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

Had two dreams that seemed to be different faceplates on the same core anxiety:

1. I spent all my money on a beautiful new Intel Mac - but I forgot that it was a laptop that I wanted, and ended up with a perfectly redundant desktop machne!

2. I rented a Zipcar and had a jolly and rewarding drive - and realized, back home and 15 minutes after my time was up, that I had returned it to the wrong spot!

Ouch. Zipcar has changed their interface and made it into crap.

Time was, the main reservation page was a set of parallel timelines, one for each car near you, with their reserved and unreserved times clearly blocked out. If there was an unreserved stretch that suited you, you clicked on it. Bing! Done.

Now you have to blindly enter pickup and return times first, with no other information, and then are told whether or not any cars meet your criteria. It's gone from picking things off a shelf to fishing. What were they thinking?!

Dude, I don't always know ahead of time when I want to take the car out! You tell me! Sometimes I plan my activities around when cars are avaialable, man. Gawrd.

After reading the FAQ, I see that you can apparently fake it by entering a days-long block of time in the first screen, getting some results, and then setting an option to show cars that conflict with your fake-requested time (probably all of them). This gives you some old-fashioned timelines, which then you can fine-tune down to what you really want. I hate that I have to do that now.

Yes, I am become one of those whiney bitches who has an aneurism upon a favorite website changing their look. I think I'm justified here, though.

But for now I am only 100000. (Last year I was 11111.)

Delightful things:

* The Hunt was fun but short, ending less than an hour after Saturday did. I personally performed about as well as I did last year, and I think our team kept up with its own record too. We had one painful bottleneck about 12 hours in that locked us out of the leader-pack, but still ended up placing about two-thirds of the way up, if I read the graph correctly. I liked the theme and how it was run.

* Chicken Heart suffered from some technical flubs and missed cues (grr), but otherwise beat its way into the hearts of a full-house crowd at Arisia yesterday. Afterwards I received, along with everyone else involved with Chicken Heart, an email from Kibo containing a Kibo-penned one-minute summary of the show in radio play format. It's been years since I regularly read a.r.k but I couldn't help but thrill at this. You can take the jmac out of the fanboy, but you can't wait that's terrible.

* Received a delightful gift from jadelennox. Monkeys were involved.

* I was happy that I got to celebrate the last day of my 2000 Maine driver's license's validity by renting a Zipcar to help shuttle hunters and their stuff around after we struck the set. But now I can't drive at all anymore, and will have to go subject myself to the Mass RMV system once again, despite my no longer owning an MV to R.

Got to the meeting and back. Misplacing the card was an $80 mistake, all told. Hoping there isn't a zillion-dollar card replacement fee from Zipcar. Going to perform a proper cleanup and maybe I'll find my card but I'm doubtful. In this morning's ransack I collected a fist-sized chunk of cards that are not my Zipcard.

Meeting was OK. This guy knows games, and it was good to be able to cut to the chase, receive specific (and unexpected) encouragement of where our ideas are cool, and specific criticism of where we're going to have to prove 'em wrong.

Got skewered on one particular question I had no answer to, which completely disarmed one of my arguments. Homework for me. But no checks written today, alas. However, I was instructed to call back when we're beta. This is an order of magnitude better than DCUWCY[1], so: good.

If I was ever less than sure that we should be entirely focused on getting to beta ASAP, funding be damned, I am completely sure now.

[1] I haven't seen this before but I declare it to be useful and that its proper pronunciation is "doo-koo-WIH-kee".

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!

Samurai Champloo is a guilty pleasure and the first TiVo season pass I've added in recent memory. WP isn't very clear on what the title means, but it sounds like it can translate to "Samurai Remix", which would make sense.

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I really like ZipCar. It occurred to me today that I've spent two months driving around other peoples' cars, without speaking to a single person about it at any time; all of my transactions, from signup to making reservations to paying my bill, have been over the Web. That's really great.

Rising gas prices might be very good or very bad for the company, depending. I hope it's the former, if it has to be either.