Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot, himself a chess master, confirmed this notion in 1938, when he took advantage of the staging of a great international tournament in Holland to compare average and strong players with the world’s leading grandmasters. One way he did so was to ask the players to describe their thoughts as they examined a position taken from a tournament game. He found that although experts–the class just below master–did analyze considerably more possibilities than the very weak players, there was little further increase in analysis as playing strength rose to the master and grandmaster levels. The better players did not examine more possibilities, only better ones

Chess memory was thus shown to be even more specific than it had seemed, being tuned not merely to the game itself but to typical chess positions. These experiments corroborated earlier studies that had demonstrated convincingly that ability in one area tends not to transfer to another. American psychologist Edward Thorndike first noted this lack of transference over a century ago, when he showed that the study of Latin, for instance, did not improve command of English and that geometric proofs do not teach the use of logic in daily life.

Even so, there were difficulties with chunking theory. It could not fully explain some aspects of memory, such as the ability of experts to perform their feats while being distracted (a favorite tactic in the study of memory). K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University and Charness argued that there must be some other mechanism that enables experts to employ long-term memory as if it, too, were a scratch pad. Says Ericsson: “The mere demonstration that highly skilled players can play at almost their normal strength under blindfold conditions is almost impossible for chunking theory to explain because you have to know the position, then you have to explore it in your memory.”

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but “effortful study,” which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player’s progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

Although nobody has yet been able to predict who will become a great expert in any field, a notable experiment has shown the possibility of deliberately creating one. L�szl� Polg�r, an educator in Hungary, homeschooled his three daughters in chess, assigning as much as six hours of work a day, producing one international master and two grandmasters–the strongest chess-playing siblings in history. The youngest Polg�r, 30-year-old Judit, is now ranked 14th in the world.

䷂ - U+4DC2 HEXAGRAM FOR DIFFICULTY AT THE BEGINNING

bad start.

Most recent first, my sister is really sick. If you know her, send her some love. I just flew back from Michigan for a visit. If you need her info let me know. Recently enough before this we went to Phoenix to visit our cousins and I learned how hot that city is. If you live there, I don’t understand you.

As far as music, I went to coachella with my pal Gabe (of sonicliving.com fame, you should check the site and sign up so we can go to concerts together!) and saw Aphex Twin, Kraftwerk, Portishead, Prince, Chromeo, and Justice (just to name the headliners). I have a crazy story about crashing an afterparty, ask me about it sometime. More recently I went to the Download festival and enjoyed it (especially Cut / Copy) even though it looked to be really under-sold. I also saw People Under The Stairs and Jamie Lidell with James Pants who are really great live, and Midnight Juggernauts who despite having one of the best albums of the year really aren’t all that good live. (They really need electronic drums and another keyboardist to get that sound live - maybe next tour?) I’m also making music again, check out Judicious Hax for a DJ mix, I’ve got another I’ve been trying to finish up since March.

As far as work, I don’t have much to elaborate on past the official Second Life blog. Doing quite a bit of survey research on certain distributed computing issues, and looking hard at what we have and how to take it to the next level along with my lovely infrastructure compatriots. I wish I were smarter! PHP is irritating to me, so if you know anything about making that fast or less irritating, I’m all ears. And let me get it out of the way: yes, the answer is python. Ha ha. Now, anything more practical would be nice. In other subjects, the CMake branch is done and out there, and it seems most ppl like it once they get over the initial learning curve. If you’re having any issues, let us know!

Other misc personal details that I never blog about… I’m about to move, from lower haight to the mission. It’s an interesting living situation, too. I’ve learned that black licorice from the right place just plain rules. The new Jewish Contemporary Museum is pretty rad, the William Steig exhibit opened my eyes more to him. Bay to Breakers is the kind of thing that makes me happy to live here. I’ve otherwise made a ton of pals, and hope to make more in the near future. There’s plenty more in the inane detail dept. (and the too-personal dept. but I digress) so you’ll just have to ask me when you see me next. Until then!

In Ubuntu 07-10 64-bit (call me old fashioned, or starved for time) installing the flashplugin-nonfree package installs the actual executable shared library into /var/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so. I’m not one who advises fucking with files automatically installed by packages, but you need to for this.

Note: the following is 64-bit specific. Do not run this on regular 32-bit ubuntu. As usual, you need to change the instructions to match your system. If you are not running 64-bit Ubuntu 7-10 this could possibly seriously fuck up your computer. Know your commands, don’t blindly follow the internets.

• Get the flash 10 beta from here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/ (found from the adobe blog Penguin SWF)
• expand the download (durr) (tar xzf flashplayer10_install_linux_051508.tar.gz or something)
• cd install_flash_player_10_linux
• nspluginwrapper -i ``pwd``/libflashplayer.so
• mv /home/poppy/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so ./
• sudo cp npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /var/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/npwrapper.libflashplayer.10-051508.so
• pushd /var/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/
• sudo mv /var/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /var/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/npwrapper.libflashplayer.9.0.124.so
• sudo ln -s npwrapper.libflashplayer.10-051508.so npwrapper.libflashplayer.so
• to revert to flash 9, simply sudo ln -sf npwrapper.libflashplayer.9.0.124.so npwrapper.libflashplayer.so

Now you can enjoy Elzhi, the new sebastiAn track “Motor” on Ed Banger(not on his own page, no idea why), that catchy new track beeper from Sinden, the octopus project, AND MORE!

NOTE: yes, it still dies sometimes. ;_;

sidenote, yes, i know I need to change the stylesheet for bullets and justification. time bucket.

• Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy.
• Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us.
• Lesson #3: There’s something beyond one’s self.
• Lesson #4: Maximize Efficiency.
• Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
• Lesson #6: Get the data.
• Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
• Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
• Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
• Lesson #10: Never say never.
• Lesson #11: You can’t change human nature.

Spidery Ha.

Torley is the famous Linden
He's the one that does the blog
Robla works in management
He's just another Linden cog
Meta is the data cruncher
for the common metrics team
Poppy Linden finds the bugs
that cause us residents to scream

Pathfinder sends his snapshots
to his famous Flickr page
Mia rounds up volunteers
who do good work but don't get paid
Chiyo Linden is Japanese
we all call her Chiyo-chan
Colossus works with Jesse
keeping live music going strong

Brad is making Windlight
to turn the weather on and off
Bridie helps to fix the grid
when it starts to hack and cough
Elle is the french Linden
she's the one I'd like to meet
Blue Linden is famous
for the avatars that look so neat

He's also known as Cyan Linden
on the teen grid

Frontier's techy articles
I can never understand
Ginsu made the final call
on who or what got permabanned
Catherine's gift at marketing
helps Linden Lab stay in the press
Steve makes the SL Viewer
so Second Life will looks its best
Phoenix works on open source
for which he gets a lot of grief
Harry's making help search better
that should give us all relief
Cory's Linden Scripting Language
is what our world is based upon
but Philip Linden had the vision
so he's the one that ends this song

Happy purim, easter, equinox, all that.

Yeah.

Anyhow, rsync -c is what you want. This does a checksum everytime regardless of timestamp. A word of caution though: it takes forever. However, my 80GB cache of corrupted MP3s are thanking me.

Our Terayon cable modem basically sucked, dropping the connection and requiring a reboot about once a day. This is super awesome if you and your roommate are on vacation and you want to get to your home server for some reason. I called and complained about it and Comcast sent a tech to deliver a new Motorola modem within a day, and gave a $20 credit to boot. This is the first time I had dealt with Comcast and not wanted to pull my eyes out. (The story of 4 weeks of calling them to get internet at my last place is for another time)

The modem is only half the problem. I’m dealing with mail routing and money online right now and half of the pages I hit aren’t loading. I want to crap my pants. This is not the “the connection kinda works” time. Traffic hops around to a few routers before getting to The Internet At Large, and unfortunately one of those routers is currently puking its guts out.

poppy@vanburen:~$ mtr --report panel.dreamhost.com
HOST: vanburen                    Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1. 192.168.10.1                  0.0%    10    0.5   0.5   0.5   0.8   0.1
  2. ???                          100.0    10    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
  3. ge-1-6-ur01.sf19th.ca.sfba.c  0.0%    10   12.2   9.7   8.6  12.2   1.2
  4. te-9-1-ur02.sf19th.ca.sfba.c 10.0%    10    9.5  10.1   7.7  12.6   1.8
  5. te-9-1-ur01.sfgeary.ca.sfba.  0.0%    10   10.3  10.1   8.3  15.0   2.4
  6. te-9-1-ur02.sfgeary.ca.sfba.  0.0%    10    9.2  10.5   8.2  16.3   2.4
  7. te-9-3-ur01.sfpine.ca.sfba.c 10.0%    10    8.0   9.9   8.0  12.3   1.2
  8. te-9-3-ur02.sfpine.ca.sfba.c 20.0%    10   10.1  12.9   8.8  20.0   4.3
  9. pos-0-7-0-0-ar01.oakland.ca. 70.0%    10    9.7  10.2   9.7  10.6   0.5
 10. pos-0-15-0-0-cr01.sacramento 10.0%    10   13.8  15.6  12.4  26.8   4.5
 11. COMCAST-IP-SERVICES-LLC.TenG  0.0%    10   16.9  17.5  15.3  27.0   3.4
 12. TenGigabitEthernet7-1.ar1.sn  0.0%    10   16.9  16.1  13.4  22.9   3.1
 13. 64.209.105.26                 0.0%    10   22.6  23.8  21.4  29.5   2.7
 14. panel.dreamhost.com           0.0%    10   26.9  24.1  22.3  27.3   2.0

Hop #9’s packet loss is the one to look at. Somewhere in Oakland CA there is a router lying prone, waiting for the reaper. So I called Comcast, expecting some of this newfound awesomeness.

My first call went to some loud, squelchy bit-bucket. I should have taken that as an omen. The second call got routed to a phone operator who had no idea what I was talking about, and told me that she couldn’t connect me with a network admin / tier 3 support / whatever they call it. All she could do is “file a ticket”. I’ve seen that router barf before, but mtr is showing spikes of 95% failure rate at midnight pacific time.

Maybe I don’t know enough about network equipment, but this sure sounds like a machine that’s either going to

1. imminently fall over
2. give terrible terrible performance like this until enough people complain to get the damn thing swapped out for something working

I believe odds favor #2. Sigh. Nerd venting done. I was just so happy about the modem that I figured maybe they changed.

Funny enough, I ran into The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks around the same time.

That’s “Uncanny”

What the hell do you do with that stuff?

I had resisted the idea of 43 folders (also the name of a GTD-focused website by Merlin Mann) because it seemed just too anal and far out there. For those who haven’t read the book, you make 31 folders for days, and 12 folders for months, hence 43 folders. You put stuff to do that day in the day folder, and things for the future months in the months. This is not a new idea, but it starts to remind me of the pencil-aligning boss in The Incredibles. It is a waste of time, if you can work without it. I don’t seem to be able to dent my pile without sorting it somehow, so I’m going to give this a try. The labeller and the file cabinet actually worked out quite well, so I’ve got high expectations here. Do you split up your to do list like this, or can you just get it done in one pass?

gotta shout it

sean + paul

having a party, this friday, 2007-11-16

see our web flyer for .infos

http://www.pauloppenheim.com/misc/party-2007-11/

(and directly)

(Or at youtube directly). Which I saw courtesy of Channel Frederator, which I got from Miro, a sweet internet video channel program that is making my dusty old TV more useful.

Yeah. Also…

The original.

The things I learn from spamming people.

If you’re IMming with me and you see a message that tells you to get OTR, that’s it working to keep the rest of the internet out of our conversation! :)

The gist of it is that you don’t just want the distance between each point of the font to be equal, you want the spacing between all letters in a word to have the same volume (actually area, volume implies 3D space, but whatev) between them. The image on the article really is worth a thousand words.

So, there’s something interesting to note about the font they used - it’s blocky! Talk about an easy job. The kerning example images on wikipedia give a better impression about where dragons may rest:

Which is the best WAR? (That sounds horrible, but at least this way I don’t have to make images.) The bottom has the WA pair very close, and the AR has quite a bit of space at the top. Is the top pair correct? The area between WA may match the AR, but it almost looks like there’s a space in there. And what do you do for letters like capital L?

There’s gotta be a Golden Ratio afoot somewhere in here.

The article also advocates personal branding, hearkening back to Fast Company and the bubble, saying if you don’t do this effectively, you don’t “get it.” Hmm. Is there such a thing as self-marketing incorrectly? I mean, if you’re shooting for a new job or a place in politics maybe, but if you’re just living your life as you want can you really be that far off base? (Am I a huge nerd for saying that?)

Me
11:31
?

MC Grifty P
11:31
heres what you do.
you make sure you have theft/collision/full insurance
and pay for it for like three months.
then, you take your sweet ride
and park it in the middle of the tenderloin.
roll down a window
and then go home!
you could even leave like a wire coat hanger or some pliers or something
what do you think about that.
brought to you by grifty mcgee.

Me
11:34
i think that's pretty great

MC Grifty P
11:34
yeah but dont actually do that because i dont want to be implicated as an accessory
you fucking criminal
dirtbag.
you ought to be ashamed :-/

If you have been hanging out around me lately, you know I totally dig the new Justice album, †. Their whole point is loud. Face-rocking, turn-it-up-to-11, side-chain-compressor-to-the-grill loud. Same with that good ol’ SebastiAn who I have previously blogged about. So, are these guys that I love so much right now really destroying the future of music technology? How can you have many of the intense modern sounds without loud? (Does indie rock make this point moot?)

(or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SSu3tJ3ns )

I’m moving to San Francisco this weekend with my roommate Sean, and I need some help. Last time I moved I didn’t ask for enough help and I damn near blew an O-ring, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

I’m gonna need help loading in Sunnyvale, help driving stuff up, and help unloading in San Francisco. Food + beer will be graciously provided.

Can you help? Please write me back and let me know! Thanks!

+ paul

Choice quote:

You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, “Yes, I’ve stood on so and so’s shoulders and I saw further.” The essence of science is cumulative. By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.

NYTimes - Among the Inept, Researchers Discover, Ignorance Is Bliss

Here’s a gem:

A competent attorney would tell you that good agreements are designed to avoid disputes, and that their most important purpose is to avoid at all costs ever putting anything that you depend on from being left up to the discretion of a court.

I just found these links equal parts handy and hilarious.

NOTE: stale blog post, finally publishing (there are a lot chilling in my “to post” queue, expect blogorrhea)

I don’t have a very good excuse for not updating earlier, but I got a job at Linden Lab makers of Second Life. A few of you know what that is, and the best way I’ve described it so far to folks is that it’s a 3D web browser where you can make and do anything. It’s a place to hang out like a chatroom (with bots, even), or its a place to play games, or it’s a place to listen to music, whatever you want. People even hold classes and meetings there.

There is a lot of hype (both positive and negative) about it, but regardless I am excited to be there.

All of this said, I do have to say this is my personal site and statements and material posted here do not necessarily reflect the position of my employer. I mostly pontificate about virtual worlds, etc. in private as not to bore my less technical readers, but if I do so here, it is not something I am doing professionally.

Also I should maybe get my alt name off of my front page? :\

meh.

In brief news, I quit my job at BDNA and got a new one at Linden Lab. I went to the Maker Faire and the Bjork concert last weekend. I’ll write soon!

Sound great? It did to me too, until I tried it - it is extremely slow. The install was easy, they have a lot of tips on the website on how you can guarantee anonymity, but it’s just too slow to use all the time. You probably want to avoid it unless you really need anonymity. But therein lies the problem - the network loses value if it’s not big and full of traffic. If it’s so slow, who is going to be using it unless they really have something to hide?

It’s the kind of thing that I really want to see succeed, and I suggest you use it if you don’t want Google, Myspace, or Youtube to build a comprehensive profile of you. But the performance hit is so large I can’t yet recommend it to everyone, which is what it needs to be successful. Install it, think about running a node, but maybe keep it turned off unless you really don’t want anyone knowing what kind of porn you like.

I would show pix, but I still need a good photo manager program to (safely and transparently!) handle my gigs and gigs of photos. Trying F-Spot… don’t hold your breath, viewers.

I think it’s time for go big or GTFO. Will it work?

The Internal Revenue Service sent their auditor to a synagogue. The auditor is doing all the checks and then turns to the Rabbi, and says, “I noticed that you buy a lot of candles.”

“Yes,” answered the Rabbi.

“Well, Rabbi, what do you do with the candle drippings?” he asked.

“A good question,” noted the Rabbi. “We actually save them up and when we have enough, we send them back to the candle maker and every now and then, they send us a free box of candles.”

“Oh,” replied the auditor somewhat disappointed that his unusual question actually had a practical answer. So he thought he’d go on, in his obnoxious way. “Rabbi, what about all these matzo purchases? What do you do with the crumbs from the matzo?”

“Ah, yes,” replied the Rabbi calmly, “we actually collect up all the crumbs from the matzo and when we have enough, we send them in a box back to the manufacturer and every now and then, they send a box of matzo balls.”

“Oh,” replied the auditor, thinking hard how to fluster the Rabbi. “Well Rabbi,” he went on, “what do you do with all the foreskins from the circumcisions?”

“Yes, here too, we do not waste,” answered the Rabbi. “What we do is save up all the foreskins, and when we have enough we send them to the IRS,”

“IRS?” questioned the auditor in disbelief.

“Ah, yes,” replied the Rabbi, “IRS… and about once a year, they send us a little prick like you.”

(19:56:30) friend: do you think the gpl undermines the
independent commercial software sector bc it effectively makes it
impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the
product rather than just the cost of distribution?
(19:56:47) me: not at all
(19:56:53) friend: why

(19:56:54) me: my company would not be in business if not for the GPL
(19:57:07) friend: that's cool
(19:57:13) me: kinda :)
(19:57:22) me: most companies are that way now though
(19:57:30) friend: can you briefly explain?
(19:58:03) me: it's because of the complexity of the software ecosystem
(19:58:18) me: let's talk about shovels
(19:58:27) me: let's say you make a shovel
(19:58:45) me: you charge $20, but it's only $5 in parts
(19:59:03) me: if I start a shovel company and charge $10, is that
unfair?
(19:59:32) me: no, because that's the market
(19:59:40) me: but what if I charge $5?
(19:59:46) friend: no, but how do people that make improvements
make profit
(20:00:00) me: it's not about the shovel, it's about how you use it
(20:00:21) me: if you have a $5 shovel, you can equip 4 times as
many diggers
(20:00:26) friend: ahh
(20:00:33) me: maybe you can afford to start a digging company,
where as before you couldn't
(20:00:40) me: i work at the digging company
(20:00:48) me: shovel's free
(20:00:49) friend: haha i like that analogy
(20:01:09) me: i mean, if you were at the old shovel company i bet
you'd be pissed
(20:01:43) me: and you'd wonder, how can these shovels be at cost?
How do they make money?
(20:01:57) me: they make money because it's not about shovels, it's
about holes.
(20:02:01) friend: what are the greatest advantages to open
source products?
(20:02:21) friend: and what would you say are the greatest
disadvantages
(20:02:29) me: well, I spoke about cost because you asked about
commerce, but many people don't even care if they have to pay
(20:02:40) me: they care about being able to change the prodcut
(20:02:59) me: the analogy starts to wear thin here, but let's keep
talking shovels
(20:03:27) me: let's say i've got a simple metal bottom and a
straight stick for a top
(20:03:43) me: well, what if I want a handle?
(20:04:06) me: if i'm using the shovel to, let's say, carry coal,
it's want a handle to make it easier
(20:04:32) me: the designer of the original shovel didn't think
about coal, only digging
(20:04:55) me: if i had the freedom to change the "schematics" of
the shovel, I could add a handle
(20:05:02) me: man, i'm on a roll.
(20:05:29) friend: haha yeah, this is actually helpful
(20:05:43) me: here's the big deal about software: it's not real.
(20:05:44) friend: are you under obligation to share improvements?
(20:05:54) me: well, who cares if you are?
(20:06:00) friend: just curious
(20:06:01) me: if you care about coal, it shouldn't be a problem
(20:06:13) me: but if you care about shovels, it would be a problem
(20:06:23) friend: ah yes
(20:06:40) friend: were you going to say something else about
software not being real?
(20:06:45) me: yeah
(20:07:13) me: the difference between software and shovels is that
you need wood and metal to take a plan of a shovel into a useful shovel
(20:07:27) me: you need exactly nothing to take a schematic for a
program into a program
(20:07:38) me: the schematic *is* the program
(20:08:45) me: now, the schematic should be covered by whatever we
decide is fair for copyright by default, butt if the author wants to
change the terms of the copyright, that's within the author's rights.
(20:09:13) me: let's say i want to ... run a website :)
(20:09:18) me: to sell shovels
(20:09:26) friend: haha
(20:09:27) me: i'm in the selling shovels business
(20:09:38) me: i don't give a shit how the shovels get on the internet
(20:10:00) me: maybe I need to put some money into making that
happen, but i'm not interested in changing my business
(20:10:25) me: so whatever code i maake to maake my website run, i
give away
(20:10:37) me: that's a program called apache
(20:10:47) me: it runs about 70% of the internet.
(20:11:25) me: if, for some reason or other, it gives me trouble
while i try to sell shovels, i can fix it and share my fix with others
(20:11:50) me: whether I *have* to share my fixes or not is up to
the original copyright owner
(20:12:20) friend: and he tells you when you buy it?
(20:12:24) me: and that's the cost of taking what they gave me
(20:12:48) me: yes and no
(20:13:24) me: they do, but they are under no obligation to give you
the source code at all anyway, right? they just do because they are nice
(20:13:56) me: and even if they gave it to you, it's still under
copyright, right? so you can't legally modify it *at all* for anything
other than private use
(20:14:02) friend: isn't that part of what the gpl does?  make
people share the source code?
(20:14:04) me:  / "fair use"
(20:14:20) me: well, if they make changes
(20:14:24) me: which they don't have to
(20:14:41) me: if i change the shovel schematics, i may have to
share them
(20:15:01) me: but I probably don't have to change them, if i'm just
digging
(20:15:11) me: goes back to shovels / digging again
(20:15:25) me: it's only a problem if i'm in the shovel business

Houses cheaper than cars in Detroit

I actually looked online for a housing auction site, and found that a lot of these houses are in heavily blighted areas such as 48215. (Yes, those green and brown spots are empty lots. Yes, this is in an “urban area.” For a quick background on Detroit’s blight issues, read about elmhurst and try and ignore the “racist jews” slant.)

There’re two parts to a bootloader: figuring out what can be booted, and letting the user select which of those bootable things to… boot. Startup Disk rocks at both of these. GRUB sucks at both of these.

On Mac OS, you press the power button and you’re booted into an OS. If you want to change which OS you boot into you open up Startup Disk, select the OS you want from the auto-generated list, and reboot. You can also hold down the option key at boot and select from a dynamic OS list which can include Firewire drives, DVD-ROMs, and USB drives. It even has little icons for each bootable OS. Each OS you boot into knows about the others, and your settings can be set from any one.

On Linux (every one I’ve used anyway) you boot to a text menu every time, and must select an OS, or the “default” will boot after a time period. This list is not dynamic, it is specified in a file called “menu.lst”. If the entries in the list are not correct, booting will fail. Users must hand-write this file, so at least one entry will be incorrect more often than not. Worse, because this process is manual, each OS has its own copy of this file. If GRUB is run from one OS with correct entries, then a second OS with incorrect entries, the incorrect entries will prevail. This has happened to me on several occasions.

If GRUB isn’t going to do the dirty work of figuring out how to boot, could it at least give me a GUI to make the entries list and check it twice? Even a text UI that listed possible boot partitions / kernel paths and actually validated that I wasn’t doing something brain-dead would be nice.

As goes with all complaining about open source, yes, I know that if I want to, I could fix it. It seems like the GRUB team is trying to, but will it end up being as simple yet functional as good old Startup Disk? Is there some “secret” of GRUB that I just haven’t found yet? Does LILO do all of this and butter my toast? If you know, let me know.

This 12″ is amazing. Listen to “Ross Ross Ross” on MySpace and rest assured that the 2 other tracks are clashtastic and all up in yr guts. Srsly.

BBC: Alaska natives left out in the cold

Just as cool as that was the show. I’m not going to put all the video on the internet, but here’s Wayne rolling out in the crowd in a giant bubble.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

AVI link if you want to keep it: Flaming Lips Concert Bubble

Yeah.

I can’t wait to try this.

Technobabble after the break…

For the nerds in the audience, I am now managing my site with Subversion. Not too controversial, but I have both WordPress and Gallery in repository as well, which adds about 20k extra files to the mix. Instant scary!

Also, if you don’t have a high rez screen (which is maybe one of you) you will notice the “pals” icons flow kind of weird on the front page. This is due to a weird CSS margin rendering error in firefox 1.5 (I know, i need to upgrade!) which makes the sites on my page that have names which are wider than the icons have a little (5px?) extra margin on the top. That’s enough to make the links flow strange - they are floating divs. I should probably make them spans, but I recall having a bit of trouble with that. Until I do, my apologies.

You may have encountered at least one of the following in a video game:

• you fight “yourself” (doppelganger, clone, shadow, evil twin, etc)
• something / everything your character perceives is not real (dream, hallucination, VR-simulation, etc)
• world run by omnipotent conspiracy (hidden cabal, evil spirits, illuminati, etc)
• you find out you are the “bad guy” from a strange turn of events

I’m not sure if these are primarily Japanese literary techniques, or whether they have a long history or are more modern. Almost every time one of these devices is used in game storytelling, it’s heralded as inventive or surprising and not cliche or trite. I think you need to have a very good reason to use these storytelling elements, because they feel like getting thwapped in the nuts. It’s like the author is saying to the audience “hey, I want to surprise you, but I can’t think of a plausible way to do it.” The metaphor each evokes is also ham-fisted at this point. I don’t need to have a literal fight with my self to highlight an inner struggle. I don’t need to have the complete story be a dream to highlight that perception is an illusion. I get it. Thanks, author. What makes it worse is that if these techniques weren’t overused, they could be useful in ways which would be genuine. The Sixth Sense was really surprising and shocking to people; almost every M. Night Shyamalan movie after it wasn’t.

However, gaming is a tricky medium. Zelda, man that was a good game! I’m amazed every time I play one of those how much fun it is to solve each dungeon and win each game piece. Killer7’s gameplay was decent; the puzzles were easy and gimmicky. The enemies eventually got to be a bit gimmicky as well (laser eyed zombie?). However, I feel the storytelling was delightfully convoluted, the art and music was cool, the game mechanic of switching personalities was unique, the zombie fights were neat, and the explosions were gratifying enough to get me through the 15 hours of game and feel pretty decent about it.

I don’t have a solution. Should developers not bother with a story? No, because then the game would be completely hollow. Should they bother making the story better if you can enjoy the game without it being great? They won’t make anymore money doing that, will they? Most people don’t buy games for their storytelling, they watch movies for that. It’s a tough question, and I’ve been a game developer and still don’t have a solid answer. I still pay attention, and the story of the average game is certainly fun, but it would be great if a game could make me deeply think and feel for the characters instead of being nauseated by its cheap tricks.