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I had to turn on registration for those that want to comment on this site because I’ve been getting a lot of .ru spam ‘comments’ that are extolling the virtue of cheap travel agencies and enlargement of your various organs.

Hopefully it isn’t too painful a hurdle and if it stops then I’ll remove the registration.

Went up to Penny Arcade eXpo – had a fabulous time over two days.  So much to see and do:

• PC Freeplay areas – a huge area with hundreds of Intel supplied machines, and equally large BYOC area that folks brought in their own machines.  Servers were set up and all the major games were pre-installed.  Just sit down and start up a game with anyone.
• Console freeplay – an equally huge area with lots of XBOX/PS3/Wii systesms you could check out and play from their large library.  They even had old systems like the original nintendo with duckhunt competition, a connected set of 4 machines with some crazy mechwarrior control setups
• Tabletop gaming – everything from your more classic D&D, to warhammer setups, to settlers of Catan, and board games from to Risk.  Big room to just browse and check out anything you want to play.  Go to any of the many rooms with friends, or make some new ones and play.
• Sessions and talks – tons of 1 hour talks and sessions by developers, experts, and just normal people.  I attended a few of the indy developer sessions and found them to be a decent intro for folks looking at the industry.  Think GDC lite-lite.  Some of the ones on the roster I saw previously at GDC in fact.
• Movies – sat and watched the fan-made THAC0.  Other famous web series and their actors were also there: The Guild, Hey Ash whatcha Playin, and a few others.
• Concerts each night. I only attended the Saturday night concerts – most notably the Johnathan Coulter concert and two funny guys who’s names escape me.
• Cosplaying – holy cow – so many people dressed up as their favorite game and cartoon characters.
• The show floor – since E3 has died, this has gotten to be the gaming convention.  Every major game dev was there: EA, Sony, Intel, nVidia, and all the rest.  Left 4 Dead 2, God of War 3, Mass Effect 2, and tons of other new and upcoming games were actually setting out to be played.  I got a LOT of free shirts and crashed a launch party or two in the hotels around the area.

Swine flu?  It appears now on the forums that lots of people are getting sick afterward.  It’s been called PAX Pox, PAX sars, and lots of the word “swine flu” being batted around.  I have seemingly managed to avoid it – but I did do a lot of hand washing and didn’t stay at the hotels usually filled with PAX folks.  Seemed to have picked up a nasty sore throat today – but I’m pretty sure that’s because we had a cold snap and I left the window open last night. Doh!

Pictures coming soon

Ever meet people you ‘knew’ as a kid?  I read the Shannara series by Terry Brooks when I was a kid – before I had read the Tolkien books.  So, it was my first exposure to the genre – and memorable for an impressionable youth.  I did my trilogy book report on his Shannara series.  Brooks lives up in Seattle and comes down to Portland for releases and signings on occasion.  I went to his signing at Powells and got a book autographed.

I can’t say I was into his later books on Landover, and despite a lot of what people say – the comparisons between Sword of Shannara and Tolkien are a bit too close for comfort.  Still, enjoyable to finally meet folks you’ve read and find them to be ‘normal’ and courteous.  Terry was indeed those things.

I’m kind of intrigued by the praise, upgrade fever, and unfortunate fan-boy-ism over Win7 coming out.  The basic talk on the forums/street is this:  That Vista blows *ss, is completely useless, and a train wreck.  Win7, however, is the messiah come to rescue Microsoft.  I however, find this really weird.

See, I adopted Vista when it first came out.   And yes – it had problems.  The primary being because they changed the driver model, you were at the whims of your hardware vendor to come out with a working driver.  And many vendors (Creative Labs being one of the worst offenders) simply never made working drivers for their old hardware.  They either simply didn’t make them, or you were stuck with crippled or wrong drivers that just happened to sort-of work.  I had lots of trouble with sleep/wake/power problems, but honestly, I had about the same number of problems with Windows XP.  Sleeping/waking has never worked well in Windows in my experience.  There were a number of niggling annoyances with my sound card not switching to Dolby correctly and so forth – but I got them sorted out well enough to be happy with it.  After all – the actual stability of Vista, and the Aero effects simply made it worth it to me.  When things did work – I could sleep/wake my machine for weeks on end without a reboot.  However, it didn’t really reach that stage until we hit Vista SP1.  And with the latest updates in SP2, it’s just about right.

Now when I put win7 on a test machine, outside of the much faster speed, I’m not noticing a lot of differences between it and Vista SP2. Sure there have been little tweaks, but honestly, out of the box – it felt and looked just like Vista to me.  It feels more like an upgrade from Win95 to Win98 than the all-out amazement that the forums/popular opinion seems to be.  Maybe it’s just because people wrote Vista off so badly and haven’t seen it lately.

Oh, I’ll get a copy and upgrade when I need to do an OS re-install.  Just kind of surprised where the public opinion is.  She’s fickle.

Two fixes for two of my annoyances earns Windows7 an upgrade to a B:

Emulate Vista Classic Menu on Windows 7:
There’s a couple of different solutions, but this one seems to be the best:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/2227/get-the-classic-start-menu-in-windows-7/

Remove the Aero snap-to-edge window behavior:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-7/disable-the-mouse-drag-window-arranging-feature-in-windows-7/

Since I have a subscription to Microsoft developer network (MSDN) – I have a *legal* copy of Windows 7 Ultimate – and the other day I stuck it on my HP laptop to play with it.  Here’s my quick first review

The Good:

• Faster – yes, it’s faster.  I even installed the 64-bit version on my laptop with 2gb ram, and it’s quite noticeably faster than Vista 32 was on the same machine for opening apps, switching apps, etc.
• Driver updating/problem fixing – was really impressed during installation how efficiently it found, downloaded, and installed drivers for everything on my machine – and it really worked.  I didn’t have to go to 50 different websites and download custom drivers.  It did it on its own automatically.
• UAC improved – Scalable user account control (UAC) notifications.  Finally – I ranted about how busted and stupid this was on Vista, and they’ve FINALLY fixed it – mostly.  You can tell the thing if YOU clicked something that it’s OK to run it.  It still pops up – but not nearly as much
• Built in ISO burning tool – it’s not fancy or feature rich – but is functional.  Might get you out of a bind burning patch dvd’s or the like – but it’s sure no nero.  Why haven’t they got mount iso as drive yet? For heavens sakes every OS has this built in now but windows…
• Windows Media Center – I like the cleaner interface and they did a great job with setting up TV stations with my tuner.  But it’s still a little clunky to use while watching a movie.  Without a remote, you have to scroll past movie info and some other menus to get to the ‘take me to root dvd menu’ selection.  Dumb – I’ll be doing that 100x more often than wondering what the name of my movie I’M CURRENTLY WATCHING is.

The bad:

• Busted DVD playback – Whenever I watch movies with Windows Media Player, I get pink garbage all over my screen and the whole desktop flickers horribly.  If I watch it in  Windows Media Center – it’s fine.  I am updated to the latest nVidia driver for my nVidia 7200 Go.  Yes, the driver is still officially beta – so we’ll see – but man – it’s busted right now.
• No classic start menu – you HAVE to use the Vista-style start menu.  No, no, no!  Wrong Microsoft.  I finally realized why this is wrong after using Win7 for a few days – answer: muscle memory.  With the Vista-sytle menu, you get a ‘last N programs run’ list to choose from, or if the program isn’t on the list – you have to click the Programs submenu to get the list of all your installed apps – TWO clicks just to find your app – a third to start it.  Problem is, the position of the programs on the ‘last N programs’ list move around constantly as you start various apps.  You can’t rely on muscle memory to pick your app or remember where it is.  You click start, have to LOOK through the whole list to see if your program is there, then possibly click Programs to get to the next page of apps which are laid out alphabetically and as you remember them.
  The time to start an average app is now more than doubled for me and I usually have to click twice as many times as before.  So, I created a folder on my desktop with my apps on them, and start them that way because my muscle memory automatically gets me 90% to the app I want when the folder opens – because they don’t move around.  Now how stupid is that for trying to work around this problem?  They removed the ‘Use classic menus’ option – which was in the betas.  If I’d known they were going to drop classic, I would have raised holy hell.
  Another point about the ‘last N apps used’ – I don’t know what algorithm it uses to put those apps on my start menu – but it seems like a dyslexic monkey is picking them.  I for the life of me can’t figure out why firefox never seems to get on the list (which I use daily), but the solitaire I ran one time is still on there…
• Snap to edge/fullscreen.  If you drag your app to the edge of the screen – it often tries to make it go fullscreen or fill half-screen.  I found this really annoying.  Maybe I’ll get used to it – but more likely I’ll be searching for the way to turn it off.  I can’t wait to see how many noobies get apps stuck all over the place now.  This is as dumb as allowing folks to resize their start bars and end up with half the screen covered with grey start bar without knowing how to fix it. Really – this feature helps how?
• Still has OS hickups – know those annoying long pauses you get for no reason?  While they seem to happen much less often than with any version of Windows yet, they didn’t entirely go away and you find yourself waiting for apps to come back to life while you twiddle your thumbs.

The Ugly:

• Pinning items to taskbar – just admit that you’re trying to do the Mac bar and get it over with.  Unfortunately, this thing is more confusing to use and definitely doesn’t look as good as the Mac version.  I say you wouldn’t NEED pin to taskbar if your stupid start menu worked right.  It’s admitting that one or the other isn’t working right – isn’t it?  Yet your solution is to straddle the fence and continue to do both poorly – which looks terrible.  Classic Microsoft design.  Get rid of one or the other and do the remaining one right.
• No more ‘classic’ anything – You can’t switch back to classic Control Panel, or classic folder views, or many other ‘classic’ controls.  The Action Center thing keeps track of all the security and update things that need to happen (nice), but you have to do all kinds of twiddling to get to any under-the-hood controls.  Yeah, maybe it’s easier for noobies, but I really doubt it.  You just put a smiley face and an extra layer of indirection on the same stuff.  That is different than fixing the problem.  If there is a problem – the OS should do everything in it’s power to solve it for you without asking or bothering you unless it absolutely has to.  I should never have to fight the OS to do my work – the OS should fight for me.
  This is a fundamental difference between Apple and Microsoft.  MS will hit you with dialogs that really, honestly, don’t help you solve the problem – but just tell you all about the problem and maybe enough info for the person to Google a solution.  Apple carefully removes features so that it will often pick a solution for you based on the smaller data set and do it – without asking.  Yeah, it’s a bit more draconian, but I’d rather have the OS do that – and then give you the power user tools to go change it by hand if you care – than having tons of knobs and tubes and covering it with a nice sheet so it doesn’t look so bad while still not actually solving your problems.   With Win7 you feel as if you walked through all kinds of fluffy menus that seem to take you twice as long to get to the darn thing you want.

Verdict: C+
It’s a good effort – good improvements – and a then a few steps back on usability.  It was telling when I did a bios update and it somehow nuked my RAID setup – requiring me to reinstall.  I had both a Windows Vista Ultimate x64 DVD and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 DVD sitting on my desk.  I thought for a minute, and picked up Vista Ultimate for re-install.  For all the goodness of Win7, I still prefer Vista right now.  If they fix some of these UI features, I’ll switch.  Till then – I’ll probably wait till Win7 SP1.

No, seriously, cut it out.  We’re Oregonians.  We don’t know what to do with heat like this…

Yeah -that’s actually correct with official temps for today.  The predicted high was only 103.  I actually went out and bought an air conditioner today.

First I got an amazing deal on a used 10,000 BTU version that just kicked major *ss.  Until it started popping the breaker in my apt.  Stupid 1900’s knob and tube sub-standard wiring.  So to avoid burning the place down, I went out and got a very high-power saving (read crappy cooling) 5amp 5000 BTU version which isn’t really doing the same job by any means, but at least helps a lot.

Update: Got my 10k BTU air-con working by – using a better wall extension cable.  I had a cable rated for 15 amps, but it was a 50″ outdoor cable.  I went out and bought a 10″ cable rated for 20amps – problem solved.  the 50″ cable just added too much resistance to the equation and it be just enough to pop the breaker when it kicked in.  Switch to a shorter, higher-rated cable and everything worked great.  Slept like a baby in sub-zero temps.

Just rented the anime movie “The Sky Crawlers” last night.  I found it to be quite indecipherable at first – but talk about an interesting trip when I started reading about what people thought was the messages of the movie.  It led to a discussion of stagnating anime content/culture, a widely spreading Japanese social/psychological disorder called hikikomori, and the general ‘checking out of society’ by a whole generation of young people happy to float along in a society that they don’t think will be around to support them as they get older.  But more on that…

First off, the movie is about young pilots in pseudo-WWII era fighters.  The children were the results of genetic experiments that accidentally left them locked as youth forever – unable to die by biological/age/normal means.  Instead, they live what are portrayed as endlessly repetitive lives – thrown into a seemingly ‘staged’ war (that seems to only serve the purpose of being to show ‘normal’ people why their freedom is valuable) with daily battles, moving from base to base to fight in different places, and so on.  This repetition goes even so far as they being genetically ‘resurrected’ when killed in combat – and while they don’t remember their past life – everyone else around them remembers them.  The movie drags on to oblivion, and endlessly repetitive series of lives re-lived the same way each time.  The manga (book) form even goes so far as to actually have been released in the wrong chronological order – and yet it doesn’t matter as the cycles rotate endlessly.  Lovers die and are reunited, one remembers the other doesn’t, etc.

Watching the movie, however, is a lesson in near boredom.  The repetition and unknowing at times becoming very tiresome and I even found myself being bored – but that’s the point of the director.  The message gets lost a bit on US audiences especially, because the idea he’s trying to talk about is a very recent Japanese phenomenon.

In the Anime News Network forums discussing this movie was an interesting comment about the recent Japanese phenomenon/psychological disorder – and those that exhibit it are called hikikomori.  Here’s the jist from Wikipedia about hikikomori:

lit. “pulling away, being confined”, i.e., “acute social withdrawal” is a Japanese term to refer to the phenomenon of reclusive individuals who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various personal and social factors in their lives.

Though acute social withdrawal in Japan appears to affect both genders equally, because of differing social expectations for maturing boys and girls, the most widely reported cases of hikikomori are from middle and upper middle class families whose sons, typically their eldest, refuse to leave the home, often after experiencing one or more traumatic episodes of social or academic failure.

Japanese commentators have also offered analysis of the hikikomori phenomenon, and find distinct causal relationships with the modern Japanese social conditions of anomie, amae and atrophying paternal influence in nuclear family child pedagogy. Sometimes referred to as a social problem in Japanese discourse, hikikomori has a number of possible contributing factors. Young adults may feel overwhelmed by modern Japanese society, or be unable to fulfill their expected social roles as they have not yet formulated a sense of personal honne and tatemae – one’s “true self” and one’s “public facade” – necessary to cope with the paradoxes of adulthood.

A decade of flat economic indicators and a shaky job market in Japan makes the pre-existing system requiring years of competitive schooling for elite jobs appear like a pointless effort to many.[7] While Japanese fathers of the current generation of youth still enjoy lifetime employment at multinational corporations, incoming employees in Japan enjoy no such guarantees in today’s job market.[8]  Some younger Japanese people begin to suspect that the system put in place for their grandfathers and fathers no longer works[9], and for some, the lack of a clear life goal makes them susceptible to social withdrawal as a hikikomori. It should be noted that hikikomori is similar to the social withdrawal exhibited by certain adults with Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDDs) in Western cultures, a group of disorders that include autism, PDD-NOS and Asperger syndrome

This was haunting echoed by a Japanese person on the forums itself:

I know it took some years to make this film, but the message couldn’t have come out in a worse time, especially with the recession.

I am currently working at the best job I could have, and it’s still shitty compared to others. I still keep it because if I leave I might not find another job, and I also have time for myself and anime of course.

My brother who’s become hikikimori became that way because he realized he can save more money by staying indoors as opposed to having a very active social life.

As the breadwinner I would want to tell him to get off his ass and find a job so I wouldn’t be the only one slaving away, then again I do envy the copious amount of time my brother has, think of all the videogames I could play.

Ideally we would go out and get higher paying jobs so we could get married to women who demand 6-figure incomes and so we can beget children who will be the future taxpayers. But you know what, I honestly don’t think there will be any social security left by the time I’m ready to retire. So I live as if there won’t be any retirement at all — that’s the reality I have come to belive in. And right now I sure as heck dislike the fact that I am helping shoulder the costs of the older generation who messed up society to begin with.

Give me an environment with stable family relationships and I will gladly slave away to support them.

But with ridiculous divorce rates and the threat of child support payments, and a lifetime of heavy taxation in the new socialist world, I have come to the conclusion that this society is not worth supporting, and if I can totally withdraw, I would.

And finally, the director himself echo’s a parallel message:

In our peaceful country, there is no more starvation, revolution, or war. We have a society where we can live out our allotted spans of lives without ever having to feel deprived of food, clothing, or shelter. Ironically, I am unsure as to whether this is a good thing. Once I read the story of a man who climbed the skies and reached Heaven, but got bored after a few days.

Isn’t this comfortable life that we have achieved, a monotonous purgatory that doesn’t end until we die?

So, is having actually worse than wanting/striving and not getting?  While nowhere near the levels/severety of Japan (and argueably very different causes/effects), Portland has its own population of youth (many call them trust-fund kids) that live bohemian lives of not working while living off trust funds left them by more wealthy parents.  Maybe Aldous Huxley is right and we’re becoming an aimless generation that will be easily controlled via our blind following of distraction?  Or the recent book by Robert Putnam called “Bowling Alone” that has tracked the huge movement of the current generations away from organized social activities in favor of markedly isolated ones.  I think these things are circling a common point – perhaps I might put some brain power to this one…