Hundred Hand

So that’s a picture of what I ate last night. And I didn’t eat it when I was hungry, oh no; it was after eating about 60 pieces of assorted sushi, rolls and sashimi, and was near bursting at the seams. The gist is, my roommate Matt, his gf, and my friend Stephan and I had a sushi eating content at an all-you-can-eat sushi place, Ichiumi in NYC, and it was brutal.

I don’t want to spoil all the details, there will be lots of pics and commentary and even a video up on Matt’s blog in a couple hours. But I will say this, it was the first eating contest in which either me or Matt gagged, and we both did within about a minute of each other, and this little guy is to blame.

For reference, it tastes like fishy chewy salt. Yummm.

Utah just executed a man via firing squad for the 3rd time since the practice became once again legal 32 years ago. It was pretty appropriate because the executie (definintion: an attractive person which is executed) had shot 2 people to death.

The interesting part of this for me are the measures they take during the execution. First, all of gunsmen are police officiers who volunteered to be on the squad. However, their identities are all hidden; I assume they wear some type of hood. One of the 7 men has blanks in their gun, so no one can truely know if they killed the guy or not. Finally, they start a countdown for the firing at 5, but they all fire at the count of 2, instead of 0 or FIRE or whatevs.

While the laws that allow this practice make sense to me, it’s strange that the method of execution takes into account the mental state of both the executors and the condemned. Perhaps that 1 in 7 chance of having blanks is enough reasonable doubt for most people to reconcile themselves if they start to feel guilty. On the other end of things, I think I would appreciate them firing earlier than expected. Even though the person is about to die, and under considerable streign from their coming fate, they spare them the worst 2 seconds of anticipation.

I believe that the death penalty is a necessary evil, but I don’t often consider what it must be like for the people involved in these proceedings. I’m happy to know someone put some thought into this.

I started writing an article about Starcraft II a while ago where I tried to give a big introduction so that people who didn’t know what it was would be able to follow along. It turned out really boring, so I scratched all that, and this is take 2 instead. If you’ve never heard of the game, that doesn’t really bother me, but I’m not going to catch you up. OK?

So, I have a beta account for Starcraft II due to the generosity and lack of gamer friends of a coworker of mine. Before this, I had never played any of the original Starcraft, and had probably only seen about 1 min of some Starcraft tournament video. I had however played Age of Empires II, and Warcraft III a good deal, and had the understanding that Starcraft fell somewhere between these two games.

You could say that it is Warcraft III without the heroes and the creeps and the items. That’s a pretty fair thing to say, but that makes it sound like it’s worse than Warcraft, which, in my opinion, it is not. Like Warcraft, there are a set number of bases around the map where you can create expansions, there are just a few races which play massively differently, and you can do some amazing things by micromanaging your troops well. However, like more macro oriented strategy games, there is no economic disadvantage to holding a large army, and the max population allowed is quite high. In fact I’ve never had that many troops, only ever getting up to about 150/200 “food” before I sent in my guys to get slaughtered.

It seemed pretty simple to me at first. You send out gatherers to gain resources, you build buildings, you make troops, you try to expand, and you have nasty encounters with the other people trying to do the same thing, whom also want to wipe your seed from the earth (or whichever planet you happen to be on). However, it didn’t take too many episodes of people having vast armies in my base about the time my very first marine was coming out, or me sending in huge groups that get obliteratied while being totally ineffective towards my oponent, before I realized there was a lot more going on in this game.

Like all the best games, it has an easy to play, hard to master quality. To truely play the game, you have to know every unit’s strengths and weaknesses, what abilities it has, how fast it is, what its attack range is, where it comes from, and what works well or poorly when attempting to fight it. You have to be able to keep your resource income up, even while you are fighting, while the limited resources are running out, and while your workers are getting shanghai’ed while your troops are out taking a stroll. You have to have the presence of mind to use the abilities of your troops at the right time, while there might be hundreds of things fighting each other, and a combined 10 different abilities between your troops.

Much like the original Starcraft, even during the beta, it’s superbly balanced. While individual units are getting nerfs and buffs here and there, the individual player’s ability separates them from one another far more than the underlying numbers. I will get slaughtered by a better opponent every time, and destroy a worse one every time. The matches where I am matched up well can become quite epic, and mental fatigue often comes into play.

Since this is a pvp game, the fun of it is largely reliant upon you being matched up with equally skilled opponents. It’ll be interesting to see how this shapes up one the full game is released. Right now in the beta, the database is reset every few weeks, at which point you have to go through 5 qualifying matches again before you are assigned to a given league, which is supposed to contain others like you. This is one thing that seems off right now, but a larger playerbase, and the omission of database resets should even this all out; at least that’s my hope.

So I’ll be playing until the beta cutoff date of June 21, and I plan to get a copy of the game once it comes out for real. In the mean time, I’m trying to find as many other people I know in real life with which to play. As we all know, competitive stuff is so much more fun when you know the person you are trashtalking.

Terran 4 Lyfe!

I was on slashdot today reading the comments to some article about the stock market, and I realized they made a very good response to the stock market post I had made earlier. Here are some of the better ones I thought would be worth sharing:

“this system rewards people who produce nothing of value, make nothing, enrich no one’s lives, do not create art, do not expand the sphere of human knowledge, and provide no meaningful service to humanity or the country.”

“If only it were so simple. Efficient allocation of capital is extremely useful. It enables all kinds of progressive development that would never occur otherwise and stock markets (and derivative markets) are the best way humanity has come up with to do it. You might as well be arguing that farmers’ markets and cattle auctions are just as useless - all they do is provide a meeting place and a means to buy and sell - they create nothing.

It should come as no surprise that the system can and is abused - that’s pretty much the case for every system man has ever come up with. But to argue that capital markets are nothing more than siphons from the poor to the rich is to throw the baby out with the bath water.”

“I subscribe that and add that the stock value concept is indeed useful but has been twisted beyond recognition. If I try to think about it with a clean sheet, I can’t find a real reason why a company that manufactures screws is worth 10% more at noon than at 9 am and then 10% less at market close.

The company in my example behaves like most companies. They are going to open the next day and sell a bit more or a bit less, manufacture about the foreseen number of screws, some employees are going to get hired, others fired, others retire… Yet the swing in value of the whole company is based around news and rumours. Traders will “discount” this or that news on stock price of our happy screw manufacturer without even bothering about the steel stock or last month’s sales. Some will buy stock and make a profit by noon if they are lucky, or loss at close if unlucky.

Now, what does all this have to do with manufacturing screws? Isn’t there much more in common with Casino Royale than with industry and people building things and making a living out of creating something of value?

I attended a conference two years ago where an accountant explained that the concept of stock worth is fatally wounded. His theory, which I also agree wholeheartedly, is that stock should benefit the stockholder with dividends, i.e., with the net value generated by the company’s activity. Not by the increase in the value of stock itself in the short term. Now there is a place for investors, he also said, who invest in stock and sell the stock. But that kind of operations ought to be separated by months or years, when actually the stock reflects the increase in the value of the company. Not by minutes, when the increase in value is nothing more than a throw of dice, even if you attach fancy and serious names to it.”

“It’s a fundamental flaw.

The incentive to do the right thing (long term investment into production) is - money. If there is another way to make the same money easier or faster, or make more money or even make more money easier and a lot faster, then a rational participant in the market will do it.

Now, the stock market is a closed system - any buck that the day trader made, someone else had to put in. The stock exchange doesn’t generate any value. So if nothing else convinces you, then ask yourself where all these short-term pure trading profits come from. If you still haven’t realized after all the bailouts: It’s you.

Can’t really blame the traders. They ran a highly profitable scam for many years, then it all blew up. They probably couldn’t believe their luck when the tax payer stepped up to cover all the losses and didn’t even stop the scam. So heck yes do they continue, of course. Who wouldn’t?”

Well it happened; prices finally came down on flash harddrives enough that it met my criteria to purchase one. I went with the Corsair 128gb SATA (price, $325), which was large enough to comfortably let me hold my OS, all the games I play regularaly (WoW is 30gb by itself), and still have about 40gb to spare. I haven’t done any direct speed tests, but as a whole, my computer just feels much more fluid.

Starting up Windows 7 now takes 13 seconds, from first MS logo, to sitting at my desktop ready to check the internet. My bios itself takes about another 10 seconds, so it’s a total of 23 seconds before I’m ready to use my computer. This works pretty well for me, because it takes me almost exactly 23 seconds to find a pair of shorts and a t-shirt put them on so I can sit down at my computer in the morning.

Other programs, like Photoshop, open up in 2 seconds, IE8 opens in 1 second, and Chrome appears to startup in negative time. iTunes still takes a number of seconds to start, but it’s because I keep my music collection on my standard platter based harddrive, and I can hear the little clicks as it’s loading up my library.

One area where I expected a larger improvement is in game loading times. I’m talking mainly about those screens where you are just sitting, looking at a loading bar. They seem good, but not nearly as improved as everything else. Specifically in the Starcraft II beta, when a match is about to start, you can see all the other players loading progress. Relative to other players, I load equally as fast. As far as I understand, much of what is loaded is coming from your harddrive, and going into the video RAM on your graphics card. Perhaps the VRAM is the bottleneck there?

Has anyone else gotten to test out one of these SSD drives? What are your thoughts?

Well I just finished up the Harry Potter books last night, and it was an extremely good series. I felt like I went through them quickly so I looked at my online order history to see when I got the first book; it was mid-January. Now, 3 months later I’ve read through 7 books, and about 4000 pages. The last book especially I couldn’t put down. I had about 100 pages left in the final book when it became my bedtime, but I stayed up another couple hours to finish, there was just so much good stuff going on.

Now, having seen all of the movies made so far, and having read all the books, I’m very interested to see how they adapt the final book to movie form. You see, the first 2-3 movies held very close to the books. But after that, the books got about twice as long, while the movies realistically couldn’t push very much past that 3 hour mark and had to condense a lot of what was going on. Now when everything comes full circle in the final book, I’m not sure how they are going to explain all the stuff they had left out. I’m glad that they are breaking up the final book into 2 movies, it seems like they’ll be able to do them justice in that way, and perhaps they should have started that trend even earlier.

So now that I have finished those books, I need something new to read. There’s nothing out there that I’m really excited about. Right now I’m into philosophy, fiction, educational and science stuff. Anyone have any ideas?

So my sister just had twin baby girls and I got to spend a lot of time with them at the hospital over the weekend. There’s something nice about hanging out with a baby, and I think I’ve figured out the reason why. You know how in superhero movies how the best part is when they first discover they have super powers and they try them out for the first time? Babies are just like that, only their powers are things like being able to open their eyes to look around, and to move their hand and grab things. Raising a baby is just like watching a really long superhero movie; they learn to do new things all the time. Granted none of these things are amazing on their own, but you’re along with them for the journey and that’s fun.

Of course, you don’t feel this way about other people’s kids. I think it’s because you know you’re not going to see this kid very often so even if they start doing something interesting you won’t get to see the ending. It’s like sitting down to watch 2 minutes of the middle of Harry Potter. Despite it being a good movie, it’s tough to care when you know you won’t get to see the whole thing.

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I have a whole list of tasks to do at work, but I’m having trouble deciding which one to do next. One is high urgency and medium priority, while the other is high priority, but medium urgency. I guess the best thing to do in this situation is to blog.

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I’ve been investing in the stock market for the past year, and there is something that’s always bothered me about it. The stock market may generate wealth for a lot of people, but it doesn’t actually do anything on its own. Nothing is produced, it’s just money being moved around. It’s a handy way for companies to generate investments, I get that, but what seems odd is just how large of an industry we have that does nothing except move around money. 1 in every 5 bucks that changes hands in the country is going towards someone in the financial industry.

I work for a company that doesn’t even move money around itself, it moves research documents around to companies so they know how to move their money around. How does this business model even work? What happens when there is an apocalypse and people suddenly realize they no longer have any usable skills? You know who would be in good shape? Bear Grilles and Les Stroud. I should quit my job to become a survivor man. We really should be growing the survival industry.

A long time ago, a few months at least, I was prepared to join the IBlog Empire by starting a video game blog, IBlogWhatIPlay. That didn’t exactly pan out, and the Empire has since crumbled and nature is reclaiming its territory, all except IBlogWhatIHear, where thankfully, Steve continues to hear stuff.

So today, I’m going to blog the way I would had I started that other blog idea. The point is just to write about the new games I play, and possibly introduce you to something you’ll enjoy. Which brings us to…..

The Creeps!

“The Creeps” is a tower-defense game for the iPhone. I’ve been playing almost as many iPhone games lately as I have computer games because of the 2 hours I spend sitting on the subway each day. Tower defense games, for those of you who don’t know about them, are strategy games where you have money to buy defensive towers. You place these towers where you want, which then automatically attack enemies trying to invade whatever it is you’re defending. When you kill the enemies, you get money to buy more towers, etc..

I’m a big fan of tower defense games, having played 7 or 8 of them a good deal. For me, “GeoDefense” was the best tower defense on the iPhone, but now “The Creeps” may be taking away its title. There are just a few things that make “The Creeps” special, but they work well and the game is overall very solid and polished.

First “The Creeps” has about 10 different towers, some of which are quite original. For standard towers, the biggest innovation is the flashlight tower, which ramps up its damage the longer it stays on an individual enemy. The towers are mediocre for killing normal enemies, but are vital for kill the bosses that come every 5-10 waves. There are also several “super towers” in the game which can only be used every once in a while but then have a large cooldown. Each of these towers also require you to use the iPhone’s accelerometer to do whatever they need to accomplish. For instance, oil slick towers make you tilt the phone so enemies slide up or down as if they were standing on your phone. UFO, Spider and Whirlwind towers make you move your phone to control the position of, well, your UFO, Spider or Whirlwind. These super towers add a lot to the strategy as they are quite powerful, but force you to ration out when they are used and plan ahead.

The other major innovation are the obstacles on the board. Enemies have a path that they move along to reach their goal, which in this game is a scared kid in his bed at night. Outside of the path there are lots of trees, rocks, seashells etc. which block you from building towers until they are destroyed. They also give you money when blown-up so you have to efficiently divide your time between blasting enemies and blasting obstacles.

I’m very happy with the game; certainly worth the 2 or 3 bucks I paid. I’ve beaten the 2 modes of play I like the most on hard, and am now going back and working on getting perfects on all of them (no enemies reaching their goal, and destroying all obstacles on the board).

I’m posting this in part, because the friend who introduced me to this game was having trouble on the 5th survival stage, called “A Sticky Situation”. I just perfected this level, and wrote up my strategy for her. There are some spoilers here, so if you’re planning to get the game and want to learn on your own, you’d best avoid what is to follow.

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*Note,  I don’t endorse the setup of towers in this picture, it’s just the only pic of this level I found on the internet.

In the beginning, I always try to destroy as many obstacles as fast as I can. Once you get a money lead then you can afford to buy extra towers which can then be dedicated to destroying more obstacles etc. If you get a good start things tend to be really easy until you run out of obstacles to blow up.

On this level in particular you start with the spider tower to slow enemies, and the first boss creep doesn’t come until wave 10 or so, plenty of time to allow the tower to recharge. What I do is use that tower immediately to slow down the first batch of creeps while my lvl2 laser tower blasts away at the smaller rubble. Because waves do not have set starting points, but are timed based on when the last creep from the previous wave was destroyed, you get the most total time by placing the bulk of your towers away from the door, closer to the bed. On this stage I place my first tower on the open space within the circular area on the left. Also don’t be afraid to pause the game while you plan and build, as you waste less time thinking and clicking, and have more time to blow up obstacles.

Laser towers aren’t very good until upgraded fully to lvl 3 so my first couple towers will be laser towers and I upgrade them as soon as possible. I specifically place them so that they can reach the maximum amount of obstacles. Once you get ahead money-wise, you should be able to always have one tower blasting obstacles, while still having enough firepower to bring down creeps.

When I have the money to spare, I buy a flashlight tower and place it right in the middle of that circle. This tower sucks on normal creeps, but is vital for the bosses. Keep it moderately upgraded, use it in conjunction with the spider tower for each boss and you’ll be set. My one issue is that two bosses come just 5 rounds apart at one point, and my spider tower hasn’t yet recharged. If I plan it right however, I can kill the first of those two bosses without using the spider tower, but to do so I have to put a lot of money into my flashlight tower(s).

Other than that, I’m debating the usefulness of boomerang towers on this level. Boomerang towers do damage within a certain radius of their primary target, and is especially useful against grouped up creeps. On this level however, you have no glue towers, so creeps are a little more spread out, you may just get the most usefulness out of straight up laser towers.

One last tip, if you’re running into trouble on the last wave you can sell your spider tower for 600 bucks right after you get your final use out of it. That’s enough to pick up and extra flashlight tower for help on the last boss. On later levels, where you can build super towers instead of just starting with them, you can sell and rebuy them to avoid waiting for them the recharge. Since you get 80% of your money back when you sell, it will usually only cost you $150-200 bucks per use, which is a pretty good deal.

Our national debt scares me. It’s currently at $12.7 trillion. We also have a $1.4 trillion dollar budget deficit so that’s how much it’s growing by each year….plus interest. We only collect $2.2 trillion in tax revenues each year, which means that we’re about 6 years worth of income in debt.

Think about how much you make annually right now, then think about what your life would be like if you owed 6 times that much (if you have no job, you win here). If this were credit card debt, with interest in the 17-29% range we would already be in an inescapable black hole of debt; an event horizon if you will. That’s because the yearly interest would exceed our yearly tax revenue. The US would collect tax money, and it would all go to China. At that point, we’d basically be owned by China.

Luckily, our debt is not taken out through credit card companies. It’s instead comprised of many different loans, which on average, currently have a 3% APR. This means, that at our current rate, it will take until 2033 before we reach the event horizon. If interest rates jump upwards to a reasonable 5%, the event horizon occurs at 2021 instead. We’re really only a couple presidents away from a huge crisis.

I haven’t heard any serious debate about what we’re going to do about this. I don’t even know if escaping this debt is a reality. It’d be political suicide to even mention cutting spending on social security and medicare which comprises of almost half of our spending. You know who did discuss this? Ross Perot. This was the whole thing he campaigned on those 2 times he ran for president, but everyone told him to shutup and stop stealing votes from the other candidates.

The one good thing I can see in this is that the 3% we’re paying is less than we could reasonably expect by investing it. Because this is the case we’re better off using surplus money to invest than to pay back, and could hopefully come up with some extra money in that way. Of course, we’ll also have to get rid of our budget deficit or maybe even have a budget surplus again, like those 2 years with Clinton in office. I definintely wish we could get a refund on our war, it was defictive anyway.

If nothing changes, I could see us ending up like the Weimar Republic in Germany after WW1; massive inflation, a complete reset of the economy. I hope I’m not saving for retirement for nothing.

P.S. Check out this awesome debt clock. So many numbers.

I don’t know if everyone has “that uncle” in their family, but I sure do. No, I don’t mean the uncle that molests you, I mean the uncle that talks your ear off, always talks in superlatives, and is painfully ignorant about the subjects about which you are speaking.

I recently attended my family’s Easter get-together, and it was generally pleasant, except for that one uncle. We play a game at these family functions where everyone tries to avoid that uncle as much as possible so you don’t get trapped in the never-ending boring conversation. I pretty much lost that game, having gotten trapped several times. Usually, if the function is hosted at my parents’ house they’ll tell me that they need my help in the kitchen if they see that I’m trapped, but without the home-court advantage I was helpless.

This uncle, who is easily the largest person in the family (though certainly not the tallest) started as always by telling me about how amazing this diet he is doing is. He revealed to me the key to losing weight. This year’s key was different from last year’s, and not surprisingly, and he still weighs the same. I guess last year’s key was wrong, but I’m sure now he’s got the right idea. When he’s not telling me about how much his health is improving, or about how healthy he was in college, he’s telling me about his various medical problems. He walks with a cane, and has to carry around a small oxygen tank with him when he goes outside, and I don’t even think he’s 50 yet. Every problem he’s had has been because of food. Food even keeps him from being able to work. You see, he was a chef after college, but then he got some kind of disability that prevents him from being able to cook anymore (it’s called getting tired of cooking) and so he’s been getting disability money for a living since I was a little kid (the last 15 years or so).

So all of this is expected, and somewhat tolerable, but then he decided to start talking about my career and about how tough the job market is. His quote, “You’re a computer operator right? A dime a dozen, is that what they say?”. Trying not to be rude, I explained that I’m a programmer and that all of my CS friends are gainfully employed and generally valued, and assured him it was skilled labor. He took that to mean that I was specialized. I guess you could call me a specialized computer operator if that title even still existed and 99% of the world didn’t operate computers as part of their job. I guess I’m a computer operator that chose application development as my specialization, whereas the computer operator at McDonalds chose order entry as his specialization. Nearly the same thing.

Do you guys have any of those uncles? Feel free to bitch about them in the comments, I need to feel like I’m not alone on this one.