video card fan update

It turns out you can replace your video card fan. The downside is that it's fiddly, nervous-making work. I saved about a hundred dollars over replacing it. Not sure what it would have cost to get it repaired at Fry's or Best Buy, but I'm glad I didn't find out.

And what's up with RAM heat sinks on video cards? Do they actually do something, or is it just feature-itis? Well I installed them anyway, sigh.

The silence that came out of my PC case last night was music to my ears. I feel better already.

a couple of cheap single player pc games maybe

I haven't played either of these but that might change.

Time Gentlemen, Please! is apparently a time travelling adventure game. Maybe in the vein of Maniac Mansion Day of the Tentacle? Idunno.
http://www.zombie-cow.com/?page_id=559
$5

Torchlight is a single player low profile streamlined Diablo clone.
http://www.torchlightgame.com/
$20

more pc blues - graphics card fan

I've never had a graphics card fan break on me before, but I'm finding it really distressing. The fan makes this horrible clicking, buzzing sound that's impossible to ignore, especially when gaming. Apparently you can replace the entire cooling unit on video cards? That sounds better than replacing the video card, since it's not more than a few months old.

...Stepping back, for me it's another reminder that our sense of self extends well beyond our physical bodies. My mood and sense of well-being can be heavily influenced by the status of my car, my computer, and my bank account. I suspect that the house will join that list in short order.

I heard that cats get more attached to places than they do to people. It makes you wonder if a cat's territory is an extension of itself in the same way.

audio research

I'm trying to put together another media temple in the living room, for consoles and movie watching and whatnot. Eventually we'll have to buy a TV I think, but until then my widescreen monitor will serve. But the audio solution really had me stumped. I have a pretty great setup for my PC, a pair of klipsch bookshelf speakers that I got from Ralph seven years ago, and they've spoiled me for PC speakers. (Basically, every PC speaker I've ever heard sucks in comparison to even a modest home theater setup.)

So, I'm unwilling to permanently downgrade my PC, and I'm going to have similar standards for the eventual setup in the living room. Long story short I need another set of speakers, either temporarily or permanently. I don't really want to go with a temporary solution (cheap PC speakers,) because I already have enough junk around the house. But I also don't want to break the bank. But I ALSO don't want to chase down a good home theater system on craigslist--my time is more valuable than it used to be, especially this month.

Anyway, after some research rejected logitech and I ended up ordering these M-Audio Studiophile AV 40 Powered Speakers speakers from amazon. I have high hopes that they will be a solid addition to my noisemaking capacity for years to come. Even if they don't have a place in whatever system I eventually set up in the living room, they should make great auxiliary speakers for either the garage or the bedroom.

the internet is a public good

Internet access will be regulated the same way that gas, electric, water, and phone service are regulated: as a public good. Next up: cell phones, and the wireless carriers.

The FCC approved new openness rules for the broadband and mobile wireless connections to the internet, gratifying President Obama;s grassroots supporters and internet services like Google, while drawing the wrath of large telecoms such as AT&T and the wireless industry.

Back in the 1990s, I was afraid that government regulation of the internet would squash innovation and end the "wild west" era. But the down side of frontier life is that because it's lawless, you're prone to exploitation by bandits and robber barons and such. So then you have to choose whether to put up with it, petition the governor to send the sheriff around, move back east, or move even further west.

(In this extended metatphor bloggers are farmers, ecommerce merchants are general store owners, web programmers are cowboys, prospectors are .com startups. The bandits are spammers, the Indians are the old media companies (music, journalism, print)*, and the oil and railroad barons are the tech companies that move in, take over, and sell access.)

The fat cats won, the infrastructure has been build and it's very profitable. The Indians have been marginalized and their attacks have subsided, they're heading for the reservations. A flood of homesteaders and regular folk is on its way. Now, for the sake of all the families that are trying to settle in, it's time for the fed to move in and civilize the place. That means busting the trusts and taking down the big monopolies.

Civilization means equality of opportunity. That's what these rules are about. The frontiersmen are just going to have to find a new frontier.

*So yeah I feel guilty about what the US did to the Native Americans and I apologize if the metaphor is offensive, but I don't think it's inaccurate. In the story of the wild west this is how it went. The natives were outcompeted, fairly and unfairly. I think it's tragic when progress steamrolls human beings.

the kitchen is packed

Last night we put all (most) of the kitchen stuff in boxes. I think most of the rest of the stuff that has to get packed is going in bags. (Also we're almost out of the 25 boxes we bought.)

But I think there's something about the kitchen gear in particular that gets you excited... This is the practical stuff, the stuff you use every day, and the next time you use it will be in your own kitchen, on your own stove.

I guess we'll be eating out until then ;-)

I keep compulsively opening up a new tab and then closing it

while ( !fired )

{

//see: http://www.facultyguide.caltech.edu/acronyms.htm#Flick

flick();

}

is not a career-enhancing procedure.

;-)

tired is relative, also unemployment economics

It's a funny feeling, this feeling I have now. When I'm at my desk, or at home at my computer, I'm utterly exhausted. When I'm at the new house working on stuff, I can stay on my feet for hours at a time. Well also there aren't many chairs over there right now so it's hard to sit down. But really I do feel very energized about it all.

I think the word 'tired' is a lot less informative than it should be... It doesn't communicate the subtleties of emotion that govern how we manage our time, or how we would prefer to manage it. Maybe it's an artifact of the English language. Or perhaps what I'm getting at is the same thing I've been chasing mentally for a long time, which is simply that I want to own my time, myself.

On the subject of time management. The idea of unemployment checks is interesting. What would look like if instead of paying people a percentage of their former income for a fixed amount of time, you just put them to work on some public good. Probably it would look like a human resources debacle of epic proportions, trying to find useful public sector work for a shifting population of millions... People who now complain about welfare would instead complain about the centrally planned economy taking over the private sector.

But on the other hand I always loved the idea of the CCC, the civilian conservation corps... The idea is you take a bunch of unemployed dudes and you give them something useful to do. Most of their pay is in free food, housing, and medical care, and they get a small stipend on top. It helps the unemployment problem, stimulates the economy, provides job training, and keeps said dudes off the street, all while providing some public good (infrastructure, conservation) on top.

Maybe as network technologies improve, the thousands and millions of local projects that need doing can be hooked up more efficiently to the people who are suddenly out of work but who have the skills to complete those projects. If the HR problem could be eased, then this sort of work might be a good replacement for unemployment for a lot of people. It might be especially good for young folk right out of college or whatnot. A good way to build connections in a community, to learn practical skills, all that good stuff.

oh yeah also we bought a house

So we got the keys on Monday. We'll be painting this weekend and moving next weekend (If you want to help out with either let me know.)

And I started a new blog just for house stuff, where Annie and I will (maybe) be recording our adventures in experimental homeownership.

That will be the spot to watch for house pictures too.

another busted water main

Our showers have been weak (too cold) for a few days now. (still at the old place, 11th St.) It's been getting so bad that I've been dreading every shower, because I have to get in and out in 5 minutes or it'll lose all warmth. This morning Annie found a new naturally occurring* hot spring in our backyard, near one of our garden planters.

WHAT.

*Warm water just coming right up out of the ground in Manhattan Beach! I didn't know we were a geothermal hot spot! I should probably call the USGS or something.**

**Or you know, a plumber.

the future soon

I heard a story on NPR a few days ago (it turns out I actually read it on boing boing but for some reason I remember it as NPR audio...weird) about a boy from Malawi who read in a book about using windmills to provide energy, and who set out to build one for his family/village farm.

So, awesome, great job*. And it makes you wonder what might be in a book from the future, if you could find one, that would represent a similarly daunting, yet achievable leap. Imagine finding instructions for making petroleum out of algae, or for spinning carbon nanotubes. Or imagine reading about the network protocols and wireless power strategies that will be the foundation of the pervasive wireless internet: the outernet. If you were a determined dude or lady, you could change the world with that kind of technosauce.

But we don't have those books, so we go on scratching around, trying to figure it out on our own, without the benefit of the knowledge that "this idea changed the world." I find it staggering how much easier it is to learn something that it is to discover or invent that same thing. But when you think about humans as clever monkeys instead of rational beings, it makes more sense... Our imaginations, as amazing as they are, are only just barely good enough to lift us out of the dirt, because that's exactly how good they had to be to get us this far. (Or, if they were better, we'd surely have flying cars by now)

AND it raises the question, is there a complexity frontier beyond which we can make no progress? Where it takes so long to get up to speed that no forward progress can be made? Or will we simply continue to build more sophisticated tools and sweep the details under the rug?

...In conclusion, humans are so great.

*This sounds like both an incredibly sad and an incredibly hopeful story, doesn't it?

kung fu panda

I can now announce that I am working on Kung Fu Panda World, a flash MMO based on Kung Fu Panda.

Hooray!

regarding pc hardware, I feel old

So my desktop's busted. Random restarts, if I leave it powered down all day it'll run for a couple of minutes first, before it starts spam restarting.

Usually when something like this happens it's the power supply, I tend to run those into the ground pretty regularly. That did not seem to be the case this time, unfortunately. Didn't seem to be a cooling issue either. Next on the list is motherboard and cpu....

It turns out that while I wasn't looking a lot of things have changed in PC hardware. Intel has a terrible, confusing brand tangle* of processors to choose from. I bought a Core i7 920 processor and a motherboard that supports Core i7 chips. But the chip didn't fit. Core i7 is split into two socket types, LGA1156 and LGA1366. WHO KNEW. (I didn't. These concerns are completely absent from the "[how to select your awesome new intel processor]" marketing posters.) Anyway I went back and got the right motherboard.

Oh the motherboard doesn't fit into the case. I'm not sure if this is because my old Dell is just Dell, or if the case standard actually changed (AGP to ATX?) and frankly I don't really care. I bought a new case.

So I was finally all set to put it all together. Oh the ram doesn't fit either. DDR3 is not DDR2.

On we go. I mean it's not a disaster, the good thing about being an old man is that I have lots of money to throw at these things. Still, burnsauce.

...

I actually still kindof like working with PC hardware... the form factors, the interface design decisions, it all speaks to a very specific design aesthetic, a funny split between engineering and show business, between high-tech and consumer concerns.

I love that you can build a PC mostly by trying to plug things into eachother until everything is plugged in, and then turning it on. That's pretty much what I do. It's sortof similar to the old PC Adventure game ethos of "[pull every lever and pick up everything that isn't nailed down,]" and I find it amusing that those problem solving skills actually turn out to be useful in some situations. Which is to say, in environments where every possible/sensible physical interaction has been planned out ahead of time, and made to work or not work as appropriate. So that if you can plug it in, it probably works. There's a certain nostalgic beauty to the process.

*brandble?

augmented reality game ideas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality

So the overwhelming problem for an augmented reality game is content creation, amirite? I mean, the real world is big. Way, way bigger than any virtual world I'm aware of. To reach a national or international audience, an augmented reality game can't rely on traditional video-game content creation pipelines. You need to either crowdsource content creation, restrict yourself to a small locality, or auto-generate content somehow. Or some combination.

So here's how I think you solve it, I'll put it in the familiar frame of an MMO, because I don't have a strong theme idea yet...

Your baseline game takes some huge local dataset like Yelp or whatevs, crunches it, and turns each node into a spawn point for critters based on the node. So a Chinese restaurant creates Chinese Food creeps that wander around the vicinity. You may or may not want to make a sophisticated thematic mapping algorithm so that all your creeps aren't ethnic food? I guess it depends on the game...

So anyway one dataset/layer gives you mobs for any populated area. Make your second layer something more explicit like the geocaching dataset. May as well include all this free content in your game, right? Caches become boss monsters or quests.

Next, give your players input into the game. As they do stuff they go up levels. The average level of players in the vicinity affects the average difficulty of the area. So if a bunch of high level bozos live in a town, then the newbs need to be careful when visiting, for example. Which means that your dedicated players will create your high level content. And the developer's office naturally becomes the highest level content in the game.

From there you might as well keep layering in every dataset you can think of, crime statistics, UPA pickup games, movie times, house prices, really anything.

What's the central activity of this game? Killing creeps? Collecting shiny stuff? Damned if I know. What kinds of things do people even do outside? What kind of augmented reality game would you like to play?

tacos

Tacos Mexico, on Van Nuys south of Sherman Way. It's no Salsa and Beer, so I wouldn't really take anyone else there, but they have great truck-style tacos for 1.05 each. Three or four makes a meal.

Also I tried putting butterscotch in my coffee, but it didn't work out as well as the chocolate syrup did. Lesson learned I guess.

missing music

I caved in and bought The Beatles Rock Band on Saturday. We visited my parents and set it up and had a great time with all my siblings, singing and playing through the songs. There are 2 key features to the game. One is singing harmony, which was pretty fun. The other is that everyone already knows all the songs, which is fantastic.

Between that and the jam session with Mick at PAX, I've been really wanting to get back into making music. The problem is, somewhere along the way I seem to have convinced myself that I'm not dedicated enough to learn an instrument. So I'm not sure what to do about that. Maybe get myself hypnotized into thinking that I love to practice the guitar. I'm not sure if I'm susceptible to hypnosis or not. I've always suspected that I'm not, but that might just be hubris.

The solution that my imagination keeps drifting towards is for me to invent my own musical instrument/interface, that takes the drudgery and dexterity out of the equation. But that almost sounds harder (and definitely a lot more pompous) than just learning an existing instrument...

Humph.

So in conclusion, any way I slice it, my big ego seems to be getting in the way of my making music. Probably time to knock it down a few pegs, I guess. Sometimes I wish I had a work ethic instead of a dream ethic. What can you do eh? :-)

I was kinda looking forward to it

My Driver's License finally came in the mail, so unfortunately I won't need witnesses to swear that I am me. Thanks everyone who offered. :-)

bonus drama - notaries and identification

So, I lost my Driver's License some time ago. I went to the DMV to get a replacement. They took my picture and all that. I waited 60 days, but it never came. I called, they said the picture didn't make it into the database. I went back to the DMV. They took my picture again. Now I'm on the waiting phase again. Hopefully it arrives soon, but in the meantime, I get to learn about Notaries Public.

There's a couple of documents we need to get notarized in order to buy this house. There's a disclosure for the Loan, and then, most crucially, there's the purchase contract itself. The thing is, a notary's main job is to confirm that you are who you say you are. I currently do not possess sufficient documentation to satisfy the requirements. We were able to get away with just Anne signing this loan disclosure, but for the purchase that's definitely not gonna fly.

So I looked up the California Notary Public guidelines, to see what my options are. On page 8 it talks about identification, and the long and short of it is that I need to have 2 credible witnesses present, with their identification, who will swear that I am really me.

We're gonna do it old-school.

I actually found it really interesting reading about notaries, because they are literally responsible for the fabric of trust that our common/civil law relies on... And it's all based on the idea that either the notary knows you personally, or can establish trust through other community members. Having ID cards is basically a shortcut for that mechanism, and frankly ID cards work way better in large cities where nobody knows eachother. But I do like that we have this old trust mechanism to fall back on.

house negotitations

So, let me tell you about this house. When we first saw it, it was listed at 550. We loved it-- it was two separate houses one a lot, with 2 garages. The lot is huge, 8,700 square feet, the second unit has 2 bedrooms, a great kitchen and its own yard. Both houses are in great shape. Great, this is exactly what we want, and it's out of our range.

We talked to the agent, the agent said, "she'll let it go for 460." We said, ok wow we can actually do that. We put in an offer at 460, our offer had an appraisal contingency, so that if the property appraises for less they have to drop the price to the appraisal.

Endless paperwork later, we're finally approved for the loan, and the appraisal comes back at 405. We're very excited, she has to drop the price, right? We offer 405. Well actually she has a backup offer at 435, so she counters at 435.

Now here's the thing, the bank is only going to lend us money against the appraised value of 405k, so if we want to buy the house for more than that we need to make up the difference up-front with cash. We were a bit lean in the down-payment department to begin with*, so this represents significant pain for us. We review our finances and counter 420, and it's as high as we're willing to go. We think we've lost the house to the other buyers at this point.

Radio silence for a few days, then we get a call saying she'll take it for 425, she just wants 5k more and we can seal the deal. Now, it's not the 5k in purchase price that's a problem, it's the fact that it's up-front that makes it a deal breaker. We can't give her more than 422 and feel like we're not being totally reckless. We already feel pretty reckless frankly.

More radio silence, then we get a call saying that our agent and the seller's agent have both agreed to take a 1.5k pay cut in order to make up the difference between us and the seller. The deal is on. So that's where we are right now. The seller has the football, we expect them to sign and pass it back to us any minute now.

I'm not totally sure how I feel about all this yet. I think it's gonna be good, but I don't want to hear your second-guessing until after we've finished the whole thing and moved in and made our first mortgage payment. Then we can talk about how irresponsible we are. ;-)

*For all you's out there wagging your finger right now, please remember that we will be renting out the front unit to cover more than half of our mortgage payment; some things are not as irresponsible as they look.

updated!

foodonshirt.com is back up, my shirts are on sale for 16$ a piece, 3$ flat shipping. I let this go for way, way too long.

Ultimately I decided it was not worth it to rescue the old ruby on rails site, and I decided to use an off-the-shelf store (Magento). There are pros and cons to it... inventory management is really smooth, and I had to do relatively little work to get it working, but it means tweaking everything, a lot, and I still don't get quite exactly what I want. My biggest gripe is with the checkout process; it has like 3 too many steps, and some bad defaults. I'd like to try to streamline it if I get the chance, but who am I kidding? The only way this store is ever gonna see more work is if I actually sell all the shirts I already have in stock and decide to do another run.

But anyway now you can vote for which food-on-shirt related flash game I should make! You''ll see the poll if you go to one of the shirt pages, e.g. here and scroll down and check out the sidebar.