And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie

And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie

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Often considered one of Agatha Christie’s best mystery/murder books – this is the story of 10 strangers lured to Indian Island by a mysterious host. Once his guests have arrived, an unknown host accuses each one of a murder from their past. Unable to leave the island, the guests begin to die one by one and they struggle to figure out who is killing them before it’s too late.

This is a great classic of murder-mystery storytelling.   So classic in fact that it has been converted to several movies and a wildly popular play.  Currently it’s the world’s best-selling mystery novel and one of the top 10 best-selling books of all time.  Its various plot devices have been copied so often that many say that it actually create a genre of its own.

The story (no big spoilers):
Ten people are invited via letter to a mysterious island.  Upon arriving, they find a beautiful mansion fully stocked with all modern conveniences and comforts – but no host.  As the settle in after dinner, a mysterious recorded voice accuses each one of a murder from their past.  As they argue over the accusations and struggle to figure out what is going on; the guests start dying.  Trapped on the island by a storm, they die one by one as they try frantically to figure out who is the murderer and why.  To add to the terror, they die in the order and method specified by a child’s nursery rhyme tacked in each of their rooms.  As the guest numbers dwindle, the levels of suspicion and hysteria rise dramatically until a crashing finale.

Review (no spoilers):
It’s a very different kind of murder mystery.  There is no master sleuth – no Hercule Poirot or Ms Marple.  There is simply you the reader and 10 ‘ordinary’ guests trapped on an island – as an unknown murderer slowly removes them one by one.  You feel as if you struggle right along with the characters trying to sort it all out.  Christie’s handling and revealing of their internal emotional states is dated but very well done.  With a few exceptions, the characters all tend to act in accordance to their very different natures – which really adds spice to the story considering you have such different folks as a war hero, a judge, a governess, two servants, a private gun, and a prim spinster.

I would suggest this is a must-read for anyone who loves the genre and for those that love house mysteries or isolated party type of spooky affairs.  As a lover of all these genres, this is the standard by which almost everything since is compared to as it rises above all the rest.  I give it a solid A for it’s enjoyable read (I listened to it via audiobook and found myself several times sitting in the driveway just to get to the next chapter), relatively quick story, and for the fact it is the canon for this type of genre.  Highly recommend

That new employment

That new employment

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Went back to Purdue for the School of Science annual alumni advisory board again.  More interesting insights.

While the tide seems to be changing, we have all heard (or lived) the woe’s of recent college graduates.  Students graduating with many hopes/promises of employment that never panned out.  Compounding matters, we see that in some fields a masters or PhD is the minimum entry bar.  Some have even asked if a BA college degree has been reduced to the new high school diploma.  The school you go to also seems to matter as we see huge unemployment rates coming from some degree-mill colleges.

So what is a potential student to do?  The good news seems to be that for half the equation you should do what you should have been doing all along, and the other half is new but may well make your time at college better.

Stuff you should do when looking at a future college (or your own if you’re already there):

  1. Am I going to college/university to simply learn as my goal, or am I expecting a job out of this?
    First questions first – what you want to do in life?  Not what major you want – but what you want to DO for a living.  Where you want to be 5 years after school is over – envision a whole day from getting up to bedtime. Are you working with people?  What things are you working on?  Academia or in industry?  Writing as much of this down can help you clarify.  This, after all, is the whole point of school anyway.  If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never know if the steps you’re taking will get you where you’ll be happy.  While going to college to ‘find yourself’ or solely for personal growth can be noble and good – it may also be a bit dangerous if you’re racking up a huge bill while doing it.  Getting as much clarity of where you want to go (or if not that – at least what you DON’T want to be doing) goes a long way to preventing being tens of thousands in debt in a field you just learned you hate or isn’t what you want to do.
  2. What does your chosen field require to be considered employable and ‘successful’?
    With step 1 done, now you need to find out what you need to know/skills needed to do that work you described in #1.  Talk to a good counselor from your perspective school, look at job postings for your desired position(s) on Monster and other job sites, look at resumes of those in the field on Linked-in, and talk with people in that industry or job.   What skills and education do they require?  Do you even need a college degree to get into your field at the level you want?  You’d be surprised which fields don’t need a college degree or that sometimes a degree actually forces you down a different part of the field than you want.  If a degree is required, what major and what level/specialization would get me into the field I most want?  In some fields, a masters is the minimum bar of entry for getting hired.  In others, getting a PhD actually closes doors to industry but opens academic work open to you.
    I’ve seen many a folk get badly burned by mismatching their desired area of work and their degree.  One fellow desired to do social work ran off and got $100k in debt to get a PhD when all they needed was a 4 year degree.  I’ve seen folks get a degree in a major to find out what they wanted to do could have been done with a simple certification.  Yes, there is always the pursuit of learning for its own sake – which is always good.  But don’t confuse just getting more education with desired outcomes.
  3. Is your school known for good work in that major/field?
    Not to give offense to the professors at these schools – but if you’re going to Julliard to learn engineering, or going to MIT for inter-racial studies – you’re probably not making the best choice for your buck.  Like it or not, I have seen the name of a school open doors.  While they do not get you a job, but they very well will open you to an interview you might not have gotten before.  You should pick the school on your list that has the best reputation for the field you’re hoping to get into (and that you can afford).
  4. Is the school you’re considering likely to get you the job you want?
    This is the pragmatic side.  You should be able to ask and see the placement rates (and hopefully) the average salary ranges of those getting hired.  If they have a career center, you should be able to get a list (or at least a good idea) of what companies come to hire from the school.  If there is nobody on the list you want to work for, or the placement rates are bad (under 50%), you better consider looking elsewhere.  It will also tell you what you should expect to earn your first few years out of college and be a good basis on how much debt you should/shouldn’t be getting into.
  5. Debt
    A good rule of thumb is that you should only take on the amount of debt that you would hope to earn in a year’s average salary for your major (disregarding taxes/etc).   A doctor?  $100,000 in debt might be totally acceptable.  An engineer?  Depending on the type – maybe $30k-60k.  If you start going over this amount – things start getting more difficult.  I recently saw a guy well over $100,000 in debt getting a PhD in social work who will be making $25k-35k/yr.  He will barely be able to pay off the interest each month and his hopes of starting a family are pretty much nil unless he marries someone who can help with that debt.  Don’t get yourself in over your head – you can end up paying for it the rest of your life.

So what more is someone to do to really seal the deal?  Last year, Purdue hired a social networking expert who was working on Purdue’s Linked-in and various other social networking sites.  She came and talked to us – and she touted an idea that adds a new arrow to your quiver of employability.

It starts with a realization of the world you are now in.  There are quite literally 1000’s of people around the country walking across graduation stages at the same time as you with the same degrees.  You’re no longer unique just because you got a degree or even if you got a near perfect GPA. Instead, you need to now stand out from that crowd – just as you did when in high school.  How does one do that?

You could get on the deans list and get a perfect GPA.  Those do help – but in reality those kudos are not quite as important as you think they are to employers.  Instead, we can take cues from very highly competitive fields: movies, design, and art.  In those industries, a portfolio of great work and a name are keys to success.  Sure, they need to have done well in their studies, but now employers are also going to want to see what you can do.  They have less time/money to train, there are more people out there applying, and they want to know more than ever that a hire will pay off.  Despite what you think, your college education just lays the groundwork for success – your employer still needs to get you up to industry-grade snuff.

New tips:

  1. A portfolio works wonders
    If possible, build a portfolio of your work you can show off.  This is essential in any art field – and becoming more so for other fields.  If you’re a programmer: got any apps you wrote that you can throw on a laptop or mobile device and show?  A demo reel?  Do you have any news articles/clippings of work you’ve done or been part of?  Pictures of things you’ve done you can show on an iPad?  Websites of open-source projects you’ve worked on?  Being able to physically hand something to an interviewer/prospective hiring manager is HUGE.  It’s tangible proof you can and have done things.  This one alone has sold us on a candidate at my place of work.  Here’s a link that might help you know what to put and not put into a portfolio.
  2. Find what you are passionate about and do some work in that outside of school work.
    This is already happening in Computer Science.  Graduates distinguish themselves by finding and contributing to an open-source project they like, leading a group in their field, presenting at conferences, writing web articles on specific topics, having a body of programming work and applications they can show off.  Hopefully (if you’ve found a field you actually like to study), this shouldn’t be a terrible burden – even if you only do this stuff in the summers/breaks.  You are trying to build and do things that can build up #1, and #3
  3. Brand yourself for today’s social media world
    Like it or not, social networking is here to stay.  The first thing that many, many employers do is Google you – so you need a robust and professional ‘brand’ for your name.  You absolutely should have a Linked-in account that is professional looking, filled out, and used regularly to make connections with people in your field  At networking events when exchanging business cards, ask if you can connect with relevant people via linked-in.  A blog, a personal website, Facebook and Twitter are also good.  Spend some time on them an update them with relevant content.  Your portfolio, interesting links and discussions on your field, etc.  Make a habit of this – it’s real obvious when someone just starts updating those sites when they’re looking for a job (i.e. no posts for 3 years then a flurry every day).  You want what they find to be professional and appropriate.  A history of entries relating to your field shows you’re actually interested in it. This work, unfortunately, starts well before you are job hunting.  Actually, it started from the day you opened an account on the site.
    I don’t want to give a lecture, but drunken pictures of parties and your stance on controversial/illegal activities isn’t what should be showing up.  Let’s just be clear: Nothing you posted on Facebook or other social media site is private.  Nothing you put on Facebook or other site can be completely deleted.  People can copy pictures, link against your content, take screen-caps of your IM’s, and quote you on other sites – and you have no way to stop them.  Just don’t post anything you don’t want employers to read or see.
  4. Selling yourself
    All the above do this, but we haven’t talked about one final thing.  This particular tip hasn’t changed; but it’s not the indie 90’s anymore.  Don’t be fooled into thinking your personal appearance is an individuality thing – it’s a reflection of your knowledge of the field.
    Dress: Dress nicely, yet appropriately casual/professional.  It shows they know about the field enough to know what is considered the ‘norm’ and shows respect for it and the employer.  You’d also be surprised how even a good photo of yourself on your profile can change things when someone is determining whether to email you based on your profile.  Again – appropriate is the key word.  Too fancy makes you look like a tool, too casual makes you come off as sloppy and unprofessional.
    Appearance: I hate to have to say this, but take a shower, get a haircut, trim unsightly hairs, clean your nails, etc.  Make sure your nice clothes fit you and you look natural/comfortable in them.  Wear them out for a day a couple of times before going to the interview so you can find any trouble spots and learn how to eat without spilling things on them. Even in the frumpy fashion world of computer science, being at least able to wear a button-up shirt with non-tennis shoes can give you a leg up.
    Speech: Practice your answers – in front of a mirror or camera if you need.  You must spend a good bit of time going over and being able to talk well about every single thing on your resume.  Expect to be quizzed on it all.  Keep your speech light, be clear and concise, and show excitement.

 

Anime and Yashigani

Anime and Yashigani

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Have you ever messed up so bad that someone named the foul-up after you?  Well, it certainly happened in anime.

Anime started picking up in Japan in the 90’s.  The quality had been going up and up; and many considered the 90’s the ‘golden age’ of anime.  However, with so many studios opening something of a bubble started to form in which it was difficult to find good animators.  Schedules were as tight as the fiercely fought for advertising dollars.

Now say you are an anime studio in this competitive environment and you’re spinning off a new series called Lost Universe after working on a very successful series called Slayers.  Good right?  You have plenty of work now that you’re right at the beginning of airing and creating this regular TV show.  But now, right around episode 3 – in the middle of crunch mode – a fire breaks out and destroys most of your work. The show must go on – so what happens?  You contract off the work to anyone with a spare pencil and ink.  In this case, a Korean company. But you don’t even have enough character sketches or time to really educate the company about what is supposed to happen in the episode.  In fact, they mix up the characters from one scene to another.  Still images stay onscreen for up to 15 seconds because you didn’t have enough time to make the moving versions.   It was so bad that the company actually had to pull the episode and re-do it for the DVD version after the one and only airing of the episode.  Unfortunately, the rest of the series never really recovers and wallows in a low-quality quagmire that dooms the series to infamy.

Here’s Lost Universe’s episode 4 – titled Yashigani – which demonstrates just how bad things can get (see especially the amazing smooth motion at 3:20 for example).  This clip shows the original along with the re-done version side by side so you can see how bad it got.

This wasn’t the only fumble in the anime world, but the episode 4 of Lost Universe episode became so infamous that drops of quality like this were simply called Yashigani’s from then on.  Ouch.

See this link for more examples of them.

 

Google and Microsoft-esk questions

Google and Microsoft-esk questions

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Read an interesting book How Would You Move Mount Fuji.  The author does a little critique of the modern approach of puzzle interviews.  His take-away – since an employer can legally no longer ask questions about age/gender/orientation/etc – we have moved to a new realm of interviewing.  This method of interviewing attempts to ascertain the raw ability and behavior of the candidate devoid of these contexts.  This is both for good and ill – as it can have a very dehumanizing effect.  Interestingly enough, while this method of interviewing is still popular (and was the RAGE in the late 90’s early 2000’s) there have been more recent articles written about the problems of this style and possibly better ways of hiring.

For instance, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell says this method would likely not find the next Steve Jobs – and that he would not likely be hired by anyone today using similar methods.  For creative jobs, he believes in finding the person’s passion is more important.  Others have suggested that we actually get more narrow and hire by their knowledge of an important algorithm a company needs vs more general principles.

Either way, the fun part for me were the questions themselves.  There was a list of Google interview puzzles that I liked too.  Here’s a collection of some of the more interesting ones in his book, and from other sources.  I find they break down into three categories – Fermi problems, hypothetical problem solving, and deducible problems:

Deducible problems:  These are designed to see how good your raw deductive skills are:

  1. A country that only wants boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?
  2. How many times in a day do a clock’s hands overlap?
  3. Explain the meaning and relevance of the term ‘dead beef’ as it relates to programming/debugging.
  4. You need to check that your friend, Bob, has your correct phone number but you cannot ask him directly. You must write the question on a card which and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number?
  5. How many places on the earth can you walk 1 mile north, 1 mile west, and 1 mile south and end up at the same place? (hint, its far more than just 1 place)

Problem solving:  These are designed to see how you would attack a problem and your thought process:

  1. Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco
  2. You’re the captain of a pirate ship and your crew gets to vote on how the gold is divided up. If fewer than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend apportioning the gold in such a way that you get a good share of the booty, but still survive?
  3. You have eight balls all of the same size 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?
  4. You are given 2 identical eggs. You have access to a 100-story building. The eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process.
Core Parking and You

Core Parking and You

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So, Windows added a little feature a while back to help save power.  Unfortunately, it can have serious side effects for gaming and other high-performance computing.

Windows 7 / Server 2008  machines running on multi-core CPU’s have an obscure feature enabled by default called CPU core parking. While usually benign – some people have experienced serious issues that seem completely unrelated to this feature.  The symptoms are a decrease in performance with unstable and jittery in-game FPS, or noticeably laggy/jittery and unresponsive game play.  All this despite a high-end graphics card and CPU that should be more than capable of running the game. People have often seen this problem or described it as micro-stuttering – random fractional frame pauses that are hard to pin down precisely but are definitely noticeable and detrimental to game play.

Core parking comes in at this point.  Modern multi-threaded games often can leave a core idle for micro-portions of the frame after it has completed it’s processing and other cores are still finishing their work up.  Windows sees this idling, and decides to put the idle core in low-power mode.  Normally, threads go idle for long periods of time (often hundreds to thousands of milliseconds), so putting them to sleep is fine and can save power.  But in a game, the core goes idle only to be woken up only microseconds later for the next frame.  Unfortunately, parking and unparking has a time cost associated with the operation of a couple of micro/milliseconds – which when rendering 60+fps – actually creates noticeable tiny ‘hitches’.  It often appears randomly because it requires just the right set of conditions to cause the parking/wakeup to be visible.

So, what to do?  You can actually disable this ‘feature’ – which on a gaming rig – is probably the right action since it’s unlikely that power saving is your highest concern.  How do you do it?  Just like this:

  • Open Regedit
  • Find this key:  ” 0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583 “
  • Within this key, there is a value called:  ” ValueMax ” This value represents the % number of cores the system will park – the default is 64(hex) or 100%  ie:  all Cores are potentially park-able.
  • Change the value from 0x64 to 0 so the ” ValueMin ”  and  ” ValueMax ” are both zero
  • You will have to find the key a few times and repeat the process for each time it is found – the number of instances will depend on the number of power profiles in your system  [  for me, it was only found twice ]D
  • Do a full shutdown, power-off, and cold-re-start

Here’s a good description of the problem and how it manifests itself.

 

Adaptive Volumetric Shadow Maps

Adaptive Volumetric Shadow Maps

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AVSM1

Many people ask me what sorts of things I work on.  Well, here’s one of them you can download and run on your own!  This is a graphics and code sample that co-developed to show off not only a novel new kind of volumetric effect, but also a new extension on some of Intel’s new CPU graphics hardware.

This technique is called adaptive volumetric shadow maps.  The base idea was developed by Marco Salvi who published a paper on it a little while back.  However, this version has been substantially improved by the use of a new feature of Intel processors called PixelSync which allows one to do the volumetric shadowing effect with a constant-sized buffer and no depth slicing.

The effect allows for self-shadowing on any kind of transmissive, volumetric media – such as smoke or hair simulations.

You can download the sample, run it your own, and read more about it here:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/03/27/adaptive-volumetric-shadow-maps

Mr. Div and his amazing graphics

Mr. Div and his amazing graphics

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As a 3D graphics software developer, what attracted me to the field was always the fact that you could create images and scenes of the mind.  There were no physical laws other than the ones you created when generating visuals.

Mr. Div is a designer that has captured much of what I have always hoped to do.  He communicates unique experiences and ‘feels’ via strange and unique graphics/animation.  I find myself drawn to the 70’s era style of his work that was present in the very first days of 3D graphics.  Even though it’s not the highest rez/most realistic graphics, and the tools he uses are simple off-the-shelf variety – it’s the output and imagination that’s amazing. It’s exactly this kind of stuff that makes me excited to be in this field.

http://mrdiv.tumblr.com/

 

 

Running Man – Stephen King

Running Man – Stephen King

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I’ve been on a big 80’s kick since reading Ready Player One.  I even went to the library and picked up a copy of The Running Man movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger.  But I also knew that there was a book version – which I’d never read.  So, I pick up the audio-book version from the library too; and off we go.

The book itself is quite short – only 6 audio CD’s.  Apparently King wrote the story in 48 hours or so.  It’s definitely got the feel of a longer short story to it.

Story:
It’s the year 2025.   The dystopian society is split between haves and have-nots. Ben Richards’ is in the latter group. He’s been blacklisted from most jobs after protesting conditions at a plant with leaky radiation shields that makes everyone sterile.  His wife has had to resort to hooking to pay the bills and his baby daughter lies seriously ill.  Desperate and at the end of his rope, Richards goes to the all-powerful media station ICS and tries out for one of their sadistic reality shows in hopes of earning enough money to save his daughter and free his wife from her state.

Richards shows up in a mass of people also desperate for a chance at cash.  After passing through hoop after hoop of evaluations, he is selected for the biggest of all the games, “The Running Man.” He is given a few thousand dollars to start, is dumped on the street outside the building with a 24 hour grace period, and then becomes the quarry in a 30 day hunt.  For each day he evades his pursuers, his family earns a large sum of money.  If he doesn’t evade them – it won’t matter because he’ll be dead.

It seems like suicide, since nobody has ever survived more than 8 days.  The network requires Ben to mail in 2 videos a day – which allows them to track him.  His face is plastered on the TV every night with dastardly satire and stories conjured up about him to get the whole country screaming for his death.  Unlike the movie, the chase happens in the open – anywhere in the country and the public are offered rewards for reporting him and for confirmed sightings.

Without giving away too much, Ben manages to stay a little ahead of his captors with tons of action and plenty of violence.  The stalkers in the book aren’t the comic-book style stalkers found in the movie.  They’re regular police and anonymous hunters that are never really described.  He hides in regular hotels, runs through streets, hides in the woods.  Yet, he manages to find a few sympathetic people who help him in evading capture. There’s lots of good social commentary during these moments since those that help him are some of the very poor of the poor.  The most downtrodden.

Eventually, however, Richards is inevitably cornered and the final showdown takes place.  The playout of those confrontations (more than one!) are very good.  King gives you get a peek into the minds of these all-in poker players raising and re-raising each other again and again.  Each side makes shocking and unexpected moves.  When the cards are finally laid on the table, what is revealed is shocking and Richard’s response is no less so.  It’s an excellent bit of psychology and imaginative writing that keeps you quite at the edge of your seat.   While the final resolution feels just a little forced, it is still quite good.

Recommendation:
Overall, I really liked the book.  In some ways, I liked the movie better (a set playing field, comic-book style stalkers, etc).  But the dsytopia that is painted in this book is raw and very believable.  There’s a lot of excellent social commentary on where we’re going as a people when societies are split so badly between the haves and have-nots; and where we go when we stop valuing people as human beings of equal dignity and just see the downtrodden as annoying grime left in the cracks.  I give the book a solid A- and recommended read.

 

Foscam

Foscam

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So, I recently had a Home Depot gift card about to expire.  It was going to either be another flashlight (which are always handy)


or this deal was going on for a Foscam FI8910W Wireless IP camera.  I’ve heard of these things; but figured I’d give it a shot.  It has some great features:

  • Day and night (up to about 10-15 feet – not the 8 meters they assert)
  • Wireless N or wired connectivity
  • 300 degree pan, 120 degree tilt – remotely controllable from pcs or mobile devices like phones
  • 2-way audio (listen and speak!)
  • Auto-detection of motion and broadcast+email of images from the device

The long and short is that it works great when set up; but the setup and software certainly can leave a lot to be desired.  At least the Foscam forums are easy to use and full of help.  You’ll be using them a lot.  While I was eventually able to solve my problems; I wasted a good 2 hours setting this thing up.  Unfortunately, the part that’s lacking is really the software stack.  It really does feel like a bunch of first-year computer programmers put this thing together.  They have a lot of features and they do seem to work, but they’re all very picky and error-prone.  You have to set up things jusssssst right. If you do accidentally make a mistake or set up a feature in conflict with another – it doesn’t report a problem, it just doesn’t work and doesn’t tell you why or even what is wrong.  Just 20 more minutes of coding for it to say ‘password wrong’ or ‘IP conflict’ or something like that would have solved 90% of these problems; but you won’t get that.  It’s the classic pain of trying to second-guess what the programmers were trying to do, what you know the stack needs to do, and using the woefully underpowered knobs to get it to do that. Problems that I encountered:

  1. Setting up the ability to watch the camera over the internet (not just locally)
    I credit the Foscam for the fact each camera actually gets its on unique hosting web address from Foscam.  That is slick.  However, getting it to work was a real pain.  Can’t remember all the details at this point, but check the forum for the common problems and solutions.  I remember I could easily control the camera locally on the network, but getting the camera to work through their web hosting was the pain.
  2. Setting up the auto-email on motion detection
    This was just a painful experience in bad software/firmware design.  Once you have #1 set up, it should be trivial to have the camera email you the pictures when it senses motion/audio.  The setup screen is fairly straightforward.  Type in the email address(es) you want the camera to mail pictures to; set the parameters for alerts (motion/audio events) and hit ok.  Well, I got these horrible problems where the camera would not save the settings.  I’d enter the data, enter the admin password to change the settings, then look at the info panel again and see the old settings.  Infuriating!  It turns out, the Foscam admin password CANNOT ACCEPT SPECIAL CHARACTERS.  If  you have any special characters in your admin password ($%#^!&*, etc) – then you basically just locked yourself out of changes.  I had to hit the hardware reset, pick a generic password, and only then did my changes stick.  Worse was that it didn’t tell you this anywhere or warn you when you were picking the admin password.  It would just act like it saved the settings, but not and merrily go on its way.
  3. Motion detection with still images is pretty much broken/useless
    When you use the email stills when motion happens feature, 1 out of 2 times the person is long gone by the time the shot fires.  I tested it a couple times, and you need a full 2 seconds of the person moving in the field of view before the shot is taken.  If someone just walks across the path of view, most of the time you get an email of an empty room.  I believe the recording of video option is better, but you better make the field of view big or place the camera such that it will have a full 2 seconds of the person moving in the target area before the shot fires.
  4. Auto-panning
    The camera had a nasty habit of going into auto-scanning paning/tiling mode when it got confused.  So you’d see/hear the little camera looking all over the place every now and again if you logged in or it reset itself.  I disabled the feature in software and it stopped.

Supposedly these are some of the better cameras out there.  But if that’s the case – then I’m disappointed.  It was worth it since it was nearly free to me; but if I’d paid the list price on this thing – I’d have been pretty upset and took it back.  It works great now; but the setup was painful and it’s poor auto-notification of motion detection give it two solid strikes.

 

 

Ready Player One by

Ready Player One by

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Another audio book down!  This time it’s Ready Player One by Earnest Cline.

Plot:
The year is 2044 and the world has not fared well. A global recession has struck and poverty is rampant with all resources scarce.  The protagonist of this story is an 18 year old named Wade Watts who has fared worse than most. Wade lives in abject poverty with his abusive aunt who simply keeps him around for extra food vouchers. Wade has one escape – the OASIS.  The OASIS started as a massively online multiplayer game, but has become all things in this dystopia. He goes to school there, works there, and plays there.
Yet the OASIS has no leader.  It’s creator, an unbelievably rich and reclusive programmer, James Halliday has died and left an easter egg in this world of the OASIS.  The person who finds it gets control of the OASIS, and all his worldly goods – a sum of billions of dollars.  Wade becomes a ‘gunter (egg hunter) in his spare time.  Hunting down the egg has gone on for years with little progress.  It requires the collecting of 3 keys – and each key is hidden and protected with challenges.  Halliday’s only hints lay in his obsession with all things 80’s: movies, D&D, music, styles and most importantly, their games.
While the independent Gunters are searching for the egg, so are the Sixers – a group of corporate lackeys – that are out to get the egg for themselves and change the utopian free OASIS into a commercial vehicle.  So the race is on.  Will Wade (Parzival as his avatar is known), along with fellow hunters Aech and Art3mis beat the Sixers and win the most amazing game prize ever?

Summary:
This was one of the most enjoyable reads I’d had in a long time.  I was apprehensive when I read that it was a book about 80’s culture and games.  Often times the well-meaning author butchers or panders the topic.  But not so with this book Every great 80’s reference to classic cult/nerd content is there: Dungeons and Dragons, movies such as Wargames and The Quest for the Holy Grail, classic video games such as pac-man, and joust, and music and pop-icons such as Max Headroom and the Cap’n Crunch hacker – as well as more modern advancements such as massively multiplayer online games.  All the greats are in there in all their shining glory.

Best of all, Earnest Cline was clearly a lover and know-er of all these as well – his descriptions and treatment of each piece of history is accurate and spoken of with the same reverence as I knew and loved them.  As a nerdy child of the 80’s, I loved this trip through memory lane – and it’s clear Cline was just as much a lover.  I found myself knowing and able to play along as Wade walked through the challenges and puzzles.  I too had run the D&D dungeon The Tomb of Horrors, had played through some of the PC-based games he mentions – although I was not a very good master of classic arcade games.  Still, watching the young Wade and others of his generation learn to fall in love with the awesomeness of the 80’s was like falling in love again myself.  It made me want to whip out my old D&D set, pull out my Tandy coco and play Dungeons of Daggorath (which I DO have a copy of and a working Tandy!), and all the other great games and adventures I had as a kid.  It re-vitalized and reminded me of why I got into computers all those years ago.

I give this book a solid A.  Sure, it’s not a heady examination of the deeper things of life nor Pulitzer-quality writing – but it’s an absolutely romp if you were a child (and especially a nerdy child) of the 80’s.  I found myself sitting in the car long after I’d got home and listening to ‘just one more chapter’.  I haven’t always had that recently – and it was a great pleasure to have that much fun with a book again.

Highly recommend for the child of the 80’s