Little of this, little of that

I was showing my blog to some people today via Internet Explorer 8 on a giant TV screen in some ungodly resolution, and the layout was broken. The right-hand sidebar was wrapped under the posts. It may have been because somebody had increased the text size, but it was still pretty embarrassing. I think everybody realized that this was a Blogger thing and not something I really have control over. I am a bit worried that I am still not using the new blogger templates, though at this point 'new' is a relative term.

If you didn't know I am in Scotland at the moment. I count myself lucky that after five years in Australia, I at least know which way to look when I cross the street. It is a lot like Australia in that they roll the sidewalks up pretty early, not counting the pubs and the lone Kebab shop.

It has been quite the two weeks though. Took my dad down to the VA hospital for his eye operation. That all appeared to have turned out quite well.

Then a few days in Disneyland with the Niece, Nephew and other assorted relatives. Kids are still pretty young and hyper while my elders are starting to get up there. Being caught in-between that was almost an event unto itself. I did get away the first night because Eric#3 and Kristina had wagon-trained up with us. She had an appointment in LA the next morning. The upshot of that is that I got to have a grown up dinner with them in Downtown Disney the night before, fireworks included.

I did get my Monte Cristo sandwich (don't look at the picture on that wiki link, it is horrible and very unappetizing) but I missed riding Space Mountain while I was making reservations for the Blue Bayou restaurant in the morning. Alex went back to get us a fastpass for it later on, but they closed it for a few hours to fix something. When we went back by it, the Fastpass time had a return of much later that night and we had dinner reservations at the Pirate's Dinner Adventure. I thought there was too much singing and a tad too much slapstick, but the kids really liked it. Next time I think I'll go back to the old tradition of Medieval Times which is next door.

Now I'm in Scotland and managed to chip my other front tooth veneer. I got in at 12:00 local time and took a small nap. When I got up I was spying around the local area on Google Earth when I kinda nodded off again. I awoke with start for no reason I can remember, bit down too hard and off comes a big chip. I had to have the Lovely Kristina call my dentist back in Vegas to extend my Wednesday appointment to get the actual new veneer on the previous one installed (I'm wearing a temporary on that one that I've been afraid would pop off during this trip) to now include starting the process to fix the next one. Anybody got a spare $1300 dollars lying around?

Speaking of the adventures of me and my dentist; when I chipped the first tooth, I had tried to get a hold of Dr. Phelps who was pretty much Westwood's dentist back in the day. He was related to one of the programmers and played Everquest with us. I found out that he had moved away and somebody else had taken over his practice. They then in-turn moved to the other side of town. When I was tracking down their address, driving down Flamingo, when I had a big scare that they would be the dentist that had taken over the old Unicorn Software office. As it turns out they are in phase two of the office complex that Unicorn was in. It was being built during my time at Unicorn back in the late 80's. I went over there and the nice ladies at the accounting office that is now there, let me take a picture of the stained glass Unicorn window from the inside. I do think that had this new dentist been in the old Unicorn office that I would have had to find someplace else to fix my tooth.

I have been desperately trying to follow the Tour de France, but am not having much luck. I got to watch the first stage via the Australian SBS website, but they blocked out of the country viewing the next day. Since they I either haven't been around or able to find a site that lets me view the videos live from where I am. I have just been settling on reading about each stage, watching the standings and following a few of the team on Twitter. Even the TV here in my hotel room doesn't appear to be working.

Half a Day and A Cramped Hand Later...

Okay, the new left hand sidebar background graphic is done, uploaded and appears to be working. If you are viewing the blog in a resolution thinner than 1024 you are just out of luck, sorry. It sure took longer than I expected. But what else do I have to do while sitting here in this hotel room? Let me just say that using Photoshop on a laptop, without a mouse, is a royal pain in the ass... or more exactly, the hand.

One of the things that made it take so long was that I just couldn't take the cover of Dune II looking so bad. It wasn't the first Real Time Strategy game, but it was the one that created and defined the RTS genre as we know it. Such an esteemed title deserves a little respect, and all the box scans that I found online were horrible. The reason being that the title text and frame around the picture on the front of the box were done in raised gold foil which doesn't scan in very well.

After a little searching I found a copy online that was uploaded pretty large. Unfortunately, it was scanned and saved in 256 colors even though it was a jpeg. Somebody needs to do their file format compression homework. It was still pretty good for what I needed. I spent about an hour cleaning it up and bringing out the title text. Once shrunken down, you can't even tell. Here is the old box cover I had and the new cleaned up one. I also left the new one a little larger.
You can also see this problem with "Mines of Titan" box cover. Notice how the giant title text doesn't stand out very well against the background. It was also done with foil text, silver this time. Looks great on the store shelf, but doesn't scan in very well. I probably should have cleaned it up a bit too, even just a little brightness & contrast adjustment to bring out the red background. Though I know how I am, if I don't make a stand and stop now at 11:00, I'll be up all night touching up every single box cover. Even now I just had to go back into Photoshop and add the drop shadow. But those drop shadow settings where the ones I used for the boxes on the top layer of the side bar montage. It doesn't quite look right, by itself, on the white background... No no no! I'm not doing any more work on it! It's just my stupid blog that is only read by half a dozen people! I'll save my anal attention to detail for work that people will actually see.

As another famous Westwood saying goes, this one from Brett Sperry directly to me over something I was working on, "It's done, quit pixel fucking it!" It is a quote that has served me well over the years.

"That's a lot of boxes!"

If you are an old Westwood employee you may recognize that saying. If you are a current Petroglyph employee, you should go up to Mike Legg and ask him; because, although it was something said by Marco, it was Mike's imitation of Macro saying it that made it one of the famous "Westwood Quotes."

Other quotes in the Mike imitating Marco series include, "You should shave, you look like Pancho Villa." and "I'm nobody's flunky."

But the purpose of this post, is to point out that I know you can't read the blog if you resolution is 1024 pixels wide. I am sitting in a hotel room in Redlands California as we speak, slaving away in Photoshop, fixing the boxes on the left.

If you are reading this blog at some point after a few hours from now, in a browser window 1024 pixels wide or smaller, and don't see what the problem is; nevermind because I have obviously already fixed it.

If; however, you are reading this at some point after... yadda yadda yadda, and the text still overlaps the boxes on the left... Sorry but I guess one of the following things happened:

• I never got back to it after going to lunch.

• Hotel's internet went out and I wasn't able to upload the new graphic.

• I couldn't figure out what I did last time to link to the new graphic in a manner which the site wasn't scaling it down to fit on screen.

• An attractive woman expressed at least some passing interest in my romantically and I am off wooing her and could care less if you could read this or not.

• My plans for world domination have been moved forward and I am busy trying to take Australia, which as we know from Risk, is strategically important.

• I am still thinking of things to add to this list instead of working on the graphic... DOH!.

04:05:06 07/08/09

There has been a piece of email bouncing around the internets the last week or so.

Just in case you had nothing more serious to think about today...

At five minutes and six seconds after 4 on the 8th of July this year, the time and date will be:

04:05:06 07/08/09.
This exact sequence will never happen again in our lifetimes

I love how it includes the tag line "This exact sequence will never happen again in our lifetimes."

First this isn't true, because after it happens in the AM, it happens again 12 hours later in the PM. Unless you are using military time.

You could fly to someplace like Australia, that does DD/MM/YYYY instead of MM/DD/YYYY, next month and it will happen again on the 7th of June. Unless you are already there in which case it isn't happening today; because, today was yesterday (Australia is 15 to 17 hours ahead of the U.S.) which doesn't matter because it was 08/07/09 for them anyway.

Who ever wrote this email also didn't consider my impending plans for world domination. One of my immediate action points after taking control, will be to start the calendar over again in my name. So about nine and a half years after I get that done, it will indeed happen again. It will also be more accurate than; because, the year really will be 0009 instead of 2009.

Sci-Fi = SyFy = Equal Still Don't Care

The Sci-Fi channel is about to change its name to SyFy sometime around now. Yeah, when I first heard the name I thought it was stupid too. I read the reasoning and understood it, but still didn’t like the new name.

At the end of the day though, I don’t really care. But I am reading forum after forum where people are just going off, ranting and raving about how they are never going to watch the channel again. Granted there was animosity generated when Tim Brooks who was part of the channel's launch, said the following in a TV Week interview:

"The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,"

SCI FI president Dave Howe responded to this quote in a recent interview:

We didn't say this! This was a quote by a TV historian named Tim Brooks, speaking to TV Week, which has been mistakenly attributed to us by some people. That is not our view, and we wholeheartedly disagree with what Brooks had to say. He does not work for the network, and he hasn't for more than 10 years.

But again, I don't care. A rose by another name and all that. If I was dating Megan Fox and she suddenly changed her name to Myrtle Pussboil, she would still look great running in slow motion!

The reason I give the channel a cold shoulder is that I'm just not impressed with their content. For every good series on their channel there are half a dozen crappy filler shows. They canceled Farscape and other a number of other award winning shows. They have been completely silent when fans have begged them to pick up shows canceled on other networks. In the end I have not a shred of loyalty to a channel brand, just the individual shows. You want to impress me SyFy? Pick up Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Yeah I know its way too late for that to happen, but that's why it would impress me.

Virtuality

I just watched Virtuality, which was supposed to be a new TV series on Fox. Instead the two part pilot was aired as a movie last month. It doesn’t look like Fox is going to pick it up as a series. You can watch it over on Hulu for free, legally.

I liked it for what it was and would watch it as a series. But there are a number of things about it that bother me and since I like to rattle on and complain about such things, I will.

First of all these people aren’t the type of people you’d send off on a long range space mission. The people who you’d find on this type of mission would be the super a-type personalities, the do or die achievers, the people with the right stuff. They are the kind of people who continue on toward their goal no matter what. The goal is their whole purpose in life. The people on the show, however, are a bunch of mental loons. Everybody has a personality problems and half of them are more irritable than I am when trying to explain why I don’t like baby-doll waistlines on women’s dresses.

The show throws in my two least favorite and ultra tired plot devices. The evil giant mega-corporation that is operating with shadowy, deceitful methods to achieve unknown goals that basically boils down to money and power. And, the whole global warming is going to kill us tomorrow thing. Note that is “kill us tomorrow” not “eventually make the planet unlivable at some distant point in the future.” Though to be fair there is a suggestion that the evil giant mega-corporation may be making up the whole global catastrophe thing to influence the crew.

Another tired thing is the over simplifying of technology in the form of some “Ghost in the Machine” figure who keeps popping up in everybody’s virtual reality program and doing bad things like killing or raping them. The crew keeps referring to it as a “glitch” and that just annoys the hell out of me. That is like playing Chess on your computer and suddenly because a computer programmer messed up, the program bugs out causing you to have to play a game of Tic-Tac-Toe every time you want to capture a pawn. Well actually in this case a Tic-Tac-Toe program that shoots you. Glitches don’t do that. A stack overflow error doesn’t create a whole other game inside the program, especially one that has its own motives. These characters wouldn’t call it a glitch, they would know it was something more purposeful.

And since the whole show was just a pilot, it doesn’t really end which sucks if you just sat through the whole thing.

New Sidebar Art

As you can see the new sidebar art is up with all the box covers from the various games I have worked on. Actually, I have only "Futuria" out of the Unicorn Software titles. I started to look for "Animal Kingdom" (later renamed "Wonders of the Animal Kingdom" because they didn't want to fight a lawsuit from Animal Kingdom magazine) but couldn't find it. The Commodore 64 version was the first professional game that I worked on.

I had actually wanted to do something like this for awhile, I just never felt like digging through the web to find all the box covers. It was a lot easier this time than it was back in 2003 when I last tried to find them all.

Anyway, I am not quite happy with the art and will make some adjustments later. I just spent an hour trying to get it working; because, Picasa Web Albums, which Blogger uses to host pictures you upload to the blog, wouldn't let me get at the actual, un-scaled down jpeg file to link to in the template. Finally got it working, but it is 4:30 AM already.

UPDATE: FYI. There are two things I am going to fix. First the boxes come over too far and you can't read the site in 1024x768. And second I need to rearrange some of the top level boxes.

Art and the Art of the User Interface

You might have noticed a few graphics on the blog, namely the title and the blue background sidebar thing, have gone missing. Those things were still being hosted at my old hewitt.org URL which is now gone. The back up of all the stuff that was hosted there is on my "Elements" portable hard drives which is sitting over at Eric#3's house with a broken power adapter. It just happens to have some proprietary power cord that you can't buy anywhere.

Doesn't matter as I've decided that it was about time to give the site a make over anyway. I fired up Photoshop and have been spending the last hour or so messing around, but haven't really created anything I like yet.

Right in the middle of this, I started randomly browsing Deviant Art for some inspiration. Just poking around to see if anything gave me any ideas. Eventually I hit something (nudity) that required me to log-in and I wanted to share something about that process.

First go to Deviant Art, pop down a few directories, then use the log-in in fields at the top of the page to log into the site. Notice how it resets the site and suddenly you are back at the very top of the directory tree. Hope you remember which sub-category of which category you were browsing in.

Now go to Hulu and start browsing down through their stuff. When ever you feel sufficiently immersed in their content, use the log-in fields at the top of the page to log into the site. Note that it did NOT change anything else on the page. You are still exactly where you were before you logged in.

Bravo to the Hulu guys, well done. Apparently the Deviant Art guys were too cool for school and need a few more lessons in usability.

Teh Learning Curve: Episode 3

Just a quick post to say that the guys in Perth have finally gotten episode 3 of "The Learning Curve" up. Jeremy, Dan and Liza try out Fallout 3.

Meanwhile, back at the Hall of Justice...

Not a lot going on at the moment. Lots of irons in the fire, but everything is moving sooooo slow. Just a lot of waiting to see how things pan out.

An odd thing kinda work related since I got back in Vegas. Two different "friends" have called me up, asking me to do some artwork for an iPhone game they are working on. Both of them flaked out on me. I've been wondering if it was me, something I said or did? But I can't think of anything. I thought I was going out of my way to be accommodating. When they brought up how much they should pay me for the work I even told them to pay me what ever they thought it was worth. Both times they went incommunicado before I actually started doing any work so it isn't like I am out any time or effort, but it still strikes me as very odd. They called me. I said I would be happy to do the work. They said they would get me the specs and such, and then nothing. Shrug.

So what else,

I signed up for Netflix even though I was tempted to boycott them because of their use of pop-up advertising.

Just borrowed the box set of "The Adventures of Brisco County Jr." staring Bruce Campbell. I've been wanting to watch the series since I missed it back when it originally aired and it is still on my Amazon.com wish list.

Cool fun fact about "The_Adventures_of_Brisco_County,_Jr." I just learned by reading the show's Wikipedia entry: Two Mare's Leg pistol props from the show were later reused in the science fiction television series "Firefly" as a rifle by the character Zoe Washburne.

Going to drive my dad to California for a doctor's appointment next week on July 7-10th. Might do Disneyland with the niece and nephew the following weekend. Monte Cristo sandwich at the Blue Bayou restaurant! Whoo-hoo!

Found my mom likes to play Solitaire on the computer, so I showed her Spider Solitaire. She quickly got addicted to it and was complaining that she is wasting too much time playing it when she has other stuff to do. So then just to be mean I introduced her to the web version of Book Worm, a Pop-Cap word game you can find at Yahoo Games. She is in her office playing it now and has been for over an hour now. hehehe.

Got my replacement passport in the mail last week, still really upset that I lost the last one. I can't believe nobody turned it in because I know it fell out of my DMV study brooklet at the library.

Speaking of the DMV, I passed my driver's test today and now just have to wait for them to mail me my new Nevada driver's license. Got a piece of paper that said I passed though, so I am no longer in fear of driving around on my expired Queensland Australian license. I had been hoping that if I get pulled over, the police officer won't notice that "11-02-09" is actually February 11th, and not November 2nd. Australia uses the DD-MM-YY format. Loosing my passport and a 2 month wait to get a driving test appointment is why it took me so long to get my license in case you were wondering.

I'm still waiting on the lab to have my replacement tooth veneer ready so my dentist can finish fixing my front tooth. The temp tooth is holding up pretty good though (knock on wood).

I finally got an answer from Hover (formerly Net Identity) and have access to my hewitt.org email address again. The website domain is gone but that's okay. All I really wanted was to keep was the email address and if the URL was still active I would have just redirected it here.

The lovely Kristina is still dragging me to Stoney's about twice a week. I mostly sit there, guard the table, watch the purses and people watch. At least it gets me out of the house. Plus the waitresses are HAWT! Out of my league, especially with the way my love life has been going, but HAWT none the less.

Meanwhile back in Perth, Brad sold my car, the 2003 Daihatsu Terios known as "The Hamster." He appears to have gotten a good price. I do wonder if not having a car there means that I will wind up back in Perth.

And that is about it for my exciting life at the moment. Thank you for your support. And stay tuned next week, same Bat time, same Bat channel.

On-Demand Entertainment

I’ve made the jokes in the past about the year 2000 coming and going without flying cars, jetpacks, and the silver jumpsuits. Please don’t send me any links for flying cars, jetpacks and silver jumpsuits; because yes, I know there are various websites where there are prototypes. Granted, almost 2010 and still not actually available in Wal-mart, but that crap really isn’t what I’ve been waiting for.

My prediction for the future has always been about on-demand TV. I imagined that new episodes would still come out as normal, but you could watch them whenever you want. I imagined it would be a subscription service of some sort that is also bolstered by normal commercials, except that the company would have some demographic information about you so that the commercials you saw would be suited to you. Maybe there would be subscription levels that eliminated the commercials. I dreamed up the basic idea as a kid back in the mid-80’s when I got annoyed that every Saturday I would see episodes of “Thundar the Barbarian” and “Battle of the Planets” that I had already seen even though I knew there were episodes that I hadn’t seen.

One of the big, unforeseen problems that appeared to have delayed my prediction coming true, was the rise of DVD sales. It is still coming true, it’s happening slower than I thought; because companies have to be weaned off DVD sales before it will really take off. For example if you go to Hulu.com, a legal streaming website from Fox, NBC, and other studios, you will only see full seasons of older and not-as-popular shows. Anything they think they can still make money on by selling on DVD, they will only show a few recent episodes of that expire as new episodes come out. It is still good if you want to watch current episodes online or if you miss an episode, just don’t expect to be able to watch The Office from season 1 episode 1 to current. The office DVD boxed sets are still making them money.

I think there is some turbulence in the DVD world though; the rental market especially seems to be bouncing around. When I left the country five years ago, it seemed like you couldn’t find a street corner without a Starbucks and a Blockbuster video store. Yeah, Starbucks is hurting, but I can still stop for a Frappuccino (tm) no matter which direction I am heading when leaving my house, and yet I only know of one Blockbuster around here that is still open. Everybody I know has a Netflix account now. Granted, the type of people I am likely to hang around is also more likely to adapt to this new paradigm (Wow! I’ve always wanted to legitimately use “paradigm” in a sentence.) I do wonder though, what this is doing to the DVD sales.

Speaking of Netflix, a subscription based streaming site, has also started to do streaming. I am a bit annoyed that a lot of the stuff that I was looking forward to watching right away isn’t available for streaming yet; I just signed up for their 2-week, free trial today. But what if you don’t want to watch TV on your computer? You just decided that your child didn’t really need that kidney transplant after all, and instead you bought that spiffy, giant, LCD HD-TV! There are already tons of adapters that allow you to connect your computer to your TV. Netflix goes on and on about that on their site. It’s just a step away from having your cable box do all that instead of your computer.

I’m telling you, it is going to be the wave of the future. The only thing I am worried about is the corporate greed. Now, I’m not one for labeling big corporations evil for wanting to make a profit, but just like the bloated music industry, the TV and Movie industry isn’t going to want to be slimmed down or miss one possible penny. I recently went to iTunes to buy True Blood season 1. They waited until the season was over to make it available, so you couldn’t buy a season pass and watch it as it aired. Now that it is available they also are charging $2.99 an episode for standard definition, which is usually the price for the high definition (HD) version. Sorry, not enough money left on my gift certificate I had to pass. I just borrowed the DVDs from a friend. And quite frankly, the amount of money they are charging for digital shows is about the same as what they charge for the boxed DVD sets. The same price even though they don’t have to press the DVDs, box them up, ship them to the stores, and have the retailer mark it up. The point of all the above is that I am worried that we are going to wind up paying more to just watch normal TV.

I’ve tossed around some thought to how this will fall out. Because of how business works, I see the broadcast companies being the service providers you subscribe to. The production companies, the people that actually make the shows you watch, would be the content providers. I imagine the quality of the shows will be much better because you won’t be watching just any old crap that is on. You’ll always have your line-up of favorite shows regardless of when they first aired. I do wonder how that will affect the line-up of shows; will we still have a bunch of sappy, barely funny sitcoms that keep coming back season after season, while critically acclaimed and well written shows get canned? I also thought that maybe they wouldn’t release new episodes like they do now, each episode airing at a fixed time each week. But instead maybe they would just dump a bunch of shows online at once each week. The problem with that is I can see shows starting to missing deadlines like other industries.

I’m sure there will also be some nightmare distribution thing that will go all wrong and screw things up and everybody will complain. But, there ya go. That is what I’m waiting for.