Cox," she says with finality. The Queen of Doom has it in for me. I just know it. Here it comes, the end of my dream of sailing in The Bahamas...

"You are cleared by The Moorings to captain any of our boats. Any boat, any size, from any Moorings base anywhere in the world."

There's a moment, a heartbreak beat, as The Psychedelic Furs might say. And it feels like love. In my minds eye, I can hear the surf again. Clear and alive, breaking on a tiny little sandy spit somewhere.

And in that somewhere, right under that single palm tree, I'm there. Drinking a beer. Watching my boat bobbing in the waves at sunset, knowing there's no captain but me. Me, in control of my own adventure.

Captain Charles Cox is going to the Bahamas. He's cleared to sail there. He's cleared to sail anywhere.

Awesome. Let's go sailing.

Related Tags: sailing, cruising, bahamas, bareboat, charles cox, chartering

The Day of Caring, Digital Promise, and Microsoft

2006-10-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

Some information on what I've been up to:

From http://seattle.gov/tech/brainstorm/#dp:

Annually, area volunteers and non-profits work with United Way to donate a full day to a worthy social cause on the "Day of Caring." This year on September 15, 17 volunteers from Microsoft and ITT Technical Institute’s Everett Campus teamed up with Digital Promise to visit computer learning centers in low income housing in Seattle and Eastside communities. The computer centers serve as gateways to the Internet and technology resources for underserved communities.

The volunteer effort accomplished a great deal. In addition to setting up three brand-new centers with 18 computers, the team performed maintenance and upgrades at four other centers. In all, 30 computers in seven centers were installed or upgraded during the day. The contribution wasn’t just in labor, however. The team brought in more than $5,000 in Microsoft software and equipment donated by the Washington State Housing Finance Commission. "We were very pleased with both the commitment of the volunteers and the welcome that we received at the centers," said Dawn Wood, Digital Promise president and Microsoft employee.

The project was a valuable experience for the techies, too. "Microsoft encourages its staff to give back to the community," noted Microsoft’s Charles Cox, who led the assembly of the Microsoft and ITT Technical Institute team. "We were delighted to participate actively in this project," stated Shelly Lisoskie, dean of Everett’s ITT Technical Institute. "Our students are encouraged to share their talents in their communities and this was a perfect opportunity for that to happen."

For more information on this project, contact Dawn Wood @ dawn.wood@microsoft.com.

Related Tags: volunteering, seattle, digital promise, charles cox, itt, microsoft, donations, non-profit, day of caring, united way

Why Defcon (The Game) Matters

2006-10-09T20:50:00.000-07:00

It's normally a pretty safe bet to say the Xbox gang has got their radar up about the latest games. But when I got approached unawares one bright Thursday afternoon about Introversion's latest offering, it was like Lil' Jon had suddenly taken over my gaming circuits.

Brendan: "You picked up Defcon?"
Charles: "WHAUT?"
Brendan: "Defcon!"
Charles: "WHAUT?"
Brendan: "It's a game about nuclear warfare, dude!"
Charles: "YEAHS!"

Almost instantly (okay, I waited until Sunday), I snatched up the demo. Apparently, the Introversion guys got slammed by downloaders when the game went live and I was one of the lucky fashionably-late comers to the party who didn't even realize he was getting all the shit at the bottom of the mojito pitcher.

Well, I slotted this bad boy and WHAUT - sorry, what - did I find? A very interesting commentary on where PC games are headed.

At first glance (and you can judge for yourself by the screenshots), the game is bare. Not as bare perhaps as Uplink, their first game, but still sparse, even to the point of everything being lines. About the only thing filled in are the nuclear explosions - everything else is a spartan planescape of stoic national borders cris-crossed with ballistic trajectories and flight paths.

But - get this - they're glowy lines. Things glow. And pulse. And say "I'm urgent" in a subdued yet throbbing-pulse way that you can only squeeze out of a conical projection abstraction of the real world. Everything about this game is done not to connect with your guts about nuclear war, but with your head. Adding to the surreal presentation is the music, a bizzare Brian Eno-Music For Airports mix interspersed at intervals with the sound of a woman crying.

When you play this game, you can play it in real time. The object, of course, is to "win" nuclear war by nuking the enemy's cities while suppressing their own nuking capabilities. You can do so with bombers, nuclear submarines, and silo-launched ICBMs. Picking the pattern and form of your strikes to match and counter your opponents moves is the critical dance necessary to win the game. Of course, millions of imaginary citizens die. That's the point. But it strikes home especially hard when you set it to real-time and just watch.

The missiles move, arcing over the great circle just like Dr. Strangelove taught us, and in real-time they seem to linger in the corner of your mind, almost moving through another tick of motion, but in the next second stock still, poised on the edge of its arc. And yet, you know that in eight minutes, it'll be making nuclear jelly out of a city somewhere, and so you let it sit.

Sit and run. And be a part of your life. More than a game. An interactive display of art, a concept piece, a zeitgeist-spiele, a bloated exaggeration of a game we still play in bunkers too deep to bring reality TV, in real-time or in game time.

The makers advertise a "whole day" game that you can play in the office while you work. There is a running demo mode that I envision being an amazing screensaver for Media Center PCs, an ever-running simulation of the end of civilization.

When I play Defcon (and I'm not sure play is even the right word), I get a sense of urgency, of tension, of importance that adds to my cache of already-stressful tasks to accomplish - on top of all, add not letting the damn Commies nuke D.C. - as part of my daily life. Like a good workout for the body, Defcon is a sexy, semi-sadistic addition to the mental knife drawer, and perfect to add to your day if you've got a second computer to spare (hey, some of us do, alright?)

It's something I'll hope to see a lot more of; these sort-of-game-sort-of-art-sort-of-time-wasters that take only as much of your time and attention as you're willing to give, in the very best traditions of Five Minute Slices.

So, way to go, Introversion - I think you're leading the pack for the future of PC games. Let's get it mobile, let's get it on Media Center, let's get it playing on touchscreens and in airports (okay, maybe not airports, that'll freak a lot of moms out) and try to remember that we're human, that we're absurd, that we could, every once in a while, use a trip to the bunker.

Related Tags: charles cox, defcon, introversion, five minute slices, pc games, computer games, strategy games, nuclear war

On XNA and Bouncing Sprites

2006-09-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you a story about the last thirty days.

There's this kind of job at Microsoft, see: it's a good job, but it's tricky. Take a piece of software - a tough technology, hard to learn - and find a way to explain it to people so that they can learn how to use it.

You know, the usual adult education rap: put a face on it, make it a little softer around the edges, but keep it dry, keep it clean, just enough to get people started without having to hand them a juice box.

Education for working professionals is funny that way. You've got to give people - sometimes people with twenty years or more of experience - a handle on something new, and they're not going to like it. Nobody likes learning. Oh sure, you can like it cerebrally, kind of in the same way I like english classes. But you don't like it - it's disruptive to your pattern, it's difficult and time consuming, and the rewards are often really vaporous to start with.

Just imagine how people who've been exposed to the Fish! philosophy feel when some educator walks into their office one tired Tuesday morning, jai-alais a stuffed fish at them and says "let's learn something new!"

Great. Well, this user educator at Microsoft sure has their job stacked against them, wouldn't you say?

Well, those that like reading ahead have already guessed it - that is my job. I'm a writer, and I write about new software development technology being released by Microsoft. Teaching is my business, teaching by proxy. My documentation is my classroom.

Working The Circuit
If you've been out on the net a bit, you'll know Microsoft has just released a Beta (a pre-release version) of a new product called XNA Game Studio Express.

It's a development framework for hobbyists and students that are interested in learning how to make games for Windows and Xbox 360. That's right - it's a way for you to make games for your PC and for your Xbox 360. Two platforms. Graphics, sound, input, storage, and all the other various stuff that made up a game. Someone had to explain it all.

That someone was me, along with five others.

Let me say this just for a moment - the writing team did incredible work. The documentation for the XNA Framework contains more than 5000 unique topics, over 25 code samples, and over 50 conceptual articles such as overviews, tutorials, and frequently-asked-questions documents. And this is all for a Beta product that hasn't even been officially released yet.

I've been hiding in a hole for the last month getting it ready for the world. In the last week, as we finalized all the pieces, I sat there at my desk knowing full well there was something still left to say about all this...XNA. Sure, I and the rest of the writers had put together lots of articles on tons of topics. We had what we needed for each technology section.

But for I.

Don't Be Ridikalus
I wasn't done. I was stuck in the adult education nightmare with the very last piece - the capstone on the whole thing. How to introduce this giant framework, this...thing that was XNA...without making it sound like an episode of Teletubbies? How? I mean, we're not three-year-olds here, I'm not showing people pictures of dogs and cats and clapping when they click one.

And yet, game development is hard. Very hard. So, in the final week, I wrestled with the last piece of the puzzle. What will your first game with XNA look like?

I sat there with this text on my computer screen, just waiting for my input, cursor blinking:

Your First XNA Game

What did I have? Examples that played sounds. Examples that made the controller vibrate. Examples that showed pictures on the screen. I searched through my code examples, looking for something that looked right. Not too tough, not too easy. I asked myself philosophical questions: what is a good introduction? Is there even such a thing as an introduction? Does writing even exist?

How Zen.

In the end, as the sun began to set on the writing window, I began to form an idea of what I wanted. A picture on the screen - good, it'll be instant gratification to see something on your screen. A picture...that moved! Good, good, I thought, as I cracked another Coke and typed up the article.

Then, the revelation. The picture, called a "sprite", would bounce off the edges of the screen. Maybe simple, but just enough to get things moving in the mind of the reader. From here, they could go anywhere. I typed up the code and instructions quickly, compiling the code and running it with my own picture I had grabbed from the Net. Balki, from Perfect Strangers. His smiling face bounced around on my screen, and I knew I'd hit the topic perfectly. Save, publish, go home. I slept, and dreamt of 80's sitcoms.

The Big Bounce
Little did I expect the coming storm. XNA was the talk of the town. It was the star at the industry trade show Gamefest, and was being announced in every major trade publication, and even consumer-facing articles were getting play. People were paying attention.

What would happen to this little example of mine (minus Balki: copyright issues, you know) when the public got a hold of it ?

The release came. XNA was unleashed on the world. A flurry of forum posts. The Slashdot article. Thousands of downloads.

Thousands of people - all creating Pong on their own computers. We knew it needed to be: it was a natural part of the process.

But where would it start?

It started with my article. And the bouncing sprites. And how.

So far I've managed to use the new system to get a picture of me standing outside the Birmingham Selfridges to bounce around inside a window on screen.
- Bill Thompson, "Let's Play", BBC News

That's a BBC News article about XNA. And my bouncing sprite tutorial. That's not the only one. There are comments inside Shacknews, a translation of the code into Python, multiple bouncy sprites, bouncy growing sprites, and even a tutorial about how to find my tutorial.

It looks like the gamble worked. Sure, there are the occasional negative comments - it's a free society - but by and large, the bouncing sprite is a hit.

And yet, I have my fears. We can't always choose how we're associated - I've lived with the grim reality that people walk up to me and ask me if I know Bill Gates. I now await the day that someone will associate me with this very first tutorial - this introduction that so many have followed.

If only to make that day come quicker and easier, I post the whole confession here. I cop to it. I dunnit. Ladies and gentlemen of this fair community, I admit: I'm the Bouncing Sprite Guy.

Welcome to XNA.

Related Tags: xna, microsoft, game development, bouncing sprite, 2d games, charles cox

The MySpace Crash Gave My Webpage 1,000 Hits In An Hour

2006-08-01T00:10:00.000-07:00

Fridays are supposed to be slow days. Still simmering in my recent marketing-exposure victory of being the #1 Charles Cox on Google, I relax. I have a sail to Eagle Island to prepare for. Mark a few charts, check the tides again, and scoot on over to my page on MySpace and notice - hmm - it's not going as fast as it usually does.

I'm not giving it much thought. Shrug it off.

I take Eagle Island (By Strategy) over the weekend, and come back rested. A message on Monday comes in from Chief Nav Greene over in Lake City.

"Dude, is your MySpace messed up?"

I check the support logs and realize something horrible has happened to MySpace over the weekend. While I'm checking the logs, I decide to kill two birds with one stone, and download my logs for The-Agent.net.

That's when I notice it.

Friday the 28th, I got hit. And hit. And hit again. Normally, my page gets 80-90 hits a day. On the 28th, it got 1,031. One thousand hits in a single day. For me - that's unheard of. What happened?

I dig deeper. When did it happen?

11 AM, Friday morning. Where did they come from? Google.

And what were they searching for?

They were searching for reasons their MySpace account got deleted in the horrible crash at 11 AM, Friday July 28th, 2006.

I do what they do. I go to Google, and I search for "myspace account deleted".

A post of mine comes up #1. Not just the first page. Not just the first couple of entries. It's the very first search result.

The first thing they see when their sweaty, MySpace-deprived fingers click "Search". Hell, they could have even clicked "I'm Feeling Lucky" and found me. It's the first thing these desperate souls saw.

And what was it? It was my quick, pointless, asinine blog post about leaving MySpace and wishing a sour-grapes farewell to Rupert Murdoch. Yeah. Back in the day, around December of '05, when I was feeling angsty and had my purple-black hair and Asian Bird Flu shirt on going on about economics-this and economics-that and...

One thousand people in one hour found me, my brand, my identity, my statement, my mark on the world of the living and the dead, and what did they get? Did they get my Five-Minute Slices speech? No. My Tablet PC/7-11 Connection? No. Did they even get a freakin' sailing post? No.

They got me being a whiny bitch about not having enough friends on MySpace.

Wow.
My fifteen minutes of fame and I completely dropped the enchilada.

I'm not sure how I feel, especially in light of the fact that I'm now back on MySpace. Embarassed? A little. But, I'm kind of delighted, in a way, that I can lay #1 claim now to two phrasebits, rather than one. I now am #1 for "charles cox", and #1 for "myspace account deleted".

Guess it pays to be in the right place at the right time.

I suppose the other side of this little parable is that when that time comes - be sure you're saying the right stuff. And not bitching. Or whining. Or bitch-whining. Because that will not look very inspiring.

And, so, we close the book on this story. Maybe my time will come around again. And maybe, when they see me again, they'll see this astute, scholarly observation.

Or maybe they'll just see a picture of Tyler holding a "Sweet Salty Nut" bar up to his balls.

You never know with the Internet.

Oh - for what it's worth, everybody - MySpace is back up now. Thank you for your patience. Have a nice day.

Related Tags: myspace, google, searching, advertising, cybersquatting, speculation, charles cox, the-agent.net

Winning The Battle of The Charles Cox (es)

2006-07-25T23:36:00.000-07:00

If you've ever set goals for yourself - and seriously, who hasn't; "I'll get up at 9:00 AM tomorrow, I swear" counts as a goal - you'll know what I mean when I say goals change.

Sometimes you've never quite sure when they turn the corner, but your goals, once so orderly and proper, start getting away from you and picking up little tricks of their own. Seriously, they do. They evolve with the times.

They learn a little street slang here, pick up a few phone numbers there, do a little rearranging, a little shuffling, and pretty soon your saintly goals are picked up on the corner of Madison, doing 75k a year speedhustling tourists on Three-Card Monte, with the little toothpick in their mouth and everything.

That toothpick thing is about where I caught my last goal before it got away with me. I don't know what this blog was really meant to be, but sooner or later I made it my goal to become something notable, something quantifiable, even if it was a small thing.

Maybe it was spurred on by my fight with my doppelganger in the Spa Shop, maybe after hearing about Naymz and deciding to give it a go I started thinking differently, but over the past three months or so, a goal emerged; and as trite as it was, it was still a goal:

I was going to become the #1 Charles Cox on Google.

This was big stuff, I thought, as I realized my goal was solidifying. I was talking about a brand. The Charles Cox brand. Defining Charles Cox to the world in a way that got people's attention. I had to finally get out there.

But, I realized one day, that meant competing with all the other Charles Coxes.

My competition was tough: a noted real estate agent, an Oklahoma State educator, a microbiology professor at the University of Iowa, a settler from 1741, Vice President of the Global Government Industry for EDS, the Mayor of Camden County in the mid 1800's, and an Assistant Professor of Molecular & Integrative Physiology, Pharmacology, Biophysics and Neuroscience.

All of them were named Charles Cox.

But I played the hands I knew how to play. I linked my blog to other blogs. I got an account with Technorati. I started using Pingoat. I submitted my blog to over a dozen blog aggregators. I placed my name everywhere, including in my blog header and RSS feeds. I bought (cheap) google ad space for my name using Naymz. As the weeks dragged on, I even added "charles cox" Technorati tags to the ends of my posts.

I wasn't sure what quantifiable benefit these actions had, if any. In the beginning, I was way back in the back row of Google, beyond the third page. You couldn't see me if I was ten feet tall and wearing a Carmen Miranda fruit hat. But I had faith in the system and was willing to see these actions out, confident that the system would do what it was designed to do, and that my brand, the Charles Cox brand, would begin slowly to float to the top.

Why do it? Because I could. Because I wanted to. Because I wanted to see how the system would handle me, whether I could make it happen. Could I be the number one Charles Cox on Google?

Well, turns out I am.

Sometime in the last twenty-four hours, the overwhelming advertising and marketing pressure I fed into the system blew the stack. If you search for "Charles Cox" or even Charles Cox (without the quotes) on Google, I'm now at the top of the list.

I was teetering at #2 for the past several weeks. Finally, the scale has tipped. I did it. For reasons I can't explain too clearly (due to lack of sleep, probably), this is beyond cool. This is a mixture of advertising, information warfare, brand strategy, and social networking all rolled up into one great big Dr. Honeydew-and-Beaker experiment. And it worked.

If I had something to sell, I'd sell it. Right now. But I don't. So, I guess I'll just keep blogging. Thanks for hanging out and listening to my stories and reports from the field, everyone. You're making this whole Internet thing work out alright.

Related Tags: charles cox, branding, google, advertising, name search, naymz, marketing

Newspaper Fortresses - Print Still Suffers

2006-07-20T22:55:00.000-07:00

I come back from a restful vacation on Mars and see this: N.Y. Times to reduce page size, slash jobs

You know, two things come to mind here. One - unless held at gunpoint, I haven't willfully picked up a newspaper in six months. Two - last I saw, the New York Times' webpage, NYTimes.com, was still harping on the "premium content" bandwagon, still trying to squeeze out otherwise free information, now while simultaneously slashing jobs.

Does this scream out the ever-popular-in-this-digital-age warning, "fortress maneuver"? Major publishers, Rupert Murdoch aside, don't get it, and they're not trying to get it. They're still trying to squeeze juice out of this juiced and re-juiced turd.

Even though just the other day I said certain jobs in the future would be dependent on reducing choice sets, right now that ain't paying the bills (in the case of the New York Times, it ain't payin' to the tune of at least $42 million annually), and it won't be while people can get better stuff for free, and the tools are good enough to get it.

It's amazing. With mobile digital technology, I can read linked, contextual news fed from blog aggregators I choose, on practically a minute-by-minute basis, with Bloglines. I don't pay for that. I can get a high-level picture of what the world gestalt is by looking at the popular Technorati tags. I don't pay for that. I can get detailed information on anything under the sun by jogging my browser over to Wikipedia. I don't pay for that.

Compare it to the New York Times, please. They pick the format (smaller now, note), they pick the content, and we're paying for their synthesis of this information down based on interpretation of assumed demand. It's not contextual beyond the Editor-In-Chief's read of his press bureaus and bird entrails the night before. Right? And what is he reading these days while browsing his web for porn waiting for the video teleconference machine to heat up? I'll bet it's a goddamned blog, nine times out of ten.

And what's this? "Turn to Page A4"? Are you kidding me? We pay for this? If I wanted to go on a wild goose chase for copy I'd flush a couple Hallmark cards down my toilet.

The point is, and always has been make me smarter. I don't want something that doesn't fulfill that request. And when I ask, I'm asking contextual questions. The newspaper, a dead tree flattened and smeared with oil, cannot answer them, except by dumb luck or the occasional reprint of Ziggy. And yet, the newspaper conglomerates still think there's cash value in their "carefully researched" and "editorially scrutinized" Pulitzer-winning journalistic juggernaut. It's just not holding cachet with the upcoming generation, I can tell you that.

I think the worst part is after all this time, I still have to put up with Doonesbury, every time I open a paper. I haven't seen those trademark canoe-phallic noses and hyper-liberal mash-up talk for six months, but they still haunt me, crawling out of every paper in every dentist's office, just waiting for their chance to strike. And they wonder why I don't sign up for the Sunday edition.

Related Tags: newspaper, new york times, media, news corporation, print media, charles cox, mobile media, mobile blog

iPods and Endless Choice: An American Dilemma

2006-07-01T00:20:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you another story.

I used to own an iPod Nano. I was proud of it. I felt that little music-spouting digital wafer fit me. That pencil-thin Calvin Klein anorexic-silicon acrylic with its Deutsche-angst silver backing screamed from all angles “You Shouldn’t Be Playing U2 On This” and that, I said to myself while drooling on the package in the Apple Store, was fine. Me and my ‘pod had an agreement, even before I flicked my card at the snotty cashier and pretended I knew more Ani DiFranco lyrics than he did.

See, I had a whole system in place around how I was going to use the hell out of those two gigabytes. I didn’t worry about not having video. I didn’t worry that when it said it could “display photos”, it really meant photo-stamps, sort of the same way you could expect an Intellivision to “play video games”. It’s passable, but not really fooling anyone.

No, photos, videos – not for me. Not yet, anyway, until I got on “the scene” with my Dad’s 8MM and made the killer Indie-video so I could be the next to tell the raving fans at Sundance that they were too bourgeois to understand my artistry, and then there’s a book deal that drops more cash on my front lawn than the Marshall Plan and Johnny Depp plays me in the movie version.

Sorry, I was dreaming again. Where were we?

So I’ve got playlists, see – I slap together some playlists around different emotions, sort of like movie scenes. I’ve got “A Million Dollars, Cash”, “End Credits”, “Zero Out”, and others. Now, of course, I’ve got a 30-gigabyte library at home. I do the work to find my favorite songs, stuff ‘em in the lists, and consolidate my entire emotion-music-connection stock from 30 gigs into 2 gigs.

And it works. My God, does it work. Crappy day? Bust out “Call Out The Fleet” and I’ve got a million Teflon-coated bullets of The Crystal Method tearing up every car on the road until they’re chicken wire with wheels. Want to relax? Dial up “Zero Out” and I get Brian Eno injected straight into my eyelids like Bohemian Botox. It was all working fine.

Until I lose the iPod.

Stick it in a bag one day with a Charleston Chew, go out sailing, and it’s gone. I didn’t even get to pretend I wasn’t going to miss it, then turn around when it left and look all wistful – it just upped and left and took all those playlists with it. I’m talking to a lawyer about those lists but it’s really beyond the reach of the courts, he says.

I did what any self-respecting human would do at this point. I held my head up, walked right back into the Apple Store, and upgraded. That’s right. I bought a 30-gigabyte iPod, with video.

And that’s when it goes wrong.

I plug the new ‘pod in, download my entire list, yank it off the cradle, stick it in my car to take a long, beautiful drive full of amazing music and as soon as the screen comes on, I realize it.

Jesus Christ on a Compaq – I can’t think of anything to play.

It’s not possible. I’m twenty-four and I’ve got the technology equivalent of erectile dysfunction. I can’t get a song up. I can’t think of a single song that’s pushing my buttons enough to roll that clickwheel over its little title bar and click. I can’t. I roll back and forth. Nothing is natural. I feel my eyes getting gritty. Am I hallucinating? Is that really “If You Leave Me Now” by Chicago in my head?

I don’t have playlists, because I didn’t think I needed them. But I do. God, do I need playlists right now. There are 5000 songs on that iPod, all waiting for me to pick them. And can I? Of course not. It is an orgy of choice, complete with the lambskin rugs and free booze and that one naked chick on the trampoline, but I’m feeling sick just looking at the buffet line.

And I know I’m not alone. Al Jareau? Spandau Ballet? The Very Best of Starship? What’s a guy going to choose? Have you been there before? Have you seen the horror of infinite choice? Now, I’ve heard it said that when you’re singing the Blues, it ain’t about infinite choice. Maybe, but if you’re talking about a circle of hell no man should ever face, it ain’t exactly “my baby said she’d give me sugar, she gave me gasoline” – it’s this: nobody can pick from five-thousand options.

We have never been this swamped with choice in our country – in our world. Never. Not even when we had our pick of land to settle on in the early days of American colonization, did we get this much choice at once. Digital music is just the most visible watershed, of course, but it’s everywhere. Books, movies, games, pantyhose – whatever – there’s too much choice and too little criteria. But while others might see impending doom (because they always do), I see a business opportunity.

In the next several years, businesses in America will be built around reducing available options. I’m not kidding here. Critics have been doing this for a while, but even more efficient – even automatic – means will emerge. And I guarantee you that the first few people to drastically reduce our choice sets here in America in each medium are going to be the new Carnegies, the new Rockefellers, the new Morgans. Think it isn’t happening? Think endless choice isn’t the enemy I think it is? Go ask Pandora why they’re successful.

Like me, I think they took one look at their iPod, saw it - in that firm, jewel-glow black and white with the famous Apple font - that Styx had as much choice of being picked as The Beatles, and with that firmly in mind, vowed: “This shall not be.”

Domo Arigato.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to make some playlists.

Related Tags: ipod, digital music, music,choices, playlists, pandora, charles cox

The Whisker Pole - Friend or Foe?

2006-06-21T12:57:00.000-07:00

Nobody's a stranger to my well-worn notions of death by spinnaker. Or, more recently, humiliating defeat by spinnaker. Next up, of course, might be catastrophic identity theft by spinnaker, or, keeping with the times, Vince and Jen Married by Spinnaker! Believe you me - they're everywhere.

So why is it I feel such a strange compulsion to indulge in the use of its simpler, only-slightly-less-accident prone cousin, the whisker pole? Am I a victim of split personality? Am I duplicitous? Do I secretly love spinnakers and won't tell your sister? Jerry Springer-worthy stuff, no doubt, but you'll have to answer it for yourself.

Let's step back a second. What's a whisker pole? Basically, you use it to push your headsail out to give it more room to catch the wind when there isn't much wind to be caught. You're cheating a little, is all. Well, maybe you won't think so, but I've got a guilty conscience.

Picture it - it's Puget Sound, East Passage. Foggy morning at about 10 AM, you're out near Dolphin Point and the wind's just doing nothing. Your jib is just dead. What do you do?

Well, some lunatic unclipped his spinnaker pole one day in just such a situation. He clipped the pole to the jib sheet and pushed it out. He made a big baggy half-balloon with it and - viola - he gets half a knot of speed.

It's 10:15 AM and we just got the pole up. We think. Not sure. Does that look right? Do the jaws go up or down? Does it matter? Should I yank on this thing? Woah, maybe not.

Now, I dunno about you, but I see a pole, and a pole lift, and a big baggy chute-looking thing all of a sudden and uh...well, that thing's starting to look like an asymmetrical spi..spi...I can't say it.

But wait! It's missing a foreguy. There's no downhaul on the pole, it can't be a spinnaker. Whew, man, that'll save months of therapy.

10:30 AM. We're getting an extra knot of speed. This pole is really working. Suddenly, the fog clears ahead. A gust of wind pops up. The pole flies into the air as the jib is punched forward. It flies again. And again. My foredeckman Mike jumps to the rescue, holding onto the pole. This won't last.

I realized that day, as the wind picked up, that I'd have two options - I'd either need to drop the whisker pole and proceed along normally as the wind picked up, or attach a downhaul.

But wait. A downhaul? The thing the Volvo Ocean Race guys call a downf---er? that'd pretty much make it a spinnaker. Wouldn't it? What would happen if you put a downhaul on a whisker pole? Would it be a gennaker? Would it be a spinnaker? Would it broach the boat magically, because I broke some unwritten law of the sea?

And if I do decide to get savvy and attach my own downhaul (there's a fairlead block in that toolbox somewhere), what do I call my MacGyver combination? A Poleaker? Polaker?

And will I use it? Would I dare? Is it possible that I actually might be getting used to spinnakers?

Scratch the thought! We never had this conversation! Who wrote all this stuff? Prank blogger, prank blogger!

*DELETE*

Related Tags: sailing, spinnaker, whisker pole, puget sound, cruising, charles cox

Five-Minute Slices: Tablet PCs at Your Local 7-11

2006-06-07T20:42:00.000-07:00

You're looking at the new cyborg. A 7-11 employee using a Tablet PC, stylus firmly in hand, ready to - do what, exactly?

Inventory. The inventory of the future.

I caught up with this guy and in between my picking through the muffins and Slim Jims, got to talk to him a little about this futuristic business model, his thoughts on the future, and just what the hell is a kielbasa hot dog anyway, mister "Oh Thank Heaven"?

Charles: How does this thing work, anyway?
Joe @ 7-11: I use it for inventory. I tell it how many items are left, it orders them automatically. Like I'll put down 2 for strawberry muffins, because that's how many are left. See, there's a graph.
Charles: It shows how many you've been selling?
Joe: Yes. Not many.
Charles: Well, nobody likes strawberry muffins, so no surprise there. But why does it help?
Joe: It doesn't help me - we used to have vendors do this. A chip guy, a soda guy, they'd come and count their own items and take care of all of it for us. Now they make me do it.
Charles: When do you have the time to do it?
Joe: Late at night, like now, I just do it when I can.

Ah-hah, I thought. Five-minute slices, again. Look at this many-to-one convergence; someone's getting promoted up there. They took a guy that had free time, and consolidated the work of at least three vendors down to him and a tablet PC.

Now, for the bad.

Dude: Woah, man, are you playin' guitar? (motioning at the Tablet around his neck)
Joe: No, it's for inventory...

That's one of the problems. The Tablet PC makes Joe look like a dork.

Joe: I wish it were faster...

The universal lament.

Joe: I just don't like it.

And that's really where it breaks down intangibly. From the psychology side, it's not surprising people don't like to take on extra work. Often it doesn't fit what they thought their job profile was, and the amount of transition is difficult. The tablet doesn't offer him anything. It's not a good trade.

Sure, there's the novelty factor. I mean, we all like the idea of tablets - it's a neat hybrid, a sort of petite-artiste moment, scribbling on an electronic etch-a-sketch, drawing a pair of boobs on the screen, but sooner or later the honeymoon's just over and the workers realize they're evolving, but their pay isn't.

But this is a good example of where we're going, like it or not. Productivity increases in an individual, done just whenever, cut hours of time off of an entire group of vendors that had to be scheduled to arrive during certain availability windows. This guy can do in his spare time what it took specifically billable hours for vendors to do, and for the company to coordinate.

Related Tags: tablet pc, 7-11, convenience stores, productivity, inventory, convergence (hah, I finally got to use that word)

Swiftsure 2006, Victoria, BC: The Agent Survives

2006-05-31T16:55:00.000-07:00

I'm back, and still trying to wrangle my thoughts on this year's Swiftsure yacht race in Victoria.

"Why write about it if you can't organize your thoughts about it?" the heckler in the audience is asking.

Well, shaddup: I raced, you didn't, and I'll give you my three rules for Swiftsure, so that when you do go, you don't get stuck with your balls hanging out. You can thank me later.

1. Use The Winch For Everything

I don't care if we're talking about winching in lines, using the radio, tying your shoelaces, cooking dinner, divorcing your wife, or filling out your next job application - if it bends, twists, or looks squiggly, you put that sonofabitch around the winch and crank until metal shavings come out. If you need to eat, well, that enchilada goes around the winch first. If you need to phone home, take the radio and wrap the wires around the winch and crank, and it'll broadcast all the way to the moon. This is because winches are made of magic.

We're sailing upwind, beating hard, twenty-five degrees heeled over. We scoot inland for a second to take off the current, and it's when we decide to tack back that it happens.

Marc's got the handle in the winch and is turning for everything he's got to sheet in the jib; the strain of the line is audible. The winch is dinging hard like a dinner bell. He's almost got it in but the breeze is huge. I turn around for a sec to get my camera when I hear a cry, and a final winch ding. I look back, and he's splattered with black specks. The deck is splattered. The lines are splattered. The gear is splattered. Everything is dotted like God had the shakes with his quill pen.

"Wh- what happened?" Marc asks. Nobody knows, until Mike shows up and laughs. Winch grease, he says. Marc sheeted that line in so hard he squirted the grease right out of the winches. 10 Points, Popeye.

2. Don't Take a Flyer

This means you do what the rest of the boats do. Don't get slick, don't get smart, just use your winches (see Rule 1) and shut up. Got a bright idea about how to get around the mark faster? Figure you can shave five hours off a crossing with some hare-brained plan? Well, forget it, we don't care. If we don't see another boat doing it, it ain't gettin' done. A flyer is a bright idea that separates you from the pack, and in racing, it's certain death (or at least certain not-really-finishing-all-that-well).

Let me explain. Swiftsure is, even for the big boys, at least a twenty-hour race. We raced for twenty-five hours(placing 5th out of 8 in division). We race anywhere from two nautical miles an hour (yawn) to nine nautical miles an hour (the nautical equivalent of the Batman ride at Universal Studios). At those speeds, with that much time, you make up your distance and set yourself apart gradually. The course is fixed, the weather is the same for everyone, and it's likely that if there were an obvious advantage to whatever you're thinking that'd really get you that much time off your finish, someone would already have done it.

We're in a toilet. A toilet called Race Rocks. It's noon, near the shore - the rocks are being pounded by waves nearby crashing from all directions. Our sails are full, we're heeled over, beating hard into wind, but there's no motion. Five knots forward motion plus five knots of current pushing us backward equals zero knots. We're running to stand still, and it's the weirdest feeling I've had since I had that lower GI done.

To make it worse, there are forty other boats around us. Nobody's going anywhere. And then, slowly, we realize a horrifying development: we're going backwards. Still full on breeze, still drafty sails, still heeled, but the land is slipping away. Watching each other, forty boats go backward in the current.

Someone decides to take a flyer, right then. He's a Beneteau, like ours. But the skipper's thinking about doing something slick. He turns hard to starboard, heading right for the rocks. See, sometimes the current turns around and goes the good way near the shore - you can actually go with the current like sailing down a river.

And it would have worked, if he hadn't hit that rock.

Nobody saw it, hidden under the water.
But we all heard it. It's the sound of $30,000 of keel repair, right there with a big fiberglass BANG. He stops dead. And slowly, almost pathetically, he limps back, and proceeds to take his place, leaky keel and all, in the same toilet with the rest of us. Sorry about that, chief. See Rule 2.

3. Spinnakers Are Evil, But Evil Wins Races

We've all heard how much I like spinnakers. These big chutes are my sworn enemy, requiring more maintenance and Prozac than a Beverly Hills wife, and I have my suspicions, on good evidence, that they are secretly plotting against me.

But let's be realistic. The only time we made 9.2 knots over the water was with the chute up ('chute' is another name for spinnaker, if you say 'chute' around me instead of 'spinnaker' you get brownie points). You just don't get that kind of nut-punching speed without a spinnaker, and that's why everybody and their mother uses them. UNITY!

So use a spinnaker. Get it ready early, get it rolling as soon as you touch off the windward mark, and fly it all the way home. And give generously to the United Way.

The GPS is squawking - thirty minutes to the finish line. We can't see it for beans; we know there's a finish line out there somewhere, but in the squall that's hitting us, all we can focus on is oh god don't let this boat tip over. And it's all the spinnaker's fault. Bastard.

The spinnaker and I are on speaking terms, after staring at each other for hours, starting at 0030, half past midnight, when it went up after rounding the windward mark, when it looked like a jumbotron-sized Pac-Man ghost flapping in the chalky glare of the steaming light. There, with the spin sheet in my hand, leaning on my elbows, getting some Z's, I decided the spinnaker wasn't so bad after all.

But all that changes in the squall. Rain comes, a gust knocks us down. There's thirty minutes to go, and we're making 9.2 knots. Can we survive? Everyone around us hasn't hit the squall yet. We've got the lead. We decide to dump the spinnaker and go with a heavy-air genoa.

We're safe. The finish line is in sight. My self-satisfied smile, knowing that we don't have to use the hellbeast chute to place well, fades as I look back. Everyone else's chutes are still up. They survived the squall, unhindered, and hauling ass. Unable to do anything about it, and unwilling to slap up the chute again, we watch as Artemis squeezes in past us, toerail dipped in the water, riding their spinnaker all the way to the finish.

I guess evil really does triumph.

Related Tags: sailing, regatta, swiftsure, yacht racing, sailboat, spinnaker

Consumer Hell: A Case of Mistaken Identity

2006-05-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

A week is about as long as I'd like to go without doing a blog post; school has taken most of the writing bug out of my system, but it's the middle of a "week off", so I get to come back to the stage for a second.

And while I'm here, I'll tell you a story.

The Wind-Up
I like to grill in the summer. And I shop for grill accessories at a spa shop. It's weird, but it's one of the mash-ups of business that seems to have worked out just due to proximity. People that grill think about having a pool or spa - people that have a pool think about grilling. Put the two together, and you get barbecue-flavored chlorine tablets, or something.

This place is one of the places that has the business practice of collecting customer data. If you want to buy, you give them your name. And your phone number. And your address. And what they do, see, is they compile your purchases, they track what you buy, then they use that to "target" you for products that they think you might like. They upsell you on your purchase history. Simple enough.

The Pitch
I'm checking out with my purchase, and give him my name. As he's scanning my items, he looks at his terminal and goes:

"How'd that solar heater work out for you?"

He looks at me, expectantly. I look at him. I don't say anything. I can't. Because I don't know what to say.

I never bought a solar heater. I don't even know what a solar heater is.

There's an awkward moment. I realize he's committed a modern error only possible in this incredible age of digital technology.

He's picked the wrong Charles Cox.

The Strike-Out
I never bought a solar heater. He's confused me with another Charles Cox somewhere in the gigantic database of customers that his 1989 two-color terminal calls into at 56k. His purchase data is for someone else.

And as we calmly sweep the issue under the rug, I realize another horror unfolding as I watch his keystrokes.

He's letting the purchase go through. On The Other Charles Cox's account. When The Other Charles Cox walks in, the rep is going to ask him "how those grill pellets worked out."

The awkwardness will continue. Slowly, inexorably, we'll be drawn into the same circle of customer serivce hell, unable to communicate to each other, unable to know anything about each other except what our last purchase was.

"How was that barbecue sauce?"
"Filter unit workin' good?"
"Getting use out of those grill tongs?"
"Did that pH tester help out?"

Cue Edvard Munch's The Scream, and put a chef's hat and swim goggles on him.

The Angry Coach
We'll never escape, we'll never really quite get the point across that there's been a very deep, very crucial, very un-exorcise-able case of mistaken identity somewhere in the system, and nobody will go to the trouble of figuring it out. And they can't. They don't understand their computer system. And even if they did, the system is flawed.

Because we are both Charles Cox. We are keyed into the system based on our name. Either one of us could come up. In a human sense, we are non-deterministic.

Purchase history isn't easily served by cards either, though, so maybe it's more deep than just fixing the primary key. Just look at supermarket "club cards". People I know use my club card number. As a result, tabulated purchase history isn't even accurate. I get special offers for tampons, for God's sake. I didn't buy those. I don't want those. But because of hangers-on on my "purchasing" identity, the supermarket thinks I do.

My take on the future? The purchase history of any individual is IP - marketing data currently owned the company that collected it. Should they? Expect a case of mistaken identity gone Pete Tong (that is to say, gone all wrong) to trigger a move in the direction of hidden purchase history and/or universal "foolproof" consumer identification.

And it's gonna happen when some angry PTA mom gets a special offer in the supermarket for Trojan Make-Her-Scream electro-shock condoms, the fraternity model with twice the herpes-killing virucide. And she's gonna get it right in line, the checker's going to ask her in front of everyone because his boss told him he had to.

Embarassment will force her to picket the White House lawn, and suddenly the issue's going to matter. Until then, I guess I'll just dream of having my own spa; living vicariously through Charles Cox #2's purchases at the spa store. Hope you're enjoying that pool, Charles.

Related Tags: marketing, identity, advertising, identification, club cards, purchasing history

Look Who's Come Crawling Back...

2006-05-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure why I'm subscribed to CreativeHeads.net, but I suppose it was a fallout of the early days of game industry employment, when I felt it necessary to be pretending I was "in touch" with my right-brain side (the type of individuals CreativeHeads is so elegantly seeking to strike recruitment gold on), as a general process of exposing myself (alright, exposing my talents, that's less offensive-sounding) to as many potential employers as possible, even those in California.

Looking at it now, I honestly shudder to think. But I hear Napa isn't bad.

Today, though, I can hardly blame it for bringing me maybe the most interesting news I've seen out of the recruitment sector for a while. Now, funny jobs have come and gone. Designers are an odd lot, with cryptic and misleading job descriptions, as are the bevy of "tools programmers" every house seems to need one of without actually calling him "The Build Guy" and paying him that extra $20k he deserves for keeping the entire studio alive with the Post-It notes he carries around in his head about how the entire content pipeline of the most recent game works.

But this one got me right in my irony bone. Vivendi Universal, the much-battered legal opponent of Valve in my favorite landmark case of Digital Distribution rights, is looking for a Digital Distribution Producer.

I won't linger on it for long - there's some evidence to support that Vivendi Universal has long understood the value of Digital Distribution, so it might not even be ironic in that classic oppressor/oppressed sense - but rather I take it as a sign of the times, a shining - if somewhat self-satisfying - symbol of the coming of digital perestroika for games.

And before you ask, I'm not applying for the job. They're saying it's a job in California. That means it's in Southern California; if it was in Northern California, they would have said so. Northern California is where people drink wine. Southern California is where bank heists and contract killings happen.

...wow. Maybe I've got this backwards. I need to take another trip to L.A.

Related Tags: digital distribution, video games, vivendi universal, valve, steam

How You Know You've Made It Big

2006-05-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

According to my access logs, someone got to my blog by googling "rotate 90 degrees nutsack".

I don't know how you feel about it, but I've finally made the big time. So suck on that, Daily Kos. Bet you aren't Twisted Nutsack Headquarters. Not to everyone, anyway.

Apparently, though, I'm the most google-famous for this blog post.

Something else comes to mind, though. Who was searching for "rotate 90 degrees nutsack"? And why? BMEZINE fan, I guess? Great.

Quartermaster Harbor By Cruiser

2006-05-14T23:05:00.000-07:00

The sailing season is upon us. And while that's appropriate to say, technically, it's also the cruising season. It's the year of the Big Boat.

And I got my first crack at that Big Boat, my new sweetheart thirty-eight footer on Saturday.

Making Quartermaster Harbor from Commencement Bay was just a dream in 2005; and not for lack of gear, and maybe not even wherewithal. I just didn't really think of going anywhere last year: sailing was enough in itself - it was tacking and jibing for the sheer sake of the art, being embedded in a new extension of my limbs and lungs and mind.

But as any good drug goes, you have to switch it up from time to time to keep the buzz fresh. With the new Ericson, there comes the live-aboard-ability and long-range spirit, and that lends itself to the new gestalt of cruising, and that involves making the shift from going nowhere, to going somewhere.

Maybe if the shift from twenty-two feet to thirty-eight feet had happened more gradually, I'd think nothing of it. But yesterday's first sail in the Ericson made things come alive in a new way.

It makes a huge difference to have a destination in mind. Even the concept of speed takes on a different meaning: it never seemed to anyone else, and not even to me at certain points in the daysailer circuit, to be an achievement to make six knots with any means, sail or motor; but in cruising, you quickly realize that parking-lot speeds mean plenty, when the water is the shortest way across the islands of the Puget Sound.

And the weight of the boat, the sheer unimpeded and undeniable mass of the boat brings along a new feeling of immediacy and reality, there's the feeling for me of finally being Captain Of Something, and the colors around become vivid, the adventure starts to take hold in a new, more immediate way.

I've heard from others who've been around enough to know, that the Puget Sound is crap for crusing, and titles like "Gunkholing In The Sound" aren't incredibly reassuring, but from what I saw on Saturday, I'm convinced cruising is good for my soul. I'm going to like it out here.

And so, naturally, I tackle racing next. Coming up Memorial Day Weekend, Swiftsure 2006. Will I make it back alive? It'll be great, don't miss it.

Related Tags: sailing, cruising, puget sound, sailboat

Creating Talent

2006-05-07T13:47:00.000-07:00

Dubner and Levitt, authors of Freakonomics, one of my favorite books, have penned an article in the NYT about a recent discovery by Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, which attempts to answer, "what is the cause of incredible talent?"

According to Ericsson, talent is made, not born. And practice really does make perfect, even if you have very little skill starting out. It also means you had ought to do what you love, regardless of talent level going in, because it's the interest you have in a subject that leads to the deliberate efforts to try to get better, not some genetic predisposition to being "good" at a particular thing.

In short - if you love it, you'll get good at it.

This is huge to me, even though will likely be a million qualifications to the statements made by the research. Check it out.

Article: A Star Is Made

Related Tags: talent, psychology, freakonomics, education

Knock The Boat Over

2006-05-04T08:45:00.000-07:00

I spent yesterday afternoon in 25-knot winds, holding the 38-foot Ericson abeam of four-foot waves in Commencement Bay.

Sometimes the weather just works out; today was a day to test survivability and safety - we gave the reefing system a workout and she held. We had no more than a handful of sail up the stick, but it still felt like the Volvo Ocean Race out there to me.

Add in tugboat wake, and we're in the wet as well as the wind. There's something discreetly pleasurable, almost smug, about being back in harbor at sunset, leisurely washing the salt off the boat, salt that you worked your ass off to spray back as far as you could. I even got some on me. It ain't genteel, but that's not one of the boxes you can check when God cranks up the fan and decides to blow your boat over.

But it held. And sailed with all of the grace I'd want out of my lady, and when the day was over, her three trips back in and out of the slip to test docking maneuverability were completed with not a stitch of complaint. Tough, smart, sexy; this boat is ready for anything.

Screw the forecasters; my summer starts now.

Related Tags: sailing

May Day and Self-Interest

2006-05-01T11:20:00.000-07:00

When we say "never forget" today, it's for once not about 9/11. Catallarchy, via EconLog, has the round-up of blog posts on the dark history of Communism.

Bryan Caplan's post in Catallarchy sums it up for me:

In short, both ideologies [Nazism and Communism] began with the creepy demand that human beings stop being the diverse, self-interested animals that we are, and eagerly jumped to the conclusion that a bloodbath was in order.

Why it is that some societies find it necessary to kill the self-interested spirit with a pickaxe is beyond me; I can see no more in that way of thinking than I can in religious arguments - both speak to hidden truths known only to the highest tier of leadership, unnatural states of being with little or no empirical evidence to support their existence, and shunning of natural competition in worldly pursuits.

Somehow, we gravitate toward these whirling centers of ideological mass, and whole civilizations are sucked up in them and turned out to unified purpose, to live and die under the unilateral self-interest of a central leadership, instead of working toward their own internal goals and desires. Even science can be twisted, as Stalinist Russia saw with Trofim Lysenko's mad race for power declaring the natural competitive state of genetics to be a "bourgeois construct", and insisting that plants don't actually compete for resources, they help each other, as if nature herself had just joined the Communist party.

Count me out. Socialists be damned, the market survives as the world survives, on self-interest, and it will continue. I'm proud to make my selfish contribution, guilt-free, and this May Day, I say to the million splinter causes all around the world that demand the world's pleasures be placed aside to make room for the angry torch of "collaborate-or-die" ideology, that individuality be supplanted by sefless sacrifice to some vague notion of a "greater ideal": suck on my stock options.

Long Live The Market.

Related Tags: communism, capitalism, may day, politics, self-interest, competition, socialism

The Sphinx's Acre

2006-04-30T22:24:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, I went out on Commencement Bay to train in the use of a spinnaker sail, something I've both awaited and dreaded.

The spinnaker, named so by a sort of decayed, simplified version of "Sphinx's Acre", referring to the first ship to fly one, The Sphinx, and its impressive size, is a large, light sail that balloons out in front of the boat, propelling it by both lift and drag forces. In this picture, it is the diversity-aware-pink colorful sail that's taking up 2/3 of the frame.

It is also the most ungainly, picky, finnicky, temperamental son of a bitch piece of equipment I've ever had to work on a boat, and I'm really trying to be nice, here.

Compare and contrast, as they say in school: to work the mainsail, really only one line needs to lead back to the cockpit; with a tiller (or wheel if you're rich and lazy) and a mainsheet, you can steer a boat and keep her in fair winds.

With a spinnaker, there are four lines. Four lines, and they're not even near each other most of the time. It's spaghetti everywhere, all over the deck, like someone had just lost their $9.99 all-you-can eat Italian dinner at Fabrizio's. Sorry about your tie, slick; hospitaliano!

And doing it yourself? Forget it, it takes at least three people to work the thing, another one if you actually want to change your tack and jibe the sail, and by the way, I'd never recommend doing that. I'd recommend you just don't change tack with a spinnaker. Ever. If you want to use the spinnaker, just go in one direction and pray your gods the wind shifts when you want it to.

When you jibe over, you gotta take the pole that runs the spinnaker out of the mast, see, and then while you're holding it and the wind is trying to rip it away from you, you go fishing for one of the lines on the opposite end of the boat, while everybody yells at you and the spinnaker starts deflating like it's date night and it used the generic brand Viagra without checking the expiration date, and then if you do manage to snag the line without losing the pole, you have to do a switcherooski and clip the opposite end of the pole back onto the mast before the spinnaker does a complete Orrin Hatch and all the ladies get bored.

It's a demon, is what I'm telling you, a demon! And it's gonna get us all killed.

With the massive deposits required to charter companies and the special certifications required to fly one of these things and all of the nasty stories I've heard, it's a wonder that anyone that values their life pops one of these things up without alerting the President and NORAD first. But this is part of racing, and racing is just, well, one of those things that people sometimes do when they're bored, or when life's just not edgy enough.

And I'm right there with them, and scared to death. Today's spinnaker class was on a 24' Martin. When we're doing it for real, in Swiftsure 2006, it's going to be on a 43' Beneteau, where the forces are increased by an order of magnitude. Watch that pole, they say; they're still talking about the guy that took a pole to the head when unclipping it and never fully recovered.

But they are very colorful, and that's nice.

Related Tags: sailing, spinnaker, sailboat racing, regatta, swiftsure

In-Game Ads

2006-04-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

Good news for digital distribution, bad news for people that just want to be left alone, Massive, the company responsible for the first wave of in-game ads (made famous by SWAT 4) is being bought by Microsoft.

Considering something had to fill in the gap where publishers were previously forking out the bucks, digital ads are probably as innocuous as you could get. Turns out I wasn't too far off the money with my prediction about a month and a half ago.

In this case, though, the thrill of getting it right is staved off a bit by the reality that we're looking at a grim prospect as oil prices continue to rise. The reality is, what can be shipped electronically will need to go that route soon - it's pure waste shoveling digital content in boxes if we can get wired up and shove it through fiber instead. And that decision is being made now, by several companies - the list of games on Steam continues to grow.

As exposure rises, you can expect game distributors and retailers to attempt a fortress maneuver, even though, as I mentioned before, publishers lost out to developers in Round 1 in the court battle for digital distribution rights. I expect to see something higher-profile, possibly related to violent videogame legislation, which is mostly targeted at retailers.

As a matter of fact, I could see it going like this.

Senate: "Retailers, you have not done your part to keep kids from buying violent video games."
Retailers: "But what about those evil DIGITALLY DISTRIBUTED GAMES? Anybody can just log on to the Internet and buy them! Why aren't you cracking down on them?"

And just like that, the retailers' fortress is the whole of the legislative hoorah about "saving kids" from violence in video games, with digital distributors like Steam playing the evil Gary Oldman part.

Well, it won't last, even if there'll be some pain in there. Digital distribution is lower cost of goods, faster to market, almost zero manufacturing errors. At least on the PC side we're saying goodbye to boxed games, and soon. Retailers aren't gonna like this.

Related Tags: digital distribution, advertising, violent video games, microsoft, in-game ads

BVI: The Movie!

2006-04-27T08:10:00.000-07:00

Well, maybe it's been a while, but thanks to JumpCut via TechCrunch, I've finally gotten my British Virgin Islands sailing trip masterpiece out on the web.

http://www.jumpcut.com/view?id=85CD21BED55C11DA963E4A6427899F31

It's a 5-minute opus spanning 130 nautical miles in one of the most beautiful places in all the world. Get on it, and leave some comments!

Related Tags: sailing, vacation, bvi, movie, jumpcut

The Value of Royalty: Sealand

2006-04-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

Get a Lordship Today, they say.

Wow. 67% off Sealand royal noble titles. The little principality that could is holding a blowout sale; probably because that crap with HavenCo didn't turn out quite the way they wanted. See the "Mea Culpa" Defcon 11 briefing from a former HavenCo employee.

Turns out Prince Michael was too busy harvesting sea ferns, and the business of hosting server racks on broadcast fiber from an old WW2 floating defense platform tanked. Big surprise. It's great fiction - Stephenson apparently took a page from the HavenCo book for Cryptonomicon - but business-wise, I guess it's not making sense to try to run a country - or a data haven - from anywhere where its residents arrive by winch.

Never heard of Sealand? Neither did I, until today. It's been more or less off and on, with respect to modern times; its image only recently revitalized with offshore web hosting getting the usual seasonal boost ala Christmas Island domains. Its last claim to fame was being one of the handful of pirate radio stations operating in Maunsell Forts in the 60's, probably just spewing out endless loops of "Ferry Cross The Mersey" (think of Moby on endless repeat, you'll see how old it'd get) - I guess you can thank Rotten.com for providing me the initial link.

Sealand's Official Site - oh look, they couldn't get a .gov domain. Be sure to read Wikipedia's article on Sealand if nothing else. Pirate radio, dragooning of the British government, hostage taking and air assaults, all on the two-legged sunken fort sitting on a sandbar just off Felixstowe. And I thought happy slapping was the most action the UK ever saw.

Anyway, lordship's cheap - only about $35.18 if you act now.

Tags: datahaven sealand uk merseybeat offshore hosting

Thermite Thermite Thermite

2006-04-21T14:46:00.000-07:00

YES.

This beats the crap out of Beakman's World. And Bill Nye. Sorry guys; I know, liability and all, but we're big kids now. We want thermite.

Digital Music Fortresses, The Sum of The Parts

2006-04-20T21:00:00.000-07:00

From the New York Post, via Techdirt.

Jobs isn't budging on the price of songs. And why should he? Oh, the execs bitch: "Where in life does the retailer set the price of the content?"

Right here, pal. In the future. I remember a similar argument coming up when Sega Sports broke the seal on the scalp-tastic pricing arrangements for console games, pricing ESPN 2K5 at $20, instead of the usual $50.

Did EA respond in kind? No. At least, not immediately. They didn't lower their price to what the market would pay. Instead, they tried to build a fortress. They circled the wagons and cut a deal with the NFL for a five-year exclusive contract, cutting Sega out of the loop entirely.

The record companies don't have this potential. In this case, their competition is their distributor - they're having problems rallying enough power to really ramrod a variable pricing plan through Jobs. But I know they're thinking it. I know it's on every mind. When the attacker attacks, the reaction is the same. Defend. They want to build a fortress.

When they say "variable pricing", they mean driving up the cost of popular songs and (maybe) lowering the cost of unpopular ones. They're hoping to maintain solvency by cutting into the new song-based market to get out the same price as before.

If Jobs has put more atomic control of consumer choice in the hands of said consumers, and there isn't a supply-side shortage of music, perhaps variable pricing does make sense. But for now, at least, until the record companies are settled enough to realize the true value of music isn't some variant of $14.99 to $17.99, Jobs would do well to keep his hand on the lever.

Related Tags: music, ipod, apple, digital distribution

Drowning In Music, We May Turn To Ambient

2006-04-12T10:28:00.000-07:00

An essay in Wired magazine via SmartMobs sets the tone of the battle.

" . . . America is drowning in sanctioned music -- an obligatory orchestration cramming every inch of public space."

The success of the iPod has to be seen against this backdrop. There's good news and bad news: IPods are both adding to the flood of music, and protecting us from it. Having an iPod means you can mask the assault of other people's bad music by playing your own good music over it, privately.

We've been exposed to it for years. Shopping music, elevator music, airport music...they probably play the "Bad Boys" theme from Cops when you're sitting in a jail cell, they just play it over and over again.

I'm not honestly sure what scientist came up with the idea that music would be good for the gestalt of the in-crowd consumption experience; certainly for stores to begin playing music there had to have been at least the scent of some distant profit. And, of course, there were certain public safety concerns, such as in the case of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, played at New York's LaGuardia Airport.

Now look at these liner notes.

The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak.

The 50's. And we've been using it as the reliable butt for all of our Music and The Establishment jokes ever since. But this was the beginning of the music-as-environment push, and it's been getting louder and uglier ever since. We're awash in it, and silence is becoming more and more of a commodity.

People like myself and VBRWE (well, one of them anyway) are seeing ambient for what it could be. A substitute for silence. I'm not joking around. Could it be that environmental, ambient music of the much-ridiculed Muzak variety will simply become the new aural negative-space?

You heard me. Muzak started off laughed at, and now it may well be the only thing that's got the chutzpah to fill in where silence is so utterly failing.

Could it be history is coming around in an ironic twist? Don't say it hasn't happened before.

The catch is - this stuff was meant to be played at a low volume. With Pete Townshend already warning us to turn our iPods down, we're risking life and limb to get ambient music up to the volume we need it to be to block out all the other crappy music that's around us.

Not only is it ruining the original meaning of ambient to play it that loud, but ambient is so normally filled with silence and non-disruptive sounds, that it still loses against anything from System of A Down or Evanescence if they're within 20 yards.

But, it beats out silence and room tone, which die by definition when sound is introduced. In fact, I see a particular scenario occuring when you're in an apartment next to a guy who has his music just loud enough so you can hear it. Ambient will come to the rescue, replacing the anguish-filled silence waiting for the next bolt-action guitar twang to come creeping through the drywall, with pleasing environmental sound, almost reminding you what silence used to be like.

And that's good, because you're not going to remember what silence sounds like. As the circles of available silence begin to close tighter, with living spaces shoring up closer and always-on broadcast music players cranking out loads of high-dB guitar and drums, silence will be the first thing to go. In its wake, Muzak may well rise again.

Do yourself a favor, get acquainted early. Here's Music for Airports.

Filed in: ambient, muzak, music, ipod

Blog Ad Revenues

2006-04-07T17:20:00.000-07:00

"A thing is worth whatever the buyer will pay for it."
- Pubilius Syrus, First Century, BC

In following up on the conversation of TV ad revenues dropping a bit, I figured we might as well look at what advertisers are willing to pay for ad revenue on blogs, since that's going to be a good lead onto what the hot topics are in blogs.

Where are people going to get seen, and what are they paying for the privilege? Here are the top ten groups from BlogAds.com (numbers have changed a bit since I made this table), ordered by ad cost:

Blog Group Name	Category	Ad Cost	Page Views
PhD Pontificators (26)	Science	$10,245.00	6485686
Liberal Blog Advertising Network (74)	Politics	$8,606.00	12247666
Gossip Blogs (41)	Gossip	$3,596.00	13815760
Political Insider Ad Network (41)	Politics	$2,922.50	3322795
Conservative Blog Advertising Network (76)	Politics	$2,888.00	3049545
Hollywood Blog Ads (39)	Gossip	$2,876.00	11476662
Beltway Bloggers (12)	Politics	$2,467.50	2503320
Gothamist blogs (10)	New York	$2,314.00	841962
BlogAds Gadget Network (43)	Technology	$2,130.00	2429198
TVblogs Ad Network (18)	TV	$1,809.00	4453076
New York City blogs (41)	New York	$1,691.00	3047090
Baseball Blogosphere (43)	Sports	$1,685.00	2186334
Gay Blogads (46)	Gay	$1,559.99	4398774
The Philly Ad Network (26)	Philadelphia	$1,480.00	1225270
Environment and Sustainability (22)	Technology	$1,469.00	1632726
Music Blog Network (24)	Music	$1,310.00	1334023
Foodblog Ad Network (24)	Food	$1,200.00	392866

So, you want the money? You want the page views? Gossip and Politics. Being in New York doesn't hurt, either.

What's at the bottom?

Business Blogs (1)	Business	$25.00	11256

At least for the business side, I guess that goes a way toward WP's recent Blogging Is Dead expose.

Customer Service Trends and Eliza

2006-04-07T12:56:00.000-07:00

Companies have phone customer service covered. They're outsourcing it, coupling it with sales pitches, doing everything they can to seal that hole. It's a money sink and companies are guilted into providing it.

There's a move for "Live Chat" services but the most expensive part of the process is the human on the other end. They may be cutting and pasting from canned responses to try to speed the chat, but ultimately they still want $12/hour. You want as few of those people around as possible.

So, while listening to Live Chat at Cingular, I started to wonder, what about Eliza? Remember that old AI conversation engine? If you did a quick Pareto on your biggest customer service issues couldn't you come up with two or three common canons that are similar?

Using more sophisticated versions of Eliza (I mean, obviously, Eliza was a '66 Rogerian psychotherapist joke), I thought, you could essentially train AI to respond to common requests, like RMA numbers, cell phone minutes checks, and so on, and then you'd train it to respond to growing customer frustration. Repeated questions, number of exclamation marks used by the customer, whatever. Heuristics all over the place.

And when the frustration reaches a peak, the system throws a flag, an actual person is routed to the chat, given a quick recap, and steps into assist until the chat can end or be re-handed to the AI.

Avatars could be used with text-to-speech to drive the thing's "personable" meter up, like these, if they weren't so creepy.

And then, I saw this. BOTizen. Customer service in a box. Read the Live Chat features. Canned responses. Typing indicators. Keyword storage. Now it's not AI-handoff but it's close. It's on the way. Customer service out, AI in.

And check out the candy striper rave chick avatar; that's what we all want, some ecstacy-popping GHB freak handling my return claim. But that's the amazing thing about the Internet, it's all make believe, with your money.

Semiotics, Celebrities Eating, and Thomas Dolby (Again!)

2006-04-06T12:33:00.000-07:00

Today's Greatest Hits:

From Metafilter, two excellent web essays from Thomas Streeter and Co. at the University of Vermont on the use of semiotic concepts in advertising and their interactions with human psychology (forgive the graphics): Semiotics and Ads and The Male Gaze.

Then, see Celebrities Eating. Two months from now, just 60 days, there'll be porn about this. I don't know how, I don't know who, and seriously, I don't know why. But this is too much of a cultural-fusion-phobic-cesspool; it'll be almost as inevitable as Potter/Buffy/Star Trek/West Wing slash fanfiction was.

Finally, and though I hesitate to put him right after a porn bullet point, one of my favorite artists has returned! Thomas Dolby, after 15 years hiatus, is back with a new album. And, if you can peep this, he's got a blog. A blog, by Thomas Dolby. Are you receiving me?

I'll have more substance later.

Political Packets - Capturing Marginal Votes

2006-04-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

From Risk Markets and Politics:

Harold Ickes' plans to create a database of (potential) Democratic voters, replete with details that will allow for targeted messages to marginal voters, a practice in which the GOP had taken the lead. There is some controversy among Democrats about the project, as Ickes, an adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton, is forming a private company (backed by George Soros) to develop the database.

From conversations I've had with Geli and Mike recently along these same lines, I continue to see further shaving down of political interest lines into market "segments". Much like sorting mail into slots for sending, these segments will further refine individual interest groups for targeted political advocacy.

And why not? Discrimination along interest lines allows the biggest bang for the buck. Why send high-color glossy expensive mass mailings to everyone when only 2% will respond? Nail the 2% and nail them hard.

Concerning the increasing waves of slacktivism present in the common man's brush with politics (see Snopes article on Internet Petitions), I see the continuation and further removal of the individual from the political process as more and more targeted political "products", such as worthless e-petitions, gain ground.

Automated letter-writing to congresspeople through MoveOn.org and other sites is a little taste of the future; consume this service, instead of actually participating, get the same warm fuzzy, a special interest gets your advocacy. Further obfuscation into political products that either tie you to or co-opt your vote is not far behind. We're not talking doomsday here, we're just talking synthesis of politics and markets.

Retirement Feelings and Retirement Realities Clash

2006-04-04T13:55:00.000-07:00

Two articles from MSNBC stood out today.

"Workers have retirement ‘overconfidence’", said one. The other, said "More Americans worry about retirement".

The poll results from each squared off the conflicting feelings Americans have about retirement:

Article 1:

"90% of Americans say they worry how well prepared they are for retirement..."

Article 2:

"About 68% of workers are confident about having adequate funds for a comfortable retirement..."

Wait a minute. 90% are worried, and yet 68% are confident? Sample size and push/pull logic aside, this is one confused nation. Are you confident, or are you worried? Do you have the money, or don't you have the money?

So let's take a look. Do they have the money?

More than half of all workers say they’ve saved less than $25,000 toward retirement, according to the Washington, D.C., based research group. Even among workers 55 and older, more than four in 10 have retirement savings under $25,000.

No, they don't have the money.

If you're retiring when you're 65, and you have $25,000 saved, assuming you'll live another ten years, that gives you $2500 of income per year. Yes, interest will bump that figure up a bit, but not by any order of magnitude.

Do you think you can live on $200 a month? If you manage to hit the trendline and live the current average of 78 years instead of 75, it's even worse: A little over $1900 a year, that's $160 a month. That's not gonna buy you much of that jello whipped cream dessert stuff at the local JJ North's, even on senior discount night.

What a massive hole we have to plug here. When this current 55-and-over crowd decides to cash in their chips there'll have to be a tremendous public outpouring from the already overtaxed social security system to keep them solvent, leaving the next wave hurting even more for public funding of their trips to the coast, RVs, and lunches at Old Country Buffet. When is this going to change?

...people would save more if they took the time to project what their costs in retirement are likely to be. But just 42 percent of workers say they’ve done such a calculation.

Not any time soon, apparently.

Excellent Counter-Terrorist/Spec Ops Artwork

2006-04-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

You gotta see this.

http://nico5608.skyblog.com/

This guy is talented. Holy crap. Browse through and see his drawings, from sketch to shading. Featured are pencil drawings of US Marines, GIGN, SWAT, RAID officers - this guy is the next Dick Kramer.

Sidenote: "Good Cover" from Dick Kramer features an Oldsmobile Intrigue - that's my car! Weird.

TV, Sunny Side Down

2006-04-02T11:50:00.000-07:00

Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
Thomas A. Edison

Okay, format of TV. Gone, right? Everyone's buying The Sopranos on DVD, serialized formats stuffed onto disc are kicking the crap out of broadcast TV. Still, the decline may well be a wash - the major upfront indicator we have announced only a moderate downtick: according to 360 View channeling WSJ:

After years of increases, major advertisers bought approximately $9.3 billion in 2005 vs. $9.5 in 2004’s upfront market.

But, we've also got mobile TV operators, Google selling TV episodes, iTunes selling TV, now whether these things come with the same grandfathered advertising that was shown in the original broadcast versions, I don't know. But it stands to reason that the sovereignty of advertisers in episodes isn't for sure - I mean, the advertisers cut the deals with the networks, not the individual shows, right? It's not like you see an episode of CSI on NBC in Seattle and get an advertisement for Carl's Jr. in Texas.

Still, it's a question I wonder about. Who gets advertising rights to rehashed TV episodes on Google and otherwise? Okay, I digress.

So I'm seeing this in my mind's eye. No longer is the experience of TV "push" technology the standardbearer for digital entertainment. Did you ever get that feeling? Fewer people are going to theaters. Advertising money in TV is beginning to drop. Nobody's sitting still long enough to let the message get injected into their brainstems. They aren't going to wait until 8PM/7PM Eastern to see PrimeTimeRehashedCrimeDramaWithThatOneGuy(tm) anymore.

They are plugging in as "pull" technology consumers. When they want it, they'll download it, they'll watch it, thank you very much.

How do I see this impacting programs? More independent studios, lower-budget "thirty-second" pilots, consolidation of franchises into few "super-genres", now currently dominated by the Crime genre, CSI/NCIS/Law And Order.

It wouldn't surprise me at all for pilot episodes to be arranged in five-to-fifteen-minute blocks (hey, sounds like the five-minute space again) to be downloaded and voted on by mobile watchers, and continued only on implicit vote of the downloading populace. Shows will come and go even faster than before. One hit wonders, no-hit blunders, and the Next Big Show will all go through the same trial by fire on the "pull" circuit, all vying for a slice of that little tiny screen on your video iPod.

It'll be like Survivor, only for real, with the big networks farming pilots out to little studios since they won't take the big risk on themselves with their big talent when they could farm it out to desperate drama graduate students for peanuts and tell them, "well, that's the business".

And you can kiss Nielsen ratings goodbye. Thank God for the future.

Win One, Lose Two

2006-03-31T13:12:00.000-08:00

I'm pissed off. You know why? Jonestown.

Remember Jonestown, November 18th, 1978.

I'm listening to an audio recording of the final speech of Reverend Jim Jones, the leader of the People's Temple, advocating mass suicide of the members of Jonestown. 913 dead, including 276 children.

An audio recorder was under Jones' chair in the Jonestown compound, and the tape was running on that fateful day.

Listen to it Here.

"You'll regret this very day if you don't die. The best testimony I can make is to leave this goddamned world."

Jones slams a woman for expressing her feelings of independence. Jones utilizes the hatred and pride of the crowd. Jones calls attention to an invisible, ultimate enemy, "parachuting in" to massacre everyone. Jones utilizes folk Marxism, creating the duality of the oppressors and oppressed. He utilizes racism. He orders the killing of a congressman visiting there and pretends he saw the killing prophetically.

"Do you know who walked out of here today? Mostly white people."

He utilizes people's fear for their children.

"If we give them our children, our children will suffer forever."

It is successful.

"If you're telling us we need to give our lives now, we're ready."

913 dead. I hear, on the tape, the buckets of Flavor Aid clanging as they bring it out.

"Please get the medication, it's simple, there's no convulsions, the GDF is coming."

I want to say, "this can't be". I can hear the children in the background. Did people do this? Did they sit there listening to this madman? They did.

"Can we hasten it up with this medication? They're not crying out of pain, there's just a little bitter taste."

Just a little bitter taste. This is madness. How can we go on listening to madmen - how long do we fool ourselves into thinking that what we want to see appears in front of us?

There's coughing on the tape. Crying. Fifteen minutes of tape left. There's gospel music run at slow speed in the background. It sounds demonic.

"I'm sure they'll pay for it, they'll pay for it, they brought this upon us."

Sure they will. He told people everything they wanted to hear. And people bought it. And people buy it every day from every type of con artist imaginable.

The kids are dying from the cyanide poison on the tape. They're crying. Just a little bitter taste. Everyone's listening to the madman, telling them everything they want to hear, and now everyone's drinking cyanide and killing themselves.

This can't be, but it is. I hear a little more of what people are capable of.

"If you knew what was ahead of you, you would be glad to be stepping over tonight."

The fear of the future. The world is so much worse, they say. We'd rather kill ourselves than face it? Pardon my French, but fuck these people. Fuck these con artists that tell us what the easy answer is.

"Who has the vat, the vat with the green C. Bring it here so the adults can begin."

There's just music now, slowed down to valium-speed. Everyone's dead. Why can't we understand ourselves to know when we're being fed this garbage? Why are we so hopeless as to need it?

When are we going to accept reality for what it is and stop being upset and hurt by it so much that we decide to give in at the sugar-coated killing orders of a psychotic?

If I can ask for one thing, I ask for your skepticism. It has kept us all alive, and I hope that it ticks on in your mind, the unwavering timekeeper that asserts that you are your own individual, free to view the world as interactions based in a reality, sovereign, subservient to none, and owned by nobody.

BY NOBODY.
YOU'RE ALIVE. THAT'S ALL THERE IS.
STOP HOPING AND FIGHT, GODDAMNIT.

Learn more about Jonestown here.

The British Virgin Islands

2006-03-29T16:05:00.000-08:00

I've got the whirlies - my body still thinks it's on a boat. If I take a shower, I want to fall over. If I try to brush my teeth, I lean back and forth in the mirror.

My body doesn't want to believe it's home. It doesn't want to be back on land. I don't blame it. It was the most unbelievable vacation I've ever had. The British Virgin Islands is still, for all our attempts to civilize, capitalize, and bastardize it, one of the most beautiful places I've ever been.

Weather was smashing, temperatures in the high 80s, mostly sunny, trade winds hollowing through the islands at a steady 15 knots from the east. It caught our sails every day without fail, and we made no less than 4 knots of headway on our South African-built Voyages 440, a catamaran with ample living space and sturdy construction.

I wouldn't call her a performer - she can sail, at best, 45 degrees off the wind, and could only give us 7 knots maximum speed. Her twin diesels, that provided crucial maneuvering in tight harbors, hardly made up for her sluggish turn radius and somewhat quirky steering.

But let's not talk technical details. Go get on these pictures and see the amazing sights we saw. See images from Anegada, Sandy Spit, The Baths at Virgin Gorda, and other beautiful destinations in the BVI. I'll be adding comments to each of the photos as the evening goes on, so keep checking back on this photo set!

See The BVI - Link to Flickr Gallery