When I came home from work today, there were chickens in my yard. They were not tasty due to the fact that they were not cooked. They were not cooked due to the fact that they had not been plucked. They were not plucked (presumably) because they were not dead. I do not know why there were chickens. I hope they're gone now.

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So, I routinely use XPost to update all of the various copies of my crossposted blog (myspace has been broken for many months and I haven't had the inclination to start doing Wireshark dumps again). This is usually a straightforward endevour, but sometime over the last few weeks google decided to change the data that they return in response to requests. This caused XPost to break for blogger blogs because it was no longer able to properly parse the blogid which is associated with each blog in the blog listing for a user. The irritating thing is that they haven't updated the API reference documentation to reflect this change. The root cause is their lack of inclusion of the "self" link-rel. This had previously been one of the easier parts of a blog entry specification from which one could parse a blogid and was the one that I had been using. Now, I'm being forced to use the "id" field (which despite what it says contains significantly more than the id) which produces information that doesn't match the specification that is in the damn reference documentation. I hate wasting time to redo working code because someone else updates the interface without bothering to tell anyone. Moreover, google should fix their api so that they have a few extra fields so that each part of the "id" field is a single unique part rather than several disjointed parts which happen to go together.

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So, this weekend I finished playing through the new Alone in the Dark. I have to say that the game is both very good and horrible. It has a lot of serious issues with the controls: third person mode is almost unplayable for any period of time. Furthermore, the camera is often your mortal foe when it chooses to arbitrarily shift you out of first person mode or when it chooses to be "cinematic" and focus on the events going on rather than focusing on your character. This situation often causes the controls to change subtlely and was a frequent cause of death for me.

On the other hand, the plot was interesting enough to keep me playing. The game also had several very well designed puzzles (my personal favorite was the flaming car catapult) as well as a rather high degree of detail for the world. As an example of the latter, you make use of various cars throughout the game. Every car can be manipulated in about a dozen way: you can sit in any of the seats, you can turn on the radio, flip the lights on or off, check behind the visors (on either side), check the glovebox (it usually contains at least one useful item), honk the horn, turn the interior lights on and off, and/or hot wire the vehicle. Also, you can puncture the gas tank of a car to use it as a makeshift explosive, dive out of it while moving at high speed to use as a battering ram, or break out the window to open a locked car.

Similarly, the game also gives you a rediculous number of ways to blow things up. You can use bug, rust, or medical spray with the lighter to create a makeshift flamethrower. You can also find both glass and plastic bottles of gasoline. The former can be made into molotov cocktails that explode on imact while the latter can be used to make "time-delay" molotov cocktains. Moreover, the latter can be wrapped with double-stick tape to create something akin to skicky grenades.

The game is probably worth picking up once it hits that $20 sweet spot (I got it at gogamer on sale for $15 a few weeks ago) if only to see the various interesting things it lets you do.

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So, I started playing the new Alone in the Dark. Slightly after getting to the title splash, the game gave me a tip to jump off a rope. The control key to do this was Prnt Scrn. What the fuck? How would anyone, ever, in the history of gaming, think that was an acceptable key to use for any action? This is especially ridiculous when you realize that the game was also released on consoles which don't have the option of using such esoteric keys.

I'll probably continue playing, but my disbelief at this default setting forced me to stop and let out a sound of disbelief.

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So, I mentioned earlier in the year that due to strange restructuring, I went from being considered an exempt employee to being an "overtime-eligible exempt employee". I considered this annoying because it meant that I had to do daily timecards and use a more irritating time entry system, but I've discussed that before.

Today, I found out that exempt employees will begin having to do something idiotic. When an exempt employee want to take a half-day (perhaps they became ill midway through the day or need to take the morning off for personal reasosn), they can either not use sick/vacation time for it (essentially placing the burden on the projects that are supporting you) or spend a whole day's worth of sick/vacation time (wasting much of a sick/vacation day in the process). This is due to the requirement that exempt employees charge whole days at a time when making use of leave time. From now on, however, people who use the method of not using sick time for taking partial days off will be required to mark down such time using a special tag: "Unproductive time".

Now, clearly this is an attempt by certain people to gain a better view of the "redundancy" or "wasted" time that employees have. There are many problems with such a standard. Firstly, no one will ever record that they were "unproductive" for 10% of a week. Doing so will lead projects to question the person's work ethic or possibly attempt to remove such a person from a project. Secondly, when one starts to question the meaning of "unproductive time" it quickly degerates into meaninglessness. Is time spent reading slashdot unproductive? Most would say yes. Is the 15 minutes that I have to spend getting back to my place after my boss comes in to talk unproductive? Absolutely, but it is also unavoidable. What about the time that I spend walking to a meeting that's being held in a meeting on the other side of the lab? How about if I stare at the wall for a few minutes while I gather my thoughts when switching between tasks? Is using the restroom unproductive time?

And what about the other side of the coin? What if I can't get to sleep at night because I'm busy considering how to go about solving some problem at work? Can I bill that as "supraproductive time"? If I'm on a telecon and also coding, is that "supraproductive time"? What if the telecon and the software have different charge numbers associated with them?

All of this really goes to what it means to be an exempt employee. Exempt employees are supposed to be professionals. They aren't hired to "write software for 40 hours a week" or to "design circuits 40 hours a week"; they're hired to do tasks. Trying to increase the effectiveness of the employees by tracking "unproductive time" seems like the sort of thing that goes counter to the very idea of jobs that require responsibility and self-management. I suspect that, once implemented, it will be a complete non-starter with employees. I doubt that any employee will ever list a single minute of time as "unproductive".

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So, at my apartment I have a phone line. This line is necessary in order to get DSL and has no telephone attached to it. For some reason, however, various companies and governmental entities have discovered that my "home phone" number is the number of this line rather than my cell phone which I actually use.

Once I discovered this, I decided to try to rig something up such that any call to my land line would be automagically sent to my cell phone. Such things have been possible for some time due to the advent of "call forwarding", but I still had some apprehension as to the details of such a Rube Goldberg machine and so called up ATT.

Firstly, the ATT phone system is quite annoying. It requires you to speak commands to it and will not allow you to go to an agent without first selecting a "topic". After doing so the first time, I was disconnected before a person answered without warning or explaination. Upon navigating the automated system a second time, I was directed to a person who could "only handle customers in the Midwest". This person kindly forwarded to my call to a person who could handle "California customers". This second person also could not handle people in California. The third person could handle people in California, but not people who were in the U-verse coverage area (of which I apparently am). However, the fourth person could help me.

I had two questions of relevance. Firstly, since I have the lowest end phone plan available, I wanted to make sure that getting incoming calls wouldn't send me over the limit. It turns out that I can get unlimited incoming calls without getting a charge. This was the right answer. The second question was whether I would be forced to pay long distance charges to forward my California telephone number to my Indiana cell phone number. It turns out that, even though I use ATT for both my land line and my cell phone, I would be forced to pay for long distance for any incoming call. The only option they offered was to go from my $5/month plan to a $25/month plan which would have unlimited long distance. This was the wrong answer.

Upon trying to end the call, I was abruptly halted by a pitch to get the U-verse service for television and internet connectivity. Presumably, this would have replaced my DSL connection so I enquired as to whether or not this would be Business-class internet. The person on the line responding by telling me about the line speed available. I told them that I wasn't asking about the speed at which point they again told me about the speed. Once again I responded that speed alone does not business class make and the person attempted to forward me to a business U-verse at which point I bid them good day.

I should also note that, once you've had your call forwarded cross-country 4 times, it becomes very difficult to hear anything that is said over a telephone.

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So, I recently have been playing through some PS3 and some 360 games. The games themselves are not the point of this entry, however. Instead, I think it it important to compare the experience between playing on the PS3 and the 360. The big thing that I've noticed is one of wireless controller behavior. The battery life of the 360 (either with a pair of AAs or with the recharable pack) is significantly better than that of the PS3 controller. I believe this fact is at least partially due to the 360's decision to automatically deactive an idle controller. Also of note is the behavior of the PS3 vs. the 360 when a controller is no longer able to connect. For every game that I've played on the 360 (approximately 3), the game automatically pauses when the controller turns off. The PS3, however, simply keeps on letting enemies shoot you. I consider this poor behavior. Restoring from a power loss is also very different. The PS3 has no removable battery which means that it must be plugged in via USB to charge. The downside to this is that, unlike the PS1 or PS2 controller's cable, the PS3 cable is only about 5 feet long. The PS3 controller also seems to not be rechargable via standard USB charging cables (like came with my cell phone). When the power dies on a 360 controller, I can put in another pair of batteries or switch for another battery pack.

Taken all together, this seems to show how much better the 360 controller is than the PS3 controller. Unfortunately, the ergonomics of the 360 controller are rather weak. They show especially in games that make heavy use of the shoulder triggers (like Kameo). The real problem is the long stroke length of the shoulder triggers which tends to cause pain in my wrist after extended playing. I had similar troubles with the controller on the Dreamcast which used a nearly identical shoulder button configuration (albeit with only one trigger per side). Hopefully, the next incarnation of the Playstation controller will include the wise decisions that were made on the 360 controller's power system without compromising the good ergonomics that have consistently been a hallmark of the line.

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So, I recently beat Eternal Sonata. Doing so earned me 360 of the 1000 gamerscore points possible in the game. After assessing the apparent difficulty of getting all 1000 points, I decided that I wanted to try to do so. I completed this task last night and have to say that it was not at all worth it. I essentially had to play through 80% of the game on a much higher difficulty while completing random, completely unclued tasks. The worst part about said tasks was that they really didn't provide any particular advantage in game. The largest point getter was the 321G achievement called EZI worshiper. This achievement requires you to collect a large pile of useless items (nearly 20) scattered across the game whose only common feature is the use of EZI in their name. This feat is somehow just barely less worthy of reward than beating the full game.

Hopefully this experience will prevent me from allowing my OCD from forcing me to try to get all of the achievements in another game. I may not end up with an impressive gamercard, but at least I'll stay sane.

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So, I joined LinkedIn a few hours ago. I don't remember precisely what prompted me to do it, but I found the experience remarkably...sterile. There was nothing at all interesting about using it, or searching for people on it, or using it. I suppose this is the direct side-effect of it being a "business social networking site" as opposed to a "drunked frat-boy social networking site" or a "maladjusted highschool loser social networking site". Regardless, I searched for many people that I knew from college and only found a handful of them, so apparently it isn't even popular enough to be mildly useful to me yet.

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People are talking about Chrome as though it is some amazing thing. I personally require the following changes before it becomes a possible browser choice.

1. Support for StumbleUpon - What use is the internet if it can't entertain me?
2. The ability to turn off tabbed browsing - OK, I understand that there are people who like tabs. I'm not one of these people. I like windows because I can alt-tab between them easily. This is a huge show-stopper for me.
3. Linux Support - Yeah, I only use Windows to play video games now.
4. Cleaner handling of self-signed SSL certificates - I use self-signed certificates for various things. I want to be able to simple add the cert to a whitelist and never have to check anything again. Currently, it doesn't seem like there is an easy way to do that.
5. A pony

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So, I decided to install Firefox 3 on my old Rose laptop. This laptop has, since I graduated, run Gentoo and thus requires me to compile FF in order to run it. Compiling software on my laptop hadn't been a problem before, but it seems as though its ability to disperse heat has been compromised possibly due to age. This situation causes the laptop to shut itself down after compiling for a period of time as it overheats. It took a few occurances before I realized what was going on. Fortunately, I have found a solution to the problem:

while(true) do kill -SIGSTOP $pid; sleep 120; kill -SIGCONT $pid; sleep 130; done

Yes, I am in fact running my compiler at a slightly less than 50% duty cycle by forcing the emerge process to suspend and the resuming it a bit later. No, I don't expect to ever have to do this again. Yes, it is stupid crap. No, I won't just install the binary package.

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When you are creating a game with voice acting, it is important to do several things. Firstly, you need to make sure that you have subtitles whenever people are speaking. This is to make sure that everyone who might be hearing impaired can still play the game. Secondly, you need to make sure that there is no time when there should be voice acting, but there are instead only subtitles because then people who don't have them enabled won't understand what is going on.

Eternal Sonata violates both of these guidelines. This is made more aggregious by the fact that the game offers to let you play with Japanese audio + subtitles rather than an English dub. During combat, occasionally friendly and opposing characters will make quips. These are not subtitled. More aggregiously, nearly half of the ending sequence is not subtitled. This is very bad if you've just played through the entire game and then characters start talking without you being able to understand at the game's conclusion. This is even worse if the only way to understand is to restart the game, enable the English dub, and then re-fight the final boss. As to the second guideline--always dubbing things--the game also fails. There are interstisials between chapters that describe various pieces of Chopin's music. Unfortunately, these apparently did not exist in the Japanese version and are thus undubbed. This means you have a soft song playing with text scrolling incredibly slowly against various static images. Such a situation is a very poor way to keep my interest.

This isn't hard. Do it right.

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So, Amazon has a cool thing: 12 of Bach's Violin Concertos performed by Itzahk Perlman. I would not have known that it was a cool thing if it were not for the fact that they collectively cost $0.99 for all of them. dealmein wins again.

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I found a temporary controller until my regular one returns.

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So, I began playing my first 360 game a few days ago. I chose to start with Eternal Sonata because I hadn't played a Japanese style RPG since Xenosaga III. Playing this game, I discovered that the analog stick on the controller that I had gotten with my 360 was somewhat marginal. Although it did what an analog stich was supposed to--move the character as it was moved--it also exhibited behavior that it should not--moving the character when it was not moved. It seems that approximately 20% of the time, the controller will pull to the left at the lowest registerable setting after it has been used.

This behavior is unacceptable due to Eternal Sonata's gameplay mechanics. The game uses a turn based combat system wherein you have a limited amount of "action time" and "tactical time" each turn. Action time is consumed by moving, attacking, using magic and using items. Once party level two is reached, action time is consumed continuously from when you first take an action in a turn. To prevent you from having zero time to prepare when a turn begins, the game gives you tactical time. This time is consumed before you begin moving and allows you to plan out your turn. Unfortunately, when the controller is constantly pulling to the side, it means that your turn begin and you begin inching to the side. This destroys any tactical time you may have and begins eating away at the action time. Needless to say, this is one condition where blaming death on a controller may in fact be justified.

I called the 360 support line and they, after some idiotic "troubleshooting", agreed to replace the controller. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, does not cross ship on repairs so I'll not have a controller for the next "5 to 10" business days. I expect about a 90% chance that I will thus purchase another controller and MS will get my money for a second controller despite the fact that the defective device was theirs.

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