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

It was thundersnowing around noon. By the time I took my lunch walk it was sunny and the dampness on the ground suggested that maybe it had rained a little several hours ago. Now it is dark and thundersnowing again.

Fine with me.

I can't say I blame it.

Happy Solstice. May your fortunes increase with the days.

Didn't sleep much last night for no particular reason, so up early and at the Diesel. I know I'll regret coming here once I start to head back home; it was already pretty hot when I walked here at 8 a.m. I allegedly came here to work on job applications but I think I will leave once I am done with this post, and this tea. Not looking forward to puttering around the square to take care of my mailing and banking chores... that's how bad it is out.

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Visited kyroraz last night with daerr and Bob. (Is there really only one guy in my mid-range social sphere named Bob? That seems weird. Make more Bobs.) Was fed pasta and then we went nutso with the DSes. Four-up Tetris is a fine thing, as is New Super Mario minigames, but Mario Kart DS was the highlight of the evening. I have never played MKDS with more than one other local human, and oh my goodness is it a heck of a good time with four players. We must have laughed and shouted for a good hour, chasing each other around the track and pelting each other with shells and bananas and ghosts n shit.

It's all been said before, but much of what makes the Mario Kart games so wonderful is their ingenious of negative feedback, using power-up distribution and other tricks to reign in lead racers and boost trailing ones. They manage to keep the game fun enough so that newbies and experts can race together and still have a roaring good time, and yet avoid seeming like they're is throwing too much weight in the newbies' corner. That's a really delicate balance, and these games nail it.

It's too bad that, if people without their own MKDS cards are playing, you're limited to only eight of the game's 32 tracks. But that doesn't keep me from wanting to go ahead with an even larger DS event at Volity World HQ sometime soon...

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Eight people signed on for the werewolf game tonight. That's wonderful, though it occurs to me that I really should have scheduled an earlier game of something just to make sure that the scheduling system works outside of the jmac-and-Andys range. I've already moved on to other sub-projects in the meantime; daerr and I spent hours kicking butt on the forums before gaming last night, and they're now nearly done (insert standard wards against jinx-fueled code gremlins here). I look forward to steamrollering on to tackle my end of the revenue model.

Despite all this time and BS&T poured into it, and all my recent bitching about wanting to do other things, coding for Frivolity and volity.net is still one of my favoritest things in the world.

Two notes to myself:

• There needs to be an RSS feed for scheduled games. (daerr?)

• When the forums go up, I should make a post to that "wibuddy" page that you see whenever you connect to the Diesel WiFi network. And then plaster ads in Your Move Games, already, sheesh.

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If I might make a post-mortem sort of statement, despite the fact that nothing is dead (despite our best efforts ho ho): we really weren't thinking like businessmen, in assigning our order of work priorities last December. While I certainly don't regret any of the work we put into the games, Gamut, and the website, I do think that with more foresight we could have recognized the importance of getting the revenue model built and functioning early. But we are hackers before MBAs (chortle) and so didn't know that our lack of a revenue stream (even a potential revenue stream) would seriously hobble our arguments to professional investors.

It seems stone-cold obvious when I put it this way, but for a whole year our thinking was more or less We have all this really cool tech! Look, look, you can play games right now!! As it turns out, that does not matter, if you are making no money. Well, we have a totally awesome moneymaking plan! That's nice, kid. I have a plan to turn purple and fly to Mars next month. What do you think of that?

(To give ourselves due credit: it's clear that our tech is in fact sufficiently cool to wedge our foot in as many investment doors as we did. But with no hard evidence of cashflow, our follow-through stunk.)

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We are making some pretty good headway with our first potential game development client, enough so that I'm starting to have concerns about legal protections we'd need to set up if we land the contract - that is, what sorts of things would go into that contract. I have no doubt that we can meet all obligations vis a vis the game itself, but we must keep in mind that we would provide both a deliverable and a service, so it would behoove us to make some signable statements about uptime/downtime ratios and AUPs and so on. And I really don't want to mess this sort of thing up.

This crazy-violent fast storm that just blew over (and out of) Boston had positive lightning in it! I didn't know about the existence of this phenomenon until now.

I saw two strange, long-lived, brilliantly purple lightning bolts and asked weather-nerd kyroraz what they were, and he told me. "It's really bad stuff", he added. "Do not get hit by it."

The snow kept the Andys away through Sunday, so this has been a really slacky weekend for me. Got into gear Sunday evening and am riding that into today, brum brum. Expect to see Space Station Assault become scrutable this week. It is a cool game and people should play it, gosh darn it... but I am well aware that, as currently presented, it's not very approachable to those who don't know the rules already.

Also, if you haven't seen Fluxx in the last few days, go check it out. I've been responding to feedback, and I think the game's sexier now than it was a week ago. I'm going to go ping the Looneys about it very soon, though I may hold off until I can coincide that communication with other stuff.

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Feeling braver lately. Had one conversation late Saturday that was exactly the sort of conversation I hate having, involving questions that, once asked, make me want to barf. But of course all is better for its having happened. Much like barfing.

And the day before that, I was in Harvard Square and feeling a rush of wot de hell paid a visit to the university medical center's dental office. I nearly wept with gratitude upon learning that I can continue to avail myself of their services; I really love Dr. Joo and the other tooth-techs there. I don't have insurance any more, but the checkup fee I was quoted was basically the same as the last dentist bill I had to pay myself, some 10 years ago in Brewer, Maine. How about that!

So, Feb. 28 I will learn how well 15 months of flossing and fluoride rinsing's been paying off. Better stated as: I will learn if the two unresolved cavities have healed themselves (our optimistic goal), need to be filled anyway (dammit), or spiraled out of control and necessitate horrible blood-gushing surgery (unlikely).

Next is getting around to having a rest-of-body checkup, coz it's been a couple of years already... meh. Maybe wait until I see what happens with the company. If it turns out I need emergency same-day kidney detorsion or whatever, I may as well put it the triggering checkup off until I'll have insurance, from one source or another, ho ho.

Two separate incidents of motorist hostility towards pedestrians spotted within a minute of one another, walking home just now. Neither against me (one vs. man in Utilikilt, one vs. woman in crosswalk) but still I was shaking by the time I got home, trying hard not to scream. Actually, still am, still am.

Mothafuckin heat better break soon. Or I will break its face.

BTW: Not to excuse anything, but wearing a Utilikilt does in fact make you look like a bloody dork. Probably you have long come to accept this, but just in case. I mean, free to be and all, but anyway.

In retrospect the hostile motorist did say "kilt" and not "skirt" or "dress", and the insulting portion of his utterance did not attempt to question the wearer's sexuality, so that's something I guess. Way to get the awareness out.

Who told the weather that it could be all warm again? Grah.

Again I say: why isn't this business headline news? Gorgeous weather spikes paranoia in area man or its equivalent would fit in nicely under all that Patriots plap.

Speaking of, I enjoy seeing cool people enjoying sports, even though I do not at all. I think being uninterested in sports is one thing, but it takes extra mental focus to live in Boston and not care at least a little about Boston (or New England) teams. (And it requires vein-popping psychic resistance to feel nothing for the Red Sox, but it's not time for that yet.)

Anyway: yesterday I finished my rewrite of that section (it's about Perl and XML and Unicode, yus, funsy-wunsies) and the combination of feeling satisfied with a writing assignment and the warm weather made it difficult not to misperceive myself as having just finished a spring semester term paper for college. Hum.

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In Diesel now. Happy. Other things about this place: it has a higher Room rating than the 1369 (to further abuse The Sims as a metaphor generation unit). More space, big glass front, booths and couches in back if you're lucky enough to score them. And, yes, as cthulhia points out, I'm more likely to bump into friends here. (However, I should note that my reuniting with Noah and Melissa occurred the very first time I ventured into the 1369, last summer.)

On the minus column, my cellphone doesn't work in here. It does in the other place. I just now wandered outside to call Erik, and ask if he wanted to sink some time into rewriting one particular section that we've been getting some strange remarks about. He said: Uuurgh, because he is swamped in his own work. So it looks like it's all me for the next two days. Hum hum hum. We'll see.

The Diesel, I see, has embraced the strange weather by removing the wintertime battens from its roll-up front facade. I still feel the need to have some token acknowledging that these temperatures shouldn't be here: I'm wearing my corduroy sportcoat, something I wouldn't do were we having this very same weather in June.

I wasn't nervous until two people at the Sunday gaming group agreed: "That's it. We're done, we're doomed. Head for high land!" While their attitude was ha-ha-only-serious, seeing any amount of fatalism in my friends still fills me with dread. This, and the constant little reminders of the oddball atmosphere (here comes Charles in the door wearing shorts, listen to the squeak of the air conditioner at the office), has put a dint on my ability to focus on things.

Internet access at home has been squidgy for over a week now, despite Charles' efforts to make the new would-be firewall machine, the scrounged Alpha, work. Last night we went shopping at Micro Center, and I picked me up a new Netgear wireless router. Though it has its own firewall capabilities, Charles wants it sitting behind the Alpha-based one if at all paossible. If we determine that the box is simply toast, we'll fall back to using the Netgear as the house firewall instead. Tonight should hold the moment of truth.

(I played with the router's Web-based configuator a little, enough to change the admin password from the factory-default "1234" (There's a tip for all you 1337 1s) (Also: insert quote from "Spaceballs" here, if you are Carla; I'll have to tell her about this and see if this triggers her automated quote mechanisms as I predict) and make its broadcast identifier string "Chez Chestnut"... @whee)

Today, though, I'm on my way back to O'Reilly to hang out (uninvited, but I'm fairly certain I'm welcome, given my goal; see below), since Internet access is out-and-out dead at Chez Chestnut, the Alpha idling with a screenful of kernel compilation error messages until we decide what to do with this mess. Charles is sincere in his belief that we can hit a working solution tonight. I just hope we can hit one before Saturday.

The pressure to not spend this Netless afternoon reading or watching movies comes from the imperitave to Finish The Book Dammit that Erik and I received yesterday. I must spend the next week and a half in hack-and-describe mode in order for this to work according to schedule. Strange and Wondeful fact: I think I can hold up my part. I don't know how, but over the last mangle of weeks (maybe since autumn) my confidence with the project has risen a lot, and stayed there. I've managed to get a lot done, and the path ahead of me seems reasonably well-defined. I'll say no more on this, though. I know myself a little too well for that. Mmm-hmm.

I'm also making progress on the other thing I told everyone I'd put off until the move was done, and have completed the first draft of my Statement of Objects essay for my MIT application and vetted it by Jon, my principal sponsor in this crazy endeavor. He filled my head with ideas for stuff the essay still needs, so that's gotta happen today, because there's now one month left for me to finish filling this thing out. I still have to choose who to tap for writing a third recommendation letter, but after speaking with Jon yesterday I have some ideas, at last.

Finally, my first-ever contracted programming job reached feature-complete stage this week. Yay. Now comes the part where the customer tells me about all the changes they need. It's just like I read about! But in this case the customers are also my dear friends, so it's all good.