Author Archives: DMZ

Took the EU job

Two weeks in London a quarter, we’ll see how that works out. The first one may be in December. December in London! Hee hee hee.

Clearly makes writing more difficult, not sure how I’m going to manage that, but uh… gotta keep the lights on at Haus Zumsteg. And my car’s latest repair bill is likely to approach its value, for the second time this year. Which is awesome. Not that I drive much, but… sigh.

My nice day

I had a bad end of the week last week, as I got weirdly sick Friday afternoon, and even after I started to feel better Saturday I still had a nagging, painful headache.

Today, things finally cleared up. It was a beautiful day, clear and sunny, I had a car available as my parents generously loaned their Passat to us (Jill and I are currently down to one car that sometimes won’t start, which is not a good situation), I took a bus into Seattle to a cool donut shop with delicious coffee to meet some other previous Clarionites for story crits, came back, made some dinner, did some work, and then I felt like I really wanted to get a bike ride in, but it was getting late – so I did.

And it was awesome. It’s always great getting some exercise in after being waylaid by illness, but the sun was low, the western sky was bright orange as I toodled along, it was nice and cool, traffic light… I was smiling almost the whole time. Streetlights came on as I came up the final street to my house, so I timed it almost perfectly.

Ahhhh… biking. If only someone would pay me to write a bicycling book.

(looks over in the direction of Boston)

I saiiiiiddd… if only someone would pay me to write a bicycling book.

Sigh.

Usability memo to application development types

To all developers, everywhere:

Unless the message you’re displaying is “you’re in incredible danger” there is no excuse, ever, to steal focus from my current application. I don’t care if you’re updating virus definitions, or if you want to check for software updates. It’s less important than me actually working. If I’m writing full-tilt and something pops up, I:
– almost certainly key input to that dialogue that does something unintentionally
– lose ~10-15 words of whatever I was writing
– lose my concentration
which leads to
– losing my shit

I, no joke, uninstall programs that can’t be quiet. If your objective was to be noticed, you succeeded, and now I don’t use your app at all. Congratulations.

Windows should – easily – allow me to disable that operation entirely. There’s no reason a user shouldn’t be able to control whether they’re interrupted by messages like that.

Worker Bee recommendation

There’s a Bay Area band called Worker Bee (myspace page here) that I totally, totally recommend. They’ve got a 5-song record out called “Divorce Your Legs” which you pretty much can’t find anywhere, but they’re ridiculously good. The best way I figured out to describe them is “If you like Explosions in the Sky, they’re like all the things you like about them”. Roger Waters once wrote an essay in Newsweek that recommended the best way to rebel against the Boomers was to find music that was complicated, subtle, and built on itself until it burned a hole in your head, and unfortunately, we didn’t have Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky and all those other great band then, but I waited, and I love them, and that’s Worker Bee.

I don’t even know how to encourage people to check them out, except to look at their MySpace page, which has two songs you can listen to, or check them out if you can get to one of their shows. They’re not even on eMusic (!). I would bet you can find their CD on all the finer P2P networks, too, though obviously, I don’t want to encourage that. I wish I could point people to an online purchase option. I’m sure I’ll be pimping their album if it ever comes out.

Car versus Bus carbon emissions

I came across something online that claimed that diesel buses emit 200x the pollution of a normal passenger car. I looked into this, read some studies, and it’s not true.

The average vehicle on the road emits ~1# of CO2/mile (it’s higher for light trucks, lower for cars, but it works out quite well). I looked up some testing data, and a late-90s diesel bus on low-sulfur fuel (no trap, none of the new cool technology) puts out ~6.4# CO2/mile.

So an older diesel bus = about six cars, CO2-wise.

Caveats:
– There’s a lot of variance in how much pollution an individual bus generates
– This doesn’t account for the relative harm of the pollution generated by the different vehicles, and there’s a case to be made that the buses should account for non-CO2 products

But as a range… there’s just no way it’s 1-to-200.

Top Twenty-Five Non-English films

I was reading this fine Jim Emerson post on Scanners about Edward Copeland’s cool project to vote on the best non-English films (post, the 122 nominees who made it, link to the final ballot)

So, in the spirit of things, I worked up a list, but it went way over. When I cut it down to one film per director, I had twenty, and that seemed a reasonable list. (I cut a bunch of other Woo/Kieslowski/Miyazaki films). My tastes run to the enjoyable craziness of a Kung Fu Hustle over the Seventh Sign, which is clearly a sign that I’m a dork.

In rough order of awesomeness:

Red, Kieslowski
Seven Samurai, Kurosawa
Kiki’s Delivery Service, Miyazaki
Drunken Master 2, Chia-Liang Liu
The Killer, Woo
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lee
Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo
Run Lola Run, Tykwer
La Femme Nikita, Besson
Fucking Amal (or “Show Me Love”), Moodysson
Kung Fu Hustle, Chow
Das Boot, Petersen
Man on the Train, Laconte
Running Out of Time, Zahn
Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang
Metropolis, Lang
The 400 Blows, Truffaut
Intacto, Fresnadillo
Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein
Battle Royale, Fukasaki

Yes, Battle Royale’s on there.

(Red is, btw, the best movie I’ve ever seen in my life.)

Summits of Bothell ride

Joel and I went out and did the Summits of Bothell ride today – it’s about 38 miles… and 3800′ of climbing. That’s not a typo. The ride’s great: they do a good job with support and everything, the food stops were really well stocked, the people were great, and the route, though it had some bumps I’m not sure any route could have avoided them: Bothell’s under crazy construction, the roads are torn up all over the place. Joel described it as “Chilly Hilly without the crowds” which is an apt description.

If you’re into climbing-heavy rides, I totally recommend it. Low, low gearing recommended though. I’ve got a triple up front, but my gearing in back is really narrow, and I was pretty screwed once the grade got too steep.

Random notes:
It rained for the first hour. Riding in the rain sucks. Riding up steep hills in the rain sucks more, because if you lose traction, you’re screwed. Descending hills is no fun, either, because your brakes don’t work and if you lose traction, you’re roadkill. When that lifted, the ride got much more enjoyable.

Enjoyable, on any climbing-heavy ride, is relative.

I have climbing power in short bursts: when I can get up out of the saddle and tear into a hill, if it’s short enough I rock out. These weren’t those kind of short hills. I’m in pretty reasonable biking shape, and I still got my ass kicked.

There were two hills in particular: the second one was so steep (and my chain derailed three times at the bottom, forcing me to abandon my three lowest gears)(that really hurt) that I felt like I was going to throw up on myself and then pass out for a good stretch. Then there was another that, had there not been a side street where I could pull off and circle for a couple minutes recovering, I think I wouldn’t have made it up.

We finished and I felt great, loaded up the bikes, drove home, and I almost fell over trying to get out of the car: in the ~20m car ride, my legs got together, decided that they were no longer needed for propulsion, and shut down in protest. I could barely wobble around the house ten minutes later.

Copy protection: training users to not buy or pirate games

I buy my PC/console/etc games, largely because I know that as the world’s constructed, the people who produce games I want to play need money now, in the same way I know that if I don’t buy some band’s album, or go to their concerts — yeah. I feel good that I have my NOLF boxes kicking around, and Full Throttle, and whatever.

The problem with this is that it totally sucks, especially on the PC. You get stuck with Star Force or whatever installed, and when I run a game I bought, sometimes they scan my system and complain about other programs… it’s a hassle, and it makes me not want to buy them.

I pre-ordered Bioshock, for example, and it asked for the serial number. and it kept rejecting my serial number. I had to go through and figure out which ambiguously printed letter/number was which. What kind of total crap is that, when they can’t forsake 0/O I/1 or at least print them so that they’re easy to differentiate?

Plus, it includes SecureRom, which means it fucks up my machine generally. AWESOME. THANKS.

Meanwhile, there’s a ton of pirated versions already out there. So the choice I’m presented with each time I consider buying a PC game, really, is:
– Buy, have to install malware with the game, figure out what software I have on my computer doesn’t work with that species of malware, probably tweak my anti-virus/firewall software, get treated like a criminal, or
– Be a criminal and pirate it

Really? That’s the choice you want me to be making? Seriously, they’re training legitimate buyers to go online, find the cracks, and use them on software they bought. Did they think that through? That all the people who go through that will make the same decision next time, instead of thinking “As long as I’m downloading the pirated version anyway, maybe I should get it first…”

Crazy. It’s just crazy. The game’s pretty sweet, if you’re curious, though it’s super important to get a high frame rate and update to the beta drivers if you’ve got an nVidia card: it’s way, way too hard to play otherwise, to the point where it’s not even fun.

“I love your little monkey.”

“If I may offer you some advice, Anshinnal,” he said, “taunting the crow is a really poor idea.”

My last story at Clarion West, I wrote a fantasy story about an assassin with painfully heightened senses forced to fight in daylight out of desperation. I spent a ton of time on the world and the dynamics, the sweeping conflict he’s caught up in, the economics of a slavery economy, and most of that ended up torn out to make deadline and focus on the story at the heart of it.

It’s been two weeks, and I still don’t know what to do with it. Putting the larger world in means I’d be running at novelette size immediately, while trimming it down seems like an even more painful cut.