monkey see, monkey doo

Most people have never heard of polyphasic sleep. The idea is, it's possible to condition yourself to sleep in many small chunks rather than one large one.

 

I've seen discussion of three types of polyphasic sleep schedules, each of which requires a daily routine:

 

I'm finally well after fighting a cold for a week. It was one of those cotton-in-the-head colds that keeps you from being able to think. Yeck.

 

To entertain myself, I spent time looking at old videos on YouTube. I have to say, this is one of the things YouTube is best for: I love music videos, and watching some of my favorites from the last 30 years is a great way to burn a few hours!

 

I used to watch Tiny Toons religiously. One of my favorite episodes was a series of small music videos written to tunes performed by 'They Might Be Giants.' The two that I remember the best are Particle Man and Istanbul, check them out if you're a TMBG or a Tiny Toons fan!

 

On the traditional music video front, there's Sensoria by Caberet Voltaire - it's held up surprisingly well. Safety dance doesn't fare quite so well, but is still entertaining. That got me thinking about Scrubs, which brought up the following two Turk segments: Turk doing a bit of safety dance himself, but even better, when Turk follows up The Todd trying out for a hospital music group dancing to Poison.

 

I've said it before, I'll say it again. The internet is my favorite thing ever, the universal library. It's hard to believe the days and nights I spent as a kid waiting to record snippets of my favorite songs from the radio onto cassette. Now literally everything in the world is available online, you can find it instantly, sample it for free, and buy it to keep it. Life is good :)

 

 

 

It's been *ages* since I've written on here. As it's the holidays and I'll have a bit of time on my hands (once I get my computer working again), I hope to remedy that situation.

 

A side note. Most of my blog posts are written with search engines in mind. Sometimes this can work against you. We went to Sharm El Sheikh recently, and I was curious whether our favorite hotel really had broadband yet or not. I searched, hoping to find information about it. Unfortunately, the only relevant article I found was from myself, talking about how I *hoped* they would have broadband soon. Ah, the irony :)

 

I just read an excellent interview with one of my favorite authors, William Gibson. While I can't give him credit for me getting into computers, I can certainly say he helped me think about them in a different way, and to stretch my electronic horizons beyond games. The guy is amazing, and has a quite unique perspective on being human, as well as our near future.

 

If you haven't read any of his books, you might want to give them a try. Certainly no cyberpunk enthusiast can claim to be such without knowing their roots. Neuromancer was the seminal start, but his latest books - although not necessarily sci-fi as such anymore - are also quite engaging.

While not so rabid a Harry Potter fan that I dragged myself out of bed at midnight to get the book, I did have it by 10am the next day. Mostly I wanted to make sure I read it before I tripped across any spoilers in the press or other places. For example, when the last one came out, a nitwit was running around WoW yelling "* dies at the end!" (with a name instead of *). This is no doubt the same sort of fellow who enjoys making people angry in games, griefers they're called.

 

But I digress.

 

No spoilers in this blog entry, out of deference to those who have yet to read the series or this book in particular.

 

The Harry Potter books, for my money, have ranged from very good to excellent. This one definitely weighs in at the 'excellent' end of that scale. Rowling always intended seven books for the series and this is the seventh. It's a fitting conclusion for the Potter series, though I have to say I'm sorry to see it over with. It choked me up more than once. It's always hard saying goodbye to characters and a world you've come to love.

 

The book is as big as any of them - 759 pages in hardcover. It starts strong and stays strong. There were a few hundred pages near the end of the first half where it wasn't as engaging (though still quite good), but I couldn't manage to put it down for the last half. Like the other books before it, despite its size it's quite a quick read.

 

Here's to Harry Potter! If you're into it and haven't already bought a copy, it's well worth full cover price.

It used to be that "made by hand" was a mark of quality. In many ways, for the older generation, I guess it still is. Recently, though, I've come to question whether this is still warranted.

 

As little as 30 years ago, mass production techniques were relatively coarse, with questionable quality control. The marks of mass production were plain on most items: prominent seams on plastic items, off-center joins on assembled pieces, shoddy stamping and finish on metal items. Nothing a bit of post-production finishing couldn't have fixed, but nobody bothered.

 

From my perspective, things have changed quite a bit over the last few years. Even cheap consumer goods appear to be made to a high spec. Even if they're not incredibly robust, they're good looking: they meet the objectives of their assembly.

 

Now, rather than equating "made by hand" with high quality, I tend to read it as "not popular enough to be worth mass producing, your quality may vary." Undoubtedly there are marvellous things being produced by artisans and labelled "made by hand." I'm equally certain that for every one high-quality product, there's a hundred low-quality one whose main selling points are uniqueness and quirkiness rather than quality.

 

I'd argue, however, that even the uniqueness is an artifact of the number of pieces being produced (not many people can have one) instead of an explicit personality imparted to each piece. It's human nature, and certainly capitalistic, to produce goods as quickly and efficiently as possible if you're making many of them. You do this by finding a routine or groove and sticking to it.

 

The next time I see "made by hand" on a label, I'll remain suitably unimpressed, and wish the manufacturer enough success to move to an automated assembly line :)

 

 

 

I've been travelling a lot for work recently. In the last four months I spent 41 days on the road, and I'll be taking another week-long trip sometime soon.

 

Travelling for work is a good way to get a lot of stuff done, but it's also a great way to burn out. Two trips ago, I worked both for my work time, and during my entertainment time: work was too accessible, and there was too much to do, so I did very little EXCEPT work. As a consequence, I was exhausted when I got back to Cambridge.

 

My next trip out, I did two things for my mental health: stayed at a hotel further away (and a little more pleasant to spend time in), and re-enabled my World of Warcraft account. Despite the dangers of addiction, I figured having something to tear me away from work would be a good thing. And it was.

 

Now I'm back in Cambridge, and I'm still playing. I've managed to keep WoW from being the huge time sink it used to be, thanks to a bit of moderation and the fact that my wife isn't playing this time around. Still, I play a couple hours a day, in the time I'd normally be playing other games. Which is a shame, because I've got six XBox-360 games waiting for attention. Ah well.

 

WoW is still an amazing game. They added a large expansion 'Burning Crusades' since the last time I played, and it looks amazing. So much more to see and learn! I'll be extremely interested to see how much longer it remains the dominant MMOG.

It's Monday morning, and I've managed to drag myself into work at a reasonable time. It's been a rough couple weeks as the stress and the number of things to do build up. Ironic, since I've got a job I love.

 

What do I mean by 'a job I love'? Four days out of five, if I was independently wealthy, and among my many options one was coming to my job and doing what I do for no pay, that's what I'd do. I believe strongly in what I'm doing, it's intellectually challenging, and I feel like I'm working to change the world (albeit in a relatively trivial manner). It's a good feeling most days.

 

One of the challenges of a job like this is the danger of investing too much of yourself in it. In my case, I've got no kids or external obligations pulling in any other direction. This makes it easy to get sucked in. Setbacks in the job start feeling like setbacks in real life. When something big doesn't work out, I'm devastated, and spend days or weeks moping around both at work and at home.

 

Last weekend I explicitly distanced myself from work. I normally check email a dozen times a day, I didn't touch it for two days. Instead, I played games, mowed the lawn, made cookies (a few of which actually got cooked instead of being eaten as dough), and watched a dozen 'lost' and 'house' episodes. By the end of the weekend, I actually felt human again, ready to come in and do what needs doing this week. And maybe, just maybe, enjoy it.

 

Beware the job you love: if you wind up hating it, you'll have only yourself to blame.

 

 

Despite my lack of faith in the space program - and the validity of space travel as a national goal, vs other priorities - I've still kept an eye on the private groups working on building a private rocket. The group I've been watching the longest is Armadillo Aerospace, run by John Carmack, more famous for his work on Doom and Quake than his space enterprises.

 

Up until the X-Prize was won, he updated his site every week with progress his team made towards a viable rocket, through a variety of fuel and engine technologies, and vehicle shapes and goals. After the X-Prize was won (by someone else), the updates dropped to once a month.

 

Even so, I find myself looking forward to each status update, and checking his site repeatedly as the right time of the month rolls around to see what's happening. It really paid off this week, when I was treated to a movie of their spacecraft taking off, flying up 50m or so, and then landing on a separate concrete pad after about 2 minutes of flight. It doesn't sound like much, but a controlled vertical rocket flight of this magnitude is something I haven't seen since the DC-X met its end famously many years ago, and it's an amazing achievement, especially for a small (if well funded) group of amateurs working only on weekends!

 

If you're interested, check out Armadillo's news update, or just go straight to the movie.

 

Congratulations Armadillo, I'm looking forward to seeing how you do at the XPrize-Cup lunar lander challenge this fall!

Over the last week or two I've been sick, which for me translates into being less motivated than usual, and spending a lot of time either re-watching things I've already seen, or playing computer games.

 

I finished two games this weekend, Crackdown and Perfect Dark Zero. Both I'd been told weren't very good. In both cases I disagree with that perspective

 

 

You're a genetically modified cop cleaning up a city that's fallen to gangs in the near future, through any means necessary. I enjoyed this game quite a bit. The city is huge, with a lot of interesting details. The graphics are fairly realistic, though with a comic-style interpretation. Gameplay is challenging without being ridiculous. There's a lot of different activities to choose from: basic puzzle solving / timing (climbing up and down buildings, rooftop races), driving (more races), and good old shoot 'em up. I thought this was a great game, and I may dig it out again sometime to play it a bit more.

 

Perfect Dark Zero

 

Despite being a 360 launch title (and therefore presumably rushed), I thought the graphics, sound & story were outstanding. There are 14 episodes, with the intro episode being a guided walkthrough. The game controls are fairly nice, and there's a wide variety of gadgets and weapons. In some places the action feels a little too tightly scripted. In others, it's all but impossible to guess what you're supposed to do and which way to go: intuition simply doesn't help. There's no map, so you basically sit there waiting for the system to hint you (which fortunately it does, by putting a flashing path towards the next place you're supposed to go). I felt like the gameplay was a bit uneven, which is a real shame because everything else about the game is marvelous.

 

I tried the online play for Perfect Dark Zero. It was fun enough, but I wound up in a capture-the-flag game that was still going after two hours, despite the fact that my team had 5 captures so far. I shrugged and quit out, and lost all the fine statistics I'd earned. Ah well. Unlike Crackdown, I don't see myself going back to play through Perfect Dark Zero again.