I just came across an old F&SF and read “The Tamarisk Hunter” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 2007). It’s easily one of the better stories I’ve read in a long time… A fine farmpunk tale, since reprinted ever as it crossed into mainstream republication. Now I have to go check out his book.

… that I can believe in.

Here’s the Fox Reality channel schedule against the inauguration coverage:

I’ve written about the Clover (and Starbucks and the Clover) here a couple times, but the short version is the Clover’s this crazy drip coffee maker that well-tended produces an amazingly good cup of coffee in under a minute. Starbucks bought them out and now you can’t purchase them new.

I saw one on ebay (link) selling for $4,000 (with a buy it now price of $18k).

And I kind of stared at it for a while. I emailed the link to fellow Clover people. I reloaded a lot. I started to come up with this plan in my head for how I could make it worthwhile (“…if I had it on my desk at work, I could collect donations for cups and it would only take four, five years…”). I stared at the picture. I wondered if I’d be able to get as good with it as Trabant, say. I looked at the seller’s feedback.

And even now, having realized it’s a little crazy to have spent that much time tossing the idea back and forth, I write this up and think “well, it’s not thaaat crazy, you can see where…”.

Stupid coffee.

The huge project I’ve been fighting for months and months is live now, and you can see it here on one of my favorite hotels’ page, the Hotel De Anza:

An image of the hotel de anza page at expedia.co.uk

Here’s the use case. Someone goes to google, types in “Hotels in San Jose” and goes to our handy Travel Guide page (my co-worker and friend Dirk Zoller, who I whole-heartedly endorse, was the Program Manager for a host of sweet features on that page) you click through to the De Anza.

I was the program manager for two new pieces: the breadcrumbs

Screenshot of breadcrumbs on the Hotel De Anza Page

and the cross-linking modules

Hotel De Anza crosslinking modules

There are potentially five on any point of sale. You only see four on the De Anza there because it’s not a chain hotel (otherwise you’d see a fifth one for, say, other Hilton hotels in the area).

Here’s what I want to talk about, though.

Hotel De Anza Overfelt Gardens link module

Though this doesn’t look like it, this is the coolest thing on the Expedia points of sale that carry it. It’s not as smart as some of the rocket science back-end stuff that handles flight search, or booking hotels, and all of that good stuff. But it’s the only feature I know of that can potentially surprise and delight a user.

Here’s what’s going on. When you come to a hotel’s page, we do a couple of hotel searches to find stuff in the neighborhood, the same (or better) class, the neighborhood, and then we look at whether you were already searching for hotels near a landmark. If you weren’t, we take a guess from the landmarks the hotel is near. It’s potentially random. For some small percentage of people who work in similar jobs like mine, that’s already enough awesome.

The result is that sometimes if you’re looking at a hotel in Seattle, you might be presented with other hotels near Seattle Center, which you’d expect. But you might get hotels near the Lake Union Sea Plane Base (airport code LKE). Or Dick’s burgers. Or Chief Seattle’s grave.

I don’t know how long it’ll take before someone out there finds something they didn’t know was out there based on this, but it’s inevitable. I have this image in my head of a user shopping for a hotel, and maybe they’re a little bored as they go through the results, or they’re tired, and out of nowhere they see hotels near the Bellevue Doll Museum.

“Doll Museum?” they think. “I didn’t know there was a doll museum in Bellevue. Let me go check that out…”

Or “Doll Museum? There’s a Doll Museum in Bellevue? Why?”

Or whatever their reaction might be. Something causes them to pay attention. Expedia’s suddenly gone from being to a pretty staid online travel agent to a place where every once in a while we’ll do something interesting and unexpected. Willing to throw the Doll Museum out there on a lark if we don’t know what you might be interested in.

It makes me happy.

I went to go take another crack at a short story that’s been dogging me today and came across something titled “Veggie Sandwich Combo for the Unseen”. It’s two pages long, hilarious, ends abruptly, and I have absolutely no recollection of it even though the time stamps are not that old.

Writing is weird.

Paradise Roasters has a rare small-lot Colombia (the “Colombia-Delgado Micro-lot”) at 50% off ($12/12 oz bag). It’s a chance to get some really high-quality coffee geek-style beans for normal-bean dollars. Derek says check it out.

1UP has a really interesting interview up that touches on a couple of questions and complaints I had:

On Tenpenny Tower, and my complaint that even when you negotiate a reasonable solution everyone gets killed:

1UP: On a related point, is there a way to finish Tenpenny Tower where the Ghouls can move in, but not end up killing everyone?

EP: Nope, there’s not. For us, it was about reinforcing to the player that, you know, the Capital Wasteland is a brutal place, and sometimes, not everything is black and white — or has a completely happy ending. If that’s not the essence of Fallout, I don’t know what is.

Oh. It would seem that this is a deliberate choice in the design where I didn’t understand what had happened, rather than a failure of the events.

And on the

1UP: Somewhat related to that: Why are companions not an option for inputting the Project Purity code? You already have the option to have Sentinel Lyons input the code in your place. There are three viable options for an alternate to input the code: Fawkes, Sergeant RL-3N, and Charon. The player has already experienced a situation where Fawkes can enter an irradiated room and perform a task, RL-3N should follow his programming to obey you, and Charon would not only become healthier due to the radiation, but he’s established as essentially a slave who will do whatever his contract-holder orders him to do. To the player, the inability for either to input the code seems really contradictory.

EP: That’s a great question, and one that’s obviously come up quite a bit in different forums. Let me try to shed some light on why the game is like that — it’s a pretty interesting look inside the development process.

All of the followers were implemented into the game fairly late in development, after the main story had already been nailed down. So, you know, we had the scene at the end of the game, with deadly radiation, and never really compensated for the fact that you could have a Supermutant, or Ghoul, or robot, who could possibly turn the purifier on for you. We’d only ever planned for you sending Sarah Lyons into the purifier, because we knew, from a story standpoint, that she’d definitely be in there with you.

What we could do — and what we did ultimately do — is cover that stuff in dialogue. You can ask those followers to go into the purifier, and they’ll tell you why they won’t. We felt that fit with their personalities, but really, they didn’t “sell” that to the player in a single line of dialogue. So, in the end, the player’s left with a, “Huh, why the hell can’t they do it?!” sort of feeling.

So the story does kind of break down. But you know what? We knew that, and were OK with it, because the trade-off is, well, you get these cool followers to join you. You meet up with Fawkes near the end of the game, and it’s true you can go right with him to the purifier. So we could’ve not had him there as a follower, and that would’ve solved the problem of him not going into the purifier — because, at that point in development, that was the only fix we had time for. But we kept it, and players got him as a follower, and they seem to love adventuring him with. Gameplay trumped story, in that example — as I believe it should have.

So if we’d planned better, we could’ve addressed that more satisfactorily. But considering how it all went down, I feel good about the decision we made there.

That’s also interesting — I’m not sure that there wasn’t a better story-based way to resolve it, but at least this was a conscious choice to add followers at the cost of a satisfactory ending.

That raises a new question, though: how can the ending be considered less important than gameplay that some players enjoy unless the story’s regarded as secondary to the game? And if that’s the case, then what’s the point of having the main story at all?

I worked this out for a story I wrote today and thought I’d share. Assumes a qwerty keyboard, does not count spaces, numbers, punctuation, etc.

Finger, percent of all presses
Left pinky 8%
Left ring 9%
Left middle 20%
Left index 22%
Right index 20%
Right middle 8%
Right ring 12%
Right pinky 2%

I’ve been trying to figure out if I should buy a new card and if so, what, and if so, what I should spend. But since I have an LCD, I’m looking for something particular — the best performance at 1920×1200. This turns out to be kind of hard to figure out if you read gaming sites, which run a bunch of tests at different resolutions without current pricing

For December 26th 2008, frame rate divided by dollars (how many $ you’re spending to get each frame-per-second, lower is better), using a variety of random benchmarks done at high quality and high AA/AF filtering. My methodology is terrible, etc etc.

Dollar per FPS, 1920x 1200 gaming
—
4870 $6.2
GTX 260 $7
4850 X2 $7.4
GTX 280 $10
4870 X2 $11

Data pulled from Firing Squad, Sharky Extreme, Anandtech

It’s weird to me that more sites don’t do exactly this kind of comparison. If you’re in the market for a new card, it’s kind of assumed that you’re either in the “mainstream” market at $100-150 or whatever they define it as, the “enthusiast” $300 or the “have an insane amount of money” at $500+.

But say you could spend any of those amounts but really, really don’t want to. What’s the best value here? Are you better off buying the best $100 card on the market every year, or spending $500 now and sticking with it for much longer?

“Is that democracy, that you get to choose your lies? We had to take the lies we were issued.”
— Vassily, Soviet metallurgist, in Alexander Jablokov’s “The Boarder”