stargeek
My eyes... the burning...My eyes... the burning...My eyes... the burning... 08/27/2004 01:51 PM Pour Some Sugar On Me, as reinvisioned by Townsend, a boy band. Some would say it's the worst thing they'd ever seen, but I'd hazard a guess that it may actually be the worst thing ever filmed. The song is enhanced with a rap section, and the video is enhanced with the addition of the jackass from Smashmouth, for some bizarre reason. NSFNSAVI (not safe for the non sight & vision impaired) This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)My eyes... the burning...Grok Headline matches for My eyes... the burning...Not so obvious: 12x Plextor burning
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Costikyan: How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are FUCKED [laughter]. We are well and truly fucked. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can't afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it's ok because the HD era is here, right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of Redwood City! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation's time there are still games to love. Laurel: GTA [Grand Theft Auto] I talked to 22 little boys in LA, all of them wanted to see that game. With only one exception, the thing that they wanted to see was to be able to drive by their house. They weren't interested in stealing cars. Or the criminals. Or the back-story. They weren't interested in that, they wanted the simulation of driving by the house. |
UPDATE: Greg has now posted the text of his talk. And it seems that at least some
of Brenda Laurel's talk drew from material in her
essay here on "New Boys."
« The smell of burning rubber. »
Cruising Night was last Friday but it seems I didn't get the memo about them first collecting in the harbour area before meeting in the icehall parking lot soo...it was too dark to really take any photos after 10p when the cars finally started arriving there. I only bothered with a few shots of the cars burning rubber on the lot for spectators and those who love the smell of burning rubber. I was disappointed since I do love classic cars.
And, barring any loss of motivation, the Prague photos will be available by sometime tomorrow.
weblog.burningbird.net/fires/life/burning_bright.htm#comment8521
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Five things I'll be doing while you're at Burning ManLink (Thanks, Jason Schultz!)
1.carefully stewarding my pallor
2. repeatedly watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on the TiVo
3. defecating indoors -- copiously, often, and without queueing
4. not tongue-kissing a sweaty Java programmer in clown makeup named "Shanti"
5. wearing clothes--lots and lots of square, capitalist, heinous-body-covering clothes
riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_riverbendblog_archiv
e.html#107206317511082928
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Copyfight has an interesting post on the discrepancy in congress over ClearPlay DVD players. The players automatically remove scenes that would be offensive to sensitive viewers, but do so in the comfort of one's own home while playing standard movies on DVD. Some politicians oppose it because individuals are creating derivative works and they also see it as opening the door to "recipe hacking", which would be like producing the Grey Album by purchasing two legal records (the original Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album) and combining them at home to produce a derivative work (if DJ Dangermouse produced software that could create his mixes).
On top of all that, since the motivation behind ClearPlay technology is largely religious, it turns the argument on its ear to many participants and observers. It's not hard to find folks that loved the Grey Album but see ClearPlay technology as something to be frowned upon, but the underlying technology and law is largely the same. It's an interesting case and hopefully does open the doors to all sorts of creative uses of derivative works.
Apparently after I last posted, the fan on the web server that hosts this site shuffled off its mortal coil, and headed for a higher fanly plane. And because of the timing of things, it took a long time for the replacement to settle into its new home. But now it's here, and I've certainly forgotten everything I intended to write. The more I think, "I need to write more posts!" the less I ever write. Perhaps now with the new humming fan, things will get back on track. Oh yeah, and A-Rod to the Yankees?! Argh!
For the past week or so, I've been furiously working on my MacWorld presentation, trying to find exactly what I want to say, and just the right way to say it. It's been a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. This is going to be a very different type of experience than what people are used to at keynotes. I'm not going to talk about the future of anything, or pontificate about how Apple is doing this or not doing that . . . I'm strictly there to entertain the audience. I'm a little nervous about how they'll respond, so I've thrown out everything and started over too many times to count. The entire time, I've watched the clock get closer and closer to 9:30 Thursday morning.
When I least expected it (around seven this morning as I packed lunches for Ryan and Nolan), the whole thing sprung into my head fully formed. What a relief! This is my favorite way to write: I can see the entire thing in my mind, like I'm looking down on a huge map. Because I know how the general landscape looks, I can zoom in on some areas and discover really interesting and unexpected details, then pull back to see the whole thing. The entire time, I know where I'm headed, so I'm not afraid to take some side trips as I transcribe what my brain's come up with when I wasn't paying attention.
I'm not going to publish all my remarks ahead of time like I usually do, because I think there will be a webcast, and I don't want to give it all away . . . but it's been so much fun to develop, I don't want to wait two whole days to share it with an audience, so I'm going to preview a little bit of it right now:
I was twelve going on thirteen the first time I saw a Macintosh computer. It happened in the summer of 1984 -- a long time ago; even longer if you measure according to Moore's Law.I was in a bookstore in the San Fernando Valley, looking for a magazine (I think it was called "Byte.") My friend Brian told me that this magazine was filled with playable arcade games — all I had to do was copy the programs, written in BASIC, to my TI 99/4a.
"Wil, we're late for dinner. We have to leave now." It was my father. He held my brother's hand, and my six year-old sister sat atop his shoulders.
I looked at the rack in front of me: the magazine I had hoped to find wasn't there, and now I would have to leave empty-handed. I tried to stall him.
"Hey, did you see this, dad?" I took a book off the shelf. The picture on the cover showed that someone had written "hello" in cursive on a computer's built-in monitor.
He took it from me and looked at it.
"That should keep him occupied for a minute, and I can find this maga—"
"Jeremy," he said to my kid brother, "take this to mommy and tell her we're ready to leave."
Before I could protest, my brother ran the book across the store, my mother paid for it, and we were on our way to The Jolly Roger restaurant to celebrate my being cast in a movie called "The Body."
In 1984, my family had almost achieved escape velocity from our white trash roots, but we were still poor. It was a big deal to go out to dinner, it was a big deal to buy a book, and I didn't want to tell my dad that he'd paid for something I didn't want. So I masked my disappointment and began to read.
"This is made by Apple? Oh, man! Kevin has that Apple ][, and it's totally lame! It doesn't play Pac Man like the arcade, and you can't even hook it up to the television!"
To give this thought some context: in 1984 I thought that Thriller was "awesome" and letting my boxers hang out the bottom of my corduroy OP shorts was "rad," so perhaps I wasn't the best judge of what was and wasn't lame.
It took less than fifteen minutes to drive from the bookstore to the restaurant, and I read that book the entire way. By the time we got out of the car, I had completely forgotten about my silly TI 99/4a. This "Macintosh" computer, I had decided, was the future.
"Dad! This is so cool!" I said as we got out of the car. "You use this thing called a 'mouse' to tell the computer what to do!"
My dad nodded politely while he helped my mom get my sister out of her car seat.
"Oh really?"
"Yeah! And it's got this puzzle game built right into it, and you can use this mouse thing to draw pictures, and it's got something called 'MacWrite' that I could use to write stories, and there's a clock, and it makes a happy face when you turn it on, and . . ."
I took the book with me into the restaurant, and by the end of the meal I had convinced myself that I had to own one of these machines.
"Mom," I said, in my most grown-up voice, as we finished dinner, "a lot of other kids at school have computers, and they use them for homework, and to learn math and stuff."
"What about your Texas Instruments thing?" She said.
"Pish!" I said, "That thing? All that can do is play games! And it doesn't have a mouse. I hear that all the new computers will have mouses. They're very important."
My parents looked at each other.
"We'll think about it," they said, in unison.
"Oh? Good. Because, you know, it has a built-in monitor, so I wouldn't have to hook it up to the television when you guys want to watch TV."
"Thank you for thinking of us," my father said, dryly.
I beamed. This was going very well.
"And it's portable, too! See?" I opened the book, and showed them a picture of the handle that was built into the top. "I could get a carrying case, and take it with me to Aunt Val's when we go to visit. I could totally entertain myself, and I wouldn't bother you guys at all."
"That's very thoughtful," my mother said.
"Have you thought about selling cars?" my father asked.
"No. Why?"
After I tell the story of how I got my first Mac, and give a quick
synopsis of my history from then until now:
"In 1988, I attended my first MacWorld, and after about an hour here, I realized that, even though I'd upgraded it to four megabytes of RAM, my MacPlus was woefully out of date. I was flush with cash from my weekly gig on Star Trek, so I went nuts: I bought a Macintosh IIx, a 30MB SCSI hard drive, a 2400 baud modem, and eight 1MB SIMMS. When I booted it the first time, I experienced a rush of excitement that I hadn't felt since I first completed that cool built-in puzzle back in 1984: two hundred and fifty-six fabulous, vibrant, living colors splashed across my screen."
Then, I plan to segue into Just A Geek. I'll talk a bit about how I wrote my entire final draft on my iBook, and then I have this thing that I hope Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak will maybe hear someday: "Steve and Woz? Thank you for being such a big part of my life. Thank you for showing people like me that if you dream it, you can do it, even — especially — when nobody else believes in you."
I'll read two stories that I hope have a little bit of a universal appeal: The Trade, and Fireworks. If everything goes well, I'll come in at just under an hour, and everyone will enjoy themselves.
And remember, if you're in the area and are not coming to MacWorld, you can still come out to Borders in Union Square on Friday night, where I'll be reading from and signing Just A Geek. I start at 7pm.
Today was my first day flying "Sky 12", Richmond, Virginia's only traffic helicopter. Sky 12 is a Bell 206 Jet Ranger that has been fitted with a Wescam gyro-stabilized camera mount and a microwave link back to the TV station. Normally the helicopter is operated by a single pilot who simultaneously talks to the TV news producer, aims the camera, and positions the aircraft. However, for $125 per hour the contractor, HeloAir, sells the right seat to rated helicopter pilots who want to build 206 time or, like me, just have some fun. The left seat is occupied by an expert with thousands of flying hours, a flight instructor's rating, and years of experience doing TV work. This morning it was Alisa, one of only a few hundred female commercial helicopter pilots in the U.S. [Young female readers: this is a great career for a woman because there is a certain amount of preferential hiring on the basis of sex and employers want pilots who are as light as possible so that they can fill the rest of the ship with equipment or passengers (just don't expect to earn more than $60,000/year and much much less for the first five years)].
Starting a turbine engine is more complex and fraught with potential for expensive damage than starting a piston engine. You begin by holding down the starter button and holding it until the turbine has been spun up to about 15%. Then you roll the throttle to flight idle, which introduces fuel into the turbine. You continue holding the starter button down until the turbine has reached 60%, at which point turning, burning and cooling become self-sustaining. If at any time the turbine outlet temperature goes into the red, indicating a "hot start", you must roll the throttle back to "off" to take the fuel out of the system while again keeping the turbine rotating with the starter so that it gets cooling air.
Once started we lifted off from the ramp and climbed to 1200' to circle downtown Richmond and await instructions from the station. Upon being told to film a particular bridge we would try to approach it so that we were heading into the wind. Then we brought the helicopter to an "out of ground effect" (mid-air) hover, with the airspeed coming down below 30 knots. Remember that we were into the wind so even if we weren't moving over the ground we were still flying forward through the air to some extent. This maneuver violates every principle that I had been taught in the light piston Robinson R22 during training. The R22 has almost no inertia in the rotor system. If the engine quits the blades will spin down dangerously slow within about 1 second. You must immediately lower the collective to begin gliding but also usually pull back on the cyclic to transfer some of the forward speed energy into higher blade RPM. If you didn't have any forward airspeed to perform that flare the blades potentially could spin down below about 83% in which case you fall like a rock and can't recover without restarting the engine. The Bell 206, by contrast, has a lot more inertia in the engine, spinning at 30,000 RPM, and the heavy rotor blades. In the unlikely event that the engine were to quit there would be plenty of time to notice, react, lower the collective, and push the cyclic forward to regain airspeed to be used at the end of an autorotation the ground.
The Jet Ranger is mostly easier to fly than the R22 because it is so much heavier and therefore more stable. Transitioning pilots will need to get used to a bit of lag after power adjustments are requested, watching the ball instead of yaw strings and using more anti-torque pedal in general, and the lack of feedback from the cyclic due to the hydraulic boosting.
One thing that I loved about the Jet Ranger was the lack of vibration in the ship overall and in the cyclic. Some R22s feel like they are about to come apart and, even if you aren't worried, the vibration is fatiguing. Whether that smoothness is worth an extra $500 per hour is another question...
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