Category: Weblog

Change

As I wander around the net aimlessly, I see lots of cool things.

Some of these things are cool in a way that most would not think cool, like this and that.

There are plenty of things like Homestar Runner that everyone should laugh at heartily.

I see other weblog sites that have style like geekychick.net and brassjarproject.com.

When I look at Cruft it lacks the same kinda style. Not that I want to copy those sites. This page looks a little locked into the whole late 90s IE vs. Netscape era when the last vocal minority of pre-WWW internet users still held back the relentless assault of Flash and CSS.

I checked and the current cruft page has been basically the same for 2 1/2 years.

I guess I still believe in Jakob Nielsen’s ideas on usability, but it’s so fucking boring sometimes. I don’t like to be fucking boring.

The time for change has come.

I don’t know exactly what, but the wheels are in motion. It will probably involve the cruftbox.com domain I’ve had waiting in the wings for a while.

Stay tuned.

NWN

I played multiplayer Neverwinter Nights last night. I met up with a group of Yoshi’s friends and we started playing on some server they knew of somewhere. We were all basically clueless as to what to do in multiplayer.

We found our way into the jail level and started killing. I could tell that most of them were EQ players since the wanted someone to ‘pull’ the monsters. We UO players never developed the ‘pull’ technique because it doesn’t work so well in a isometric perspective game. In the NWN perspective, you have a good view of your surroundings and can see who’s inbound from every side. In first person perspective games like EQ & DaoC, you can’t see what’s behind you easily, so everyone worries about pulling from the right direction.

Another factor is that the monsters typically cannot be soloed in EQ. In NWN, most of the low level monsters are easily soloed, but tend to attack in groups. UO players would have designated two players to the attack of the most powerful monster straightaway, while the rest of the group cleared the low level monsters and tossed heals.

After a while, the server simply evaporated. My wicked cool deer hat was GONE! Earlier, I had brought a NWN server on the girls computer. It’s a 1GHz box, so in dedicated mode it’s fine for running a server. It’s called “The Kitty Server”, since it runs on the girl’s Kitty server. Everyone logged into the server and we started to play. I had to boot a random player that was killing all the NPCs and turning everyone evil. Muah-ha-ha-ha, the power of the console…

Enough, it’s time to head to work…

Cheap Camera

I saw that there was a $10 digital camera on sale at OfficeMax today.

You can see the camera here.

There’s a OfficeMax nearby and I called and indeed they had them in stock. They are $15 with a $5 mail-in rebate.

At lunch, I headed out with Brad and Yoshi in search of this ‘too good to be true’ deal.

I bought two. Yoshi bought one.

They are basically webcams that allow you to take up to 27 320×240 pixel images without being connected to the computer.

Here are the images. I converted the 225k bmps to jpgs for web viewing. There is no degradation in quality from this conversion.

We tested webcam mode and it works as well.  So if you want a cheap webcam, this may be your answer.

Minority Report

After reading a few more reviews about Minority Report this morning, I am firmly convinced that America is being drugged.

People seem to think this is a “great” movie.

Unless I passed out and missed 20 minutes of the film where are the plot flaws were fixed, I can’t see why people thnk this was so great. Cool special effects, but the story lets me down.

The long hike

I wrote up yesterday’s geocaching adventure in the usual story form.

My legs are quite sore today. I need to exercise more if I’m going to do this regularly. Here’s a view from near the top.

Last night, I saw Minority Report with Len. It was OK, but it doesn’t deserve the praise it’s getting from critics. Cool special effects are great, but a plot with huge holes in it is less than I expect from Mr. Spielberg.

Game or Reality

It’s just after 7PM and I’m still at work. I’m done with what I needed to do, but I’m in no hurry since Michele and the girls are out of town.

I got a little stressed at work today over part of our budgeting process. In normal person speak what it means is that the comapny plans out how much money we are going to spend next year. Seems simple, but it’s not.

I routinely deal with plans and projects that involve millions of dollars. Projects that are under $100,000 aren’t scrutinized heavily. We spend around a million dollars a day in just my part of Disney. The money takes on a unreal feel. It’s like a game.

In private life, the difference between $50 and $150 is huge in my purchasing decision. At work, money flows out like water. I regularly sign invoices for $10,000. Today I signed for a $30,000 piece of software. I gave it no more thought than most people would give the bill at dinner.

We need it, we got the money, buy it.

But when you stop for a second and consider what that kind of money would buy in ‘private life’, it boggles the mind. $30,000 would buy Michele the new Volvo she’s been eyeing. As it is, it will probably take 5 years to pay off a new car.

It’s a strange disconnect with reality. The money doesn’t seem real. It’s a strange game.

Today we got delivery of a few boxes of hardware. Sitting on the loading dock was around $250,000 worth of gear. That’s a fucking entire house sitting outside waiting for us to wheel it inside.

Everything inside the corporation seems like a game. There are rules. There are winners and losers. And most amazingly, there is the rejection of reality. People make decisions based on not what is the best idea, but based on the politics of the company and looking good. For all the financial analysis we do, it’s basically ignored in large part.

The company will issue cost cutting edicts that lower morale and productivity over trivial things like “No doughnuts on Fridays!” while at the same time losing $35 million dollars on a film that any thrid grader could have told them would suck. How many doughnuts do we have to forgo to pay off the decision to make a bad movie?

It’s simply not reality.