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

I was talking with some friends out on the street. Suddenly leighjen started pulling away; she was balanced on the rear bumper of an MBTA bus which had been idling near us. And she kept talking, and it became clear that she wasn't talking to us but actually just loudspeakering (sans actual loudspeaker) into the air to promote some production that she was evidently involved in. I could her using her stage-level voice even after the bus rounded a corner and disappeared from sight.

It was a drizzly day, and I was worried that she might slip and fall off. But I think she had something to hold onto so it was all right.

The drive back from Maine on Monday was uneventful, but for a nice discovery. I listened via iPod to the entirety of Hard 'N Phirm's Horses and Grasses, which I bought last year after falling in love with the video for their "Pi" song, but didn't really give a full listen to. I mean, it's a novelty album, and I haven't been in the mood to sit and listen to 40.3 minutes of yuk-yuk since the days when getting up early on Sunday for the Dr. Demento show was the high point of my week. But I'll make an exception for drive-time entertainment.

The album is a mix of nerdy-cool catchiness ("Pi", "The Carbon Cycle"), style-parodies of various non-nerdy American music genres (including "Rodeohead", a grand-ole-opryized medley of Radiohead lyrics), and at least three songs that spend 95 percent of their time setting up for the last-two-seconds punchline. (One song is entirely in Spanish and I'm too lazy to Google a translation but I bet it falls into this category.) The latter group's a little weak but the whole is actually a gem of a novelty album and I'm glad I finally listened to the whole thing.

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Tuesday evening I found myself playing board games with pheromone and company. I've actually been running into Ms. P somewhat often lately, but I have not seen much of (what I think of as) the "Elboids" social circle since, eh, around the time I moved into my current apt in 2003, really. It was nice to see some familiar faces and catch up, even a little.

I won a game of Target, taught Metro and the Icehouse game Pikemen to people, and got re-aquianted with Cities & Knights of Catan. I did pretty well at it and I like it OK, but I can now confirm like vanilla Settlers betterer.

(Hm, I wonder pheromone may be among the few all-around gamer's gamers I know, good at the whole field, a la temvald and Shmike...)

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Shadow's doing better. Last night classicaljunkie visited and Shadow became very happy, actually. She twirled around and was very social and talkative the whole time. I think she may like girls more'n dudes.

No guests tonight, though, and the cat's been curled up on my bed all evening, barely acknowledging me. At least she's not squirrelly and hostile like she was two nights ago. I guess she's done with that.

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Oh, also saw The Departed. Enjoyed it, for all its veering between thuggishness and cornballery. The sympathetic character was actually the worst psychologist I've ever seen (I think she was supposed to be at least pretty good at it), and I swear that at least one of the many splatterhappy scenes was a Monty Python homage, somehow.

The movie's been playing as a second-run feature at the Somerville Theater for weeks and it still filled the cinema on a Thursday night. I guess everyone likes to see Jack Nicholson riding the Red Line. But dude, you can't use a cell phone under Park Street. I mean, duh.

I finally used cash to buy a Charlie Card last night, since they're finally converting Porter Square. (In the past, I've just traded tokens for single-use tickets.)

It took a long time before I realized that the ticket machine won't take your cash bills until you press a button located nowhere near the bill feed telling it that you would like to give it some cash.

That's jaw-droppingly bad UI along multiple axes.

(a) The feed serves no purpose other than taking your money. It does not need to be modal. It is safe to assume that a customer will not insert money unless they wish to buy something. Instead of refusing the money, it should graciously accept it and then enter a dialog with the customer about what they would like to buy.

(b) For every bill-accepting vending machine that I've ever seen, the way you initiate a transaction is feeding it some dough. There are decades of UI tradition in play here; it's what people expect. If you, as a machine, act differently, customers will assume you are broken. As did I. Only when I stepped back and looked for other options did I notice the instructions telling me to poke the screen first.

After finally buying a hot new card, I proceeded to try feeding it through the turnstile, where it made a farting noise, and an integral screen lit up with a message telling me to re-insert it. So I did. Fart. OK, turnstile broken! Try next one over. Fart. WTF? Oh, I see, I'm putting the card in upside-down, because the up-side is clearly the plain white one with a large orange arrow on it, and not the colorful one with three small black arrows on it. Folks, I can understand the cost savings of not putting a strip reader on both sides of the slot, but would it have killed you to clearly print which side was up? (And which side was down?)

Ugh... what a disaster.

radiotelescope adds that the turnstiles, if they drain your ticket of the last of its funds, will hand it back to you anyway. Other cities' subways will chew up a newly empty ticket, say THANK YOU and let you through. Our city's subway, on the other hand, is destined to have a floor littered with dead tickets.

I take it back if the machines give you a bonus for recharging a ticket, like (for example) the LAUNDR-O-MAT does with its cash cards. Otherwise, why would anyone want to bother recharging an empty ticket when it's easier to just buy a new one?

Went to meerkitty's house this evening for an antisocial. She worked on her strange Cisco moon-voodoo while I talked business with daerr and read Rules of Play (which I'm enjoying more and more). Met her very friendly cat. I think traveling all the way from Porter to Riverside (D line) is the longest I've ever ridden the T. It takes more than an hour, even when the red->green transition is bang-on-time.

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Nearly done with the show, which I've been working on since midnight. The Shadows over Camelot clip, which I put off until last, just isn't going to look very good. It's entirely because I attempted to direct it while playing, and therefore it had no direction at all.

Now that I'm more comfortable in the SCAT studio and have made friends there, I am going to try to have future game sessions at the studio, with a real director (who is not me) and real cameras (though kyroraz did an excellent job working with my vague instructions at the SoC shoot). It's not as interesting-looking as ruthling's basement but it will do.

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5 a.m. and not sleepy. Guess I'll go watch TV and floss. Or something. Let's hear it for 30-hour days!

While waiting for T to unstick, on the way to work yesterday.