Dare on Copyright

Dare Obasanjo had an insightful post on copyright and how it works a few days ago. Typically, I would simply dump this into my del.icio.us favorites and FeedBurner would dutifully insert it into my RSS feed. However, I'm calling it out on my blog proper because I loved this analogy: 

Pointing out that copyright infringement doesn't meet some 17th century definition of the verb "steal" because the original property isn't changing hands is like arguing that calling your ex-girlfriend a slut isn't libel because you only said it to people over IM.

QOTD - Rick Barnes

As usual, I'm behind on blogging. This quote is actually from last Tuesday.

"Sunshine is a terrific bleach"
                                -Rick Barnes

Rick, by the way, is my manager.

QOTD from Raganwald 2.0

Saw these on Reg Braithwaite's while I was reading that Wasabi cannot cure rotten fish.

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

And my new personal personal favorite:

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
Howard Aitken

I like that quote so much, I updated my email signature to include it.

IDEA 2006

I saw from Bruce Sterling's blog that he's going to be at Idea 2006 next month in Seattle. Bruce is at or near the top of the list of "folks I'd like to chat with over a few good beers". I saw him at ETech and have since read and thoroughly enjoyed both Shaping Things and Tomorrow Now. I wonder if I can make it to IDEA?

Off to Mashup Camp

In direct contrast with my last trip to the Bay Area, this one is going well so far. I'm in Mountain View for Mashup Camp. The flight down was actually early and nearly empty - I had my side of the bulkhead row to myself. On the other side of the aisle was Todd Biggs from MSN, who was the one who announced the availability of free tools for building IM bots and MSN Messenger Activities with Conversagent. Long time readers of this blog might remember that I've been involved with programming to MSN Messenger in the past, so it was great to spend some time with someone from the product (service?) team.

To top it off, Avis was out of normal cars, so I ended up with a red convertible Mustang. Yes, I can hear your pity coming my way now.

Of course, no trip is all early arrivals and convertibles. As my wife wrote a week ago, ours is the House of Plague. Everyone back home is still sick to some degree. And to top it off, today is Patrick's birthday. We had his party yesterday morning, so really the celebration was all weekend, but it's hard enough to be gone much less when my boy is turning three.

No Go on Developer 2.0

Well that was the most annoying business trip of my life. The short version of the story is that my flight to San Francisco sat at the gate for over two hours before they decided to offload everyone and rebook them. I ended up taking a flight into Oakland which was itself thirty minutes late. Combined with the longest AirBART bus trip from Oakland Airport in the history of mankind and I ended up being 20 minutes late for my session, which they had canceled when it became clear I wouldn't make it. Mucho apologies to the FTP staff, though I was in contact with them thru the day so they are well aware of the effort I made to be there on time.

The most annoying part was the airplane crew who continuously assured me that I'd make it because the repairs we were waiting on would be finished any minutes. Two hours later the damage was done.

I guess if I go to Toronto or Orlando, I'll go in the day before to avoid this happening again. I didn't want to be gone from home the extra night since both my kids are sick. But instead, I ended up going to SFO for nothing which is worse.

Xbox 360 Marketing Challenges

While my blog was down, Microsoft launched the Xbox 360 with significant fanfare and dramatic demand. Of course, a month later the Xbox 360 is still sold out pretty much every where you go. I remember I got able to find an original Xbox before Christmas back in 2001 so either the demand is much higher or the supply is much lower (probably both). I've personally decided to wait on getting a 360 - I'm way behind on original Xbox games and my two kids don't leave much playtime anyway. But I'm certainly in the minority on this one.

Anyway, at the height of the frenzy a couple days after launch, John Porcaro wrote what I thought was an amazing post about the difficulties of marketing a product like Xbox 360. I mean, we're all acutely aware of the technical challenges of designing a hardware product like Xbox 360 or a software service like Xbox Live. Maybe that time in marketing rotted my brain, but the challenge John describes is significant.

Furthermore, I think John really lays it out there in his post. It may not have been good news (i.e. Xbox 360 shortages for the near-term future) but it was open and forthright about where Microsoft is with the Xbox 360 and how Microsoft wants Xbox to grow.

(Note: AFAIK, I am not getting a free Xbox 360 from John for writing this.)

Custom Domains Rock

I'm digging the new Custom Domains service from Windows Live. Setup couldn't have been smoother:

• Sign up on Custom Domains
• Change the MX record of my domain
• Add Users

The only even slightly tricky point is that I had set up a passport for harry@devhawk.net in the distant past and long forgotten the password. However, Custom Domains allows be to "evict" a user from the domain so I was able to recreate it with little trouble.

I do have two feature requests that I'm guessing are on the horizon for the Custom Domains team:

• Aliases: I'd like to set up "webmaster@devhawk.net" to simply forward to my main devhawk email. This is a pretty common feature of other email systems, so I expect some future release will include this.
• Non-Web Client Access: I can use Outlook to access my personal hotmail account, but I had issues accessing my devhawk email.

Back in Business

After an extended absence, DevHawk is back on the air (so to speak). My pal Tom had a hardware failure and we've moved DevHawk onto a hosting service. As it turns out, Tom had the hosting service set up over a month ago and I just never got around to making the switch. So, I have no one to blame but myself for being offline so long.

There's much to blog about, but I'll get to that tomorrow. This is as much a test post as anything else.

One quick note, thanks to the relatively-new Windows Live Custom Domains, my blog email is also working again.

It's Great To Have Hockey Back, But...

I'm glad the NHL is back. I'm glad that I get to watch some games in HD. But it's more than a little disconcerting to see commercials for hunting shows and other so called "field sports" during breaks in the action.

I'm not sure that having the NHL on the same station as "Wanted: Ted or Alive" is really helping the sports image.

Stalked by Author of Several Best Selling .NET and Win32 Programming Books

First it was at Fred Meyer a week or two ago. Next it was at my favorite teriyaki resturant last Thursday. Then this past weekend, it happened again at Remlinger Farms. I think Jeff Richter is stalking me.

Penguins Lay A Goose Egg (So Far)

It warms my heart that Toronto and St. Louis both won tonight. That means the only team without a win in the NHL at the end of the first week is the Penguins. I can hear John groaning as I type. And Pittsburg doesn't play again until Saturday, so I can run smack at him all week.

Finally Back On The Ice!

So Day One of the 2005-06 NHL season is in the books. Good for the Caps, bad for the Kings. Really bad for the Penguins, but I hate the Penguins so that's cool. And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that OLN was broadcasting the Rangers/Flyers game in HD on INHD. They have an HDTV broadcast schedule, so the need for HDNet just dropped dramatically. I will have to spring for NHL Center Ice - one night of the free preview and I'm sold. The only bummer was not getting the Caps game live - with all 30 teams in action tonight, there weren't enough channels to carry them all live. But they won, and after eighteen months and one day since their last game that is good enough for me.

The NHL in Outlook

Mark Schmidt from the WWF team built a nifty little app to import the NHL hockey schedule into Outlook. So I went to import the Caps schedule, only to find that the time zones don't match up. All the game times are in east coast time and I am on the west coast. I was going to bug Mark for the code, but decided instead to change my current timezone to east coast, import the games into Outlook, and then change my timezone back. It's a bit of a hack, but it was quicker than changing the code. Sometimes, simple is better.

Now, I just need Comcast to get HDNet.

UPDATE: No word from Concast on getting HDNet. They hope to have more HD Channels "by the end of the year". I found a petition online asking for HDNet on Comcast and a blog entry from Mark Cuban (co-owner of HDNet) that compares HDNet vs. InHD to "David vs. Goliath". InHD is owned in part, I think, by Comcast. However, Comcast now owns the broadcast rights to the NHL via their OLN network. So I'm hoping we'll eventually see HD NHL on Comcast, thought it sounds like I have to wait a few months. :(

MSR RSS

I hadn't realized it, but Microsoft Research is RSS Enabled with seperate feeds for news, downloads and publications. As you would expect, there's some cool stuff up there. The current headline caught my eye: Concurrent Programming Enters Atomic Age. We spent some time discussing this with the ARC MVPs, so it was fresh in my mind.

Two Things I Want From My Digital Camera

GPS and Voice Recording

Omar does a good job covering the GPS front, so I won't bother repeating those reasons. However, often when I'm taking pictures of something, I want to record a little voice note so I can later remember some details about whatever I'm shooting. Maybe the place has history, or maybe something caught my eye. Often, looking back at picture I can remember those things, but not always.

And since I'm asking, I wouldn't mind bluetooth so I could shoot pictures of my kids and send them to my parents via my mobile phone. Sure, the phone has a camera...a crappy one. Fun for my MSN Space, but not for any serious picture taking.

Owning Content

Personally, I am listening to music chosen for me by Comcast right now and a combination subscription/buy model sounds most interesting to me. Most music I listen to isn't worth owning. But the RIAA doesn't seem particularly concerned about music listeners.
[Robert Scoble - Om says tough times ahead for Jobs]

Scoble's comment that most music isn't worth owning really resonated with me. I think we can generalize - most content isn't worth owning. Music, movies, books, etc. I find it interesting how the own vs. rent model works in each of these independent forms of media. For example, most people want to "own" their music, but have no problem renting movies. Most people buy books, even though libraries are pretty prevelent, but I wonder if that's more related to availability. How many popular books are at the local library to borrow?

I hope we see some dovetailing around the rental model across all content types in the future.

Scott Charney on Critical Infrastructure Protection

Scott Charney is the Vice President of Trustworthy Computing for Microsoft. If you've never seen him present, check out this talk on Critical Infrastructure Protection that he gave at UW last year. Even if you don't care about critical infrastructure protection (all none of you) you should check out Scott's talk because he's a great presenter. Great stories, great connection with the audience and no crutches slides.

Finally

From NHL.com:

NHL, NHLPA reach agreement in principle on new CBA

NEW YORK/TORONTO (July 13, 2005) - The National Hockey League and the National Hockey League Players' Association have reached an agreement in principle on the terms of a new Collective Bargaining Agreement.

Details of the new Agreement will not be made available publicly pending the formal ratification process by the NHLPA Members and the NHL Board of Governors.

It is anticipated that the ratification process will be completed next week, at which time the parties will be prepared to discuss the details of the Agreement and plans for next season. No further comment will be made until then.

Game On!

Update - Obviously, the NHL has to do ALOT to recover from missing last season. Apparently, HDTV is one of the things they are thinking about:

The NHL, which claims that hockey fans are the most technologically savvy of all pro sports fans, will focus a portion of its marketing energies on the cyber world. It will also work to improve the at-home experience for an ever-waning television audience, employing new camera angles, microphones on players and coaches and the use of high definition television production.

"The opportunities that exist for us with high definition television are enormous," [NHL Group VP of Communications Bernadette] Mansur said.

[Scott Burnside, ESPN.com, NHL Marketing Challenges Lie Ahead]

I'm hard pressed to say that getting HDTV would make the lockout "worth it" but it sure would lessen the sting.

The Inform Language

I got interested in computers when my dad started bringing home a terminal to access his companies mainframe over a 300 baud telecoupled modem. The first terminals were paper-based, then we moved-on-up to a VT100. I got interested in programming because I wanted to be able to build my own game like Adventure or Zork. The rest as they say is history and some 20-25 years later I work for Microsoft. I never actually built an adventure game, but if I still wanted to, apparently Rory is teaching a sesson on Inform which apparently is a language for building Interactive Fiction.

Sounds like Code Camp is going to be a blast. Note to self, bug Rory for his slides.

QOTD - Norman Guadagno

Actually, this quote is from Tuesday - I'm just way behind on blogging.

"The benefit of being despised is that you have carte blanche. They can't hate me any more than they already do." - Norman Guadagno

QOTD - Jim Dial

I'm giving credit to Jim Dial for this quote since he told it to me, but he did say someone told him. I just don't remember who...

"The difference between a hallucination and a vision is how many other people can see it"

QOTD : Harry Pierson

Yes, I am my own quote of the day...

"There are no stupid questions, just ones that are easy to mock"

QOTD : Michael Lehman

I was talking about modeling with Michael Lehman today when he mentioned the "cult of the arcane" - people who specialize in typically older technologies that are not widely understood who use this general lack of knowledge for job security. I thought it was funny.

Three Seperate IM Stacks

It's interesting to see how consumer and corporate IM have finally started to evolve in different directions. I have a personal IM account (harrypierson at hotmail dot com) on MSN running the newly released MSN 7. I really like the integration with Spaces, the contact cards and the new Personal Message feature that also integrates w/ WMP and iTunes to show "what I'm listening to" (in case you're curious, baby lullabies - I'm sitting in Patrick's room as he goes to sleep). I hadn't realized how many of my coworkers (primarily ex-teammates) have started blogs on MSN Spaces.

I also just installed Office Communicator 2005, the new corporate client for Live Communications Server 2005. While we've had LCS installed internally for a while, I rarely used it. I mean, the only real value I saw in corporate IM in general was security - if your employees are chatting on IM, better to keep it off the public Internet. But w/ LCS 2005 & new new client, there are several cool new features. First off, LCS 2005 connects with both AOL and MSN public IM services. So if you want to, add me as an IM contact via my corporate email address (hpierson at microsoft dot com). Next, LCS 2005 & the new client integrate with your Exchange calendar. So if you're in a meeting, you're status changes to Busy. I can also hover on a contact and see what they're up to now (in a meeting until noon, free until 3:30, etc). Finally, the new Office Communicator client integrates with PBX systems. So I can select a conact, hit call, and my desktop phone automatically calls the person. For incoming calls, I get notification even if I'm not in my office. So if I'm in a meeting, my wife calls, I can click on the notification to forward the call to my mobile phone.

Finally, I'm running Skype (callto harrypierson). I was in Barcelona most of last week and I used the SkypeOut service all the time, except when I was making connections in the Amsterdam airport. I racked up the big 2 Euros in calls over the course of a week. I seem to remember MSN IM having support a similar service via Net2Phone, but they stopped some time ago. I'd probably can Skype if they brought it back. I don't want or need three contact points like this. Two is good - one for work and one for personal - but three is one too many.

If you want to reach me, you have zero excuse! 

Great Support from Napster on the Bleeding Edge

As I have written several times on this blog, I am using Napster 2 Go with my Creative Nomad Zen Micro. Unfortunately, the N2G compatible firmware from Creative is still in beta. Everyone in a while...not sure what the repro steps are...the Zen Micro would lose all the N2G music licenses. They've released new firmware (2.11.02) that is supposed to solve this problem.

However, while the new firmware will eliminate this from happening in the future, it doesn't help you with songs that have lost their license. So you have to delete them off the device and reload them. Simple enough to do w/ WMP10. However, the music you download from N2G has a set of license restrictions, including a limit for the number of times you can transfer it to a portable device per month. I think the limit is three. I've reset my device a few times experimenting with it, so about half my N2G songs had reached their limit. Major bummer.

However, I dropped a quick email to the folks at Napster and the next time I synced my device, suddenly all the songs had their transfer count reset. So I was able to resync even the songs that didn't work before. I had figured I wouldn't get those songs back until next month, so I decided to download some other stuff to tide me over. Having the older songs transfer was a very pleasant surprise.

Bravo Napster Support!

Tape Deck for PC

Back in college, I used to DJ for KSCR, USC's student run radio station. I've got a bunch of old cassette of my "work". Now, with the PlusDeck, I could actually install a tape deck in a free 5.25" drive bay of my home computer. But for $150, I think I'd rather just plug my old tape deck from the garage into the sound card.

Inverse DVR

Usually you use your DVR to watch the show and skip the commercials. Today, however, I did the opposite. Used the DVR to blow thru 58 minutes of The OC to catch the new Star Wars Episode III trailer. Pretty cool stuff. As an added bouns, they also had the trailer for Sin City. I didn't realize Robert Rodriguez was directing.

The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit

Matt got this book as a present for Patrick when he was still a baby. When Patrick was a baby that is! :) It has my favorite line from all of childrens literature:

THIS is a man with a gun.

They don't write them like that any more!

Dino Rocks so now I can Rock and Roll

Last weekend, I tried in vain to install a PIE GM9-AUX in my Chevy Blazer. The GM9-AUX converts the CD changer port on the stock CD player that came in the car to a standard RCA jack, which I can plug any one of my four Nomad media players into (though I imaging 99.9% of the time, it will be the Zen Micro) via a standard miniplug to RCA adapter cable. This weekend, my neighbor Dino helped out and we got it installed. He did most of the dashboard removal work and I did the cable installtion and threading it thru the dashboard to somewhere accessable from the driver seat. Thanks Dino!

DIY Car Radio Harder Than I Thought

I want to listen to my Nomad in my car. Turns out you can get a cable that plugs into the CD Changer port on the back of the stock stereo in my 2001 Chevy Blazer that converts it to an RCA jack for only $60. Add a $5 miniplug to RCA cable and I figured I was golden. That is, until I tried to install it.

A comedian named Rida Rutner once said she "only like cars because they take me to clothes". I'm not a big fan of clothes, but I don't like cars much either (I only like care because they take me to Fry's?). Apparently, this simple sounding DIY project of "plug in cable" requires the disassembling of half the car. Well, half the dashboard anyway. I didn't realy expect that removing the radio would require "releas[ing] the park brake release cable from the park brake lever". Wow.

Of course, in my area of expertise I guess most non-experts would be equally lost. I'm setting up a website for some friends, so I sent them a quick email with the status, and the response came back "could you write this again, but this time in English?" :)

Almost Hockey On Carpet

I watched the National Lacrosse League All-Star Game this afternoon. It's not hockey, but I enjoyed it quite a bit - especially at the end. They had the league commissioner on at halftime talking about expansion. If they had a team in Seattle, I'd go.

One of the things I liked about Lacrosse is that the players all have to have day jobs. Average NLL salary is apparently around $12,000. Apparently, many of the player's teach for their "day jobs" which impressed my wife immensely. She mentioned that this is how all sports leagues should be. I couldn't agree more.

When I lived in LA, I used to play hockey in the amateur league. I haven't played since I moved up due to a variety of reasons - including cost and distance to rink. But there's an indoor facility where they play lacrosse in Redmond, less than four miles from campus. They also play inline hockey and indoor soccer too.

Slight Issue

I've discovered one thing about my Nomad/Napster To Go/WMP combo that I don't like. Napster is wholy inconsistent when it comes to tagging their music. For example, I downloaded Denis Leary's Merry F'n Christmas album, but half the songs are tagged that they come from the Merry F#%$in' Christmas album. This specific example only appears to be an issue in WMP, but I also had issues with the tagging of Chris Rock's Never Scared album. One song shows up as part of the "Never Scared" album, but the rest show up as "Never Scared [Bonus DVD]".

I think WMP adds to the difficulty here because of the sheer amount of metadata it tracks. Artist and Album Artist for example. Good idea, but it's really easy for those to get out of sync (check out this website for more info on that). And because these files are all DRM protected, you can't edit the metadata in the file itself, only in WMP's library. But I can't figure out how the metadata & file structure on my computer corrisponds to metadata structure on the Nomad with 100% certanty.

However, even with that, I still recommend Napster to Go highly. This is a very minor issue that I think highlights a few of the remaining rough edges in a consumer scenario that involved Microsoft, Napster and the media player manufacturer. Plus, I'm anal about things like album names.

(One other side note - deleteing and rebuilding your WMP library causes all the songs on the device to be retransfered. Woops. Had to reformat the device, but since there's nothing on it but my Napster music, it was no big deal.)

Experimenting with Podcasting

So I'm playing around with podcasting. The new version of dasBlog supports RSS enclosures for local binaries and I'm thinking of adding support for remote binaries. (I'm not sure my friend who hosts this blog for me would appreciate the bandwidth spike from adding downloads of media files. Of course, that assumes people would listen). So far, I'm just listening. My friend Mike does his Manic Minute and I guess Daily Source Code is the defacto standard podcast. This will be easier when I get my new AUX input installed in my car.

Listening to 30 minute podcasts like DSC on my Nomad have me longing for WMP's variable speed feature. I listen to podcasts primarily on my Nomad - the combination of WMP 10 AutoSync, Doppler Radio and Sean's podcast playlists makes syncing down to my player effortless. But listening to Adam Curry ramble on about podcast commercialization for 45 minutes doesn't fit into my communte. However, listening to Adam Curry sped up 1.4x would make a 45 minute show end in just over 30 minutes. But alas, the Nomad doesn't have that feature. Does any player support that? Or does it take more proccessing power than these things are carrying around?

Note to MSTV Foundation team - variable speed support would also be a great feature for the DVR. I wouldn't watch 24 sped up, but I might watch the Daily Show that way.

UPDATE - I neglected to "give props" to my boss Norman for convincing me to look at this whole podcasting thing in the first place. Given how little spare time I have these days, I'm not sure that I needed yet another hobby. On the other hand, not following your boss's suggestions or giving him props is never good for the career! :)

NHL HDTV?

The NHL is also counting on the ever-growing popularity of high-definition television to boost TV ratings that are respectable on a regional basis but minuscule nationally. Both ESPN2 and NBC plan HDTV telecasts once the league returns, though ESPN2 first must pick up its options for the 2005-06 and 2006-07 seasons.

Hockey, like football, is well-suited for HDTV's movie screen-like wide picture, which is five times sharper than conventional analog TV. The league is also excited about the ever-expanding acceptance of HDTV, which saw more than 1 million sets sold recently during the run-up to the Super Bowl.

[Associated Press: NHL looking at new rules, becoming HDTV-friendly]

At least we have something to look forward to I guess 

24 Does Use A Three Act Structure

Sunday, I said that I didn't think that 24 has a well defined three act structure. On further reflection, I'm not sure I was correct. I'm used to seeing these three act structure within a single episode and I don't think most episodes of 24 follow that model. However, if you look at the season as a whole, it follows the three act structure pretty closely

[Note - as with Sunday, there some first season spoilers here - but again I'm avoiding the big ones. I also talk about the current season a bit at the end]

Typically, the three act structure divides the story into three parts - Setup, Confrontaion and Resolution. Each of these parts is deliniated with a plot point - some type of major reversal in the story. In a story as long as a season of 24, these reversals take a much more screen time than I'm used to. To take Star Wars as an example, the first reversal is when Luke discovers his parents have been murdered and he decides to go with Obi-Wan. That's one scene - takes up a couple of minutes of screen time at most. But in 24, the first reversal is the last 20 minutes of Episode 6: Jack is comproised by the bad guys who have his daughter, it's revealed that his wife is with one of the bad guys, the guy that kidnapped Jack's daughter realizes what a bad situation he's in and Palmer decides to tell the world about the death of his daughter's rapist at the hands of his son that been covered up for seven years.

The second act is typically a series of cycles - alternating between story exposition and action. For example, the first cycle of the second act builds towards the attempt on Palmer's life at the morning press conference. This goes on typically for half of the overall length of the story and ends in another reversal. To use Star Wars as an example again, the second act ends with our heroes returning to the rebel base with the Death Star's plans while being tracked by the Empire. In 24, while the end of the first act ends is very clear and occurs exactly at the one quarter mark, act two runs a little long and has a muddier ending. Personally, I'd say it ends in the middle of episode 19, with Jack in the underground prison, realizing who the prisoner being kept there is while Palmer is realizing that he can't trust his wife anymore.

Of course, the third act is where everything is resolved - typically running the final quarter of screen time. You can really see here the major difference between a format like 24 and a two hour movie. I don't think you could reveal a twist as big as the one at the end of the next to last episode of 24's first season in the last five minutes of a 2 hours movie and make it work. But that's the time ratio - every minute of a two hours movie equals 12 minutes of a season of 24.

If you apply this same structure to the current season of 24, you realize that the we're in the middle of act two right now.  The kidnapping and trial of the secretary of defense was act one - and again act one ends right at the end of episode 6. Jack and CTU realizes the "real" target is melting down nuclear power plant via the override device, Behrooz kills the man his father sent to kill him, Jack's girlfriend's estranged husband shows up and we realize there's a mole inside CTU (I get the feeling this is a running plot point - the CTU spy. I'm guessing that if they've used that every season it's gotta be pretty old by now). I put "real" in quotes because assuming this season follows the same pattern as season one, there will need to be some new "real" target in act three.

But I Don't Think 18 Is A Catchy Title

Tanya pointed out the other day that having a DVR causes you to watch a lot more TV. Case in point: 24. I missed the first three seasons. I never knew when it was on and once you miss a single episode, you're kinda done. Now that I have a DVR, I've haven't missed any of season four. Furthermore, the first three seasons are available on DVD, so not only am I watching more TV from this season, I'm catching up on previous seasons. We just finished season one tonight.

[Note - there are some first season spoilers here - not big ones, but some nonetheless]

First off, there is alot of filler - at least in season one. There are long sequences (the girls escaping from the kidnappers leaps to mind) where there's all this action and suspense, but everything ends up back where they started. Secondly, by the end I thought it was over the top on the amount of resources the bad guys had. I mean, they kidnap his daughter again? Maybe it bothered me more because I watched the whole season over a couple of weeks, instead of several months. Finally, the story flow really feels off - but that's the nature of the real-time format. In a more typical series, there's a slow build towards a final confrontation with a collection of connected yet distinct stories. But 24 is like a single 24 hour long movie, except that it doesn't have a clearly defined 3 act structure. It kust puts the pedal to the metal at around episode four and doesn't let up. That's not as exciting as it sounds - stuff just happens...and keeps happening. There's no time for reflection or anticipation which makes it much more difficult to enjoy the story.

I realize part of the show's gimick is that it's a full 24 hours. But really, I think the story - at least season one's story - would have been better told in 14-18 hours. Of course, that won't stop me from watching the current season or starting in on season two.

Rory Gets The Scoop

...And I'm laughing so hard that I can barely type.

Read This.

Getting Things Done

A few weeks ago, I got a chance to see David Allen present his Getting Things Done methodology. It really struck a chord with me, in many ways because it's seems like such a basic point. I would describe GTD as a way of dealing with the fact that our brains haven't evolved to deal with the details of modern day life. Face it, our brains evolved in a time when our big concerns of the day were finding food and not getting eaten.  It's just not designed to keep the millions of picky little details that make up life today in order.

I've only just started reading the book, but I've been trying to apply what I've learned. I haven't reached "Mind Like Water" yet, but I have knocked my inbox down from 400+ emails to 20. I've been taking it slowly - cleaning out all the new stuff plus 10-20 of the backlog every day. I'm doing it on my own - there's a GTD addin for Outlook, but I just hated it. One of the principles of GTD is to get the stuff out of your head and into a system that you trust. Frankly, when the GTD addin started hiding my email, I couldn't trust it anymore. So instead, I do my own thing with Outlook - heavy on the task list of course. And so far so good.

Note to self, check out Jeff's GTD wiki...

NHL Players - Do Any Of Them Have Any Common Sense?

"[H]ow many [people] can actually stand up and shout to the world that they let a BILLION DOLLARS in cash disappear into thin air?

I couldnt  name one off the top of my head that has lost cash money of 1 billion dollars or more, until today.

Congratulations Bob Goodenow, President of the NHL Players Association. You turned down 30 teams paying what would probably average out to 35mm dollars in salary per team for this year. Thats more than $ 1,000,000,000.00 in cash that would have been paid to NHL players this year." [Blog Maverick - How to Lose 1 Billion Dollars]

I guess it's not surprising that the owner of the Dallas Mavericks sides with the owners. But he brings up an interesting point - the players are giving up money that they will never get back. And it's more than a billion - the final league proposal was for each team to pay a maximum of $44.7 Million. Times 30 teams equals ONE AND A THIRD BILLION DOLLARS.

Even the league's Feb 2nd proposal, which the players dismissed out of hand, guaranteed the players would receive a minimum of 53% of league reveues. Assuming $2.1 billion in revenue - which obviously the league won't get back to for a long time - means the players would have received over $1.1 billion dollars.

The players have short careers (I think the average is four years) and are losing much more by not playing than the owners are. Even if you don't believe the owners are losing less by not playing, I can't imagine anyone believes the owners were making money hand over fist - i.e. the way the players are. How much common sense does it take for the players to realize the gravy train is over and forcing the owners to lock them out isn't going to change that fact?

It Has Come To This

"When I stood before you in September, I said NHL teams would not play again until our economic problems had been solved. As I stand before you today, it is my sad duty to announce that because that solution has not yet been attained, it no longer is practical to conduct even an abbreviated season. Accordingly, I have no choice but to announce the formal cancellation of play for 2004-05" [NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman]

I have blogged about the NHL work stoppage several times - I imagine it's pretty obvious that I place the blame for the cancellation of the season firmly on the shoulders of the NHL players association. I find it interesting that Gary open his comments today with an apology to the fans while NHLPA exec director Bob Goodenow opened his comments today by slamming the league. In fact, when asked if the NHLPA owes the fans an apology, this was Bob's response:

"Absolutely an apology to all the fans, and speaking on behalf of all the players up here, they didn't want to be locked out. They didn't want to be not allowed to entertain the fans. Gary owes an apology because he started the lock out. He put all this in motion, and the proposals that these players have put forward, in particular, the roll back, which would have made the league successful in one fell swoop, very serious steps were taken, and, you know, yes, we apologize to the fans for this situation, this circumstance, and the fans can say, what are you going to do about it? Well, we've done an awful lot, we feel, to get to a fair resolution, and unfortunately, it's the other side that we haven't been able to make a contact with, and it's unfortunate that this situation will continue. That's all I can say."

I guess the NHLPA doesn't believe they owe me - the fan - an apology. Here's my response to Bob's response:

Fuck you, Bob.

If Bob really believes that the player's proposal would have made the league successful, how come they didn't accept the league's offer last week to try it the player's way, but have a system in place to enforce cost certainty if it didn't work? I'm guessing it's because no matter how many times the Bob refers to one of his proposals as "groundbreaking" than nobody - including Bob - really believes that the 24% rollback would do anything to stem the skyrocketing salaries in the long run. Bob had the nerve to say in his statement today that "During the last CBA, when revenues went up, so did salaries. When revenues eased, so did salaries. As evidenced by recent signings." What a load of bullshit. When revenue growth dropped to around 5% year over year in 01/02 & 02/03, salary growth ballooned to almost 12%. And as for "evidenced by recent signings", I guess Bob is just going to gloss over the fact that reason that salaries has eased recently is only because so many players went unsigned last summer since all the teams realized the lockout was looming.

Well I guess if I need a hockey fix, my only choice is catching a Silvertips or Thunderbirds game.

You Never Owned Any Music

"I just tried out Napster to Go with my iMate and while I still am not sure that I like the idea of music rental, but I would pay a monthly fee to Apple if I could get access to any piece of music anytime even if just for a while after using Napster for even a few days.  The software experience needs work, but it is a lot better than I ever expected it to be.  Napster has something here actually, but most people don't realize it yet because Microsoft and the industry is doing a piss poor job at showing just how interesting life can be in this model." [Lenn Pryor]

While Lenn admits that "Napster has something here actually", I guess I have never understood the issue some people have with "music rental". You don't own the music and you never did. You've always owned a copy of the music. You "rented" the music in perpetuity (that's legalese for "a long ass time") for a flat fee. You can argue that the record labels have kept more than their fair share of said flat fee, but it doesn't change the fact that you never owned anything but a copy.

Personally, I like the Napster model much better. I am paying $15 a month in perpetuity but I get access to pretty much everything that comes out. Actually, I'm not even paying yet - I'm still in my 14 day trial period. But I've downloaded nearly 3GB so far including a variety of stuff that I was going to buy on CD anyway when I got around to it. Life is certainly more interesting under this model.

Inital Thoughts on Zen Micro and Nomad to Go

After using the new 2.1 firmware for my Nomad Zen Micro for a couple of days, I can see why they haven't upgraded all their players en masse quite yet. It still has a few rough edges. Red Chair Software, makers of the awesome Notmad Explorer that I use to manage my other Nomads, advises that you use the older 1.x firmware "you have a specific reason to switch". Of course, I have a very good reason to switch. The 2.1 firmware is actually beta - something I think Creative should make a little more obvious on the website (not that I wouldn't have downloaded it anyway). For the less adventurous, the 2.0 firmware also supports Napster to Go and isn't in beta.

The place where I notice the rough edge the most during song transition. When I push next or previous song, sometimes it happens right away and sometimes it takes 4-5 seconds. It doesn't happen when it's playing back a set of songs - what ever the Nomad is doing (verifying licenses I'm assume) it must do it for the next song before the current song ends, so the lag only occurs when you're jumping around manually.

That's really my biggest complaint. Napster to Go works really well. They haven't upgraded their help files to the new 3.x version of Napster - for example, all of their screenshots have a separate library function within Napster, but on my machine it just uses WMP's library - but it's pretty easy to figure out. I've configured NTG and WMP 10 to auto sync any Zen Micro with any songs I've downloaded from Napster (about 1GB in the first 24 hours I've used it!). The only complaint there is that autosync works by playlist. If you download a Napster compilation, autosync will transfer the music but not the playlist.

And that reminds me of a feature I'd like to see on the Nomad (all of them). I want to be able filter the list of album to exclude the ones that only have one or two songs. When you download a compilation, you get around 25 songs from different artists. Great for discovering new music, but it adds a bunch of noise to the list of albums. So why not exclude albums that only have a few songs downloaded?

My Fourth Nomad

I just got my hands on a Nomad Zen Micro. That makes four Nomad's so far - I also have a IIc, Zen Xtra, and a MuVo NX. While I like my other Nomads, the Micro blows them all away.

First off, it's tiny. It may only be 5GB compared to the Zen Xtra's 40GB, but it's also around a third the size. The touch pad is a little funky to get used to, but it sure looks nice. And unlike the Xtra, it pulls power from the USB connector. It doesn't even have a separate power connector - the AC adapter that it comes with actually plugs into the mini USB slot. Cool

Haven't had it long enough to talk about battery life or the interface, though the interface at first blush seems much better than the Zen Xtra. For example, if you're listening to a song you can jump to that artist in the library. I've wished for that feature many times with the Zen Xtra.

Of course, the first thing I did was flash the device to the new 2.1 firmware. The 2.x firmware adds support for Plays for Sure subscription services like Napster To Go. And I signed up for my 14 day trial on Napster about 10 seconds after I updated the firmware. I've downloaded about 1GB of music from Napster - I figure that's a good start.

(Note to Creative - the fact that I got a Zen Micro does not let you off the hook for updating the firmware of the Zen Xtra. I expect to be able to use that with Napster To Go as soon as possible.)

Do Muppets Grow Up?

This is way off topic, but did you ever notice that the characters on Sesame Street that date back to the 70's - Big Bird, Grover, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, The Count, etc. - are all adults while the more recent additions like Elmo, Rosita, Zoe and Baby Bear are all kids. I'm not sure what it means, but it made me think: Did the makers of the show decide they needed characters that kids could identify with better? Or did the original characters somehow grow up? That's a sorta wacky thought.

In case you're wondering, Patrick watches Sesame Steet every morning and I have to sit in with him to make sure he doesn't climb out of his high chair.

The Aristocrats

Typically, my movie tastes are further down the long tail from the big blockbusters. I mean, I'm looking forward to movies like Batman Begins and War of the Worlds, but usually it's the small quirky films that get my attention. In fact, one of the reasons I'm excited about Batman Begins is because it's directed by Chris Nolan, director of the awesome yet quirky independent film Memento.

Along these lines, I saw something about a movie from Sundance called The Aristocrats by Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller). The premise sounds awesome:

Magician, comedian and entertainer extraordinaire Penn Jillette takes us into the secret world of comedians as we're introduced to a perpetually filthy joke that is never told the same way twice, serving as the comedy equilavent of a jazz solo since the Vaudeville days. All that remains constant is the beginning and the end, and 105 comedians fill in the rest. [From Greg's Previews on Yahoo Movies]

Aristocrats has been picked up by ThinkFilm. I hope they get into a theater near me, but clicking thru their site, I don't have a lot of confidence. The only movie currently listed on the site that I recognized was Going Upriver, a documentary about John Kerry that I heard about late last year during the presidential campain. Combined with the fact that it will likely be released “unrated” as it would likely get an NC-17 rating for langugage, I'm thinking that I won't see it until it gets released on DVD.

Napster to Go Got Going

With their Super Bowl ad yesterday, I guess Napster to Go is out of the closet. They have some new compatible devices, including the iriver H10 that Jeff likes so much. Alas, my Nomad Zen Xtra is still out in the cold. So far, it looks like only portable media centers and a handful of 5GB players (the H10, Nomad Zen Micro, Dell Pocket DJ, Gateway Photo Jukebox) are supported.

I'm wondering if older devices will ever be supported? I mean, it's a new protocol and technology, I wouldn't be super suprised if the older devices just couldn't be upgraded to support the subscription service. But if that's the case, I wish they would simply announce it and move on rather than leaving it in limbo. This post on the Creative Europe forum makes it sounds like the firmware will get upgraded, but with no idea of a date. So, in other words, I don't know when or if I'll get to use Napster to Go to fill up the other half of my 40GB Zen.

Mourning a Passing

Recently, I learned that a friend of mine from high school took his own life. I hadn't spoke to him in nearly a decade, but it was still a shock and very saddening.

There's a memorial for him this weekend in Northern Virginia, but there's no way I can make time to go back east for it. There will be a large number of old friends there, many of whom I haven't seen or spoken to much since high school. It further adds to my sadness that it took the death of a friend for me to both realize the need and have the opportunity to reconnect with so many old friends.

Outlook Connector

I recently had to repave my main machine. Among other things I installed MSN Premium which I use to manage my hotmail and DevHawk emails. However, this time I installed the Outlook Connector for MSN, which enables you to use Outlook 2002 or later to manage your hotmail account. Calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, everything. Very very cool. Now, there's no need to install the MSN Premium client at all...or is there?

The coolest feature of the Outlook Connector is that it delivers all of my personal hotmail to a totally different top level folder inside Outlook. Does anyone know how to do that for POP3 mailboxes? I tried using Outlook to manage my DevHawk email, but then all that mail gets mingled together with my work email. I want the exact same experience for my DevHawk email inside Outlook as I get for my hotmail. However, it appears that while you can have multiple PSTs, you have to designate one as the new mail delivery location default for all accounts. I.e. it doesn't appear that you can configure this on a per-account basis. I'm guessing the Outlook Connector is overriding this for my hotmail.

Anyone have any ideas on how to deliver email from two different accounts to two different locations? (Other than the obvious “use rules” - I had issues with that approach.)

Atlas Brand View, Wabi Sabi … and DevHawk?

Tanya, my cohort on the Architecture Strategy Marketing team, has finally - after much promising and subsequent delays - starter her blog. So far, just she's just written a hello world post where she explains why she named her blog "Wabi-Sabi".

Of course, long time readers are probably wondering: "Did he just say 'Marketing team'?"

Yes. Yes I did.

About two weeks ago, I was re-orged to be reporting to Norman. While you might expect me to be displeased about this, I'm really ok with it. First off, I was acting as the marketing director for about six months, so the fact that we now have three people doing marketing instead of just me is a huge bonus. Secondly, while I was acting as the marketing director (badly I might add) I was in total firefighting mode - no opportunity to do advance planning whatsoever. Now, I have the opportunity to focus on doing a great job on a few things well (like the TechEd Architecture track) rather than doing just enough to keep a ton of things from completely falling apart. It's taken a while to shift gears, but now I spend more time doing and less time running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

Finally, my move to the marketing team is inherently temporary. Yeah, it's fun while it lasts and I'm learning a ton, but don't think this is a long term career change. Before it even happened, Adam (head of Architecture Strategy) explained that he expects me to be over on the architecture side of the house "soon". Norman and I have already started planning that transition.

So get your "marketing slime" digs in while you can! (Apparently, we marketing slime prefer the term "marketing flacks".)

Wizmo + MSN Deskbar

If you're using the MSN Deskbar, you might want to pick up Gibson Research's Wizmo. Wizmo is a command line tool that provides a grab-bag of tools. Personally, I use it for the shutdown commands. I've mapped several of them to Deskbar shortcut, particularly “shutdown” and “shutdown!”. The exclamation point invokes the “damit” variation that overrides applications and/or device drivers that refuse to shutdown. I know a repave is in the near future when I'm find myself using shutdown! on a regular basis.

I'm surprised Wizmo didn't make Scott's Ultimate Power Tools list.

Connecting To Your Windows Media

I started reading The Nears after Sean linked to his comparison of Media Center Extenders. Today, there's a great comparison of Media Center Extenders to Windows Media Connect devices. Very cool stuff. I'd love to have all my media on a central machine and then be able to listen to or watch it all over the house. The Nears linked to the Roku SoundBridge which plugs into your stereo system. Supports wired or 802.11b/g wireless in as well as analog, optical and coax audio out. Controllable via remote control or web app. Of course, what would be truly killer is web services support. Prices seem pretty reasonable. There are three different models with the same functionality - the only difference is the size and quality of the display. I think I need one or two of these...

Napster To Go

Apparently Napster to Go is old news, having been launched in beta months ago. They don't appear to be marketing it - the only mention of it I could find was on the page of compatible devices. I'm guessing the reason is the page only lists five devices compatible with the Napster to Go service and all of them are portable media centers. I wanted to search for other devices compatible with Windows Media Digital Rights Management 10 but the PlaysForSure advance search isn't working. There's new firmware for the Zen Micro that supports WMDRM 10, but nothing yet for the Zen Xtra. On the plus side, I discovered the Nomad SDK and FriendlyNomad C# wrapper for the SDK. Not sure what I would write that accessed my Nomad - I which I could customize the playback experience but Red Chair Software's Notmad Explorer provides a great PC expereince.

MechAssault 2 Conquest

First it was Halo 2's online stats, game viewer and RSS feeds. Now, MechAssault 2 introduces the concept of Conquest. While Halo 2's online gaming experience is awesome, it doesn't lead anywhere - each game is completely unrelated to the others. But with Conquest, each battle impacts the ownership of planets in the galaxy. Each player joins one of the five houses and then can participate in the galactic war. Planet ownership is based on the results of battles fought there. You can see the current map of the galaxy as well as war updates at any time. (But no RSS feed for the war updates - what's up with that?)

The only bad thing is that MechAssault 2 doesn't appear to have any per game stats like Halo 2 has. Wouldn't that be a great experience - Halo 2's game viewer and per game stats combined with MechAssault 2's conquest metagame.

Leave No Doubt

I was on vacation without access to the 'net most of last week, so I didn't get to immediately blog the USC's utter dominance in the Orange Bowl last Tuesday. I got to watch the game with several college buddies (the benefit of vacationing in LA) and we just had a ball. After the bittersweet shared championship last year, this feels great. Who would have thought it would be over at halftime? I called it "in the refrigerator" 4 minutes into the third when SC went up 45-10. I would have called it at half time, but I figured OU would come out with some life in the second half, but they didn't.

While I am glad about many things about this season, I am most glad that the Orange Bowl rout leaves the title undisputed. Even the most die-hard Auburn fan, having watched their team nearly blow the Sugar Bowl the night before, has got to be hard pressed to honestly argue that they deserve to be #1. Especially when they think to the last time they played USC - they got shutout at home 23-0. Sure, Auburn isn't the same team but then again, neither is USC.

There's already talk of USC being a dynasty and of a threepeat (or should that be three-Pete?) Frankly, that talk is a little premature in my opinion. But given the massive drought USC football went through when I was in school there (during the decade long plus losing streak to Notre Dame) it sure is nice to be on top.

The New Year Is Upon Us

Christmas was spent with just my local family - me, Julie, Patrick and Julie's mom Patty (who lives ten minutes away). New Year's was spent with Julie's side of the family - three of Patty's four children and all six of her grandkids are at Brother Jim's in Santa Barbara. Even Julie's dad drove up, making it the first time this much of her family was together since Julie and I got married 4 1/2 years ago.

However, it's hard to be happy without feeling for the people who's family and friends were devastated by last week's tsunami. I've got a few friends in the area - I've done TechEd Malaysia twice and have been working closely with the Indian MSFT office of late. I've heard from I think everyone I know in the region and luckily they're all OK (though one had a close call). Of course, there are countless others who were not so lucky and my heart goes out to them. I wish I had more to say, but given the scale and scope of this tragedy, mere words seem almost trite.

I don't make resolutions anymore, since they are pretty much the same every year (more time with family, lose weight, smarter with money, etc.) I make a little progress on each every year - enough to be somewhat proud of but not enough that I can quit working on it. I've been reading Dee Hock's Birth of the Chaordic Age which my Dad lent me at thanksgiving and I'm really enjoying it. I've marked down several passages, but this one seems most appropriate for the new year:

"Riches are not in the number of possessions, but the fewness of wants."

By that measure, I know few richer than myself.

Portable Media Devices and Subscription Services

I just read this interesting article on subscription services and portable devices. Apparently, Napster is going to be offering an upgrade to their current unlimited streaming service next year that will support portable devices. For $5 more a month (a grand total of $15 a month) you can transfer an unlimited number of Napster's 700,000 tracks to a compatible portable device. Major Cool. In Napster's CEO's own words:

You can fit 10,000 songs on [a top-of-the-line iPod], but to do that would cost you $10,000 if you bought the songs from Apple. With our plan, customers can get 10,000 songs on their device for $180 a year. It's an enormous value.

I had the Napster streaming service for a while, but the inability to take the music on the go was the major reason I canceled it. My 40GB Nomad Zen Xtra is only 55% full - I would re-subscribe to this service in a second if I could use it to fill up the remaining 17GB. Unfortunately, according to the article, the Zen Xtra isn't one of the six devices that works with the new DRM technology...yet. Creative is supposed to upgrade their Zen Micro (again, according to the article) early next year. I would expect that Creative would upgrade at least their jukebox media players - if not the entire line - to support the new technology. I've been a happy Nomad customer for years now (I own three Nomads - the Zen Xtra, a IIc and a MuVo) but my brand loyalty would plummet if I had to buy a new player to use the new service.

We're At Elf-Con 1

NORAD has been tracking Santa on Christmas Eve for 50 years. My mother-in-law remembers listening to it on the radio. Now, they have a website. Apparently, Santa and I visited a few of the same places this year. Here's Santa at Sky City in Auckland, New Zealand. Here he is at the Sydney Opera House in Australia. And here he is at the Great Wall of China. According to NORAD, Santa hasn't hit Seattle yet - last report was at 10pm pacific time and Santa was in Colorado. But I'm sure he's on his way.

Happy Holidays everyone.

Update - about 15 minues after I posted this originally, Santa was spotted in Seattle. I thought I heard something downstairs.

More Thoughts On The NHLPA's Bullshit

Apparently, with no hockey to watch, I am passing the time running numbers in Excel. I was thinking a little bit more about the NHLPA's bullshit claim that the NHL should have used either their ten year revenue average of 9.4% or five year average of 7.8% instead of the 3% number they used when determining the impact of the NHLPA's last proposal. I debunked that a few days ago, but I thought of another interesting angle -  if the players association really believed that revenue average, then I think they would be willing to accept a salary cap. Here's why:

Based on the NHLPA's proposal, it's pretty clear they want the average team payroll to be around $50 million. Their proposed payroll tax doesn't even start until you get to $45 million and is a pretty lame 20% until you get to $50 million (at that rate, a $50 million payroll would be taxed only $1 million) The current average team payroll is around $50 million and would be $40 after the NHLPA's proposed 24% salary rollback. (Note - I realize $40 million appears to be a rollback of 20%, but there are some components of team payroll like benefits and payroll bonuses that are unaffected by the rollback.) Now, under the NHL's proposal, the salary cap would be linked to overall revenue - as revenue goes up, salary cap goes up too. If revenues really went up by 7.8% per year, in three years the team salary cap would go up to $49.7 million. At 9.4% growth, the salary cap in 07-08 would be $51.7 million! So you get the NHL's cost certainty while still driving salaries up to a level that the players want.

This disparity is really obvious when you look at the NHLPA's revenue projection using five year historical league averages of revenue and player cost growth. In this model, revenue increases at 7.8% per year and player costs at 7.3%. If that were really true, wouldn't the salary cap system actually be better for the players? Since their share of the overall revenue would stay the same, that would mean the total paid to players would also grow at 7.8% per year. At those rates, the NHL's plan of linking player costs to revenue would mean nearly $20 million more for the players in 07-08 than their own plan.

So either the NHLPA is really bad at math, they want the owners to make more or even they don't believe their own bullshit. I'm guessing door #3.

Haven't We Seen The Long Tail Before?

Chris jumped all over this Long Tail stuff after I sent him a link to the article and got me thinking. Maybe this thought has been expressed else where, but isn't the Long Tail an updated version of the direct-to-video phenomenon? I mean, NetFlix may have more virtual shelf space than your neighborhood Blockbuster, but that video rental store has a similar size advantage over the local cineplex. A 10 theater cineplex shows around 200 different movies a year, given that most movies have a 2-3 week run. That's a similar percentage compared to Blockbuster as Blockbuster compared to NetFlix. I wonder what percentage of Blockbuster (or NetFlix for that matter) rentals are never shown in theaters.

It took a while, but the major production houses eventually adapted to this phenomenon. Disney has had huge success with DtV including sequels of it's biggest blockbusters. I would imagine that the media companies will adjust to the long tail phenomenon in the long run as well.

But If You Plug In Phony Bullshit Numbers, It All OK!

Looks like the hypocrosy is running wide and deep @ the NHLPA. After claiming for months that the NHL's numbers are “fundamentally flawed”, they claim to have pluged those very same numbers into the NHL's forcast projects and “proved” a difference of nearly a billion dollars, from losing $569 million over three years to making $412 million. Wow, if that's true, that's some pretty shitty math by the NHL. Of course, it's complete bullshit.

The NHLPA's argument rests on the projected revenue and player cost growth for the next three years. The NHL projects that revenue will rise at 3% per year while the players claim the NHL's own historical numbers suggest that revenue will rise 7.8% per year. And it's true that over the past five years, the NHL's Y/Y revenue growth has been 7.8%. Of course, during that time, there has been three new teams added as well as TV contracts that have come and gone (the current NHL TV contract w/ NBC is worth much less than the previous one with Fox). If you look at just the past four years - a much more relevant time frame - revenue has gone up between 4.3% and 6.4% per year. Given the effect of the lockout, I'm thinking 3% is a pretty good estimate.

The NHLPA goes on to argue that the NHL's own numbers suggest that player salaries will only go up 7.3% rather than the 12% the league suggests. Again, the 7.3% number for five years is accurate, but if you at the player cost growth for 01-02 and 02-03 the increase was 11.6% & 11.8% Y/Y. (03-04 was a paltry 1.8% Y/Y increase, but I would attribute that to the looming lockout.) What's really scary is that in 01-02 and 02-03, total player costs went up more per year than in the two years prior when new teams joining increased the total number of player jobs! In 00-01, when two new teams (around 50 new players) joined the league, total player cost went up $121 million. The following two years, when no new teams were added, total player cost went up $127 and $144 million respectively. Gee, looks like the 12% estimate is pretty close to reality too. Plus, the league admitted that the player cost growth might drop as low as 9% based on the 24% salary rollback and other deflators the players proposed. But last I checked 3% revenue growth + 9% player cost growth = bad news for the owners in the long run.

I'm thinking the NHLPA has a bunch of excel users punching in random historical data into the model to see what provides the best outcome for the league. In their “rebuttal”, they keep switching their historical model - first they use 10 year historical revenue growth numbers, then they use five year historical revenue and player cost growth numbers. Then, in their final chart uses an unprovided player cost growth estimate that is actually marginally higher than what the league is projecting, cutting the difference from the NHL's projection in half to $440 million.

If they can't even keep their story straight on their web page, do they really expect to fool anyone else with this Enron-esque number crunching?

Well, There's Always Minor League Hockey

So the latest round of negotiation has come and gone with little change. The players offer an eye-popping 24% salary rollback and a yawn-inducing luxury tax system that doesn't even kick in until $45 million and doesn't really get serious until $50 million. (The current average team payroll is around $46 million.) The league offers with a predictable salary cap that they have said they need since day one. (They appear to be losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year at the current average team payroll.) Both sides walk away blaming the other side. And Tampa Bay edges that much closer to being the current Stanley Cup Champions for two years without winning back-to-back titles.

I'm still with the owners on this. I've seen a few reporters suggest that the players are the only ones giving back in these negotiations. Scott Burnside of ESPN wrote "Both sides have taken steps toward a compromise -- the players' step a stride, the owners' step a shuffle." Of course, it's the players who've been making out like bandits under the previous CBA while owners have been getting the screw. Jim McKenzie of the Nashville Predators predicted no hockey until 2006 and then went on to point out that he "would not be where I am now if 10 years ago the [players] had given in [to a salary cap]". But then he points the finger at the league for their graduated roll back proposal: "They're like 'Don't worry about it. You're going to get your money.'". So which is it Jim? Are you worried about getting yours or aren't you?

Chris Pronger of the St. Louis Blues also predicted no hockey until 2006. Pronger said that "Probably December of '05 and going into January '06 we're going to be in the same position we are in now, trying to come to a resolution." I'm not sure what's going to happen then that will resolve this - will the laws of economics suddenly change or will the players union wake up? Personally, I don't think there will be hockey until 2006 either. We lose this whole season from the lockout and most if not all next season with legal wrangling after the owners eventually declare an impasse.

Will there be anything more disingenuous than Bob Goodenow saying something like "We're suing the league to protect its integrity" or some shit like that?

MSDN2's Hackable URLs + MSN Toolbar

This is just too cool:

You can also use a $w to indicate a parameter.  For example:

@msdn2, http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/$w

...and then you can type msdn2 System.String - for the easiest way to lookup classes in the MSDN2 library.

[Simon Guest - Off Topic: MSN Toolbar Suite]

MSN Toolbar with Desktop Search

The new MSN Toolbar is now publicly available in beta. The big new feature is the integrated desktop search. I've been running internal builds for a while, and I love it. Obviously, comparisons will be drawn to Google Desktop but I can't comment because Google Desktop wouldn't run on my machine because I have the Microsoft ISA Server client (according to the Google Desktop Help Center, the latest version of the ISA client should work, but that's what I was running). However, from looking at the Google Desktop screen shots, I know that Google doesn't have my favorite feature of the MSN Toolbar - the Deskbar. It's available via keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Alt-M) and supports program execution (type “=appname” to launch appname) as well as typing shortcuts. I also like the search results page as I can narrow where my search executes in real time. For example, if I type “OOPSLA” into my deskbar it auto executes the the search across all locations on my desktop. As you would expect, the search screen is near-instant - just the time it takes to draw the window. Then I can narrow down to just show results from Documents, Email, Music, Pictures & Video, Email Attachments, Meetings, Contacts, etc. - in all around 19 different locations. I'm also only one click away from searching the web, news or images online from the search results screen.

Not Your Average Night At The Movies

Tonight, we went to see my mother-in-law's new movie Telephone Pole Numbering System at the Northwest Film Forum. My wife and her mother are both actors. Julie was a child actor (she was in some of the old James Garner Polaroid commercials) and her mom was on Days of our Lives back in the 70s. I have always had a passion for movies and spent significant time back when I lived in LA writing bad screenplays (not bad on purpose of course). This movie was mostly OK - it had some very funny bits but also long stretches that were uninteresting and seemingly unrelated to the plot. Luckily, all the parts with my mother in law fell under the "funny bits" category.

While it was cool to see a family member on the big screen, I am really interested in getting more involved with the NWFF. The organization is a not-for-profit film arts organization that includes a two-screen cinema in downtown Seattle, production facilities for rent, workshops and classes plus a non-profit film studio (which produced Telephone Pole Numbering System). In many ways, this is like community theater, but for movie making. I got to chat briefly with the film's director Bill Weiss, but Patrick was up past his bed time so I'll need to make time for a longer chat with these folks soon.

If you could make a movie, what would it be? For me, if we're talking pie-in-the-sky, no-real-world-constraints, it would be "Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League" hands down. (Laugh while you can, monkey boy)

Favorite Line from Telephone Pole Numbering System:

"If I was a tree, I'd want to be a telephone pole"
"You're too short"

Cool Smartphone Bluetooth Software

I haven't installed it, buy Mike Tautly has written a Bluetooth Remote Control for SmartPhone. It's a managed app that uses Bluetooth to communitcate between a remote control app running on the smartphone and a desktop app that can drive other applications. Mike originally built it to drive PowerPoint from his phone. I gotta try this - both my MPx220 SmartPhone and Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop support Bluetooth.

Fight On!

A year ago, I was pointing out how badly messed up the BCS computer system was, denying the unanimous #1 ranked team in the land a shot at the national championship game. This year, USC has gone wire to wire ranked #1 and will face the #2 Oklahoma Sooners for the national championship. Fight On!

Of course, there are those pointing out the fact that #3 Auburn went undefeated creates an "unprecedented headache for the BCS". Excuse me? What a bunch of crap. The BCS is supposed to make sure there's a unified national champion - something it failed to do last year I might point out  - by having the top two teams play each other. USC and Oklahoma have been #1 and #2 all year, and they're playing each other. Sure, it sucks to be Auburn, go undefeated and still come up third. But there's no question who the top two teams are - they've been the same all year.

I'm sure this will revive the yearly "BCS sucks, we need a playoff" talk. Quick memo to playoff people: any college football playoff system is going to screw someone. For example, a 4 team playoff this year (using the BCS rankings) would have been USC, Oklahoma, Auburn and Texas, screwing unanimous #4 ranked Cal. An 8 team playoff would add Cal, Utah, Georgia and Va Tech, but screw Louisville who's ranked at least 8th in both polls. Even a 16 team playoff - which is virtually infeasible - would screw unanimous #16 ranked Wisconsin. So let's not pretend this issue will go away by playing more games.

Do I think the BCS works well now? No, even though USC didn't get screwed this year (not exactly a ringing endorsement). Personally, I think BCS computer system should only be used when the polls don't agree. There's just no objective way to measure the relative records of teams that don't play the same teams. Thus, leave it in the hands of the humans, and use the computers to break ties when they happen. It would have given us a USC vs. LSU championship last year and still had a USC vs. OU championship this year.

Turkey Day 2004

We've had a good family Thanksgiving this year. We flew to northern Virginia where my parents live on Monday, avoiding the craziness of traveling the day before Thanksgiving. Patrick is such a good traveler! Tuesday, we went to the brand new National Museum of the American Indian with two of my mother's first cousins and her aunt (I think - hard to keep these family relations straight sometimes). It was great having that part of the family around - I hadn't seen them since my grandfather passed away back in high school. They were also over for Thanksgiving today, which was fascinating listening to stories of my grandfather's family as well as their world travels. For example, they recently visited the River Kwai and learned of its history - let's just say it's nothing like the movie.

I've also seen a bunch of old friends who still live here or flew in to be with family who live here. Last night, Jules made enchiladas en mas for the family and for our good friends John and Barbara and their daughter Elizabeth. John works for a defense contractor these days and Barbara is a stay at home mom. (I hate that term, but I don't know how else to put it. Moms work hard - they don't just "stay home") Rich and Jess, who are in from San Francisco, also stopped by. Rich is a marketing expert and also covers the SF Giants for the newspaper. Today, we had breakfast with Rich and Jess plus Dave and Heather and their son Ethan. I didn't really know Dave growing up - more of a friend of a friend who I got to know after high school. Dave has worked at the White House since sometime in Clinton's first term. Rich wore his "Free Martha" t-shirt for the occasion. He also pointed out that Mary Cheney - yes, that Mary Cheney - graduated from my high school a year behind me. It's a small world.

We're here thru the middle of next week - I almost always get to the end of the year with vacation to use or lose. I can't stand traveling the day before Thanksgiving or shopping the day after, so I'm probably going to hang out with my brother while Jules and my mother and my great aunt go shopping. Dad has to work - which seems ludicrous since how much is really going to get done the day after Thanksgiving? Maybe he'll find time to blog. Next week is more hanging out, though I am taking the time to visit a customer before I head back to the grind.

New Smartphone(s)

As I mentioned in my last post, I have a new toy - a Motorola MPx220 smartphone. I'm actually lucky enough to have recently laid my hands on two smartphones. The other was a dopod 515 which was a gift from the organizers of TechEd Beijing. The dopod is nice, but I really dig the MPx220. I'm partial to flip phones, plus the MPx220 has a camera and Bluetooth.

Of course, one of the benefits of having a smartphone is the ability to write some custom stuff for it. There are a variety of tweaks available that are predicated on registry modifications. There's a registry editor for Smartphone 2002, but I couldn't get it to install on since my phone is running Windows Mobile 2003. Luckily, there's OpenNETCF.org with a wide variety of useful libraries for compact framework development. They even have registry editing libraries that work from the device or the desktop. Not sure what else I want to write yet other than an app to download movie times a la the new SPOT watch movies channel, but I'm sure I can think of something!

One PhotoStory Gripe

I'm pretty impressed with the new Photo Story. I've been tracking this program since it was a research project so it's been cool to watch it evolve. However, I did run into something I didn't like in the new version. Once you've built a Photo Story, you can render it to a variety of target profiles. One of the target profiles is for SmartPhone. I've recently got an MPx220 so I figured I'd try it out. Didn't work as Photo Story's target profile is for SmartPhone with Windows Media Player 10 Mobile which the MPx220 doesn't have installed. Woops. And you can't upgrade the device to WMP10 Mobile. Double woops.

While I'm annoyed that I can't install WMP10 Mobile on my MPx220, I'm more annoyed at Photo Story. There's no way to build a custom target profile that would work with my phone. I was able to build an encoder profile to convert a Photo Story rendered for the desktop to be converted down to work well on the SmartPhone. Why can't I just do that inside Photo Story?

Two Thumbs Up on New Comcast Service

Jeff Sandquist and Scoble have gotten their new ComCast boxes and apparently the service rocks. Mine gets installed Sunday. 

(side note - Does anyone still use Scoble's first name or has Scoble transcended the whole first-name/last-name thing and moved directly to single name status?)

Halo 2 Stats

I hadn't realized how cool the Halo 2 stats site on bungie.net is until Scott blogged it . This really brings the online experience to a new level. It's so cool, that I had to create a new flair for my blog linking to my stats page (I also put up a link to my games RSS feed). Granted, my stats so far are pretty lame - I've only played one multiplayer game so far and I came in 5th. (I did spend most of last night playing the campain.) Maybe the public nature of the stats will drive me to improve them. I haven't joined a clan yet, but when I do I'll create a flair for that too.

The coolest thing about this is that it sets a new bar for online experience. ESPN Video Games and EA Sports are nowhere near this level of detail, but I imagine they are taking notice.

Konfabulator

I just installed Konfabulator as I've seen several people, like Scoble, blogging about it. I think I need to dig thru the widget gallery. Of the preinstalled ones, I only like the Battery Level and WiFi Signal widgets. But I really like them - as in like them enough to keep the software installed just for them. I've only played with it for 5 minutes, but already I am not interested in any of the interactive widgits - having a nice partially transparent graphic displaying information at a glance works for me the best.

Esp. after the launch of Halo 2, I'd love to see a Konfabulator widget with the status of my Xbox Live Friends list. Maybe something for the XboxFriends folks?

Speaking of Halo 2, I'm headed home now to do just that...

Halo 2

I didn't join the midnight madness, but I did pick up Halo 2 at the company store today. There was a line around the building before the store opened this morning, but by lunchtime it was down to a 15 minute wait. Like many others, I was on the multiplayer beta, but I'm guessing nothing compares to the real deal. I'm not going to get a chance to play until tonight :( but I sure am looking forward to it. Quick reminder - my gamertag is RayTracer, though I'll probably start off w/ the single player campain.

I wonder how many Xbox owners called in sick today?

More on HW

In trolling for HW suggestions, I forgot to mention what I'm planning on using the HW for. I've got a couple of things in mind:

• Public facing web/media server. Family members are constantly asking for updated pictures of Patrick. I've gotten tired of regularly uploading pictures to a public website for them to download. I've got them all on my personal machine, so it would be much easier just to expose them directly. Similarly, between our camcorder, the video functions of our digital cameras and PhotoStory, I also have quite a bit of video media to make available to the rest of my family.
• Experimental / development server. ASP.NET 2.0 is coming, so if I'm going to expose photos and/or video, I might as well take advantage of the new stuff to do it with. I'm also thinking about writing some apps for keeping track of my family tree along with my dad and cousin.

• Movie making / 3D Rendering. I was working on my garage over the weekend and I came across my old copy of 3D Studio Max. It's up to version 7 now, so my copy of version 1.0 is way behind the times. I've been interested in movie making for a long time and if (when?) I get back into it I know I'll want to do some effects work - stuff like Matrix XP. This is where the Intel P4 HT vs. AMD Athlon 64 question really comes into play. Dual core vs. 64 bits?

One thing that's not on this list is Media Center. I'm interested in MCE05, but then yesterday MSFT and Comcast announce that they are rolling out Microsoft TV Foundation Edition in Washington state starting next week. I think, in the end, I'll want MCE since I'd like the ability to hack my TV but for now I think I want to try out the MSTV stuff. Also, the HDTV story around MCE doesn't look clear yet - it works with "over-the-air" HDTV, but makes no mention of cable delivered HDTV. I think the HW in this area is pretty new, but I would guess that would change in the next 6-12 months.

Update - I just spoke to Comcast regarding the MSTV functionallity. Their PVR functionallity supports both HD and non-HD programs so I'm definitely going to give that a try. Only downside - they can't come install for a week and a half. :(

HW Recommendations?

So I'm thinking of getting some new hardware. My big question is Intel P4 w/ HT vs. AMD XP vs. AMD 64 (along with associated mobo & memory)Any suggestions?

Movie Times on your SPOT Watch

Last week, Microsoft announced the new Movies channel for SPOT Watches. I blogged a while ago about wanting movie times on my SmartPhone. On my watch is nearly as good, except that I don't have said watch. I've been thinking about getting a SPOT watch, but I'm curious - why can't I get MSN Direct content delivered to my device of choice? I'd be happy to pay a service fee - I've just gotten used to not wearing a watch.

Horror Stories for Halloween

Halloween is the time for scary movies. Julie and I have seen two since I got back from OOPSLA - 28 Days Later... and The Grudge. I'm not sure I would have called 28 Days Later “Scary As Hell” but I did really like it. It had a real plot and real characters that had real arcs. True, it also had zombies running around, but that was much less the focus than I expected. In fact, I think it had some thinly veiled social commentary (that I can't discuss w/o spoiling the movie).

On the other hand, The Grudge is simply a run-of-the-mill haunted house story. Not that scary and no plot or characters worth mentioning. Simply a series of loosely strung together scary scenes with little consistency. Which was a bummer as it did have a great opening scene. After all the comparisons to The Ring (which I liked, though not as much as most people) and the fact that Sam Raimi was producing, it was very dissappointing.

Of course, neither of these can compare to the potential horrors of election fraud on Tuesday. Apparently, over 80 lawsuits have already been filed (on both sides) which I don't take as a good sign.

Photo Story 3

Since I'm at OOPSLA, I'm behind on my blog reading. But in case someone else hasn't already blogged it, go check out Photo Story 3. I've got an an 20 month old, over 2000 pictures taken this year and a pile of relatives who are clamoring regularly for pictures so I'm pretty excited about this.

Virtual PC 2004 SP1

I'm sure this has made the rounds, but VPC 2004 SP1 is available. Among other updates, it has a new version of the VM Additions, which significantly improves the performance of XP SP2.

Final Day of My Far East Trip

I said yesterday that the Metropolis session had gone very well. Got the score back - 7.71/9 speaker satisfaction and 7.83/9 content satisfaction. Not bad, esp. given that it was a translated session. Today, I presented Data in SOA, and I thought it well also. This time, I did it without the translator at the audience's request. We'll see how the scores come back. I thought it was encouraging that attendance at the architecture sessions steadily improved. Gurp's session yesterday afternoon had more people than my Metropolis session and today's session had more people still.

After the session, I spent some time answering questions. After Metropolis, there was one guy from China Mobile. This time, he was joined by two dozen other attendees. And again, Mr. China Mobile had some great questions that really made me think. He pointed out that often architecture is focused on the non-functional requirements of a system (perf, scale, reliability, etc) that are very technology platform dependent. As the platform evolves, the decisions made in implementing a system become obsolete, which makes it very hard to evolve a solution to take advantage of the improved platform. He's right. The reason he's right is that we don't a good mechanism to capture the design decisions made during the development of a system, just the outcome. Software Factories can really help out here.

After the presentation and Q&A with the attendees, several of the speakers and I were treated to a trip to the Great Wall of China. One of the other speakers was Stan Lippman, whom I had never met. As for the Wall, what can I say but wow. We climbed for about two hours - glad I put on my sneakers! We reached at least a local summit, where there is a quote from a Mao poem stating that you can't be a real man until you've climbed the Great Wall. Well, I guess that makes me a real man now. The wall is over 45 degrees in several places that we walked. I sure got a good workout today.

I'm exhausted, but I figure I can sleep on the 12 hours worth of plane ride I have tomorrow so I'm heading out (after a shower) to do a little shopping. I've had a great trip and met with some great people - both MSFT employees and customers alike - but I sure am looking forward to being home.

Shopping in Shinjuku

Since I had the morning off, I spent it wandering around Shinjuku, the part of Tokyo where the MS Japan office is. I was looking for presents for my wife and son, but couldn’t find anything. Experience tells me that I’m a poor judge of clothes for Julie plus with the diet she’s been on and the foreign sizes there’s little chance I’ll pick out something that she likes or that fits. Too bad, as this is like heaven for women’s clothes shopping. I went to four different department stores, and each had floor after floor of ladies wear. For example, the Odakyu department store has 14 floors, of which 6 are dedicated to ladies wear. Other departments get a floor or less. I did find a cute shirt for Patrick, but it was around 8,000 yen, which I was told was $76 US. Seems pretty steep for a shirt he will only wear a few times before he out grows it. 
 
I did have more shopping luck (for me at least, not for Julie or Patrick) at Yodobashi Camera. Their slogan is “Total Multimedia Life” and let me tell you they are not kidding! If it uses electricity, they have it. From computer equipment to media players to digital and video cameras to pro music gear to home appliances - eight floors of geek paradise to put Fry’s to shame. I picked up a compact USB 2.0 hub and a Wireless 54G card for my laptop – grand total about $50 US. I know I could get these in the states, but the place was so cool I had to get something. And unlike the US, they had racks of hubs to choose from. Literally, they must have had 30 different models of compact USB 2.0 hubs in different shapes and colors. The one thing they didn’t have that I looked for was a tablet PC. Hey Scoble, what’s up with that?

First Stop - Japan

It took forever, but I'm in Tokyo. Ten hours on a plane I expected. I didn't expect the two hours late departure and I didn't realize it was an hour and a half train ride to the hotel from the airport. But I'm here now and I had a relatively good night sleep (I never sleep great on the road). I've got some time to look for souvenirs this morning, then I have meetings this afternoon and tomorrow morning before flying out to Kuala Lumpur tomorrow.

On the flight out, I ended up next to Jesper Johansson from Microsoft's Security Business Unit. He writes the Security Management column on Technet and had two of the top ten presentations at TechEd US. He spent most of the plane ride working on his "How to Get Your Network Hacked in 10 Easy Steps" presentation. He showed me his demo, where he hacks a Win2k/SQL2k machine using a SQL injection attack. Anybody still using concatenation to generate SQL commands? I realized that was bad before meeting Jesper, but now I've seen just how bad. I'm glad we're out there showing people how this stuff works, if nothing else in order to make them realize what they can do to identify and mitigate security risks. I want Jesper to write some security infrastructure architecture articles for Architecture Center and/or JOURNAL.

Also ran into Mark Hindsbo, who works down the hall from me. He's in town, like me, to meet with the Japanese subsidiary, though he's not going on to TechEd. It was nice having someone around who had been to the MSFT Japan office before (the hotel is in the same building) and to chat with on the train.

Long Cold Winter Without Hockey

John Evdemon and I were chatting about making time to "get our hands dirty" on some code. After the last meeting between hockey owners and players, it looks like we'll both have plenty of time on our hands since there won't be any hockey to watch.

I agree with this ESPN.com article that there is plenty of blame to go around, but it looks to me that most of it sits with the players on this one. The players 12th-hour proposal apparently included a luxury tax/revenue sharing system and a salary rollback that would come to about $100 million dollars. The problem is the league as a whole is losing around $200-$300 million a year (according to former SEC Commission Chair Arthur Levitt). So great, with the player's proposal, the league continues to hemorrhage over $100 million a year while the luxury tax system spreads it around so everyone feels the pain.

Maybe these guys have been checked into the boards a few too many times, but the numbers are very simple: According to the league, their revenue is around $2 billion, with around 75% going to player salaries. Furthermore, in the past decade, revenue has grown 173% but player salaries have grown 261%. Mess around with those numbers in Excel and you'll discover that revenue is growing about 5.6% year while salaries are growing 10% a year. Assuming those numbers stay constant and you have salaries equaling revenue in 2011 - only 7 years away. Now, if you include the 5% salary rollback that the players are proposing, assuming the model doesn't change much (and it shouldn't - my understanding of the rest of the player proposal deals with revenue sharing, but I'm using the overall league revenue and salaries in this analysis) then that date pushes back just one entire season before the player salaries equal revenue. I'm not sure how anyone in the player's union can say the current system is working with a straight face.

It's going to be a long cold winter if you're a hockey fan. I'm guessing the players are assuming they owners will cave like they did during the '94-'95 season. Memo to the players, in 1994, the owners were only paying about half of league revenues to player salaries. In other words, they made more money playing than not playing. This time, with the owners losing less money by not playing, they don't have much incentive to cave.

More on my New VoIP Service

I got my Lingo phone set up last night. It was mind-numbingly easy:

1. Ignore included directions which tell you to turn off the computer, router and cable modem. (maybe you unplug the microwave just to be sure)
2. Plug Lingo VoIP box into router
3. Plug Lingo VoIP box into phone
4. Plug Lingo VoIP box into power outlet
5. Wait for VoIP light to come on

We made a few calls, both locally and to our family & friends in Europe. I couldn't hear any difference in quality from our normal land line. We're going to run with both in parallel for a while, and then I'm going to cut back the services on the land line. I figure I don't want to shut it off completely for SLA reasons - it works when the power's out and in the very rare occasions that the internet connection is down. Otherwise, I figure I'll be completely switched over in a month or so.

BTW, like other VoIP vendors, Lingo offers incentives to sign up your friends. If you want Lingo and an extra $25 credit, drop me a line.

New Phones Arrived

I got my twin V300's tonight. No sweat - only issue was figuring out which one was mine and which one was Julie's (We don't have exactly the same plans). Of course, they look identical. We've set the backgrounds to different images so we can tell by opening the phone who's it is, but it would be really nice to have a different faceplate for at least one of them. Plus we need 2 car chargers and I'd like to get a data cable to sync my contact list. Ebay has a bunch of vendors like PhoneStations that offer these accessories cheap - car charger for 99 cents, faceplate for $2.97, data cable for $14.99. S&H is a little outragous - $15 for four items - but $35 total including S&H seems way reasonable, esp. when T-Mobile charges $35 for just the data cable. Anyone know anything about places to buy V300 accessories? What about applications for the V300? The data cable doesn't come w/ any software. I found MotoCoder, but I don't really have time to write my own apps for this phone (esp. in J2ME).

T-Mobile Rocks, Sprint Sucks

A while ago, Tom mentioned that I had a great customer service experience with T-Mobile. Truthfully, the great customer service experience came today. T-Mobile just earned a customer for...well, maybe not for life, but they certainly have earned enough karma to keep me around a while. And at the same time, Sprint has spurned a customer for life.

I blogged back in April about getting a SmartPhone. Well, the honeymoon was short lived - it was a developer beta unit and it was not particularly robust. I dropped it about a month ago and it died. No huge deal, the MPx220 is coming soon. Of course, I need a phone in the meantime. I had signed up for T-Mobile service to power the SmartPhone so I went back to pick up a V300 which would go to my wife when the MPx220 became available. Only trouble was that since I hadn't bought the phone when I activated my account, I was not eligible for an activation discount. I had asked about that when I bought the service, and had been assured it was no big deal. So I call up customer service, and they promise to wave the disconnect fee on the current account if I buy a new phone (with the activation discount). This was right before I went to New Zealand, so I figured I'd take care of it when I got back. In the meantime, I'm using a old borrowed phone and my existing account.

So I've been back a week, but hadn't gotten to taking care of the phone yet. Then last night, someone steals my phone and my wife's phone out of the car. So I call T-Mobile and explain the situation. They cancel the account on the spot, outright - no early termination fee or anything. Pretty cool. Of course, I did tell them I was going to buy not one but two new V300's from Amazon (for the low price of -$100 each after rebate) but still, I thought that was pretty cool. The only bummer of this whole scenario is that I won't be able to get the MPx220 with an activation discount when it comes up.

After talking to T-Mobile, I called Sprint. Now, I've been a Sprint customer for five years. You would think that would warrant a little respect and/or leeway, but apparently not. The "customer service" rep I spoke to was both rude and stupid. He was able to suspend my wife's phone, but when I asked to cancel it he told me there would be an early termination fee. Funny thing is, the term on this "contract" (which I never signed and was unaware of) end's on the 28th of August. You know, next Saturday. As in, six days from today. You would think that you might give a customer of five years who is dealing with a case of theft the benefit of the doubt and wave the early termination fee less than a week before the contract expires anyway. No, apparently I have to call back Saturday to terminate the contract. Fine. I set a reminder on my calendar so I don't forget to rid myself of Sprint for good and forever.

AT&T in the VOIP Fray

Watching the Olympics I've seen ads for AT&T's CallVantage, a VOIP service similar to Vonage and Lingo (any others?). All three have the basics - Unlimited calling to US & Canada, voicemail, call waiting/forwarding, 911 support, caller ID & 3-way calling. However, each has a feature or two that the others don't. AT&T has Do Not Disturb (no big deal) and Personal Conferencing up to nine people (wow!). Vonage has a soft phone (i.e. an app that acts like a phone so you can call and receive calls while on the road). Lingo is the cheapest ($20 a month + 3 free months) and Western Europe is included in the unlimited free calling area (hello brother-in-law from Germany). I'm leaning towards Lingo as I don't need personal conferencing (I organize groups of people outside my immediate family with email) and when I travel with my family, I don't really spend much time online so the soft phone is of limited use. One issue - checking out Broadband Reports VOIP reviews, Lingo sounds like it's got really awful tech support. But, with three months free, I'm hoping I can try it out and cancel it if it's a problem.

Update - I called Lingo and they confirmed they have an activation fee as well as a 30 day cancellation policy. So while the first three months are free, you pay $10 S&H and $30 to activate. If you cancel the service in the first 30 days, you can get your $30 back. And there is no service contract, so you can cancel anytime (not sure if the other services require a contract or not).

Weird VPC Issue

I'm setting up a new SQL 2005 / VS 2005 VPC. While I'm pretty excited about SQL Express, I want to experiment with some of the features in the full product so I'm installing Express's big brother. However, there must be some weird issue w/ VPC's shared folders feature - the setup support files fail to install. If I connect to my host across the virtual network to the loopback adapter then the install works fine. As I said, weird.

On a related note, anyone know a good, simple, free/cheap DHCP server for XP? The one issue w/ using the loopback adapter is that you either hardcode network addresses or use the “Automatic Private Address” (i.e. the 169.254.*.* address). The auto private address works fine, except that it takes a while for the DHCP to time out before assigning the private address. Plus, in XP SP2, there's an annoying tray icon that pops up to tell you that the loopback adapter failed to get a DHCP address. If I had a DHCP server for the virtual network hanging off the loopback adapter, then I could avoid all that timeout and annoying pop up tray icon stuff.

The Incredible Shrinking Inbox

My inbox is getting to be reasonable again. After two weeks on the road, it got up over 300 messages even though I cleaned it out before I left. Now, it's back down to 45 messages. I already use rules to break out messages that come to various mailing lists, that come to our team alias, or ones that I'm cc'ed on. I've realized that everything that comes into my inbox falls into one of three categories: shit I need to know, shit I need to do, and shit I don't need. I'm trying to be really diligent getting all these things out of my inbox. Shit I need to do gets moved to the task list. Shit I need to know gets moved into some other folder - usually by category though I have Lookout if I need to search for it. Shit I don't need gets deleted. Of course, once I'm done with my inbox, I've still got to tackle those nearly 400 messages in my cc, team and not to me folders. I'm hoping this will help me stay better organized - something I manager tells me that I need to work on (along with focusing on what's important and improving my diplomacy). One thing that taking this job has taught me, you can always get more email, whether you want it or not!

My Ride (Revisited)

I'm not sure how this happened, but I overwrote the following post from July 27th. Found the original in Google's cache, but not before I deleted the original. So here it is again:

Brad Smith (via Chris) wants to know what kind of cars 'softies drive. I drive a green 2002 Chevy Blazer. This picture is from Patrick's trip home from the hospital. In the picture, you can see my old car - a purple '97 GMC Sonoma pickup truck. That got traded in earlier this year for a Nissan Quest minivan. Those two cars take a fair bit of gas, so we're thinking of getting a hybrid - Ford has a hybrid Escape SUV coming this year. My mom has a hybrid Honda and loves it. In the meantime, I try to carpool or bus (or hit John up for a ride) to work as often as possible.

Amazing Cheese

I've blogged about cheese before, but it was in jest. However, the cheese here in Australia and New Zealand has been awesome. It's like going to Tahiti and eating pineapple. When you come home to the same old stuff, it's a real let down. Maybe I need to stop making fun of my coworker Earnie (he's the one who showed me the American Cheese Society annual conference and awards).

Slight Nomad Issue Solved

I've had my Nomad Zen for just over a month now. I've loaded almost 6500 tracks from 525 albums and it's only about half full. However, I did have a slight issue with it. Walking across campus the other day, I tripped over my own damn feet. Luckily, the Nomad broke my fall :(. I ripped the protective case and scuffed the LCD screen, but otherwise it didn't seem any the worse for wear. However, when I fired it up on the flight to Sydney it wouldn't work. It would boot and claim to be playing, but no music came out. If I selected a new song, it would freeze and needed a hard reboot or battery removal in order to shut down. I tried the reset button and reloading the firmware, no luck. Today, I searched Creative Labs' knowledge base, searched for "zen xtra crash" and found an article on the Zen's Rescue Mode. This allows you to Clean Up, Format All and Reload OS. Clean Up took a while - around 15 minutes - but it did the trick. I guess the rapid deceleration caused some temporary issue to the internal hard drive, but there don't seem to be any residual effects. Even the song that I was listening to when I fell is fine.

Of course, no device is perfect. In addition to "Make Rescue Mode Easily Discoverable", I have two minor quibbles with the device. First, it doesn't draw power from the USB connection. With Red Chair's Notmad Explorer, I can play the music from the Zen thru my computer's speakers. I also use Notmad Explorer to convert my music from WMA lossless to WMA 96k when it transfers to the Zen. In both of these cases, the Zen is connected to the computer for a long period of time. It would be nice if I didn't have to plug in both power and USB. Second (and more likely to be addressed as it's a software issue) is that when you're listening to a song, you can get it's track details, displaying the artist and album names. It would be nice to be able to jump directly to the artist or album in the music library from the track details screen.

Minor quibbles aside, this is an awesome device.

Hanging in Hobbiton

TechEd New Zealand is at the Sky City Convention Center - part of Sky City Auckland which includes casinos, shops, restaurants and a hotel where we are staying. Feels sort of like a Vegas hotel, as if they don't expect you to spend much time in the rooms. For example, there is very little dresser space - I'm guessing the typical guest comes for just a weekend. But it's very nice. Sky City Tower is the highest tower in the southern hemisphere. There's a restaurant at the top where we went last night for the speaker's dinner. You can also jump off the tower in a rig similar to what stuntmen use. It's the tallest basejump in the world - 192 meters straight down. I have no interest in that whatsoever, but Jules wants to do it. I think the only thing keeping her from trying it is the fact that I don't think I could watch, which means I couldn't videotape it.

Yesterday, we rented a car and drove across the New Zealand countryside, even though they drive on the left side of the road here. It took me a while to get used to it, but I think I did OK - no accidents, no near misses and only caught myself on the wrong side of the road once. I'm glad we upgraded to an automatic - I can't imagine shifting with my left hand! Hardest thing was staying in the lane, since everything was backwards. I kept wanting to have a car width between me and the right edge of the lane, which meant I kept ending up half in the next lane over (or on the shoulder). Jules almost yanked the door handle off - she said it was very unnerving to sit in what back home is the drivers seat and yet have no control. By the end of the day, however, Jules and I had both adjusted quite well to driving on the "wrong" side of the road, thank you very much.

We drove two hours to Matamata, which is where the Hobbiton sequences of LOTR were filmed. Matamata itself is pretty small - 6,000 city residents with another 7,000 in the surrounding "suburbs". I'm fairly sure that more people work on MSFT's main campus. Sort of gives you a different perspective of scale - Matamata doesn't even have a stoplight - just a series of traffic circles along their main drag. In fact, in five hours of driving around NZ, we saw exactly one stoplight outside of Auckland - controlling traffic across a one lane bridge! Many of the shops in Matamata were closed, seemingly for the winter. I'm guessing there are a lot more tourists in the summer - Matamata has it's own KFC and Subway is "opening soon". We ate at a local bakery where you can get a wide variety of fried food - fish, chicken and crab. They sure like fried food here - at dinner last night, we were served fried mashed potatoes.

While most of LOTR was filmed on the southern island of New Zealand, Hobbiton was filmed on a 500 hectare sheep farm just outside of Matamata. The owners of said sheep farm run official tours where you get to spend around an hour and a half wandering around the remains of the set. "Remains" is the operative word here as over half of Hobbiton was destroyed after filming was completed. All of it was scheduled to be destroyed, but the production company only got half done before the weather forced them to stop. They were going to come back and finish the job, but the farm owners petitioned New Line Cinema for permission to keep the rest up and run tours. In fact, of the 150+ locations used in LOTR, only Hobbiton was not completely returned to its natural state. Most of the locations used were national parks and the like, so keeping the sets up wasn't really an option. New Line also seems to be very concerned that no one "leverage" the sets. For example, as you can see from the pictures, the hobbit holes are pretty much holes in the side of a hill now - all of the set dressing has been removed. The tour guide indicated that they would like to return the set to as it appeared in the movie, but New Line won't let them. The legal aspect of the set is interesting - the land belongs to the farm owners, but the sets on that land belong to New Line. Their control of the sets seems a bit draconian to me - it is absolutely forbidden to record any sort of story reenactment in the remaining set pieces - but hey, it's their IP. Regardless, it was awesome. We stood under the Party Tree, "danced" on the Party Field and stood inside Bag End.

Vonage and Skype

I need to start using more communication tools on the internet. Yesterday I researched Vonage and downloaded Skype. Given how much I use my mobile phone, I don't think I need to spend so much on my home phone system. Vonage is much cheaper than my current phone provider - only $30 a month - which includes unlimited calling in the US. It's got neat features like virtual numbers, so multiple numbers in different area codes all point to the same phone. And while it provides unlimited US calling, the phone doesn't have to be in the US. So if my brother-in-law in Germany got it, he could call all his family in the US for free. A teammate has it, and said it works pretty well. Anyone else out there using it? If I got it, I'd like to use it with the existing phone wiring in the house. My cable box has to dial up to download program listings. I think it would be funny to use an analog model over the broadband connection.

As for Skype, lots of people have blogged that, so I won't bother to here, except to point out that Skype 1.0 is now available (released today). Feel free to skype me, though it doesn't appear to work through the corporate firewall.

Update - I should have realized, but there are other choices in the internet telephone business. Lingo caught my eye - only $20 a month for unlimited calling to the US, Canada and Western Europe (which includes Germany where my afore-mentioned brother-in-law lives). Anyone on Lingo? Also, I'm not sure why, but you can only call landlines in Europe as part of the unlimited calling plan. I also noticed that calling mobile phones in Europe on Vonage is more expensive. Why is that?

Lookout and Cω

Cool thing about blogs - sometimes I learn about stuff happening inside the big house from outside in blogs. Case in point - Scott pointed out to the Lookout download. I also found out about the COmega site from Don (though honestly, I knew about that one before. That is before it changed names.)

Update - Lookout's download site changed, back to a page on http://lookoutsoft.com instead of a page on http://download.microsoft.com. Strange, but true.

That's A Lot of Space

John was just in here admiring my Nomad Zen Xtra. I've got nearly 500 albums loaded, over 6000 songs, and I've only filled it half way. On my recent trip to Atlanta, I realized I regularly travel with 220 GB of storage. 60GB internal laptop drive, 60GB multibay drive, 60GB Iomega external portable USB drive and the 40GB Nomad Zen. I can even get really obscene and make it a round 300GB, with my new Argosy drive enclosure (thanks to Peter for recommending Argosy) and extra 80GB drive.

Evolutionary Computation and Dinner

Julie, Patrick and I had dinner with my cousin David Schaffer tonight. David is a research fellow for Phillips and is an expert on genetic algorithms. He was one of the founding members of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation and an editor for Evolutionary Computation Journal. He was in town for the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation COnference 2004 (i.e. GECCO - cute). It was funny that we are both software experts (though he is much more expert than I), but had to explain to the other what we did. I explained SOA to him and he explained genetic algorithms to me. We didn't into too much depth over dinner - it was much more fun to watch Patrick try and feed himself noodles and talk about family stuff. However, I think I want to learn more about this - I'm thinking there will be applicability of genetic and evolutionary computation to SOA. Maybe I can get David to write for my JOURNAL.

David is also into genealogy, and he gave me a copy of the family tree he's been building up over the years. It's all 20 year old console apps and text files, but he wants to bring it to the web in order to better enable collaboration among family members. Of course, David's never built a web app before. Sounds like a job for Visual Web Developer 2005 Express! (BTW, what's the abbreviation for that? VWD?)

New Toy

I just picked up a 40GB Nomad Zen Xtra. I know everyone is all ga-ga for the iPod, but I have all my media in WMA I found the Nomad for almost half the price of a 40GB iPod. I also picked up Notmad Explorer which is much cooler than the built in software. I especially like the Xtreamer capability which allows you to play music stored on the Nomad thru your computer speakers. So far, I've only filled up 1/3 of the storage - I guess I need to rip more of my CD collection!

Welcome Maddy

In my almost six years of working at MSFT, I've had one great manager after another. I just found out one of them had a baby two months ago. Madelyn Marie Heard was born on April 30th. Congrats to her mom Jennifer, who was my manager two jobs ago when I was on MSFT's National Technology Team.

Back on Email

FYI, I haven't been accessing my DevHawk email address for a while. Basically, I never got back in the rhythm of checking that address after the site came back up in early May. Excuses abound - I was way to busy with TechEd, work, family, I get more than enough email at my work address, blah blah blah. Anyway, I've finally got around to checking that email. Besides the ton of spam, there was also a bunch of real email from people asking questions. If you sent me email in the past two months, sorry I've ignored you. I'll stop ignoring and respond shortly! :)

Xbox Live on MSN Messenger

I've been playing a bunch of Rallisport Challenge 2 since I got back from Tech·Ed. I haven't seen many of my Xbox friends online when I've been online, but I just setup the MSN Messenger / Xbox Live integration. Cool idea, but none of my friends are online right now, so there's not really anything to see, yet.

On a similar note, Cory (who provided my Xbox Live Flair) has an app called Xbox Friends where you can see your friends playing habits in addition to their current status. For those who don't have it, I can save you the bother of installing it to find out my habits - all Rallisport Challenge 2 all the time!

Update - I also signed up for Xbox Live Alerts as well. This isn't as useful as there are a wide variety of alerts types and I have to have one delivery profile for all of them. I want to be notified in email if there is new downloads, but on MSN Messenger if a friend logs in. This appears to be an MSN Alerts wide issue - alert settings are per alert provider, not per alert type. Not very useful to be notified in email that a friend was online...yesterday.

Thoughts on Prisoner of Azkaban

My wife and I saw the latest Harry Potter movie over the weekend. It's my favorite so far. I'm not sure if it was the new director, or just the fact that this book was longer than the first two, but I thought this movie spent far less time on stuff from the book that wasn't relevant to the story. I took a film class back in high school, and the teacher explained that every scene in a movie has to do one of three things.

1. Advance the plot
2. Advance the character
3. Get a laugh

I amended rule #3 to be “Get a reaction” since there are often scenes in a horror or thriller movie that are there just to scare you. The first two Harry Potter movies seemed to spend a significant amount of screen time on getting the reaction: “I remember that from the book”. For example, in the last movie, when Harry and Ron drink a potion to transform into Malfoy's two henchmen (henchboys?) , Hermione accidentally transforms herself into a cat. The only reason that scene is in the movie is because it's in the book. Not having Hermione doesn't affect Harry and Ron's mission (i.e. it didn't advance the plot) nor was there any fallout or change to Hermione in later scenes (i.e. it didn't advance the character). It doesn't even get a laugh. Given the Harry Potter movies are around 2 1/2 hours long each, there's no excuse for extraneous scenes like this.

Kill Bill Vol 2, Troy, Shrek 2 and Harry Potter so far with Spider-Man 2 and King Arthur on the horizon. Sure we've had Van Helsing and The Day After Tomorrow, but so far the summer movie season is looking good.

What's the Opposite of "Giant Sucking Sound"?

A while ago, Chris spouted on the then-trend of all of his friends coming to work for MSFT. He himself joined up six month after writing that entry. Now, there seem to be a bunch of new consulting companies sprouting up. ThinkTecture, PluralSight (thanks for the shirt Keith!), Barracuda.NET and Wangdera just to name a few. Most of these seem to feature DevelopMentor alumni. Will we see newly-minted MSFT alumni join this trend? I know one - my friend Jeff left MSFT to start his own consulting firm Secure Justice Solutions, focusing on integrated justice information systems. One isn't a trend, but it's interesting to watch as the economy slowly improves.

Note, unlike Chris, who observed a trend only to become a part of it a few short months later, we won't be seeing any “DevHawk Consulting” nonsense around here. I’m having *way* too much fun doing what I’m doing w/ Architecture Strategy. Besides, I get to torment work with Pat.

Update - in the comments, Avery pointed out that Rob Howard has left MSFT to create a company called »telligentsystems.

Plane Ride Home

BTW, I ended up watching the three episodes of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! on the flight home from Tech·Ed. I made this a seperate post since I wasn't sure how much the MSDN folks would appreciate the "foul" lanugage on Architecture Center. Amazon spells it "Bullsh*t" but I don't get the whole changing one letter thing. I mean, if you're offended by the word "Bullshit", are your really going to be placated by a fucking asterisk? :)

New Office

Almost our whole team moved offices yesterday. We used to be spread out across campus in 34, 40, 22 and 119. Now, we'll all be on one hallway in 18. It's a little unnerving to be able to walk the hall and see everybody after spending 6 months on a team who saw each other about once a month. Unnerving, but very very cool.

As you can see on this map, 18 is in the NW corner of the main campus. From the posters left behind, I'm guessing Mac Office used to be here - I think the whole Office group is moving to 36, the newest building on campus. (36 is so new, it's not even on the map yet. It's to the east of 3.) Not sure how nice 36 is, but 18 is much nicer than 22. About 30 feet from my office is a large lounge area with ~10 couches and wireless access. We have a full size cafe with ATM. And, now that we're on main campus, we're much closer to meetings with other groups (other than DevDiv - we used to be just across the street from them).

I was going to bring a camera and post some pictures of our new offices, but I forgot in a haze of sleeplessness. Julie and Patrick went to LA this morning for the weekend, and we had to get up at 5am to get her to the airport in time to get all the baby gear thru security. Since I can't post any office pictures, here's a picture of a nesting hawk my friend (and hoster) Tom emailed me.

New Toy

I came back from lunch yesterday to discover that my boss had left a new toy on my desk - a Smartphone Developer Kit. Not sure where he got it, since it's all sold out. I'm stoked because I've been wanting a Smartphone for a while, but I want to use T-Mobile's service and I didn't want to pay a premium for an unlocked device. Now, I don't have to.

Any suggestions on cool Smartphone software?

Da Vinci Code

Like the rest of the known universe, I recently read The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. I had read Angels & Demons on a plane trip back from Alaska when my laptop battery had died. A&D was good, esp. considering the low bar of killing several hours flying back from Anchorage. I tried to read Digital Fortress but just couldn't stand it. I liked the crypto part of it, but the characters were blown so out of proportion that I just could never get into it. Also, who starts a thriller with that much backstory? So I approached Da Vinci Code with some trepidation, but also hope.

Of course, it hooked me instantly and before I knew it I was 100 pages in. This was much much better than Fortress or A&D. In addition to the great plot and characters, this book does an amazing job of obfuscating the line between reality and fiction. While I don't believe the events actually occurred or that Robert Langdon exists, the background history of Da Vinci, the Holy Grail, Christianity and the incorporation of pagan traditions was fascinating. Given the success of Passion of the Christ - by all accounts a hyper-literal interpretation of the Bible - I think it's interesting that the equally-successful Da Vinci Code essentially refutes that the Bible is THE word of God. Of course, the Da Vinci Code is a novel so I'm not really sure where the facts ends and the fiction begins. I haven't read a book that blurred that line so well since Jurassic Park.

Unfortunately, while Dan Brown may be a brilliant researcher and steadily improving as a writer, it all comes apart in the end. The true identity of the Da Vinci Code's primary nemesis left me (and subsequently my wife) very disappointed. I kept wondering how he was going to pull it all together in the end. For all the finely detailed logic and history of this story, it felt to me as if the author essentially picked the least likely character to be the bad guy for the sole purpose of minimizing the chances the reader would guess it. It's fine to be surprised at the end, but it's got to make some sense. What's the point of building to a climax only to pull it out of your ass when you get there?

It's all a Platform

I used to say that everything we build should be a platform except for games. What's interesting is that games are becoming platforms in their own right. Dungeon Siege has the freely downloadable Siege Editor which allows you to "rework nearly every aspect of the gaming world, making Dungeon Siege not only a game, but also a platform for those who wish to create their own spells, dungeons, and even entire worlds." There are several projects that do just that. And Dungeon Siege II is coming later this year, which looks amazing (all trailer graphics were rendered with the game engine). If RTS is more your speed, Relic - developers of Impossible Creatures - has their developer network which provides both a companion tool for enhancing Impossible Creatures as well as the Impossible Creatures SDK "which includes source code from the IC engine that can be used to create Total Conversion Mods for IC" (Relic Developer Network requires registration). Of course, there's also the Allegiance source code which was released a few months ago.

I guess the new viewpoint is that everything we build should be a platform, including games.

Off-the-Wall Movie Sites

Thanks to Werner for linking to the Flick Filosopher. I liked the analysis of The Passion of the Christ and the comparison Monty Python's Life of Brian. I especially liked her Best & Worst Of 2003 article as well. An you have got to respect anyone who has "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension" at the top of their list of 100 comfort movies. Only downer - no RSS feed. <sigh>

The other movie review site I read regularly is Mr. Cranky. I'm a big fan of his unique comments on bad movies such as " I have never come closer to tearing my own penis off and throwing it at the screen while watching a movie" (Laura Croft 2) "Chris Klein is like Keanu Reeves without any talent...Frankly, I have a hard time even comprehending that sentence and its terrible implications." (Rollerball) and "This film caused the kind of pain I'd normally associate with being shot through the thigh by a rusty nail from a high-powered nail gun" (Saving Silverman). Again, no RSS feed. <double sigh>

Bob is *now* available

I subscribed to the brand-new MSDN Subscriber Downloads RSS feed so I could stay up to date on the cutting edge technologies being shipped to the MSDN subscribers. So imagine my surprise when I see the following:

Microsoft Bob 1.0a was posted to MSDN Subscriber Downloads on March 31, 2004.

SHN2WMA

I rewrote the script that I blogged about over the weekend to convert shorten files to WMA 9 lossless format. You've got to have the shorten utility on the path and have Windows Media 9 Encoder installed.

Download the SHN2WMA script.

BTW, I claimed that the WMA lossless format was half the size of shorten's format. Turns out that the ratio varies widely. For the concerts I've converted, I've seen as reduction percentage between WMA and shorten be as high as 55% and as low as 12%.

Pat Mcgee Band and the Live Music Archive

My brother called earlier this week to let me know that the Pat McGee Band, a band he introduced me to, has a new album "Save Me" and a new EP "Drive By Romance" with four live tracks. I picked up both on Napster last week. Also, they will be in Seattle on May 4th. Most of the bands my brother introduces me too are local to the east coast, so I rarely get to see them.

If you want to know how good Pat McGee is live, you can head over to the Internet Archive where they have archived about 140 live shows of Pat with and without his band. Pat McGee is "trade friendly" which means he lets his fans tape and trade his live concerts. Other artists up on the Live Music Archive include the Grateful Dead (over 300 shows!), Little Feat and Toad the Wet Sprocket.

The only issue with the the Live Music Archive is that the songs are mostly in a lossless compression format called "shorten". Unfortunately, there's no way to play shorten files in Windows Media Player (as far as I know - there is a plugin for WinAmp). What I really want is to convert these files to Windows Media format using the Lossless codec. No such utility exists, though I did find a free command-line utility to convert shorten files to uncompressed wav files. So I hacked up a little batch program to convert each file from shorten to wav and then to WMA lossless. Turns out that the WMA lossless versions of the files are about half the size of the shorten versions, so I get both playback convenience as well as a non-trivial space savings. I'd post the batch file, except that when I said I hacked it up, I really mean it. Hard-coded paths, implicit assumptions, bad code, the works. I'm going to take another pass at it, then I'll post it.

Technology Issues Ruin Air America Launch

I was excited about Al Franken's new show - "The O'Franken Factor" - which launched Air America Radio today. I got to the office a bit early so I could listen online (they don't have a Seattle station yet). Apparently, even though Al was on the cover of the NYTimes magazine a few weeks ago, they were surprised by the volume of listeners and the experience has been pretty bad. I couldn't even connect for the first 45 minutes. Now, either they've added more servers or enought people have given up that I can at least listen. However, I can only listen for about a few minutes at a time before the connection drops and I have to manually press play to (hopefully) reconnect. I hope Air America Radio and their hosting partner get this fixed so I can enjoy the shows until it comes to Seattle.

Update: I was able to listen to most of the last hour without constant interuption, though I'm guessing that was primarily due to people dropping off more than anything Air America or their hosting partner did. Also, Franken's show replays from 8pm-11pm pacific time so I have it on as I type this and apparently they had a ton of technical issues to start the show - basically the first fifteen minutes has been background noise, concurrent playback of multiple audio streams and multiple news casts. I'm not even sure if what I'm listening to now is previously recorded or live - I just heard someone tell someone else to "have a good night". Hopefully, they'll get these issues worked out shortly.

Two Gaming Notes

I'm way behind on blog reading as well as writing, so maybe other have covered these, but I feel compelled to mention them anyway.

Microsoft XNA is an odd name (we sure have a fascination with the letter 'X') for a very interesting looking game development platform. You can check out the videos to see some idea of the capabilities, but trust me they're pretty impressive (of course, they are pre-rendered - I wanna see them render in real-time on my machine). In addition to the graphics capabilities, they're bringing Xbox Live to Windows. And the FAQ implies that the XNA will be part of the DirectX SDK & Xbox XDK, meaning that there won't be any additional cost for it. I wonder how this toolkit will impact the non-industry programmer. i.e. can I use it to make 3D games?

I've blogged before about my interest in machinima - which is frankly why I'm interested in XNA. Now, Lionhead studios and Activision is coming out with The Movies, a simulation game where you get to manage a movie studio. What's cool is that you can actually make little movies (according to the FAQ, average length is between 30 seconds and three minutes, but you can make full-length movies if you have the patience) Horror movies and westerns have screenshots, but you can make sci-fi, action, comedy, romance, thriller and romance movies as well. I don't get much game time these days (I've gone back to work my way thru the original Splinter Cell before buying Pandora Tomorrow) but I know this is one I'll get as soon as it comes out.

Spinning the Unthinkable

My parents (avid Caps fans and season ticket holders - at least for now) pointed me to the "Owner's Corner" on the official Washington Capitals homepage where the owner attempts to explain without "spin" the moves that he has taken over the past month. It may not be obvious from my original post on the subject, but I agree with most of his deals. Jagr wasn't worth the money, Lang and Nylander were recent free agents and I hear Gonchar wanted to leave. Most of all, they just weren't getting it done. I agree with Ted when he writes that he's "not committed to ... a $50-million payroll for a team that is last in its division." Especially when the division in question is the worst in the league. Tampa Bay might be good, but the reason are in the race for the President's Trophy is because they get to play the other four teams in this wretched division the most. (Of the six teams under .500 in the Eastern Conference, four are from the Southwest Conference. That's every team except Tampa Bay)

However, he glosses over so many ugly details but I can't help but see spin.

• He refers to Kolzig, Halpern, Witt and Zubrus as "a strong core of veteran leaders". However, Kolzig and Halpern sat out the last game before the trading deadline - a pretty sure sign they were being shopped around as trade bait. Zubrus has been injured off-and-on. So they are more like "a strong core of veteran players we couldn't trade".
• He explains that Konowalchuk was traded since he would have been an unrestricted free agent at the end of the year. That's a great reason to trade a player - even the captain. I can see trading the captain as part of a fire sale at the end of a losing season. However, that's not what happened to Kono - he was traded back in October when the season wasn't even a month old. He wasn't traded because he was going to be a free agent. I'm not sure why he was traded, but the rumor mill is that he and then-coach Cassidy didn't get along. Which brings me to...
• How come there's no mention of the utter failure the Bruce Cassidy head coaching experiment was? Cassidy lasted all of a year and a half - getting fired in December of this year. Word is the players didn't like him (see bullet above). Leonsis has thrown his support behind now-head-coach Hanlon, but he did that before firing Ron Wilson a few years ago (Ron's now leading the San Jose Sharks to the Pacific Division championship). In the end, all of this talent wasting comes down to be the coach's fault - and the hiring of that coach is the GM and owner's fault.
• Finally, he totally glosses over any explanation of the Bondra trade. For all the other traded players, he detailed the hot young prospects or high draft picks we got in return. For Bondra, he writes of "ensuring" Bondra was "comfortable" on a team with "a legitimate opportunity to win the Cup this year". The truth is that Bondra was "comfortable" where he was and had no interest in leaving, even for a "legitimate opportunity to win the Cup this year". Also, while Leonsis is technically correct when he writes that Bondra was in the last year of his contract, the fact is that Bondra's contract had a team option for another year. Given that his contract wasn't really ending and that Leonsis acknowledged that they didn't save a significant amount by trading him (the Caps had paid 70% of his salary already), why would you trade "Mr. Capital"?
• Even if he couldn't produce (which he could - he still leads the team in power play goals), Bondra was the perfect mentor for Alexander Semin. Semin is a gifted 19 year old Russian who the Caps picked up in last year's draft. He's a little undersized for the NHL at this point, but he sure can skate and shoot. He had a gorgeous rebound goal against Atlanta the other night. The announcer even said something to the effect of "I've called his name so much that I thought he'd had 10-15 minutes of ice time so far. Turns out he's only had seven". Semin's story is very similar to Bondra's, who came over from Slovakia as a 19 year old. Who better to learn about America and the NHL from than a five-time all-star who started out exactly like you did?

Sorry Ted, we can all see you spin. The most depressing part of the Owner's Corner for me is that you are still the owner and that doesn't look like it's changing anytime soon.

Misery Loves Company

Fellow 'softie and Washington Caps fan Dan Fernandez feels my pain. I called my father the other day and chirped: "Any new ex-Caps today?" and was very depressed to hear "Yeah, Gonchar's gone". I know I SAID my favorite Caps were on one way tickets out of town, but it's depressing to be right. Between the fire sale and the upcoming CBA quagmire, I wonder if the Caps will sell ANY season tickets for next year.

I have a coworker who used to work for AOL in general and Ted "Hockey Abomination" Leonsis in particular. He's watched a game from the owner box. I told him to give Ted a message for me : "Sell the Team". Of course, I'm guessing he's hearing that message on several fronts these days.

Update: Raymond Chen enjoyed a Seattle Thunderbirds game recently. Also, the annual Microsoft Hockey Challenge is next weekend. Traditionally, we played rival IT companies like Sun and AOL, thrashing them soundly on the ice (the one time I went, we been Sun 8-1). This year, there are a variety of intra-MSFT games and a series of MSFT vs. Customer games, but no industry rivalry games. Bummer!

Disk Defrag

My main machine was getting pretty fragmented, so I ran graphical disk defrag program provided with XP. After it ran, my disk still had 27% file fragmentation and it was recommending that I needed to defrag again. In my online search for a better defrag utility, I discovered that there's command line defrag utility. I tried it out, and now I'm at 0% fragmentation. I'm not sure why the command-line utility did so much better than the GUI version, but safe to say I'll be using the command line version from now on.

I was going to try out the SysInternals PageDefrag utility to defrag my system files, but they're already contiguous. Not sure if they were that way before or if the windows defrag tool took care of them too.

Finished KotOR

It took 30 hours of game play, spread out over a month and a half, but I finally finished Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It's easy to see why this game received so many Game of the Year honors, it's the best game I've ever played. And what's even cooler is that I want to play it again, this time as a bad guy. The whole light vs. dark side conflict works very well and I'm really curious to see how the game progresses when you're more Vader than Anakin.

I can't wait to see Bioware's next XBOX effort: Jade Empire. Between that and Fable, this should be a good year for RPGs on XBOX.

In Support of Gay Marriage

Scoble and Chris have blogged their support for homosexual marriage, so here's my +1. Unlike Chris, I've known quite a few homosexuals in my life. Several of my best friends (as in, would seriously consider donating a kidney to kind of friends) are gay. I grew up hanging around the theater world where homosexuality is much more pervasive (and accepted) than "mainstream" society. I used to have a bunch of friends on a gay hockey team (it sounds cliché, but they were called the Gay Blades). And this past summer, my wife, our then-six-month-old son and I went to Victoria, Canada to see my two uncles get married after a lifetime of commitment to each other.

As part of the ceremony, my uncle told me how much my involvement in his life has meant to him and husband. I wasn't told that he was gay until I was going to college at USC, which was about an hour drive from my uncle's home. For reasons they would have to explain, my parents didn't tell me until then. When my mother finally told me my uncle was gay, she was in tears, so I naturally assumed he had AIDS and was dying. I mean, why else would she be crying? He wasn't dying, she was just worried how I would react. As far as I was and still am concerned, being gay doesn't change anything. Since I couldn't fly back to the east coast for long weekends, I got to spend them with my uncles instead. I don't get to see them as often as I did back then, though they have come up to see us twice since my son was born. But they will always be a major part of my life and I will be forever honored that they asked me and my family to be a part of their wedding.

I'm a huge Bill Maher fan and I only just recently discovered Real Time. He talked about gay marriage in the Valentine's Day edition of his New Rules. As a Democrat, it really struck a cord with me.

Republicans used to be the party that opposed social engineering. But now they push programs to outlaw marriage for some people and encourage it for others. If you're straight, there's a billion-five in the budget to promote marriage, but gay marriage is opposed because it threatens or mocks or does something to the "sanctity" of marriage, as if anything you can do in Vegas, drunk off your ass in front of an Elvis impersonator, could be considered sacred.

But at least the right wing aren't hypocrites on this issue. They really believe that homosexuality is an abomination and a dysfunction that's curable...But I have to tell you, the greater shame in this story goes to the Democrats, because they don't believe homosexuality is an abomination. And therefore, their refusal to endorse gay marriage is hypocrisy. Their position doesn't come from the Bible. It's ripped right from the latest poll, which says most Americans are against gay marriage.

Well, you know what? Sometimes most Americans are just wrong. And where is the Democrat who will stand up and go beyond the half measures of "civil union" and "hate the sin, love the sinner" and say loud and clear, "There is no sin; it's not an abomination and no one can control how cupid aims his arrows."

I'm not running for office, but I'll say it: Homosexuality isn't a sin, an abomination or wrong. Letting homosexuals get married isn't going to weaken society, change the most fundamental institution of civilization, cause the sky to fall or any of the other things that Bush claims it will cause. Legislating discrimination however, which is what Bush's proposed amendment to the Constitution amounts to, actually will weaken society and change what is really the most fundamental institution of civilization: freedom.

Bush certainly talks a lot about freedom when he's trying to justify the invasion liberation of Iraq. However, in calling for a amendment to outlaw gay marriage, the only reference to freedom was when he said that "commitment of freedom...does not require the redefinition of one of our most basic social institutions." Actually, when these "basic social institutions" are inherently discriminatory - take slavery and women's lack of right to vote as examples - it is absolutely required that we redefine them to eliminate the discrimination. Otherwise, we become the kind of a fascist society that our founding fathers were trying to avoid when they wrote the Constitution in the first place. That's what establishing Justice, insuring domestic Tranquility and securing the Blessings of Liberty is all about.

Don't Read Sldies. In Fact, Try Not To Use Slides.

I'm behind on my blog reading (it's been one of those weeks) but I just found Scott's post of PowerPoint Advice. He couldn't be more right about not reading slides (and not just because he linked to me). This is a sure sign of a presenter who doesn't know the material. Back when I was explaining .NET to customers 3-5 times a week, I could do the presentation on a whiteboard while hanging upside down blindfolded

I actually try to avoid slides when possible and just explain everything with words and a whiteboard. The nice thing about this approach is that I can be flexible when the audience needs me to be. Today, I presented to a group of architects from an ISV on Metropolis and SOA. I had slides at the ready, but I spent most of the time just talking with the audience, not to them. When I finally did go to the slides, I found I had covered the vast majority of the information I wanted to explain and the slides were more of a hiderance than a help. I shut down the projector a few minutes later and went back to just talking.

Granted, for larger audiences (like TechEd), you need to use slides, but they should be a fall-back position when needed, not the first tool out of the toolbox. If you have to do slides, please follow Scott's advice.

Happy Birthday Patrick

Almost exactly year ago, my life was changed forever by the arrival of my son Patrick. I tried to approach my imending fatherhood with an open mind, realizing that my life was going to change but not really sure exactly how. So far, I think I'm doing pretty well. Today, Patrick is walking (in spurts), talking (in gibberish mostly), eating solid foods and otherwise making everyone around him smile. I don't write as much code, play as much XBOX or read for fun as much as I used to, but I do seem to smile a lot more.

I am truly blessed to have such an amazing wife, son and job.

Eureka

I had a great idea while I was in the shower this morning (all great ideas come while bathing, at least in my experience), and it proved to work famously. [Robert McLaws]

I've joked in the past that if I took more showers I'd be filthy rich. Apparently, I'm not the only one who does their best thinking while bathing. It's a rich tradition, dating back to Archimedes who figured out in the bath that you can measure the volume of an irregular object (in his case, a crown) by measuring the volume of the water it displaced.

Actually, I don't think it's the bathing - it's the disconnection. In my office I have a phone, two laptops connected to the Internet, four virtual PCs, twelve books, about a ream of various papers plus a pretty nice view of outside. In the shower, I have nothing but soap (not SOAP) and my thoughts.

My Work Bookshelf

When I first started my new job, I decided to blog the books I brought in from home to populate my new office bookshelf. Well, 4 months in and I've only just brought in my second batch. Here's what's up there so far.

• The Emergence of Sociological Theory 3rd Edition by Jonathan Turner et al (an old textbook of my wife's)
• Design for Community by Derek Powazek
• Writing Secure Code 2nd Edition by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc
• .NET & J2EE Interop Toolkit by Simon Guest (a gift from the author)
• The Art of Computer Programming (Vol 1-3) by Donald Knuth (a xmas gift from my dad)
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al (recommended to me by Greg Stone)
• Analysis Patterns by Martin Fowler (signed by the author)
• Design Patterns by the GoF
• Object Oriented Software Engineering by Ivar Jacobson et al
• Software Reuse by Ivar Jacobson et al

Education and Entitlement

I sent my wife a link to Joshua's entry on offshoring. Julie's a teacher so I thought she'd find the following interesting:

For the past twenty years, while a changing economy and technology have dictated that we should increase the level of education of the workforce, we have seen the educational achievement of working-age citizens decline.  We do have the world's best advanced educational institutions, but the majority of advanced science and math degrees are awarded to foreign nationals.  Obviously, not everyone needs to be a science or math genius, but this is a competetive world economy and people who don't have these skills are certainly not going to be in any position to push the frontiers and create the next industry segments as old ones mature and are taken over by low-cost providers.  One would think that a responsible government would be doing everything possible to increase the density of skilled people (including more competitive education, fast-track citizenship for skilled and highly-educated foreign workers) and stack the odds in our favor.  Instead, I get the impression that it's easier for politicians to get votes by telling students "it's not your fault that you are being out-competed, it's really the fault of the corporations and the incumbents".  Education is not a passive thing that happens to a student, and the more that students realize that their ultimate competitiveness lies within themselves, the more they will be prepared to push the value curve instead of falling for scarcity thinking -- and ultimately that benefits everyone.

She did find it intersting, so she posted of her on experience of earning success vs. entitlement.

There seems to be a trend in allowing people to point fingers wherever they can but at themselves when it comes time to recon with the fact that we are the masters of our own destiny and education and successes. The deal is that many people believe in the “equality” phase our culture has cultivated. What I mean is, treating people in the most PC or Fair way has led many children to feel that they are owed something in their future. No one is owed a thing. We are lucky to live in a country where our rights are honored, to be sure, but believe me; we are not striving very hard as a culture to maintain our supremacy of success.

We are slowly becoming a nation of people who wield our sense of entitlement recklessly and at the cost of our own opportunity

 I wish she'd come work for Microsoft's learning business unit.

National Champions

I'm not sure which of the post-game analysts said it, but the 2003 college football season is summed up with these words: "Any coach who doesn't vote USC #1 is crazy". Congrats to SC for their 28-14 victory over Michigan @ the Rose Bowl and for winning at least a share of the national championship. Now, my Sunday night is clear since I don't need to watch the Nokia "Battle for Second Place" bowl (which I blogged a month ago). 

UPDATE: I added a link to a picture my son all decked out in his Trojan gear and smiling wide after winning the national championship (actually, his mother is making faces off camera).

Another UPDATE: I found a great post on the subject of the BCS by Jason Salas via Bryan's Weblog of Stuff. Jason is a .NET developer and a sportscaster, so his views on the BCS from both sides are facinating (though he did mix up the AP and the Coaches poll).

Twas the Night Before Christmas

My son (pictured with Santa) finally fell asleep for his first Christmas Eve. Of course, I read him 'Twas the Night Before Christmas before bedtime. He was pretty worked up because we have quite a crowd in town. My parents, brother and great aunt all arrived today. That makes eight with my wife, my son, my mother-in-law (who just moved up a few months ago) and me. Add the tree and all the presents and you get a very excited little boy. Plus we're going to Victoria to see my uncles the day after Christmas.

With so many people in town plus it being my son's first Christmas, we have a ton of presents under the tree. My wife's immediate thought was of the kids all over the world who don't get the presents (or the opportunities) that we do. It's been an amazing year for me, from the birth of my son to my new job and getting published.  I can only hope I am lucky enough to have as good year next year as I had this past year. In addition to the usual resolutions to clean out the garage and lose weight (though I have a role model on that one), I want to do more in 2004 to share this happiness and prosperity with those less fortunate.

Have a happy holiday season and good luck to you, dear reader, for the year ahead.

Live on XBOX

After months of having my XBOX hooked up on my big screen TV but far away from my cable modem, I finally broke down and bought a wireless adapter for it. I had been thinking about wiring the house and/or buying a Media Center PC. However, Media Center doesn't support HD inputs (AFAIK) and HD PVR via cable or satellite should be here shortly. So I decided to skip the wiring job and go straight to playtime.

My gamertag is "RayTracer". (Buy me a beer at the next MSFT conference and I'll tell you why.) Many thanks to Cory for hooking me up with a gamertag graphic to live on my home page.

Let me know if you want to hit the ice, the mountain, the streets or the sky.

When you're REALLY into Cheese

And I mean you love cheese. As in you rate cheese and say things to co-workers like "this is one of my top 15 cheeses in the world". You've got to check out The American Cheese Society and their annual conference and award winners. They judged over 600 cheeses in 70 categories such as "Fresh Unripened Hispanic and Portuguese Style" and "Sheep's Milk Washed Rind".

Too bad they didn't judge any Venezuelan Beaver Cheese.

True Fresco

For vacation this past week, my family went to Los Angeles to visit friends and family. We got to see some of my old college friends as well as Julie's brother, dad and best friend. We also went by our old apartment building to see iLia and Elena Anossov, the apartment managers, as well as their son Phillip. In addition to managing our old apartment building, they are both artists. Ilia is one of the few fresco masters living in the US. In addition to his art, he also runs a variety of online properties dedicated to fresco painting. You can check out his portfolio, read his bio, learn about fresco painting, take a fresco painting class, view the fresco image database or read the Fresco Painting Society Weblog (RSS subscribed).

I'm reading Jeff's account of the mural for his wife with great interest. I don't think I want to invest in such a project in my current house, but in a few years when we move on to something bigger (hopefully) then I hope I can bring Ilia (and family) up to paint a fresco mural for my house.

PVR HDTV?

From Sean Alexander's Addicted to Digital Media blog, I learned that the Dish Network is planning on bringing a HDTV-PVR system to market in a few weeks. I was just begining to wonder about HDTV + PVR functionallity. I'm really interested in how Media Center systems will incorporate this functionallity. I really dig the new Gateway Media Center with it's stereo-component form factor. According to the specs, it has Composite A/V inputs to the TV Tuner card. Does that mean it can PVR HDTV too?

To Err Is Human

...but to really screw up, you need a computer. Or in the case of the BCS, you need seven of them.

I'm sure the Nokia Sugar Bowl officials are really excited about hosting "The Battle for Second Place"

The Matrix Rethought

I took my wife to see Matrix Revolutions, even though I saw it Monday. Still liked it, though the second viewing really helped me figure out what I didn't like about Reloaded and Revolutions. I can sum it up in two words: The Merovingian. He represents everything thematically that was added in the second two movies that both didn't work and wasn't there in the original Matrix.

Note: I'm guessing everyone who's going to see Revolutions has seen it by now. So there are some spoilers below. If you haven't seen it and want to remain blissfully unaware, stop reading now.

The themes of Control and Choice were very strongly represented in the original Matrix. Choice was directly represented (red pill vs. blue pill), control somewhat less so, but still there. Certainly, there was enough material in those themes for two more movies. Choice is stated bluntly in the climatic battle between Neo and Smith when Smith asks Neo why he continues to fight and Neo replies "Because I choose to". A little corny and heavy handed to be sure, but still consistent with the original theme. Smith's relation to the theme of control (or lack thereof) is also stated bluntly by Neo: "The program Smith has grown beyond your control". Choice and Control come up over and over again: The Architect's unbalanced equations, Commander Lock's defenses, Neo returning to the Matrix rather than Source, Niobe going after the Nebuchanezar, etc. Pretty much every character has to deal with Choice and Control to some degree.

However, the Brothers Wachowski apparently decided that wasn't enough, so they added all the stuff about "exiled" programs. Programs hacking programs, choosing exile over deletion, falling in love and having daughter programs, etc. Thematically, I don't see the connection to the Choice and Control elements introduced in the first movie. There were only a few machine characters in the original movie: the Agents and the Oracle - and we didn't know for sure that the Oracle was a program at the time. So when we meet Merovingian, Persephone, the Twins, the Train Man, etc. in the second and third movies, they are a major departure from the way programs in the first movie act. They act like they have free will. I can accept that the Oracle - a program "initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche" - would exhibit some aspects of free will. But all programs? Come on. Free will could have been the thing that differentiated Smith from the other Agents. Instead, all of the programs basically act human. And their motivation makes no sense. The Architect claimed the entire Matrix would suffer a "cataclysmic system crash" unless the One returned to the Source. Why would the Merovingian, who lives in the Matrix, try and stop Neo by keeping the Keymaker prisoner? Since Merovingian has survived Neo's predecessors, he must have some idea what's at stake. Of course, the Neo the Matrix doesn't crash when he doesn't comply, but how would the Merovingian know that would happen?

The really sad part is that it wouldn't have taken much to rework the stories without the human-acting programs. The second half of Reloaded would have been tough. Maybe Agents would have had the Keymaker instead of the Merovingian. Or the Twins, working for the Architect, could have him. Revolutions would have been much easier: Merovingian et. al. are in Revolutions for just a couple of minutes. Neo could have figured a way back to the Matrix on his own - it's sorta crappy when your main character has to be rescued. After that, it's back to just Smith and the Oracle. Seraph can stay since he's just a bodyguard program but Sati would have to go. With the extra screen time, I think I would have concentrated on the Neo / Smith relationship more. Since Smith is "the result of the equation trying to balance itself out" then his power should equal Neo's. When Neo gains the power of the Source, Smith should have had some similar improvement. But Smith's already has the ability to replicate as well as "reach" the real world by the time Neo meets the Architect.

One thing I liked is that they killed off this story line, literally, while keeping the world open for more. There's a Matrix comic now and a MMORPG coming next year. I've seen several short fan films done with Machinima plus a hilarious parody. I'm sure there are more out there. I'm looking forward to more stories from the Matrix world.

Entertain Me the Way I Want To Be Entertained

Talking about the Matrix movies and game got me thinking about the way I am entertained. I'm used to being entertained on opposite ends of the interactivity spectrum: passive movie watching and active game playing. I think you could generate more interesting experiences by intermixing those two extremes. For example, my favorite games are ones with a great story. You could watch someone else play Halo and still enjoy the experience. I hear Crimson Skies is the same way. So why can't you choose to passively experience the story without getting involved in the game play, if I only care about the story? My wife has no interest in playing Enter the Matrix, but she'd like to see the story.

I also really like sports games (esp. hockey). Many sports games are adding "owner" modes where hire staff and sign players but don't control the game play on the field. That's pretty cool. Microsoft's XSN Sports lineup doesn't have those modes, instead the focus on online leagues and tournaments. While most of that experience is very interactive, how about having a XSN "SportsCenter" where you can see highlights from other games in your league? Maybe even cut away during breaks in the action to show highlights from other games in your league that may be going on at the same time. Those features are passive, but they would add immensely to the game experience.

Some of these techniques start to get into the realm of Machinima - making movies using gaming engines.

Anyone else interested in this? What are the good tools and engines that work with Managed DirectX?

Matrix Revolutions

I finally got to see The Matrix Revolutions. My whole division saw it on opening day, but since that was during SAF, our team couldn't go. So we went en masse on Monday. I guess I'm in the minority, both in blogsphere and on the team, but I really enjoyed it. I also just finished playing Enter The Matrix. Funny coincidence, I reached the point of the game that corresponds to the end of The Matrix Reloaded on Sunday, saw Revolutions Monday, finished the game Tuesday. The game got somewhat decent ratings, but again I liked it. Probably because I was more interested in it as an adjunct to the movies than as a game. One review I read complained about the amount of action that took place during cinematic cut-scenes rather than in the game itself. But since I played the game primarily for the story, I didn't mind.