I want to create a new product called “The Mondays” and then sell it only by the case.

After two years in a small house, it’s back to apartment life for me. Our current place is decent, but the floorplan layout is terrible… there is a lot of wasted space and we are not making good use of the space we do have.  The attic and basement are great, but because the narrow & steep stairs we just don’t fully utilize them.  Instead I’ve been craving large open spaces.

We looked at a variety of townhomes and apartments, but found the townhome layouts to be lacking.  Specifically they all have a sense of confined space, where the living arrangements would have to make compromises based on the angles and abutments intrinsic to the design.  After 2 years of fighting with space, I just want a playground to fill with stuff.

The apartment we did get is large and simple in its layout.  Not much more than some rectangles, and enough room for the 2 couches and recliner so we can comfortably sit 6 and also have room for some dining space on the huge island.  Another key factor is that we will have enough space to organize our stuff the way we really need to… cabinet and other space in the bathroom, bedroom, kitchen… will be great.

Now comes the less fun part… the move itself.  Whee?

A recent NY Times article about the Netherlands reminds me why I love and miss Canada.

This picture is amazing… reminds me of Delicatessen.  Maybe Kim Jong-il could make some cash on the side producing some futuristic dystopia movies.

Some anagrams for my name:

• Insert Hyenas (please no)
• Earnest Shiny
• Tarnishes Yen
• Shantey Siren

Yesterday I was looking at my save game files for Oblivion.  Inside the expansion pack “Shivering Isles”, which I am currently finishing up now, I have put over 120 hours into it already.  Inside the original game?  Over 480 hours.  I am pretty sure that most of that time is real and not just idling overnight or something.

I have some coworkers who play WoW, and this doesn’t phase them at all… their in-game numbers dwarf my ludicrous Oblivion time.  Another good reason to avoid WoW like the plague.

Yesterday my fortune cookie said:

Among the lucky, you are the chosen one

I am apparently the Luck Messiah.

Yesterday on the Twitter:

Uncool how both super glue and my eye drops are the same form factor. That would make a very unpleasant mistake.

Today in the News:

Woman Glues Eyeball Shut

Life lesson:

if only she was following me on twitter, this whole catastrophe could have been avoided

$ history | awk '{print $2}' | awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"}{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -n 20 | sort -nr
322 ssh
123 cd
96 ls
80 svn
43 awk
36 mysql
34 cat
32 vi
24 man
19 sudo
14 rm
11 elinks
10 /usr/local/bin/mysql
8 gedit
8 echo
8 apt-cache
7 scp
7 ps


I have finally finished Desktop Tower Defense’s 1.9 “10K challenge”.  This took me literally months to build up the skills required, and the final game took several hours spread out over the course of a week.

Here I am, having just defeated the deadly Level 91 flying creep wave while still having all 20 lives intact.  This was the first time I’d ever managed to do this, and likely the key to my eventual success.

Whelp, I survived the insanity of level 98 and 99… barely.  Since there were no more flier waves to come, I could sell off all of my anti-aircraft defense and focus all of my resources on bash towers.

The trick now is to keep on juggling your creeps until they fall from attrition.  I re-used the centre space, and installed a “pressure valve” in the form of the top centre pellet tower.  This allowed re-balancing if the stream of creeps got too spread out.

OMFG.  I am I actually doing to do this.  Only one more creep remaining, the deadly armoured creep.

SUCCESS.  This is the cumulation of months of determination and hard work.  I actually devised a spreadsheet to compute the maximum damage and cost effectiveness of the anti-aircraft towers and boost towers.  I was ridiculed and told it could never be done.  But here I am.  The victor.

Yesterday I “wrote” a poem about an old BBS game we play at work, “Legend of the Red Dragon”.  It was a particularly good day for my in-game character.

Two turns diverged in an ANSI yellow wood,
And sorry I could not adventure both
And be a level 6 Mage, long I stood
And looked to the forest as much as I could
To see the Dragon in his lair;
Then tried to Slaughter, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because I had Able’s Armour to wear;
Though as for that the forest turn there
Had opportunity about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no Dragon had yet burned black.
Oh, I kept the forest turn for another day!
Though riskier as some might say,
I know tomorrow I would be coming back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two turns diverged in the game, and I-
I killed Krumpet and Steve the Manatee,
And that has made all the difference.

Sometimes you can read the news, and just think “how long before this becomes a Law & Order” episode?  I’m sure this one will be covered by one of the CSI spinoffs, and probably House and Monk and a couple more.

The BSG series finale profoundly sucked.

The first reason is that they used the ultimate cop-out to answer some of the most interesting questions posed by the show.  What was the reason for the Six in Baltar’s head?  What exactly was Starbuck?  The ultimate cop-out: God did it.

Supernatural explanations have been the basis of lazy thinking for thousands of years… first it was water gods that made the river flow downhill, until that could be explained by the science of gravity.  Then they said gods created the universe, until enterprising folks realized the Big Bang had a lot more evidence than the theory that the Earth hatched from the egg of a giant bird.  Then they said the gods were necessary to created life, but Darwin realized that also had a natural explanation.

Now there is no excuse for laziness.  And yet, that’s what BSG did in the finale.  Don’t answer questions, and leave it on the river gods.

I understand most people are still superstitious to various degrees, which is why I accepted the show leaning on themes of prophecy.  It’s unavoidable and I understand that.. and even found that entertaining.  But what I do not tolerate is the lazy cop-out, refusing to put thought into the answers the show had tried so hard to create.

They didn’t even bother to tie together the prophetic elements of the show that had been repeated time and time again since the very beginning.  The temple scene with Baltar, Six, Hera, Roslin, Athena… all of that was basically meaningless.  The final five, basically meaningless.  I was expecting at least a partial resolution to these questions, but instead they just lazily threw something together that was utterly unsatisfying.

What it tells me is that they didn’t have any picture of where the story was going when they introduced those elements in the first place.  Contrast that to a Lost, a much better show, which has shown that they have answers to the mysterious elements raised in earlier seasons.  There, the payoff seems significant because you can see that it wasn’t a waste, they had some idea of the explanation to the mystery.

Now I wish I had never watched the show at all.  I haven’t been this disappointed in an ending to a fictional story since Stephen King’s The Stand, which had a very similar cop-out ending.   LAME.

I cannot find a sane explanation for why the US Dollar has marched ahead of the Canadian Dollar since the economic crisis began.  I believe that as a result, the CAD represents an incredible buying opportunity, and I expect that within one year the value of the CAD to rise at minimum 20% relative to the USD.

The standard explanation for the newfound strength of the USD is that investors are skittish, and have dumped stocks and other investments for cold hard cash.  However the fundamentals of the USD are incredibly weak.  For one, it has a terrible return rate… at or below the rate of inflation last I checked.  This is a TERRIBLE investment, only looking good in comparison to the shocking decline of the stock markets.

The second reason I don’t like the USD right now is that the US economy is still in terrible shape, with what many saw as the core competency (financial sector) now in ruins while the established markets like automotive and aeronautics are surpassed by the rest of the world.  The technology industry is being surpassed by foreigners, and foreigners have the lead in the future “green” technologies which will be the wave of the future.  The collapse of the US education system combined with immigration “reform” will leave the next generation of US startups stillborn.

The third reason is that the government is in terrible shape.  The Bush administration left the balance sheet in ruins, and the Obama administration is unwilling to push the substantial (middle class) tax increases required to correct course.  The massive tax cuts that were included as part of the stimulus bill are worse than useless because they move the balance sheet even further offline, while also failing to provide much real benefit.

Combined all this with two ongoing wars (neither of which will end anytime soon), and I think I’ve made a pretty solid case that the deficits will continue to be a very large percentage of GDP for years to come.  Debt and deficit is not in itself a disaster, however it will sharply apply downward pressure to the USD as they borrow and/or print money to make up the gap.

Enough about America.  The fourth reason is that the Canadian Dollar is in part depressed right now due to the worldwide retraction of demand for resources.  If the world economies rebound because of stimulus, that resource market will again rev up — along with it the demand for Canadian dollars to pay for Canadian resources.  As well, with little military expenditures, healthy immigration and education polices, and relatively solid banking and government balance sheets… Canada is on pretty damn good footing right now.  Not just compared to the US, but to the entire world.

It’s low.  You know that old saying “Buy Low, Sell High”?  Time to buy.

The NY Times today posted a whinge from banks about how they don’t like the strings attached to their bailout money.  Turns out they like free money, but not when it requires them to make real sacrifices.

“On Tuesday, Signature Bank of New York announced that because of new executive pay restrictions in the economic stimulus package, it notified the Treasury that it intended to return the $120 million it had received from the government only three months ago”

In my opinion, this is the greatest development of the economic crisis thus far.  If attaching difficult but reasonable restrictions makes banks think twice and thrice about accepting bailout money, than the public at large wins.  If the banks decide they can survive without the bailout money (and can justify that to their shareholders) it proves they didn’t need it in the first place.  So only the banks which *really* needed the money would accept it — and thus increased efficiency.

I would take this a step further and extend this principle to other forms of government assistance.  For example apply this to all corporate welfare, not just for bailouts — I’d like to see ADM whine about executive pay restrictions.  And even unemployment and welfare recipients, what about a requirement to suspend fast food, cable tv, tobacco and alcohol purchases while on the Dole?  I say this without malice, but it may be a good incentive for some who perhaps don’t really need government money.  And those who need it (corporate or individual) they can still get help when they need it and are prepared to make some sacrifices.

So, let’s see some more whining!!

One nice consequence of the flailing economy… I booked a plane ticket the other day.  Turns out that first class was only a few more dollars than economy!  So after my miserable experience flying back from Maui (suffered some mild panic attacks due to claustrophobia), I splurged.

LIVING THE HIGH LIFE.

Recently I have heard people complaining about mess and untidiness in a group setting.  For example not cleaning up after themselves in the common kitchen area, cleaning out rotting food in the fridge, or dropping paper towels on the floor of the bathroom when the bin overflows.  The solution as far as these people see it is to whine and nag, and its effectiveness is approximately zero.

These “solutions” are quite natural, and by no means confined to this one experience.  At other places you will see signs like “stop stealing other people’s food” posted on the fridge, or many other kinds of nags.  Again, these are near completely ineffective!

As I see it, the root cause for this is that humans evolved in small close knit groups.  In these small groups, social pressures can be quite effective, as everyone feels part of the same tribe.  Once the tribe grows however, group cohesiveness declines.  This means that it’s easier to slink into the background, and anti-social behaviour (messy kitchen) can increase while the value of and pro-social incentives (nagging) declines.  For example, someone may see you leave the kitchen in a mess, but they are less likely to know who you are and you are less likely to care that they saw you because you don’t know them.

Ineffective managers don’t realize this, and try to use the techniques that worked on the small group and apply them to the larger group.  And they get very frustrated when those tactics don’t work anymore, and amplify the requests.

As I see it, the solution is quite simple.  If possible, arrange common areas into smaller groups, where pro-social tendencies will naturally help to control bad behaviour.  If that’s not possible, just deal with it and don’t get frustrated.  Throw away the rotting food, and hire someone to clean up after the slobs.  It’s just part of group dynamics, nothing personal or unique to any one group.

So I’m back now, and I really miss it already. We had a really good time… biked down a volcano, snorkeled with turtles, and saw so many humpback whales that it almost became old hat to see calves playing and jumping.

Flying still sucks.

I didn’t bring my laptop with me to Maui so itLs hard to update like usual.

See twtter feed for updates…

When playing Fallout 3, I felt that it wasn’t as strong of a game as Elder Scrolls IV:Oblivion.  Going back now and playing the Oblivion expansion pack Shivering Isles, I think I realize why.

In Fallout 3, much of the richness of the story is in how they tailor the story around the choices you make inside the game.  If you play one way, you get a very different storyline, with different characters and goals (at least in the side quests).  This is less true in Oblivion, where it is more of a singular story experience.

Thus when playing Oblivion you get a much larger story, as you play a larger percent of the content that the game story creators actually made.  With Fallout 3 you only get to see one side of the story unless you replay the game with a different style of play, which I find tedious.

So while Fallout3 creates an experience that is more specific to your gameplay, it ends up feeling like a much smaller world — even though they had to put in a lot more effort!!  On the other hand, Oblivion feels a lot more epic because you get more exposure to all of the story telling effort that the creators poured into it.

In conclusion, Shivering Isles is pretty awesome.

If so, hold down the “meta” key (aka windows key) , and press “e”.

Cool, eh?  Also try 1,2,3,n,m.  I can’t figure out what “r” does, but it also does something.

(tested on hardy, probably only works with their default XGL blah blah blah)

As an experiment I have started up a twitter account.  http://twitter.com/ryanthiessen

Yesterday I got a new toy… an android G1.

Very cool!

When asked the mundane question “Who do you admire most?” my answer is Charles Darwin.

He was the first person to realize and codify that the richness and complexity of life could be perfectly explained without magic.  His application of the idea was to Biology, but it can also be equally applied to complexity on micro and macro scales.  Stuff just happens naturally and the outcome is selected, and given time complexity arises.  No magic required!

It’s so completely basic and obvious in hindsight, but took hundreds of thousands of years for a human to really recognize this simple and fundamental fact of life.  Kudos, Mr Darwin.

http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp02122009.gif

The world “nauseous” is best pronounced “nachoes”. (more…)

You know the old saying “when you assume, you make an ass out of ‘u’ and me”?

I realized that since I’m already an ass, it’s a no-loss situation for me.  Assume away!

It really sucks.

Folks,

I’m starting to have some doubts about the realism in the 2008 series remake “Knight Rider”.  I hate to be the doubting Thomas in the crowd but I’ve got some nagging doubts that just aren’t going away.

For starters: the car has an amazingly advanced artificial intelligence system compared to any known commercial or research editions.  In addition to sophisticated navigation skills, it also is capable of verbal communication and even learning.  How has Knight Industries managed to advance so far ahead of the academic and industrial world?

This brings me to my second concern: the vehicle “Kitt” is remarkably advanced, having the ability to even shield and repair itself using nanotechnology.  Why have we not seen even crude versions of this technology in commercial or military applications, when a working prototype vehicle is clearing demonstrating the viability right now?

The only answer to these two questions is the obvious one: massive government conspiracy.  Clearly the federal government is diverting a hundreds of billions in tax income to fund Knight Industries.  Despite that, this rogue military contractor appears to have extremely limited oversight relative to the amount of money being spend to develop these cutting edge projects.

This development is not strictly related to nanotechnology and artificial intelligence — it’s also completed working implementations of matter replication, vehicle structural transformation in real time, and streaming satellite high-resolution video communication without latency.  They have also mastered on-board weapons systems, including rockets and a robust harpooning mechanism.  Plus the car can fly or something?  I wasn’t really clear on that point.

It strikes me as interesting that all of these incredible advanced technologies are all bundled into one car — as a taxpayer it concerns me that the risk of total toss is quite significant.  This is compounded by the fact that operation of the vehicle is done by young and reckless crew and command, who often seem far more interested in sexual relations with each other than utilizing the remarkable technology at their disposal.

I also question the priorities of the command group.  Given the abilities of this amazing talking car, why waste them chasing drug dealers and petty thugs instead of fighting terrorism or the Axis of Evil or something?  Maybe use the advanced AI to solve problems to benefit humanity, not to offer relationship advice to its operators?  I’m just saying.

Anyhow, I’m sure there is a perfectly good explanation for all this.  Just wish I could figure it all out myself.

Between the furrin hax0rs, mad scientists, and Blu Ray Viewers… is anyone actually buying the 3rd place PS3 actually sell for, you know, gaming?

Why do you suck so much?  I really want to like you.  That’s right… even after last season, I still really want to like you.  So why oh why did you decide to completely suck again?  It makes me sad like panda.

I was willing and eager to suspend my disbelief for you, my good friend 24.  But a small African nation infiltrating agents at every level of the US government?  Just to help them in some crappy civil war?

I give up.

Today I won a contest on the Freakonomics blog on the NY Times.  The question posed to readers was “what do Economists and garbage have in common?” and my answer “Ignoring either will inevitably lead to a very messy situation” won for sucking up!

Woo!

Was talking about artificial intelligence the other day… how would you know if a computer became self aware?  Well one way would be to simply ask it!  So I asked Google how it was feeling.  Turns out that the Google Search Engine is not self aware, or else it is shy.  Now you know.

After my previous post, I realized that I could actually try some of the games out since they have demos available on the PSN.   I tried MSG4 and Civ Revolutions.  I also discovered that they have movie rentals there, so I watched Hancock.

Hancock was unexpectedly great!  I was expecting more of a fluffier action movie, but it was very enjoyable.  The plot twist was completely unexpected and also I found the backstory delightful.  Even my darling wife watched it, and she usually hates everything.

Then I tried the MSG4 demo.  Meh.  I demand more from games these days than just shooting things, got bored pretty quickly (though the sneaking was kinda cool).  Fallout 3 and Oblivion have ruined me for FPS games I think.

Finally I played CivRev.  I found it completely fantastic!  In fact it may be my favourite entry in the Civ franchise to date… well, at least better than Civ4.  They removed a lot of the micromanagement and complexity but the basics are still there.  So the next morning I went out to the store and bought the full version!

My only complaint is that there is no option for longer games.  Anyhow on my first try I rocked on Warlord setting as India, won with a domination victory (and would have achieved cultural victory in the same turn).  Enough chatter, now I’m going to go play again on the next setting where I expect to be spanked.  [Update]  Beat it on King difficulty setting as well on my first try, heh.  They must really expect console players to be stupid!

This is a new years celebration I can totally get behind

We should totally do this next year!

I need some new video games.  I am so far considering the following but am willing to consider more options.  Any input on these games or anything I missed would be appreciated!

PS3:

• BioShock
• Assassin’s Creed
• Resistance 2
• Saint’s Row 2
• Civilization Revolution
• Orange Box
• Mirror’s Edge
• MGS4
• Far Cry 2

Wii:

• Williams Pinball
• Shaun White Snowboarding
• No More Heroes

Thanks for sending me the postcard in the mail about your new high speed fibre service.  Actually yes, I am interested.  However I have one problem though.  As your postcard suggested, I checked to see if my area was covered by this new services.  Turns out that it’s not.

SO WHY THE @#$% DID YOU SEND ME THE MOTHER$@!%ING FLYER?

I have teh arriveds.

2 inches of snow!

(more…)

• LittleBigPlanet is cute, but not fun to play
• Gail Collins is the best writer on the NYT editorial staff
• I scored a 57563 Desktop Tower Defense.  Oh yes
• Anyone out there with Wii Animal Crossing?
• I still don’t have a garbage can