A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I finally called Ricky back just now. He wants to come down for Art Beat this year. We went to only a little bit of 2005's (2006 being the Ricky-(and-art-)free Volity Year) but he has only good memories of it, as well as sadness that he didn't buy "that piece with the string". I don't remember this.

I do remember feeling a little antsy when he was trying to have a conversation with one seller about her stuff when it was clear that How much is this? was the only question she wanted to hear. Ricky does not pick up on these things. It is too bad that it makes me antsy, but it always does.

Anyway, he's how tentatively scheduled to be staying at my apt for that weekend. We will probably hit the MFA too so he can enjoy its courtyard, where he hasn't sat in a long time.

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In other news, I finally cleaned my keyboard this afternoon. I didn't have the article author's specialized scrubby tool, but I did have a whole lotta Q-tips and some Windex, so I got most of the gross (and I do mean gross) matter off the base. His sandwich-baggie method of mass key-cleaning worked like a charm.

Sadly, as a fan and frequent user of mammalian skin and hair, it's bound to get all gunked up again soon enough unless I invest in a cover thingum. karlvonl recommends this one. Maybe!

Also, the AC is up again. Whirrr. $$$$. eh

I'm on my couch and feeling mellow. Part of this is because I have been cleaning lately, and I am greatly calmed by the - well, I suppose it isn't order, really, so much as a moving towards orderliness that fills my apartment. I mean, there's still crap all over the place, but it looks slightly more right than it did yesterday, when it looked a bit more correct than it did the day before that. I have a new system I've been trying, see. If I can keep up the pace I'll describe it, sometime.

The other reason is that for a good while now I've had a real handle on Volity development, consistently setting short-term goals and then meeting them. Pace is enforced by the fact that the three core Volity boys are guaranteed to meet together only once a week, on Monday nights, so when I get to a decision point I can't overcome by myself I just make a note to bring it up Monday, and then move on. Eventually I hit everything I wanted to do that morning, and so I go do something else. I'm in such an in-between mode now, and feel like I have a right to be here. It's nice!

We're shooting to have a soft launch of the revenue system by the end of this month. That's a few weeks slipped past our summertime make-up-a-date deadline, but I'm willing to stand behind this one; we know exactly what needs to be done, and how. The fact that my Volity work-week has been shortened to four days might make this a week later, all told. So be it! It shall get done.

Once again growing skeptical of the participatoryculture.org folks. Their DTV channel guide is moderated, and they don't tell you why or how, though they mumble things about decency standards in the FAQ. I can understand wanting to be wary of porn and spam, but surely there are better ways of attending to this than using human bottlenecks? Over the last three days, one (1) new channel has been added. I submitted The Gameshelf as a channel, and I bet they're getting hammered with similar requests as their software gets more attention.

So what are they filtering against? If it turns out they're making decisions based on subjective notions of content quality, I shall be severely unimpressed. So far I'm willing to believe that they're swamped and unable to dedicate the time to manually picking through submissions. (Which still makes me unimpressed, though in a less severe way.) I have made a post to a forum asking if they need more volunteers, or something. We'll see.

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Interesting that this is not wholly unrelated to Volity. Ideally, lots of game parlors will appear, and we're not planning on introducing any human moderation or "hard" filters to the system. We do have some cool ideas for user-driven moderation, though, which should not just knock out any spam we get but, more importantly, help alleviate Sturgeon's Law.

As much as I will love every game development effort that finds its way to our system, I don't doubt that 90 percent of it will still manage to be crap. Giving users a way to help each other find the good stuff is a special challenge, and one that few providers bother with.

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New, undecorated Gameshelf homepage, including episode guide with links to information about the games we cover: http://gameshelf.jmac.org . Props as alwys to my technical consultant daerr for helping me renoogle jmac.org's namesever setup once again.

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Drove a Hybrid car for the first time... this feller, a Toyota Prius. Passenger Karl noted the LCD touchscreen that's below the LED dashboard display and declared that I was driving a Nintendo DS.

In truth, the UI was pretty awful. All the readouts were in the center again, but the speedometer was numeric-only -- barf -- and the five-position gearshift had only two positions labeled: P and B. (B? So, park, and... "brake", maybe? So my two choices are "stop" and "stop"? What?) I sat there staring at it after starting the engine, not sure how to actually make the car go forward. I actually had to look in the owner's manual to learn that the gearshift's visual feedback is an animated meter up next to the speedometer. Ew.

(B, by the way, was apparently the low-gear setting. Whatever, guys.)

Other than that it was OK. It stopped on a dime but it accelerated more sluggishly than I'm used to... was definitely crankier than my 8-year-old Corolla or any of the other gas-guzzlin Zipcars I've known lately. I don't know if this is endemic to hybrids or not.

The continuously updated cartoon depiction of the energy-flow direction among the battery, engine, motor and alternator on the LCD screen was fun to watch. More fun than watching the road, possibly; screech!! I don't know if that screen had any other purpose, though. I've tried to convince taskboy that it had a Tetris mode where you steered pieces with the steering wheel and hit the brakes to do a quick-drop but I don't think he believed me.

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kyroraz invited me to dinner on Friday and we got a chance to try the new Princess & Dragon expansion to Carcassonne. It is a.k.a. the OM NOM NOM variant, since 12 times per game you get to set a meeple-eating dragon tearing across the board, sound effects optional.

However, it seems lot more dangerous at the start of the game than it is at the end, because of the smaller board and higher meeple density. Then again, there do tend to be more meeples on the board later in the game, and the volcano tiles (which let you effectively teleport the dragon wherever you'd like) may further keep the threat level high. I guess I'd have to play it some more to see for sure... I definitely want to.

You people who have no idea what I'm talking about are probably so jealous of my life right now, eh? snort

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Ate at a Quiznos for the first time. It was good. Why was it good? Because I like toast, that's why.

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I found a certain mostly-ex-goth housemate's dancin'-skeleton dishrag the other day. She turned down my offer to return it so now it's Halloween every day my kitchen, huzzah. I mean, boogity boo!

Cleaning is its own reward, especially when there is forgotten Christmas chocolate underneath the rubble covering the dining room table.

(Really rich chocolate makes me sneeze.)