The joys of an overactive imagination

For my whole life I've had an overactive imagination. I'm often off in my own little world, dreaming up random scenarios, thinking about what might have been or what could be.

So when I get an email like this from Twitter, it send my mind reeling to some wacky places:

This is a notice that I have a new follower on my work Twitter account, where I mostly post neat stuff I either write or find about data analytics. What jumped out at first was that the person's name and description were entirely in kanji.

Then... I saw the Twitter handle @BulletCluster. Which has led me to believe this can mean only one thing:

I've been followed by a Yakuza crime lord.

I mean, it all fits. The violent name, the kanji, the really pissed off looking bird... it's all there.

Should I be scared? Maybe. Or maybe I can help this guy better understand his organizations data so he can create actionable insights.

The Egyptian coup is... unsettling

I don't know much, but I do know that a military coup deposing a democratically elected president is a very bad thing. For everybody, and especially the folks jammed into Tahrir Square who think this is what they want.

Trust me, it's not. Presidents piss off their people all the time, especially in this country. Our president, for whom I've voted twice, is currently really pissing me off about all sorts of things, mainly on his complete lack of leadership on some major issues. That's another blog post for another time.

But you've got to have faith in the system. Even if your president is a dick, you have to believe that the system in place will minimize the damage he can do, and at the next opportunity you can vote his or her ass out of there.

That's not what's happening in Egypt. What's happening there a group (admittedly, a large one) of malcontents unhappy with the president, and an independent military acting as a loose cannon.

It's going to get ugly, is my guess. Democracy is hard. But you've got to give it a chance.

I'm saying all this from my ivory tower, but ... isn't that what bloggers do?

Ahh yes, I remember these: thumb blisters

I'm not really a console gamer anymore. In my youth I undoubtedly put thousands of hours into my Sega Genesis and Sony Playstation, and as I've said before I've owned a console from every generation from Atari 2600 through now.

But most of my gaming gets done on a PC these days, and that's been true since Age of Empires and the original Warcraft. (I've actually moved past RTS games for the most part, but that's another post for another day.)

So Saturday's experience, where I played my Ouya until my thumbs blistered, is something of a throwback for me. And given all the flak that little console has gotten for no "killer" launch title, I was very happy to realized I had played away the better part of a day with just two games.

The first is Super Crate Box, a retro-style arcade game that is crazily addictive and really challenging. The gameplay is stupendously simple: collect as many crates as you can. Each crate contains a different weapon that you instantly equip. Baddies come at you fast and furiously, and one touch kills you dead.

For one thing, it's really hard. But you instantly respawn and start over after each death, so dying - which happens a lot - doesn't break your rhythm. Getting 10 crates and unlocking the next level gave such an incredible sense of accomplishment, I let out a whoop of excitement that scared the cat and puzzled the wife.

The graphics are decidedly 8-bit, but the soundtrack is brilliant and there are several little touches that show the game was well-crafted. Here is a gameplay trailer.

The second game was BombSquad, a Bomberman meets fighting game with lots of potential for multiplayer madness. I really enjoyed just playing against the AI, but had nobody around to play with (the cat said no, and my wife doesn't have opposable thumbs).

Again, gameplay is pretty simple. You throw bombs at each other. There is some hand to hand combat, and most of the games are played on platforms, so it's possible to knock opponents off. Still, the gameplay was positively addictive. The physics model is fantastic, the rag doll effects are very entertaining, and little things like the noises each character utters make the game very enjoyable. The graphics are crisp and attractive, and the soundtrack features rousing classical music like the William Tell Overture.

I played this for hours. If this game supported online multiplayer, it would be amazing. It featured a 1 hour free trial of full gameplay, and I quickly forked over my $4.99 after the demo was up.

It supports any number of controller formats, features a controller app for Android devices like phones or tablets, and I very much look forward to trying to blow up as many as eight of my friends.



 

Boston-Chicago Hockey Lovefest

I don't ever recall this happening before. Ever.

The Chicago Blackhawks took out a full page ad in the Boston Globe thanking the Boston Bruins, its fans and the city for its class during a hard fought Stanley Cup series.

I understand that hockey is filled with Canadians, and Canadians have an extra kindness gene, or something. And most of the reaction in Boston about the Bruins loss was something along the lines of "great series, sucks we lost the way we did, but the Blackhawks are a really good team."

The fans were great, most sticking around for the cup presentation after the shocking Game Six loss, and hearing the fans chant "Let's Go, Bruins" made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

But... what the hell is going on here? I want the Bruins to come out and flatten the Blackhawks when they play them next year. No more of this diplomacy crap.

Grief

A friend of mine from work died today.

Except she wasn't really my friend, I just wanted her to be. We were friendly, and given time I'm sure we would have been friends. She was bright, warm, fun, attractive, and great at what she did. I've only been working here for about a year, and she mostly ate lunch in her office and worked late, so we didn't have much chance to interact. But I have a picture of us together in front of the White House from a company trip on my cork board.

The rest of the office is really upset, especially my area of the building, where her team sits. She was in her late twenties, and the company hired her right out of college, so she'd been here a while. I'm told her heart just stopped. She was very fit, and this is quite a shock.

Company leadership is handling this great, allowing people to go home, giving everyone a place to congregate and grieve, and I think they're bringing in a grief counselor to help people through. She was very well liked.

I'm sad that she died, and I feel for my colleagues who knew her better. But I don't know what to do. I wanted to go make an appearance in the room where everyone is together, but the sorrow was so thick in there I couldn't even walk through the door. I want to be there for them, but I feel like a fraud just being there.

I know everybody grieves differently, but I guess I have no idea how to do it. Instead I'm just thinking about how if someone so young and fit can die suddenly, then life really is ephemeral. That's a sad thought, too, but it makes me glad that I've held very little back in terms of the life I'm choosing to live, the friendships I've made and maintained, the life I have with my wife.

That sounds selfish, to think about how happy I am in the face of sorrow, but maybe that's just how I deal with grief?

Day One with my Ouya

I pre-ordered the Ouya, an Android-based gaming console, on May 10.

It came, somewhat surprisingly, yesterday, the day of its official launch. So spent most of the evening tooling around with it.

Why was I surprised it came yesterday, you ask? Because I've been getting excited for my new toy over the last several weeks, and I've been following the Ouya saga somewhat closely, and there has been a lot of chatter about the problems with the console.

Not everyone who backed the little-box-that-should (my term) on Kickstarter had received their Ouya yet, and I hadn't received any notice whatsoever from DHL that my package had shipped, so why should I expect my Ouya to be waiting for me when I came home from work?

But there it was.

Talkin' bout a revolution? Perhaps... 

I didn't really know what to expect. In my research about the product I had purchased, the Ouya received mixed reviews at best. Much of the tech gadget media took the console to task for a bad interface, mediocre controller, and a lack of alluring launch titles for games. Internet trolls slammed the console as irrelevant before it even hit shelves, and unhappy backers who were expecting something more expressed disappointment.

So I had to ask myself: I'm into this thing for $119 all told including shipping, what is it that I want from the Ouya? It's pretty simple.

I love gaming, but for me it's a very small part of it. I want an entertainment set top box with an open operating system where thousands of creative developers are developing apps to make my living room experience better. One of my biggest frustrations with my XBOX 360 was the lack of apps for XBOX Live.

I think with the Ouya, that's what I'm going to get, and at $99 plus shipping, that's not bad.

I am excited to do some retro gaming with emulators. I've had a console every single generation, from Atari 2600 up to Xbox 360. The retro games are the best... I played Megaman 2 last night, and it was awesome.

I'm also looking forward to supporting some indie developers and discovering the weird stuff they come up with. I don't care about Call of Duty 11, or Madden 2273. If I want an immersive experience in gaming, I'll use my PC.

Let me address some of the gripes that I saw on various reviews and message boards.

Interface: I'm not really sure what all the fuss is about. Maybe I'm just very familiar with Android - I have an Android phone and tablet - but within an hour of turning the thing on, I had Dropbox and XBMC sideloaded, and I was sorting through internet video on my TV. Next I'll get the Amazon App Store, and see what's out there. I'm about a six out of 10 on the tech savvy scale, but this was easy, especially with the help of this crazy thing called "the Internet."

One thing I did find annoying was the lack of a clear way to back out of the current game or application. You basically just hit the Ouya button on the controller, and it zips you back to the main menu. It feels like your force stopping the current app. I'm sure this will get fixed as Ouya updates its interface.

Controller: I had absolutely no trouble with the touch pad on the controller, which was a huge gripe I read.  The controller fits well in my rather large hands, it came with two Duracells (a little touch I appreciate), and I had no issues with buttons sticking. The only trouble I had was I had to lean forward on my couch to keep the wireless controller in range; I had the same problem with my XBOX.

Launch titles: The critics are right about this... there is no launch title that I decided I absolutely had to have. But it does have the most launch titles of any new console, ever. There were several that intrigue me, like ChronoBlade and Soul Fjord, both of which are still in development, and Organ Trail, a zombie apocalypse version of Oregon Trail.

But the complaints that Ouya has no go-to title the day it launches strike the same chord with me as the people who wanted their money back from Blizzard and EA when they couldn't play Diablo 3 or SimCity the day it came out. Did you really buy those games just for the experience of playing them on launch day, or is it something you're going to try to enjoy for dozens of hours over the next several months/years? Just because there isn't a knock-your-socks-off title the day of launch, so what? I'm in for the long hall.

Graphics: The box works with 1080p and 720p HD. The graphics in the ChronoBlade demo look fantastic. Some of the videos on XBMC look crappy... but that's because they're hosted in standard def, not because of something the Ouya is doing. Are they going to be as pretty as the Playstation 4 or XBOX One? Obviously not. But they're sufficient, and at the price, they're darn good.

Here is my feeling so far. It's an unfinished product... but I don't mean that in a bad way. Ouya's kickstarter went live on July 10, 2012. This thing is not even a year old, conceptually. They recognized there was a demand, built the thing, and got it shipped. It sold out at all of its retail locations on day one.

Now people in the Android ecosystem have a platform to build on that's going to stay in my living room, displayed on my HD TV. That makes it different from my phone and tablet, and that means devs are going to have to figure out what works and what doesn't in that paradigm. I'm looking forward to taking that journey along with them.

Just how often would you say W. V. Fluffington mentioned jihad?

I'm giving this whole blogging thing another try. And in the truest form of the blogosphere, I'm going to rip off content from somewhere else as part of my first post: 

From The MetroWest Daily News, June 23, 2013: 

"I like sales. But do I like having my identity and shopping habits instantly known by any corporation who wants to sell me something? That’s the reality today’s Big Data age. Nothing is deleted, terabytes of data can be crunched to find correlations and trends in milliseconds, and my personal privacy is only a speed bump on the path to profit. 

That doesn't scare me. What scares me is when my personal privacy is a speed bump on the way to public safety. The NSA and FBI don’t slow down for speed bumps."

Now, the chump who wrote that is clearly an alarmist Luddite who doesn't like to see technological progress. But I can also tell he's a charming and skilled writer who is prone to occasional bouts of brilliance.

Okay, none of that is true. I wrote that piece for The MetroWest Daily News as my first Op-Ed ever to be published in a big boy, non-college newspaper. And I like how it turned out.

The only point I wanted to be more clear about: big data is great, and it provides the capacity for amazing progress as a society. But where major corporations and the government are concerned, I think citizens (and consumers) need to have the most transparent system possible in place. We have to be as informed as possible how our personal data is being collected and used.

I want Target to send my wife coupons for baby clothes and vitamins when she's pregnant... that stuff is expensive. I'm happy to opt-in to that program. Just make it clear that you're collecting our purchase data to give better timed promotional offers and sales, and we're fine.

And you, Uncle Sam, you need to be as transparent as possible too. I don't believe that secret surveillance programs make the country safer; I believe they make the country more paranoid. You have to prove to me what you're doing is for the public good, and I'm not just going to take your word on it.