uppercase numbers

I’ve just spent 120 hours and 41 levels on a pure Destruction mage in Skyrim.  I spent most of this time just wondering when the experience was going to get good.  But I’ve finished the main quest line and feel left down.  Skyrim started off on the right foot with the dual handed casting.  They even added in the magic block concept.  But the execution is just utterly flawed.

The real problem is that I’ve put all my level up points in to Magicka because it’s the one resource I’m always starved in.  Even with magicka regen gear or fortify destruction gear, even after this many levels there is not enough magicka to fight more than two enemies at a time.  The game makes you do this all the time.  But because all my points went to magicka and not health, the mage is extremely fragile.  There really aren’t many good dropped items to really improve armor AND the correct magic thing you want.

One could enchant, but that brings up issue number 2: there aren’t enough skill points.  Even as a Destruction purist, the Restoration and Alteration bring a lot of spells to improve offense, defense, and reduce Magicka cost.  But there aren’t enough skill points to do all that AND level enchantment which is the only way to get the decent gear we need.  You might say that it’s the point, that it’d be too easy otherwise.  But there’s just no balance when a single arrow or ice spell can kill you and you STILL don’t have enough magicka to fend off three dead guys without running or potting.

Luckily, Destruction provides stuns.  If you dual cast the spell, you can stun an opponent and this is critical to surviving any fight.  Crowd control is a must, but it also kills the action.  You dual cast a spell, stun the guy, wait 15 seconds, do it again.  It’s cheap and it’s boring.  It also forces you to dual cast every spell which kind of ruins blocking.  I can’t just hit block to dodge a spell.  I have to switch to that spell, let it charge up, and then hope that it blocks.

But all a magic block or ward ends up doing is draining your magicka pool super quick.  And it usually fails with a single destruction hit.  There is a talent point that can be used to make wards absorb magicka, but see my note about not enough talent points.  Also, like Oblivion, you can simply side step most destruction spells.  Why burn precious magicka off trying to block it when you can instantly step to the side?

Magic blocking would actually be a fun component if it came up instantly with a key press without having to change spells.  Let it burn magicka at the same rate, but if we bring it up for only a second while we need it, that’s fine.

Oblivion had a better magic system overall.  More spells AND you got to create your own monstrosities.  Touch versus range spells were a good idea and gave an otherwise long range class some close range action.  You could be a pretty powerful mage in Oblivion and still have major health.

A lot of people complain about Skyrim’s obvious flaws.  The dated graphics, the shitty UI, the bugs, the crashes, the annoying Radiant AI talking at you in the middle of other conversations, the lack of money at the vendors.  But those things can be forgiven, they don’t really hurt the action.  But hurtling the same spells for 120 hours does.  Flame walls and glyphs are good ideas but almost entirely useless in just about every battle.

This biggest effrontery is that there seem to only be 8 mappable spell keys.  It makes it annoying to try other spells since they require rummaging through a shitty UI to find.  Suddenly need water breathing or a ward or frost instead of flame, well now you have to remap hot keys.  Fun in the heat of battle.

The little oil pots and fire spells are a great addition.  I also like the candlelight spell you can shoot to make, well lets face it, the majority of the game visible.  Oblivion was awesome because of the spell variety it gave.  And it was just dumbed down like all new games seem to be this day.

As a mage, Shouts are confusing.  Ice Form gives great crowd control, but most of the other spells are complete rip offs of spells I already have.  I’m torn on Slow Time since I’m not sure it affects magicka regen, which is all I really need time for.  A “slow their time but keep mine the same” button would work better.

Maybe swords are the way to go with this game.  The combo moves look interesting.  I miss some meaningful combat.  Not this recursion of stun, stun, stun, stun, shout, drink potion, stun, stun, stun, collect loot.

In 2004 I bought my first new car, a 2004 Subaru Impreza RS.  Each of my previous vehicles had been extremely well used and most had cost less than $1000.  But in 2004 my wife needed a reliable car and we didn’t have the money to buy a decent used model so our only option was to finance.  The banks would only let us purchase a new car.

Every month for the next five years came the bill for $382.  It was a good car and really only cost us about $2000 in non wear repairs such as a new master pully and a rusted through catalytic converter.  Tires and breaks probably cost another $3000 on top of that.  We sold it at the rather fair rate of $8000.  In the end, we spent about $226 a month for having owned that car.  If we had kept the car beyond 7 years, we may have made out a little better although it was nearing 100,000 miles and would have suddenly needed a lot more money in repairs.  The 100,000 area seems to be an expensive time for most cars.

There are plenty of cars in the used market that used to cost $20-$30K new and can be had for $2000-$4000 used.  You can usually find them at around 70-100K miles which is about when new cars are sold to purchase more new cars.  If you buy one of these cars for $3000, you will likely dump another $3000 in to it right away for breaks, tires, mufflers, accessory belts, a timing belt, and a tune up.  A manual car may need $1000 in a clutch as well.  This seems to scare many people off since you’re in $7000 on a car that’s still only worth $3000.  They see the repairs as a nuisance and opt instead for a new car which they see as costing less in repairs and being more reliable.

But this car with that work is likely going to last you at least another 50,000 miles.  You can get 4-5 years out of one of these things easily.  At $7000 over 48 months, the cost of this car is $145/mo but you can do better.  This doesn’t account for selling the car when you are done with it, although your best bet is to drive it in to the ground.

It can save you well over $1000 a year to buy a used car.  So I wonder what puts people off the most about it.  Obviously the bigger savings can be had by purchasing from a private party which people may find an intimidating experience.  This is especially true if they don’t know what to look for in a car.  With Google and a printer you can find all sorts of tips on how to buy a used car.  Also there is savings by not involving the bank.  People may not have $3000-$4000 up front to buy a car through a private seller.  Also, if you spend $3000 on a car, expect to spend another $1000 right away for brakes or tires.  They always seem to need something right out of the gate and people may not realize this.

Buying used is the best thing you can do for your environment.  A lot of green conscious people don’t realize that the energy and pollution caused by creating a new vehicle often outweighs any gasoline savings.  How many people have traded in perfectly decent Civics or Camrys for a Prius only to do more harm than good?

Just some other random thoughts:

* Roadside assistance is cheap and although used cars are slightly less reliable, with cell phones and cheap assistance, breaking down is rarely more than a minor inconvenience.  And even new cars can break down.

* If you have a new car, every scratch or ding is going to make you cringe.  If you live in a city or do a lot of highway driving this is especially true.  Looks mean a lot to some people.  But it’s always easier to swallow a dent if it’s on a $2,000 car than a $20,000 car.

* Put $100/mo away for repairs.  You will probably spend about $1000/year on repairing an old car so it’s good to plan for that and earn a little interest to boot.

* Test drive that car hard and get it real warm.  If something smells or sounds off about the car, skip it.  Even a layman can usually tell if something sounds wrong even if he or she doesn’t realize what might be causing it.  Avoid cars with any signs of present or previous leaks as fixing them can be more money than you need to spend.  Accelerate hard in the car to see how the engine compression is doing.  Don’t worry about the tires or brakes, or clutch, just assume they’ll need to be done.

* If you don’t get service records for the car, change fluids like the transmission or differential fluid.  This is usually required for 45-60K service and is often ignored.  Change timing belts on an interference engine if you don’t have records as well.  Never believe anyone if they claim to have had service done.

* Use the dealer’s mechanic sparingly.  They’re very over priced.  They may be your best hope for more complicated jobs such as faulty ABS or a timing belt.  Otherwise, find a local mechanic who is ASE certified.  Don’t be afraid to try a few different mechanics before settling on one who does the best job.  If you can find a mechanic who will install parts you purchase yourself, even better.  Mechanics often add write up to part costs.

* Most mechanics don’t want to spend your money.  I don’t know if they are naturally frugal or used to customers who are extremely cheap.  It’s usually a fight to get them to order higher quality parts or fix things that may only be slightly broken.  If a single hose or belt breaks, have the mechanic change them all.  It can help the reliability situation and keep your down time to a minimum.  But like I said, very few mechanics like fixing things that aren’t broken.  But do you really care if a $3 hose can go 200,000 miles or not?

* Always get a stainless steel muffler system.  Yours will fall off.  And they will keep falling off until you go stainless.  It costs a little more up front but a stainless unit will probably last the rest of the car’s life.  If you do a lot of short drives, you may join the ‘new muffler every 2 years’ club otherwise.

* The little things are going to stop working.  Cruise control seems to be fragile.  Plastic latches and switches will often be very brittle after 10 years.  An older car isn’t going to be perfect so don’t put money in to fixing the little things like mirror controls, seat heaters, etc.

* Buy the best brakes and tires you can afford.  The cost of one accident far outweighs the cost of good tires and brakes.  And tires especially can make a huge difference in your safety.  And do put snow tires on any car you intend to drive on the snow.  Good all-seasons do quite well on the snow, but not nearly as good as snow tires do.  They really are worth the expense if you can’t stay at home when there’s snow on the roads.

* You can get a much ‘nicer’ car used than you can new.  For example, some luxury cars are surprisingly affordable used.  You can get a Subaru, Audi, Honda, for less than it costs to get a Kia, Suzuki, or Hyundai.  Or, get a BMW, Mercedes, Porsche for a little more and still spend less than a Kia costs new.  Or get 4 Hondas or 2 Porsches for the cost of a new Kia.  But beware, parts can be expensive on less common cars.  Japanese and American car parts are very affordable in the US but many European car parts are still expensive.  You have the option of getting an exotic or rare model, but it comes at a price.

* These days a used car is a late 90s or early 00s car and these cars are likely to all have air conditioning, ABS, air bags and many of the features you’ve come to expect.  Avoid cars that are much older even if they have low mileage because you will miss some of the features and the cars are less safe.  The differences between an early 90s and a late 90s car can be dramatic.

* Consider 150,000 miles to be end of life for any car.  Many car engines will gladly do 200,000 miles but don’t buy a car with 160,000 miles expecting to get five years of commuting out of it.  A car at 80-90K miles has a lot of life left but will need that 100K work done.  A car at 120K miles that has already had timing belt, clutch, air conditioning, etc replaced and has quality service records is also a contender.  It has a bit less life but has already had a lot of the major mid-life crisis work done on it so may save you some money.

I was watching a show last night called Invention Nation, and the episode New Cool caught my attention.  One particular segment showed how this one company was adapting refrigerators to use cold outside air instead of the compressor during nights and cold days to save energy.  Now, I’m not a very green person in general and don’t like going out of my way to be ‘Earth conscious’ but this idea seemed to make extremely perfect sense.  I live in an area where it’s plenty cold enough to refrigerate food at least for half of the year.

But then I gave it a little more thought.  On those same cold days we’re heating our houses.  The condensor on the refridgerator is actually cutting money off of the heating bill.  In fact, cutting a hole through the side of the house might actually hurt the heating costs since sealing holes can be quite tricky.

Of course, most of us have our fridges tucked away in to some wooden cubby hole where all that heat builds up and is ultimately wasted energy.  In fact, our aesthetic will causes refridgerators to work harder than they have too since they’ll run inefficiently without proper cooling.  A simple $5 fan is all that’s required to circulate that heat out from behind the cabinets and out in to the open air where it can be of more benefit to cold humans.

Refridgerators are pretty stupid all around when you think about it.  They should be top loading, not side loading.  Throw a retractable counter top or butcher block on the thing and it can be quite functional that way.  The fact that it uses air for cooling food is quite inefficient.  Some metal conductors and some reusable tinfoil packaging might work better.  A little cold water bath for things like soda, milk, or other plastic containers would be nice as well.  Think of a giant cooler at a picnic.  That’s really the right design.

I’m not saying that using the cold winter air for the fridge is a bad idea.  It certainly helps reduce your dependency on the stressed out grid.  I’m not sure it’s the energy win they claim it to be.  It’d be better to make use of the heat energy the fridge pumps to the condensor for heating rooms or water.  Between wasted stove energy and fridge energy you could probably generate all the hot water you need.  That’d be useful in the summer months where you don’t want the fridge dumping hot air in to the house.  But you still take warm showers.

What I really want is a thermo-resonant cooling system that these guys make: http://www.cficinc.com/

In the later part of 2007 I finally had some funds put together to get myself a proper PC gaming rig again.  I settled on the Nvidia 8800 Ultra as my card of choice.  I bought the MSI version for a massive $589 before shipping.  This was actually quite cheap for the Ultra at that time thanks to it being an MSI model.  And then I strapped a $130 waterblock to it.

Yep.  I upgraded from a $300 mid-range video card to a $700 one.  Even in 2007 the 8800 series was getting a bit dated.  The Ultra was discontinued only a couple months after I purchased it.  It wasn’t a good value for the money so they say.

I’ve been using it for a year and a half now and today is the first day it’s let me down.  I can’t run STALKER Clear Sky at 1600×1200 with full eye candy at 30FPS minimum.  FarCry 2, Crysis, Fallout 3, FEAR2 and GTA4 are all games I’ve recently played with it and it’s done amazing on each and every one.  STALKER:CS is a demanding game with amazing lighting effects and at 1600×1200 it will dip down to 20FPS.  Again, with maximum settings.

Except for AA.  I don’t use or like AA.

The problem seems to be video RAM.  768m just isn’t enough anymore if you want full eye candy.  GTA4 is the most noticible when it comes to video ram usage since it provides a handy little utility for guestimating how much you need.  If you want big draw distances you just need a lot more video memory.

Super fast DDR3 helps when you need to swap textures but it’s still a bad idea.  So I have to run STALKER:CS at 1280×960 resolution.  With full eye candy but less resolution I get the 30FPS minimum I want with averages in the mid 40s.  The video memory usuage drops to 600-800m so mcuh more inline with the card.

Don’t know why dropping resolution drops down memory usage but since it does more power too me.

I’ve noticed that I’m not running the card overclocked.  With RivaTuner and the water cooling I can clock this card to over 720MHz core, 1580MHz shader, and 1250MHz vram.  RivaTuner somehow got uninstalled on this machine so it’s only running it’s stock ‘overclock’ of 660/1512/1150MHz.

The stock Ultra is spec’ed for 612/1500/2160MHz.  So MSI really got some solid numbers out of it out of the box.  But don’t let MSI fool you: the card was NEVER stable at those settings with the stock cooling.  You’d get a lot of pixel ‘glitter’ at those settings though underclocking it to stock Ultra settings fixed that.  So did going to water cooling.

As far as the DangerDen cooler well I think it was a waste to be honest.  I love DangerDen products and I’m absolutely glad someone makes such a massive cooler that can also cool the RAM and power components.  But the thing of it is that you just can’t get much more out of the RAM.  RAM tends not to overclock so well on video cards and even when it does it provides very little performance gain.  Having MORE ram is important.  Does the DangerDen cooler sacrifice GPU cooling abilites for the RAM?  The GPU temperatures are quite high.  Well over 65c after intense gaming.  Thermal transfer from the GPU to the water is poor with this block.  That doesn’t stop 720-730MHz core ranges from being unreachable though.  With a little overvolting I think 730-740MHz would be completely stable.  I would like a better GPU block though.

I still think vram is the limiting factor here.  Who cares about a fast core/shader if you’re swapping textures from system RAM all the time?  If this card had 1GB or more of RAM I think I’d be playing at full res on STALKER.

The bottom line for me is that I’ve gotten a lot of use out of this card.  Being able to run PC games with all the lovely eye candy has sort of made me buy and play a ton of PC games in the past 18 months.  I’m still shocked every time I get a new game and go in to the options screen and crank everything up and watch it not struggle at all.  Did I get my moneys worth?  No I don’t think so.  The water cooling kit was too much for what I got out of it.  And the MSI Ultra, while a good deal at the time, wasn’t priced to compete with the slightly better valued 8800 GTX.

But I still don’t need to upgrade.  The Nvidia GTX 285 can be had for under $400 and it’ll have 1GB of RAM.  It’s a tremendous value for that and it’d be my card of choice.  I get to wait for the next series of GPUs to come out before I start feeling the slowdown.

I was thinking about tech company organization the other day and I stumbled upon an interesting thought.  In many ways, working in a development house is like working in a restaurant.  You have customers.  They look at a menu, pick what they find appetizing at that moment in time, and then place the order.  The kitchen springs to life, uses the ingredients and appliances they have to create a meal, and then some one delivers it to the customer.  If all goes well, the customer pays and comes back again for more.  The customer really has almost no idea what goes on in the kitchen and usually doesn’t want to know for fear that they would be appalled.  The customer and chefs almost never communicate with each other unless it’s through a volley of intermediate employees.

Imagine your developers are the guys in the back making the food.  Imagine the development managers are taking the orders.  Imagine the product people or upper management as the customers.  The consumers.

It all sort of fits, doesn’t it?

Customers all want the same basic things.  They want fast service.  They want quality service.  They want reliable service.  And most important of all is that they want it cheap.  It’s easy to tell when when your service is fast at a restaurant.  If you don’t have your food right quick you’ll be bloody hungry!  Quality and reliability are easy to measure too.  If the food tastes like burnt motor oil than they’ve failed on both accounts.

For some reason the customers of the software development world have a much more difficult time of gauging the performance of their ‘kitchens’.  They almost always seem to focus on speed and cheap.  I don’t think they always realize that they’re getting McDonald’s though.

Fast food joints provide a ready supply of expedient food options.  Through clever marketing it even seems cheap.  Your typical fast food meal can cost just as much as eating out somewhere more reputable however.  The real problem with fast food is that it’s completely unhealthy and has a tendency to kill you if you eat too much of it.

Your typical developer is like a fry cook.  You don’t even want to know what this guy would do to your burger.  You certainly wouldn’t want him to take your order cause he’d simply muck it up.  He’s getting paid so little and similar jobs are so readily available that he just doesn’t care about your fries one bit.  So you get soggy fries.  And no matter how bad those fries are you’ll still go back to this place because it’s quite simply a quick fix.

There are nice restaurants though.  There are developers out there who think just like fine chefs.  They want to make something beautiful and tasty because that is their passion.  They design their menu carefully and they charge a lot more so they can go buy the best steaks or wine.  The wait staff is cute and attentive and will certainly know which delightful soup the chef has whipped up.

And the chef will certainly feel a little annoyed if you pour ketchup all over your dry aged filet.

You’d probably like your developers to be chefs and not fry cooks.  You have to give them the leeway to do the kind of work they can be proud of.  Just place your order and sit back and enjoy the appetizers while they assemble something you’ll love.  If the food arrives late and cold than don’t pay!

The sad reality of this, however, is that no matter how good of a restaurant your development house turns out to be, it’s still a restaurant.  Your customers are placing orders and waiting to see what will arrive at the table.  It’s almost always a surprise.  I think this is a terribly ineffective way of building quality software products.

Think baseball team instead.  Everyone has different positions on the team but they still all work as a single unit.  They’re all working for a single goal and the greater good.  They’re playing to win the game.  And in modern times they’re also playing to raise someones stock portfolio.  You can make a lot of money while doing an excellent job and having fun.

Oh sure, every company throws out terms like ‘team building’ but they almost always mean hierarchy building.  And hierarchy is exactly the root cause of the restaurant scenario.  You segregate the people requesting work from the people doing the work and create tiny choke points of failure.  No one ever really seems to know what anyone else wants.  By putting someone over someone else you’ve almost certainly reduced the amount of two-way communication between those people.  Person A might feel intimidated by Person B now.  Or Person B might feel they don’t need to listen to Person A because they value their own opinions more.

I know many development companies have adopted flattened management structures.  Others create things called ‘verticals’ or ‘pods’.  Like communism it sounds good on paper but these types of things always seem to have fundamental flaws.  My personal experiences with pods has been grueling primarily because pods don’t interact well with other pods.

The bottom line I think is that if you have a room full of smart and educated people from developers to managers and everywhere in between, why should communications be one way?  How can one set of people dictating requests to another possibly use the full group’s combined potential?  Bi-directional communication has to be encouraged.  The most junior guy on the team might have the best solution for the project.  The product manager might have thought of a simple approach to a tricky development problem but the developers might immediate dismiss it.

Avoiding conflict is not always the best solution.  But the real trick here is to maximize ideas while minimizing conflict.  In the end I don’t know the proper solution.  And I’m certainly not saying that I work for McDonald’s.  But I’m fascinated by the various attempts at company organization I’ve seen first hand.  I’ve seen the ups and downs of many different kinds of structures.  But what I see the most is company after company always falling back on the old standby of ridged org charts and middle management.

I think the offices of the future are going to be much different than that.

You can read more about it on the discussion thread here.  Long story short, because resellerratings.com felt that I was infringing on their trademark by using the words “reseller ratings” to describe the activity on one of my subforums.

Activity that consituted about half a dozen posts and maybe a few thousand views since the sub forum’s inception.

So they bullied me and threatened me in to legal action until I changed it.

So it’s changed now and that’s the end of that chapter.  But the moral of the story is important here.  Corporations are slowly stripping away our civil liberties.  Bloggers have to watch what they say or risk receiving cease and desist letters.

Donate to the EFF today :)

I’m so happy to have gotten president’s day off from work.  It gives me a nice long weekend to decompress and spend some maitenance time on some projects.  One of the things that went missing from my life when I got married is downtime.  Prisoners have this sort of thing in droves.  It’s the kind of time that lets you obsess over the details.  It’s the kind of time that forces you in to doing something you want to do and would take pride in doing except you’d probably never get around to doing it otherwise.

Okay, maybe it’s not just marriage and kids.  It’s also video games and television and the internet.  It’s an enormous amount of media that I could spend my whole life digesting.  And I think this sort of thing can be very educational.  I’ve learned more in the past few years from Wikipedia than I had in my entire highschool career.  But this desire to absorb has overtaken my desire to produce.  And that’s very unlike me.

Video games and reading and movies are also an escape.  Escaping is important to me as it gives me a drug free way to turn reality off for a moment.  It’s an ideal way to melt away stress.  But with a successful career comes the added means to buying a lot more books and video games and movies.  There’s just not enough time in the day to deal with it all.

So now I try not to fall in to my habit of watching or reading or playing the same things over and over again.  I could read that Neil Gaiman book or play that Valve game 100 times over and be perfectly satisfied.  But then I’m not experiencing new things and it seems like a waste of time.  Unfortunately, it turns out that my ability for comprehension on the first time through anything is a bit poor.  You watch Spirited Away for the 12th time and I guarantee you will see something new.

There is, of course, a health factor when it comes to media digestion.  Doing something is actually a lot better for your body, physically speaking.  I’m looking over the course guide at Le Cordon Bleu and I’d love to have the $50K to learn how to be a chef.  And I know that I’d loose 100 pounds running all over cooking things in a hot sweaty kitchen.  The repetitive nature of cooking makes me realize that I don’t want to go through with it.  But there’s no denying that it might actually be a very healthy thing to attempt.

If I don’t eat anything that I cook of course ;)

I can’t wait for spring cleaning.  I feel that strong desire to throw open the windows and start rearranging everything in my house.  We moved in last year around August and though we took a bit of extra time to plan things out, it still takes about a year to really understand the flow of your house and to know how to change it to make things better.  My office is a particular challenge since although I spent a lot of time organizing it so everything fit… well, there’s just a lot of stuff in here and the simplest project explodes in to an unweildy mess in an instant.  The cube keeps eating AGP video cards (though the PCI one I bought seems to be happy enough) and this isn’t helping since it’s guts seem to be forever strewn about my floor.

It’s going to take me a day just to organize all the CDs and DVDs I have thrown all over my desk.  God forbid I should label any of them or put them back in my organizer.

On the plus side, I have Reason 4 and Photoshop CS3 installed today.  My Canopus ADVC110 is working just great and I have some videos to edit together of the kids.  I’m sure the relatives would get a kick out of seeing some online videos.  I might just decide to be lazy and use Steam to buy FEAR2 or FarCry2 though.

It took several nasty emails to LayeredTech to get them to reverse their ridiculous charges.  But they finally gave and credited my account.  I still really beleive that this policy of theirs only exists to grab an extra buck from their more casual customers.  The one off guys like me who don’t spend a lot of money there and maybe don’t pay as much attention as some other companies.  Or, maybe they’re just used to companies saying ‘aww fuck it’ and paying them that extra last month.

I wouldn’t be as sensetive to this if I didn’t work for that certain ISP in Buffalo, NY (LocalNet) that took PRIDE in getting a few extra payments out of their customers who just wanted to cancel.  Some people will just make 2-3 extra payments if they’re not paying attention or don’t want to wait 60 minutes on hold.  Companies know this and take advantage of it.  They ‘love’ autopay accounts.

Which is why I avoid them like the plague.

If you call these companies out and put the time in to it, they always seem to back down and do the right thing.  Threaten to go to the BBB and State Department of Commerce and they always seem to listen a little harder.  NY state used to really do a good job looking in to these things for the consumer and I had many a utility bill adjusted with their help.  Be an educated consumer, help us all out.  Never allowed yourself to be taken advantage of.

This is the lifeblood of those TV informercials and Made for TV products.  It’s the same principle that allows commercial banks to rape consumers with low balances by charging all sorts of NSF or Negative Balance fees.  The moment you allow someone else to control your money is the same moment that you’re at a disadvantage.

We really need laws in place to protect consumers with firm cancelation dates.  If a consumer says that they don’t want a service TODAY then the billing should stop TODAY if there isn’t some term contract in place.  It shouldn’t be up to the company to decide just when the customer is allowed to cancel their services.

I love the Monty Hall Problem.  I think it really showcases how much the average human mind (mine at least) can struggle with probability.  The fact that coin flipping is always a 50:50 probability even if you’ve thrown heads 100 times in a row seems completely opposite to what one would expect.  Just like switching your door in the Monty Hall problem increases your odds from 33% to 66%.

I guess the rule to probability is that YOU’RE ALWAYS WRONG.  Unless you’re a genius or took statistics classes.

It made for some interesting conversation on the drive up to NH, anyway.

I see that Paul Robertson has a new video.  It’s not as epic as Kings of Power 4 Billion % but it’s still pretty sick I think.  Mecha Fetus.

I just can’t find a theme I like for wordpress.  And I can’t bring myself to custom roll one.  I have a better idea of what I like now at least.  I definitely like black text on white backgrounds.  And I definitely like an article title list on the sidebar somewhere.  And I only want one sidebar.  And I want a theme at least 950px wide.  If you still have an 800×600 screen then you deserve to scroll a little.

But to find such a theme that doesn’t look like ass for some other reason?  Very difficult.

Update: I’ve been hacking this old ‘blue’ theme a bit.  It’s a bit ugly but I did at least get it to do the main things I was hoping it’d do.  Most importantly, I find it a lot easier on the eyes.  No one is ever going to read this blog except me but at least the ability to do so is there.  The other themes were making my eyes bleed.

I am rough on furniture. I seem to destroy an office chair every 2-3 years at home. Even my couch is breaking down slowly. I’m a large bodied individual but I do have to wonder how many other people have these same sorts of issues with seating. I’ve seen people half my size fall on their asses when the backs of the chairs give way. Office chairs in particular just aren’t designed that well and even by spending $250 you’re not guaranteed to get something not made in China.

$250 every three years isn’t bad though when you start pricing out high end office chairs. It’s easy to drop a couple grand on one and maybe that’s not a horrible idea when you spend 10 hours a day in one. My current office chair was about, you guessed it, $250 and is currently being held together with some door hardware and deck screws since the arm braces supporting the back of the chair gave way several months go.

I thought $250 was going to get me a better chair over the $80 ones I had been breaking but I was wrong. So I’m giving a $400 chair a go. Assuming I don’t get ripped off by this company it’ll be the first chair I’ve purchased actually rated for well over my weight. I don’t have high hopes that it will last say five years but it’s worth a shot. If it doesn’t work out I’m going back to the $80 Chinese models.

The Chinese, by the way, seem to make terrible terrible steel. It shouldn’t bend like copper or crumble like a clump of dirt guys. Maybe they keep all the good stuff for themselves.

It shouldn’t be that hard to make a chair last a long time. In fact I’ve had several chairs from the 70s that never had a structural problem but really had some upholstery issues in the end. I can live with foam and fabric wearing out but it’s damn appalling when a wheel keeps falling out/cracks in half.

My biggest issue is with chair backs. They’re usually either supported by the bottom of the chair with a thin piece of L shaped steel or they’re supported by arms on the side. The L shaped steel is just stupid. It bends over time. So you sink farther and farther back until you use pillows to prop yourself back up. Worst case scenario here though is that you pop bolts out of the plywood bottom or crack said bottom in half. That’s pretty rare though. The arms is a better system if they’re not plastic. Plastic arms will simply snap over time as it dries out. Metal arms are quite good though. They’re usually boxed and arched so they’re particularly strong. The weak point is usually the bolts holding them in to the chairs which tend to loosen over time.

On the $80 chairs I had a lot of plastic chair legs just snap off. In the $250 range you can find metal legs and I haven’t had a problem with those. I’m fairly convinced that a chair made with metal legs and metal arms should last, again as you’d expect, quite a while.

Which is why the $400 chair I bought is made of plastic.

Yeeeaaah.

The good news is that I could have purchased this $799 chair at other stores for about $500-$600 and with $50-$130 for shipping. So I got a good deal maybe.

So, I don’t know. I’m nervous about spending so much money on a chair and I’m nervous about it being plastic. When it says it supports up to 450 pounds I have to wonder about how many seconds they intend someone of that weight to sit in said chair.

I have really nothing to report.  My life has been on hold due to moving to a new home and having another kid. I’m happy to say that all of the PCs managed to make it to the new house unscathed.  I haven’t unboxed my games yet but I’ve been without a console for well over three months now I think.  I’m waiting for my MIL to leave this Friday before I can really unpack, relax, and unwind.

So instead of finishing work on my gaming rig I’ve been unpacking, hanging curtains, washing clothes, cleaning the house and grilling.

I do hope to be getting a new laptop within the next few weeks with my returned deposit check from the last apartment.  My budget is around $1500 and I’m hoping to get something that will run WoW, GTA:SA, SL, and some other relatively modern games without overheating.  And something with a keyboard that lights up.  I’m typing in the dark right now on my Dell Inspiron 600m (but really a Latitude) and I can’t always see the letters.  Mostly upsetting when trying to type some cryptic password.  I’m an okay touch typist but not at weird angles on a smaller than average keyboard!

I’m not sure what I’ll get but I am thinking Dell or Asus.  Dell business class laptops aren’t really all that bad and you get a lot for the money.  Asus gives you a lot too and is a bit smaller so more competitive.  I’m not sure there are any Lenovo gamers in my price range and as for something Apple?  Costly for the money and I want a GPU dammit.

I’ve been rocking an awesome cold for almost a week now so I haven’t been up to anything. I can barely stand to watch TV. My Atarimax 8Mbit flash cart came in but I haven’t had a chance to try it.  It’s on the to do list for this weekend.

I get sick more often than most people.  Whether it’s due to my parents smoking when I was a child or just some natural reason my immune system seems weak.  To make matters worse I also get sicker than most people do as well.  Some people, my father especially, believe that my problems stem from the way I bother to take care of myself.  I don’t dress warm, I don’t blow my nose enough, I don’t eat orange skins, I don’t take vitamins, I don’t drink positively charged water, and I don’t lower my glucose intake.  I’ve heard a lot of crazy reasons why people think I get sick and I’ve tried a lot of crazy things to prevent myself from getting sick.  But I seem to just be designed this way.

I make full use out of my sick policies.  I always feel guilty about it but at the same time I should feel angry for working in environments that spread germs like the black death is in style.  What I wouldn’t give for fresh air sometimes.  There are two kinds of attitudes bosses have towards sick days.  The first is that there is no such thing and it exists on paper alone and you’ll be going in if you have pneumonia.  The second attitude consists on germphobia and wanting sick employees home and as far away as possible.  I’ve worked for both kinds of places but I’m glad I currently work for the latter.

Taking a week off for a ‘common cold’ probably seems outrageous to even the most liberal of office settings though.  This confuses me however since the shortest of colds lasts 6-7 days easy.  People come in and work the ‘less bad’ days usually.  The last time I did that I wound up in the Chicago ER and was sick for almost a month.  I had been sick for a week prior to a business trip and was markedly better in time to jump on the JetBlue flight to O’Hare.  The next day arrives and the stress of travel I guess gave me terrible bronchitus.  I got winded just walking to the bathroom to vomit.  I’ve never felt so bad in my life and I’m actually frightened of ever feeling that way again.

I make it a point to take an extra day or two to recover from these damn viruses now.  I think it’s probably worth it in the long run.  Time can always be made up later while healthy but I really think that people need to be a little less willing to work while being sick.  But that’s just the opinion of someone who’ll catch your cold if you sneeze in the next state!

Those bastard squatters may have gotten Player0.com but I like orgies better anyway. In celebration of finally purchasing my $6.00 personal domain I decided to find blog software. Wordpress it is. Because why not.

As far as installation goes Wordpress was a breeze. I created a new virtual host, unzipped the files, inserted some SQL and I was away. The dirty work is always in the details. I do plan to better organize this blog someday but I suspect that this will happen little by little. See that right column over there? I really don’t want a right column over there. And seeing as how a right column shouldn’t be anywhere else but on the right, then it has to go completely.

I’m staring at the tag field below this post and I’m trying desperately to find the words that best describe this primarily meaningless example blog entry. Ah, I’ve got it.