Tea Leaves

For several years now I’ve had issues with the Meyersdale Maple Festival. Namely, I always intend to go but then always forget. Sometime in June I’ll ask my friends “Hey, when’s the maple festival? I want to meet the Maple Queen.” and they shout “March!” and I say “Oh, oops, maybe next year.”

This year, the 60th year of the festival, I finally remembered to go. And I met the Maple Queen.

The thing about the Maple Queen has been driving my friends insane for years now. It started out as a joke. In ages past, according to my friends from the area, participating in the Maple Festival was compulsory: one friend of mine was chosen by her school for the contest, and decided not to participate. She was informed, firmly, that if she did not she would get detention. So, at least years ago, people in these parts apparently took the festival really, really seriously. And who can blame them? It’s a big event.

People-watching

Meyersdale is a sleepy town nestled deep in the Laurel Highlands, not far from the Maryland border. Large windmills sit astride the ridge overlooking the town. We hit the classic auto show first, under the theory that the classic car people would get bored and drive away fairly soon (we turned out to be right). Activities in town included the pancake breakfast (with lots of maple syrup, of course, and completely awesome homemade sausage), and people-watching. It was a beautiful day, so the bikers were out in full force.

The actual fair proper had lots of interesting displays and talks. Active maple taps to look at and touch (and taste — the sap really doesn’t taste like much before it’s processed, which makes one wonder how they discovered the process to begin with). The boiling off of the excess water in the sugar shack was interesting, but for me the highlight was watching the woodworkers make wooden buckets: woodworking is a skill I’ve never had the patience for, but there is true beauty in it. My photos from this part of the fair weren’t good enough to post, but fortunately someone else has produced a great gallery of maple production photos, so I don’t have to.

I only had one question: “Did anyone make maple-based liquor?” This is a question that has been burning in my mind for a while now. It seems to me that every place where people make things that could be fermented, they do ferment them, so perhaps there might be a local moonshine-like equivalent to rum. I think the presenters thought I was poking fun at them, but I was in earnest: this area of Pennsylvania, after all, was the epicenter of the Whiskey Rebellion, so they certainly knew a lot about distilling. No one, however, had ever heard of maple spirits. After the festival I did a little digging. No one has definitive answers, but the best hypothesis I’ve read is that the economics of maple syrup production made competing with rum impractical. It turns out that a maple vodka does exist, but it’s a fairly recent innovation.

Maple Queen and her retinue. Click to enlarge.

Most importantly, though, I met the 2007 Maple Queen, Kaitlyn Berkley. Her Majesty was very gracious.

There was a break in the bleak weather and a small break in the workload at work, so we spent the weekend doing weekend things instead of surfing the web and finding some dork topic to spout off on. Instead, I have some short thoughts on things that are not worth a whole article.

Yupcakes

Recently, Pittsburgh has joined a socioeconomic and culinary trend that has been sweeping through the neighborhoods of the intellectually less gifted. I refer, of course, to the foofy cupcake shop. Now, I am never one to critcize those who are willing to spend stupid amounts of either time or money in the pursuit of culinary delights. My problem with the foofy cupcake is not with the theory, but the practice. If I am going to pay $2.50 for a small confectionary pastry, it better have more going for it than half a pound of butter creme on top.

In Pittsburgh, there are two new local instantiations of this new way to separate those with too much money from some of their cash. I have tried the one in Shadyside that is of higher repute, at least among the people I know. What I have to say is, if you want to spend $2.50 on cake and butter creme, I suggest you go by your local Giant Eagle and pick up some butter creme Gobs. Not only is the cake better, so is the butter creme. We tried three or four different kinds of cakes. They were uniformly dry, crumbly, tasteless, and generally lacked anything to recommend them except for the fact that they each cost as much as two and a half songs from iTunes.

And, lest you think I’m just being a grump, even the Pittsburgh Post Gazette agrees with me. You have to feel bad for anyone who apsires to make fancy food and gets dumped on by the Post Gazette.

Note: my friend Francisco (or it could have been Ray) came up with the term “yupcake.” I could never think of something that funny on my own.

Grade Inflation

We went to our first PSO concert in a while. It was very enjoyable. However, the show did point out a strange behavior of the PSO audience. This particular night, the young piano soloist gave what appeared to be a spirited performance of a concerto by Robert Schumann. I am generally bored by Schumann, and the performance here was not strong enough to shake me of my convictions. The band itself didn’t seem all that excited by it either. But, reaching the end of the piece, the audience members sprang up roaring their approval, eventually making the soloist walk out four or five times.

This ritual standing ovation has always puzzled me. I think it is fine to express appreciation for a performance that is particularly momentous. But to stand up at the end of every show and make a big show out of giving a standing O for even pedestrian performances of the odd warhorse seems to me to just cheapen to the whole enterprise.

Of course, when I stood up after the Sibelius Fifth Symphony that ended the concert, the woman sitting behind me huffed a bit about how she liked the piano player better.

First Ride

Took my first bike ride of the year this weekend. It’s been too cold or wet or busy before now. After fifteen years of this I’ve finally learned the core lesson of the early season ride. Anyone, no matter how old or feeble, can use their legs to drive a bike at 15-17mph on a flat road with favorable wind. But don’t be fooled. The second you hit that little rise, you will not feel as good as you did last year. So if you want to avoid that sick dizzy feeling that you can get from working too hard, just suck it up and take the hills slowly.

With this lesson, I successfully avoided feeling like I had to puke for an hour after the ride.

Parking Denied

Streets with parallel parking on them make drivers dumber. I have proof. How often has this happened to you?

You are creeping up the road looking for parking. You see a spot near the curb. You line yourself up to back into said spot. Just at that moment, the mental midget in the car behind you decides that he needs to creep up your tailpipe so that the whole line of cars can make progress. The result is that you can’t park and you have to spend the next fifteen hours driving in circles looking for parking. What the hell?

Ad Sense

The people who program the nationally broadcast advertising time slots for sports events at the major networks seem to me to lack a reliable sense of time. Apparently, they think that three in the afternoon is actually in the middle of the night when the kiddies have all gone to bed. I say this because all through the football season I had to endure promos for the horror and crime fiction shows on CBS and NBC, flipping the TV off if the child was in the room.

Then, this weekend, the Pens were on TV. I haven’t seen the Pens since they got good, so I watched a bit. Lo and behold, a promo for some movie that tells the touching story of how Spartan warriors disembowel their enemies came over the wire in between periods. Speaking of Spartans, just few minutes later, there was an extended ad for God of War, showing everyone’s favorite pale Spartan doing those God of War things. I guess blood in the afternoon is the new thing for the kids who like to watch sports.

Good show TV networks. Well played.

Teaser

Speaking of God of War, I caved, so it’s time for my nightly ritual slicing and dicing of faceless enemies. More thoughts on God of War later this week.

My internet provider of choice (and former employer) Telerama has been having a few problems lately. This has engendered some morbid conversations, Irish wake-style, among some folks about whether and when the business will completely give up the ghost.

Regardless of what happens to Telerama — and I hope it’s around for a long time, and regains a solid financial footing — I think it brings some lessons that are of interest to anyone who wants to run a small business. I’m going to wander far afield and talk about some of these, and also talk a little bit about Telerama.

A friend of mine asked me yesterday whether I had switched my DSL over to some other company yet. “No, not yet,” I said. “I’m going to ride it out for a few days and give Doug some time.” “Is that an emotional attachment, or a financial calculation?” she asked. “Neither. It’s just, well, having my DSL through these guys keeps things interesting.”

Now, the unfortunate thing for Telerama is that “interesting” is not really what most people want out of their service providers.

The intriguing thing about Telerama as a case study is that it was clear from around 1995 or so that it was in the wrong business. Small businesses can’t make money and grow selling internet services to end users. Yes, I’m aware that there are a number of other providers in the Pittsburgh region in this market, but that doesn’t make the statement any less true: unless you are offering some substantive service that isn’t available elsewhere, you’ll eventually be pushed out of the market by larger players, who will offer better service for lower cost.

So the key question for Telerama in the early 1990s was: how could the company exploit its early start and find new markets? That’s what never happened. Why not?

Unwanted Guests

Most of the people who started internet companies in the early 1990’s had, to put it mildly, strong personalities. This is not coincidental. The Internet in 1990s was largely controlled by an oligopoly of entities that worked on behalf of universities and research institutions. For-profit network operators were unwanted. Early on, your ability to resell service lived or died at the pleasure of someone who had no interest in actually selling you bandwidth. The only people who started ISPs were those who were prepared to take risks that others were not willing to take.

In order to start an ISP in the early 1990s, you had to be willing to look your upstream provider in the face and lie to them about what you were doing. That really meant that only a certain type of person could start a succesful ISP.

This very attitude let Doug, Telerama’s owner, do some things that others were unwilling or unable to do. Doug was a superb judge of technical talent, as distinguished from technical knowledge. He was constantly hiring people who had very sparse technical resumes, but who would prove to be sharp, quick-learning, and adept. I know of many people working as software developers, networking researchers, and network operators today whose careers were launched because Doug gave them a chance before anyone else did. The importance of his ability to recognize this kind of talent can’t be overstated.

It’s also important to note that Telerama has been an ISP for 16 years. In that time, countless other ISPs have started and gone bankrupt. Keeping an ISP afloat in the marketplace for this long is no mean feat.

The Control Paradox

The key paradox in running (and growing) a small business is that you can’t grow without dividing up control and responsibility, but there’s incentive against doing so. Giving the wrong guy too much control can result in someone taking the company you worked hard to build and driving it into the ground. But in my experience, failing to find the right people to give control to will result in the same end — it’ll just take longer. You can’t do it all yourself, and you shouldn’t try. Finding the right people to give responsibility to will increase your control over the company.

This can be summed up as follows: as an entrepreneur who owns a startup, your number 1 priority should be hiring your replacement.

You need 4 good people to have a hope of managing any business:

1. The Guy Who Manages People. This is the person who hires the people who do the “real work”, and whom they report to.
2. The Guy Who Sells Things. This is the person whose job is to help you plan where you will make your money, and to help you execute that plan (yes, I am well aware that I am mixing marketing and sales together. You will unmix them as you grow).
3. The Guy Who Watches The Cash. This is the person who can, at a moment’s notice, answer the questions “What are we spending money on?” and “What can we do to improve our cash flow?”
4. The Idea Guy. This is the person thinking about products or services that you can be selling several years down the road.

In most of the successful companies I’ve seen, the founder ends up being The Idea Guy, since that’s how he came up with the idea for the company in the first place. If you actually plan to grow, and not just maintain your business, you’ll very quickly need an HR person (”The Guy Who Keeps You From Getting Sued Too Much”).

The road to failure is littered with the corpses of companies who let their Idea Guy also be The Guy Who Watches The Cash or, for that matter, any of the other guys. One or more of these people will also be your Guys Who Raise Money, but that’s a subject that’s beyond the scope of this article.

The thing I’m trying to make clear here is that it is in your business’s best interest if these are all physically separate Guys. There are a number of reasons for this, but it boils down to two things. First, the most important part of fixing a screwup is figuring out that the screwup exists. Second, you want accountability. You want to be able to make the minimum number of staff changes needed to fix the problem, and no more.

My impression at Telerama is that at any given time they really only had 2 Guys: “Doug” and “This other guy that Doug hired to do everything.”

That’s not enough Guys.

An Illustrative Story

In early 1994, Doug and I were in our early 20s. Neither of us had a lot of experience running a business. When things at Telerama needed to be done, we just did them. The idea of hiring (for example) a Sales Guy didn’t really occur to us.

Once, we showed up for a sales call on a local Internet startup (motto: “We don’t produce anything of value!”). These folks were looking to lease a modest amount of high speed internet services. The local phone company was still charging usurious rates for DS1 service, and the expertise to operate the lines was still fairly specialized. Telerama had already demonstrated competence at operating such services, and was quoting a price significantly less than our closest competitor.

I wore a suit. Doug, who was used to dealing with techically savvy people who didn’t trust people who wore suits, was wearing very casual street clothes.

Since this potential customer was a very “straight” company, that’s really all you have to say. The numbers we put up, the value proposition, none of that mattered. To this company, Telerama had just become the oddly-dressed guys, and there was no chance of making the sale.

On the way out to the parking lot, Doug said “Huh, that didn’t go so well, I guess.” I looked over at him. “You’re buying a suit.” “I can’t afford a suit!” he said. “The company is buying you a suit,” I said.

We got Doug a suit. We started making sales after that. This particular potential customer went bankrupt in 1997, so at least some good came out of the meeting.

The interesting thing about this story, to me, is that it could have gone either way: had the client been a different sort of company, the sale might have been lost because I was wearing a suit. “Why should we trust these guys? They’re a bunch of suits.”

If you have a Guy Who Sells Things, she knows exactly what the customer expects her to be wearing before she shows up.

100% of $0 is $0

One thing about Telerama that I think most people don’t realize is that it mostly grew by its bootstraps. Most of the money invested in the company came from its customers. This is unusual. Many companies, especially tech companies, choose venture capital. The most egregiously unselfconscious of entrepreneurs even choose VC and then whine about how they had to sleep in the bed they made. VC comes with strings, and for many businesses those strings are very helpful. But the secret of VC is that the real value it brings isn’t cash, but expertise — expertise in running a company. A good VC helps you hire your replacements. That will help your company grow.

All of this sounds obvious, but the missing link is that founders are not always rational about money. Many of them don’t view the company as an intangible holder of value, but as an emotion-laden opus into which they’ve poured their hopes and dreams. And so the rational argument “bringing in more expertise will help the company grow” sometimes can’t outweigh the desire to keep tight control on “their baby.” All you can do as an employee is learn to recognize when this is happening, and run in the opposite direction as fast as you can.

Memento Mori

In Republican Rome, when a victorious general would receive a triumph, a slave dressed in rags would be perched behind him. That slave would periodically lean over and whisper in the general’s ear, reminding him that he was merely a man. In a business, that role is served by your partners, by your board, and by your shareholders. If you have no partners, no board, and no shareholders, then you are navigating a very strong current with only a very weak rudder. I think that, more than anything else, is what has put Telerama into its present dire strait. No matter how good Doug’s judgment is, he’s just one guy, and without a group of people with brains, experience, and a vested interest in the matter, he’ll continue to struggle.

I don’t know how one can salvage the situation. But if there’s one thing I know about Doug, it’s that he’s not afraid to try new things. If he can find the fortitude to find funding, gather a competent team, give them responsibility, and execute a plan, then who can say where the company will go. This is Telerama’s standing eight count. “Down and out” may seem likely, but it’s not a certainty. Not yet.

Since our office moved closer to Oakland, Craig Street is the most convenient place to get a bite to eat or a cup of coffee. This is somewhat tragic, since Craig Street has always been covered with a miasma that makes food served in the area merely adequate. The best example of this is the Coffee Situation.

Coffee on Craig St. is an unmitigated disaster. There’s Kiva Han, which for all its hip aura sells coffee so unremittingly and gruellingly terrible that I’ve actually poured it out after one sip. There’s Starbucks, about which we know all there is to know. There’s the crêpe place, which sells decent coffee but charges you $5 or something, and the atmosphere is all wrong. There’s the new place in Mellon Bank which I haven’t tried but which looks like a chain. And there’s Eat Unique.

Eat Unique, formerly Craig St. Coffee, sells adequate coffee. It’s not overpriced. It doesn’t taste terrible. It’s not actually good, either: I’ve driven a half hour out of my way to have a macchiato at La Prima Espresso, but I wouldn’t detour five minutes for an Eat Unique coffee.

Eat Unique wants to be a lunch place. Here, they do a little better: every time I go there for lunch, I have a yummy sandwich or interesting soup. The problem, of course, is their throughput. Going there for lunch basically means I have to wait about 20 minutes longer than I think I should to pick up my meal. It’s usually worth the wait, but the wait still often discourages me from eating there at all.

Lately, however, they’ve been paying more attention to breakfast pastries. Now, they’re no replacement for Antonio — no one will ever be a replacement for Antonio — but they are bringing some interesting options to the table. Their cinnamon rolls are excellent, but what is particularly interesting is that they are now serving a line of savory scones that are actually unique: this morning I grabbed a fig and blue cheese scone. It’s excellent. The seeds in the figs give a nice crunch, and the blue cheese is really more of a suggestion than anything, and doesn’t overwhelm. This probably makes them the breakfast place of choice on Craig St., in my book, at least for now.

I’m still working up the courage to try the maple syrup and bacon scone, though.

Does this improve the coffee? Not really. But it does help to have something yummy to wash down.

One bit of fallout from the Wii “Everybody Votes!” channel is that you’ll find yourself going along through your work day when suddenly you’re overcome with the inability to comprehend: who the hell are all these people who aren’t mad when they get stood up on dates?

Or the people who don’t brush their teeth right before going to bed. You people sicken me.

For the last two months or so, I’ve been in the enviable position of not having to think about games. I’ve had a “one game” that I can just leave in the machine and fire up every time the urge hits. I hear that this is one of the reasons people are so happy about World of Warcraft.

Sadly, all good things must reach the final Boss. And thus my run through Final Fantasy XII finally came to an end. This leaves me in the difficult situation of being in between games.

But first, a couple of thoughts about Final Fantasy. This was the first game of the series that I managed to play to the end. I’ve messed with some of the older ones for “historical research” purposes, but found them too stilted to actually play. I tried to play Final Fantasy X during my post Shadow Hearts JRPG binge. The water polo mini-game and the voice work both sucked the life out of that game for me.

XII is different. As I said before, the one thing you can’t complain about is the production values. The art direction, level design, character design, sound design, voice work, writing and cut scene production are all top notch. Even the rendering engine almost manages to make you forget about the PS2 looks-like-ass filter. While there is no progressive scan, playing the game in widescreen is a pleasing audio and video experience. I found the game compelling and easy to play for a long time. Which is good, because it’s a damn long game.

A lot of people have complained about the robot combat system. I like it. It is easy to get yourself killed with buggy scripts. But the scripting and auto-combat are not that different from what Bioware has done its KOTOR games, except that you can actually make the characters smart enough to take care of most fights on their own. It’s especially convenient that you can set up scripts to auto-buff your party so you don’t have to cast the same tedious series of buffing spells for every damn fight. This makes grinding for levels almost fun. Which is good because if you play this game to just do the main story, you’ll find yourself feeling chronically weak until near the end of the game. I think the game is designed with the idea that you will actually do the boring hunt side-quests and therefore level your characters and collect cash fairly quickly. Sadly, the hunt quests are boring and frustrating. More sadly, you must do at least a few of them to get a few spells and devices that will make your life a lot easier in the later parts of the game. This goes against my streamlined theory of RPG design, which is that I should never have to do any extra work to get the all the killer stuff I need to beat the game easily. Boo Square-Enix.

The result of all of this is that it takes longer than you would like to be of the right level and have the right stuff. Being relatively weak means you end up engaging in what I call the “flee to the savepoint” tactic whenever coming into a new area. I found that usually the creatures in any new place would pummel me into jelly if I hung around too long to fight them and they ganged up on me. So instead I would just run away to the next save and then backtrack from the save back into the area to slowly defeat things and level up a bit. This works OK until you get into the final few areas where the game decides that it should subject you to chains of bosses at the end of a dungeon with no intermediate savepoint. This happens a few times during the game and most egregiously at the end of the game. The final area is a soul-sucking chain of multiple bosses, each one of which will sap your party of the resources it needs to fight. But, if you manage these resources well, and have some way to restore them near the end, the fight itself is not very interesting, just long and boring. Happily, the final cut scene is pretty.

In all, I found FFXII to be greatly entertaining with only a couple of minor annoyances related to balance and a sparse matrix of savepoints.

But now that I’m done, what do I play? There aren’t a lot of compelling options on the horizon.

On the Xbox 360, there is the brainless sandbox cop game (Crackdown) and yet another Ubisoft shooter (GRAW 2). No thanks. The good games for the 360 still appear to be a few months out. Maybe Bioshock won’t suck.

On the PS2, there is God of War but I can’t see that being any more interesting or less offensive than the first one. Karen hated the first one. I could get the new MLB:07 game, but I just got my RPG pitcher a $32M contract in MLB:06, and I can’t see starting that whole thing over again.

I guess I could play more Zelda but that tends to hurt my brain.

When no new games will do, the back catalog comes to the rescue! Standing in the Exchange yesterday, I saw two games I could pick up without hating myself. First, there was a badly reviewed JPRG for the 360 called Enchanted Arms. It was cheap and the guys over at Penny Arcade liked it, so it’s worth a shot. I also saw a very cheap copy of that old peterb favorite Beyond Good and Evil. I never managed to finish this game on the Xbox because I found the controls too tiring, but I find these games much easier to play on the PS2 so it’s worth a shot.

If these don’t work out, I guess I could work my way through my own back catalog. There are the old PS2 platformers I’ve never finished (Jak, Sly, Ratchet). There is my stable of sports games (Madden, MLB, NBA Street). There is my collection of unfinished JPRGs and strategy games (More Shadow Hearts, Disgaea, etc). And finally, there are the odd horror games that I never get through (Eternal Darkness, Silent Hill, Fatal Frame).

Of course, I never finished these games before, and there isn’t any evidence that they will grab me harder this time. This is not really the fault of the games. That catalog unquestionably contains titles that are almost universally praised. This is just the nature of being in between games. You bounce from product to product until you manage to find another one game. Games that really grab you are fairly rare and really great long games are even more rare. I think the fact that we spend so much time between games tends to make us gamer nerds overly pessimistic about the state of the industry. We want every game to recreate that combination of a great buzz and the feeling of security and well being that the “one game” brings. When it doesn’t happen, we lash out at the developers and publishers for “not innovating” or always subjecting us to stale mediocrity. We should probably be more forgiving. It’s not likely that I will ever have another year like 2004/2005 where there was a chain of great games to play for 11 out of 12 months. The key to inner peace and happiness is to accept this as the natural state of the world and just bide your time until the next great game comes along. Then you can enjoy a month or two of stability before bouncing back out into the state of being in between.

This weekend a story with horrifying implications came over the airwaves of the Internet Gaming Forums. This story is of such gravity and importance that I decided to delay my usual Monday morning semi-philosophical wanky gaming article for a day and inform you, our dear reader, of its existence so you can gird yourself for the impending doom to come.

So, without further delay, here is the terrible news: Nintendo’s online service will continue to require separate friend codes for every different game. That’s right. There will be no unified friends list. Ok. You can sit down and catch your breath now.

This story about Nintendo game over one of the two forums I read. Let’s see, one of the first replies was something along the lines of

… fuck you for this, Nintendo. Fuck you very hard.

This took me a bit by surprise. On the one hand, it makes sense that people reading an online forum about video games would would think that online gaming is important. Therefore it would make sense that the people on the forum would be disappointed that Nintendo has stuck with their tedious friend code system.

On the other hand, it is astounding to me that anyone would make a unified online profile and matchmaking system the single feature from which their entire view of a particular system is drawn. It’s just not that important. Yes, Microsoft makes a lot of revenue off of Xbox Live. Yes, Blizzard prints money. But those are just two companies with online customer bases numbered in the tens of millions. There are something like *200* million active console gaming devices, and who knows how many hundreds of millions of units of offline games sold for that hardware. Even the bathtubs of money that Blizzard has with World of Warcraft pale in comparison to the total amount of money in the whole industry.

On the third hand, it’s also safe to say that it is an area of future growth. More people are connected every day. If you want to survive through the next few product cycles, you have to figure out how you are going to exploit this for money.

Microsoft has decided that a good long term strategy is to aggressively pursue the online gamer. They have spent the last five years building a unified hardware and software infrastructure for Xbox Live. In addition, they have required that games on the system use this infrastructure for all of their online needs. They even make the publishers make up those stupid achievements so we can all get our pavlovian online treats. This strategy make a lot of sense for Microsoft.

I can’t really tell what Sony is thinking. They are sort of out to lunch lately.

Nintendo has taken a cautious approach. Basically, to play games with your friends online, you have to spend a few minutes tediously writing down some numbers and entering them into your machine. You can then try to jump into a game with them. Apparently, this is an unforgivable sin for a few different reasons.

First, there is the claim that the system is somewhere between tedious and clunky and completely crippled and unusable. I would agree that the system is inconvenient. I don’t know that I’d call it crippled or retarded.

Second, there is the claim that since Nintendo was building an online gaming system anyway, they surely could have built something equivalent to Xbox Live “while they were at it.” This ignores a very important fact: no one has been able to build an online matchmaking system as good as Xbox Live at its best. Even on the Xbox 360 itself, only Halo 2 gets this completely right. Most of the others, even big titles like Gears of War, don’t come close. I don’t know what the current state of the art on PCs is, but the last time I tried to play online using Steam I wanted to put an ice pick through my aorta because it would hurt less.

So, yes, it is true that what Nintendo has built for online gaming is not as nice as Xbox Live. But, the claim they could just roll out an Xbox Live killer from their back pocket is one that only someone with a very loose connection to actual reality could make. In reality, building such a service would cost Nintendo a lot of extra time and money. This is not time and money that Nintendo wants to spend. I don’t really know anything, but I think Nintendo has analyzed the situation and decided that people who buy the Wii may want to use an online service to do things like download virtual console games or read the world news, but that online gameplay is not a high priority. Given this, they have decided to build something more limited and cheaper than what Microsoft built.

All of this makes sense to me. But then, I am not much for online gaming, so I guess it makes sense that it makes sense to me. Nintendo is basically doing what I want them to do. They are providing some interesting online services, but they are not wasting a lot of money trying to ape Xbox Live. This meets my needs and expectations perfectly. Since my needs are obviously exactly what the mainstream wants, Nintendo is obviously doing the right thing.

Of course, the angry forum-boys are angry precisely because their needs are the most important and Nintendo is ignoring them. This is what I call the “I am the most important customer in the whole world” fallacy. We all like to think that we are the only market that matters, and that our tastes drive the desires of the whole nation. I think this fallacy is what drives the anger of the forum wrathboys. They simply cannot understand why Nintendo would so blatently ignore their needs and desires when their needs and desires are so clearly the most important. They don’t understand why Nintendo does not care.

And here we hit an impasse. I can try to calmy explain why Nintendo doesn’t care, or at least why they have higher priority products to build. Nintendo doesn’t think that this part of the online service is that important to their users. Nintendo might be right or they might be wrong. I don’t really know, although I suspect they are right. This leaves the angry people in the forum without satisfaction. To them, Nintendo is obviously doing the wrong thing. They can only conclude that Nintendo doesn’t give a shit about what they want. This is a harsh reality to live with, but sometimes it’s true. Sometimes they just don’t care. Sometimes what you want just is not that important.

Because I have the plague.

I blame psu.

To my way of thinking, every major genre of music has its quintessential forms. There is the three minute pop song sung by a group of three or four young freaks with long hair. There is the large scale Classical/Romantic Symphony. And in Jazz, there is the piano trio or quartet. With all due respect to the other instrumentalists, there is something about the piano trio that connects with the part of my brain that enjoys Jazz and just makes it tingle in a particular way that other records don’t.

I own a lot of piano records. I have the classic Bill Evans groups. I have the pre-Columbia Monk recordings because I’m a snob. I have the Monk-like Jessica Williams. I have the post-Coltrane uber-hard-bop Mccoy Tyner. I have the the Sun Ra records from Saturn and the Cecil Taylor records that sound like a hallucinogenic drug on tape. I have the completely original and unlike anything else Herbie Nichols records. And of course, there are the small group Ellington and Count Basie records. There are dozens of others.

I would recommend any of these records to anyone who will listen, and if you send me email I can give you a list of the best ones. But, for the pure pleasure of performance art, there is one artist that you should investigate first. Stop reading this now and go pick up some Oscar Peterson records. Then just put the CD in the player, or the iPod headphones in your ears and just let the pure unadulterated swing, drive and absolutely unbounded virtuosity wash over you. Consider this humble clip:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=212191357&s=143441&i=212191382

And that’s before they really get cranked up. Peterson combines three phenomenal abilities into a single unmatched package:

1. He can play fast. He plays faster than should be physically possible. He’s so fast that even after he had a stroke in the early 90s he’s still so fast you can’t believe it.

2. He seems to effortlessly generate and endless stream of interesting ideas.

3. He has an unfailing sense of swing. You cannot listen to this music without your feet wanting to move around in a happy dance.

I don’t have any specific recommendations. I would say that you should buy everything he ever recorded in whatever order you like. I will say that the above clip is from a trio recording featuring Peterson, Joe Pass and the bassist who has recorded with everyone: NHOP. I think the original set was on Pablo. It’s as good a place as any to start. You’ll be hooked.

Travelling to Europe ruined me in several ways. One, of course, is that I’m compelled to constantly demonstrate what an insufferable poseur I am by placedropping (”Oh, yes, there’s this little bar in Madrid just north of the Gran Via that specializes in Vermouth. They serve anchovies and olives as tapas — you really should go, dahling…”). The other is that I can’t enjoy a meal at a restaurant any more, because I can’t stand being interrupted while I eat.

The intra-prandial checkup seems to be a thoroughly American phenomenon. It’s one that you don’t even notice until you’ve eaten somewhere that doesn’t do it. Try this: the next time you’re out eating with a friend, keep track of the number of times a waiter or waitress comes over and interrupts your conversation to ask “Hi! Everything OK here?” This typically happens to me at least 3 times when eating dinner out.

I want to be clear that my ire isn’t addressed at the servers, who are just doing their job and meeting cultural expectations. Rather, I’m bemoaning that this has become our cultural standard. When I first started travelling abroad it actually made me nervous, on a subconcious level, that the waiters weren’t checking up on us. Were they ignoring me? Well, yes, but only because that’s part of what it means to be polite in Rome: you don’t interrupt someone’s meal without a really good reason (note that “bringing more food” is one of the good reasons). Eventually, I not only got used to it, but started to enjoy it. To eat out is not a big deal, but to eat out and actually feel unrushed and unhurried is a true luxury. In the US it almost feels like the service expectations of fast food have leaked into the standard restaurant culture. Hi! Welcome! Please sit down. What would you like? Everything OK? Everything OK? Everything OK? Please leave now.

Welcome to America

I don’t see any real hope for changing the practice here. Our tipping culture encourages wait staff to be more attentive rather than laid back, and restaurants, as businesses, want to turn tables over more quickly to get high volume. I do find it somehow amusing that our coffee culture is also the inverse of the Italian coffee culture, specifically, with Starbucks encouraging you to sit and relax with your espresso, which is a drink that God clearly intended you to gulp down at the bar in 10 seconds shortly before striding out of the door of the bar stuffing a cornetto in your face on the way to work.

I don’t want to make the situation seem more bleak than it really is. There is great food culture in the US, even in Pittsburgh. It’s just not the norm. You have to work to find it. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

And, in the worst case, I guess I can just look at this as another excuse to go back to Rome. See, I know this little bakery hidden away on Via di San Teodoro! They’re only open 2 hours a day, and…

Me: “Hey, Nat, do you know what this ‘Azureus magnet link’ thing is?”

Nat: “Oh, I think of that as ‘That thing that when I click on it, doesn’t work.”

Me: “Hey, me too.”

We have mentioned on occasion that the main reason that the Xbox 360 exists is to deliver the Xbox Live service to your TV. There is something in Xbox Live for everyone. For people who care to play games with others on the Internet, something that I don’t really understand anymore, the friend tracking and online matchmaking in Xbox Live puts all other such services to shame. For people who want to not have to buy the next Ubisoft shooter to find out that it’s crap, the Live service provides downloadable demos and other content that make this easy. For those who like to spend their extra money on retro games they played 20 years ago, the Live Arcade is just the ticket.

Finally, for the marketing geeks in the audience there is the Xbox Live Achievements system. This attaches a persistent online profile to every Xbox Live customer. This profile tracks every single thing they do on the console, thus providing you the salesperson with perfect information about all of our gaming habits. Who could ask for more?

I understand why Microsoft would put something like this in the system. It gives them a way to collect information about who is playing what and for how long, and they can feed this information back to the publishers. This all makes sense. What I don’t understand is why anyone else cares.

In the first Xbox Live, a few games had online tracking of in-game achievments. The online scoreboards in Project Gotham and links to the online game records at Bungie in Halo 2 come to mind. The online information that Halo and Project Gotham collected on you made sense in the context of those two particular games. If you are playing a racing game, you probably care a bit about how fast you drive a particular car around a particular track as compared to other people on the planet. Similarly, if you are playing online deathmatch in Halo, it is nice to have a record of such games, in case you want to look back on old victories.

The Achievements system lacks this concrete connection to the gameplay. Instead, achievements are little abstract cookies like “You made it past level 2!” or “You killed the purple three-eyed boss monster with just your knife!” I know I did these things, I was playing the game while I did it. I probably did it to get to the next cut scene, and beyond that I really don’t care and I don’t understand why anyone else would care. Sure, you get “points”. But as of yet these points are even more useless than the other Xbox Live points you can get just by giving Microsoft money. Besides the utility of recording my actions for the demographers, I still don’t see the utility here. Achievment points are like Microsoft the crack dealer giving me extra kudos for getting high

Apparently, I am alone in my confusion. This sort of virtual trophy case is important to a lot of people. The sum total of good news for the PS3 in the last six months was the announcement of this “Home” system which appears to be nothing more than a 3-d room where fake people can walk around and look at each other’s fake loot. Come to think of it, Second Life is a whole pyramid scheme based on the idea that people will pay just as much money for fake stuff as real stuff. I gather that there are entire side industries that generate real money for fake stuff in World of Warcraft. In fact, this business is big enough to have gotten coverage on NPR, your Dork Nation news source.

Observing all of this brings me no closer to understanding what motivates people to pursure these strange virtual measures of their own self-worth. I understand why people enjoy playing the games. I understand many sources of pride related to playing games. There is the satisfaction of the final cut scene. There is the acquisition of mad skillz. I can understand these things as they are directly connected to the experience of the game itself. Achievements are an external and artificial meta-game. They are like a side-quest with no in-game payoff. You only notice them when you’ve turned the game off, and by then you don’t care anymore.

I love strategy games. At least that’s what I tell myself. One of the first games I was ever seriously addicted to was this FORTRAN monstrosity called EMPIRE that ran on a VT100 terminal on your neighborhood Vax in the late 70s. I remember wasting away many afternoons in the terminal room conquering the world with my armies and boats and aircraft. This game was classic turn-based strategy. You give orders to your dozens of units. The computer moves his dozens of units. Eventually, one side is out of units and loses.

Later on, I played Strategic Conquest which was EMPIRE reborn on the Mac with cute little icons and funny sound effects. Exactly the same game though. These days, this type of tactical game is nearly impossible for me to resist. I bought a GBA for almost the sole purpose of playing Advance Wars. Of course, Advance Wars is also on the DS, along with a turn-based version of Age of Empires. Then there are the all of the great Japanese tactical RPGs: Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea, Phantom Brave and on and on.

My gaming life is apparently filled with an overwhelming buffet of different strategy games. I could sit on my couch and move units 24/7 for the rest of my life and probably not finish them all. I could, but for one problem. The truth is, I can barely play them at all.

Let’s take Disgaea as an illustrative example. I’ve had this game for about two years. So far, I’ve worked my way through the first four missions a couple of times. Here is what happens when I decide I want to play the game again:

1. Find the disk.

2. Stare at the idle PS2 and consider what I’m going to do.

3. Remember that the game is a byzantine combination of combat missions, RPG spreadsheet processing, weird combat mechanics that I can’t remember, and that slightly grating anime-style art and writing (the penguins say “d00d” and explode when you throw them).

4. As I consider booting the disk, I can feel the residual energy slowly leak out of my brain, leaving me unable to deal with any game that requires more thought that “X-button! now!”

5. Once in a while, I put the disk in and remember just enough of the game (using the walkthrough) to play the next map once or twice.

6. Then I put the disk back and play Madden or Final Fantasy for a few months.

Just last month, I thought about playing Disgaea and instead I decided to see how many rushing yards you can gain with a single running back in one season. It turns out if you work at it, you can get at least 3,500 yards with one player. What you do is trick the defense into a Nickel formation, and then lock it there by going hurry-up. You can then run at will for as long as you need to. Anyway, when I got tired of that, I ran my FF12 people around some and let them fight by themselves, which was less work than moving the weird exploding penguins around the battle map.

Soon after picking up Disgaea and not playing it much, I bought Phantom Brave, which was developed by the same company. I can’t remember if have even cut the shrink wrap off of that game.

I have the same relationship with my portable strategy games, even though the hand-helds should be perfect for the genre. Start a map, play a few turns, sleep the machine, repeat. I was told that Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a great game, but the half-hour opening cut scene sort of put me off of it. I might have played one or two of the opening missions, but then I sort of lost the rhythm. Same with Fire Emblem. I think I own both of GBA Fire Emblem games, and I have thought about buying the Gamecube version. It would be a great thing to go with Disgaea!

The one almost-exception to my general rule about strategy games is Advance Wars. Here I have actually made decent progress through every entry in the series. I think I’ve played about half of the story mode of each. In other words, I played through most of the easy maps but quit once the game got more complicated. By this measure, it should be clear that Advance Wars is by far the best strategy game on the planet. I’ve played an order of magnitude more of it than any of the dozen or so others I’ve tried.

I think I buy tactical and strategy games in an effort to convince myself that my interest in video games is not purely driven by an infantile need for escapism. In other words, I think they are good for me the same way serious books or music are good for me. The difference is, I actually read… well, I actually do listen to…, well, I used to anyway.

For better or worse, the truth is just the opposite. My interest in video games is almost completely about an infantile need for escapism. What is the point of a good game if you are not being the hero, or shooting the bad guys, or swinging that huge sword mindlessly in the air. Games are not the place where I want to be exercising my higher brain function. I’m willing to read some text to avoid horrible voice-work. But that’s about as far as I’ll take it.

I like dumb games for dumb people. I’m a dumb gamer.

Still, maybe tonight I’ll play a couple maps of Disgaea. I’m just starting to get the hang of the combat system and am really starting to groove on some of its more unique and flexible features.

The latest edition of PTD is out! In this month’s free digest you’ll find my review of one of the most revered games of all time, X-Com: UFO Defense, a review of indie entry Arctic Stud Poker Run. You’ll also find the record of how I utterly dominated Lorien at Sid Meier’s Railroads!, and an editorial in which I urge game designers to avoid 3D just for the sake of 3D (I’m not holding my breath on that one).

The print magazine has all this, and also my review of Sam and Max Episode 3, as well as many other articles by talented writers. Both the digest and subscriptions to the full edition are available at the ptdmagazine.com web site.

When you live in a place for a while, your mental map of that place starts getting annotations. Specifically, I find that I start coming up with names for places that are better than their actual names. On Fifth Avenue, across the street from WQED, is a church; its given, wrong, name is “Holy Spirit Byzantine Catholic Church.”

I used to walk past this building every day on the way to class. The front of the church is covered with a huge mosaic:

I never thought much of it, not caring much about religious iconography. One day, however, I examined the mosaic a little more closely.

As I did so, I realized it had a particular detail that I found not only jarring, but downright disturbing. Here’s a close-up shot of that detail (click to enlarge):

To the person who created this particular work of art, I ask the question: what the hell?.

Ever since noticing the World War II-era bomber and the fighter jet on the mosaic, I’ve always thought of this church by its secret True Name: Our Lady of Nagasaki.

The decline and fall of civil society is not the sort of thing that will be immediately obvious to someone observing the process on a day to day basis. It happens in a series of small steps, none of which seem all that fatal on their own. In these “new media” days, one of these small steps is the slow decay of the American Newspaper in the face of new forms of information delivery that cater to those with the attention span of a small house fly.

In what I can only imagine is a strange and pathetic attempt at holding on to a neurotic and affluent reader base, there seems to be an increasing number of stories in, of all places, The New York Times these days that I can only characterize as “rich parents in NYC do stupid things.”

Growing up, my dad always read the Times from front to back on the couch every afternoon and evening. I would pick it up occasionally and skim the sports pages. To me, the paper was the ultimate adult literature. Even the sports pages had an atmosphere of overwhelming seriousness. I could never have imagined that the sections that I ignored might contain this sort of frivolous pap. Maybe they’ve published this sort of thing since the beginning of time and I’ve only started to notice it now, but I’d like to think the paper was better in the past.

For whatever reason, these stories pop up on the NYT web site with alarming regularity. Their highest concentration is in the “style” type sections. Why stupid people are fashionable is, I’m sure, a deep philosophical puzzle that we’ll be mulling over for ages.

From the coverage in the Times, it would appear that parents are simply overwhelmed by the complexities of raising a child in our modern world. This book review contains this choice quote:

Try giving your 3-year-old an old-fashioned cake-and-balloon birthday party at home, with neither facilitator nor gift bags, and you’ll see that Warner’s onto something, and that it’s harder to opt out than you’d think.

To which all I can say is, in the style of Jon Stewart, “whhhhaaaaaaa?”. How was I not informed of these minimum requirements for a proper birthday party? I’ve gone through my life under an apparently false delusion that all you need for birthdays are a few friends, a couple of relatives and maybe some cake as a bonus. I guess this makes me an abusive parent, not providing enough in the way of material goods even though they might be within my means.

The notion that it’s impossible to “opt-out” of this kind of nonsense is at the core of the NYC stupid parent syndrome. I suppose I can see where some combination of excessive material means and guilt over the work needed to obtain those means could lead one into this kind of death spiral. But frankly I’d expect more from, you know, adults.

Consider this recent article about parents who have seen the need to hire outside psychological counseling to help their kids sleep in their own beds. Again, all the signs of the affluent parent syndrome are here. There is an excess of money and a distinct lack of realistic perspective. Most importantly, these people don’t seem to understand the most fundamental rule of parenting: they are not on this earth to service the children. They remind me of pet owners who are owned and completely controlled by their pets. I realize that getting the kid to sleep can be an experience filled with a combination of terror and frustration. I realize that there is a certain amount of luck involved in getting a kid who is amenable to behavior modification. But, there are limits to how much I can sympathize with the plight of my fellow parent.

Then there are the people whose goal, it seems, is to turn their kids into little clones of themselves. Consider this appalling article about foodies who spend their days inflicting their hobby on their young children. The best part of this piece is the quote from the moron who fed his 18 month old daughter medium rare hamburger, because he “didn’t want the kid growing up on well done.” I remain unable to to fathom how someone would think this is a good idea. Speaking from experience, kids don’t think about food the same way we do. And, there is plenty of time later in life to develop the skills of a true food obsessive. There is no reason to pollute childhood with this nonsense.

Not to be outdone by their sister New York paper, the Wall Street Journal this week published this piece about the “required” costs of raising a child. This article has everything. There is the distasteful purely economic analysis of child-rearing. There is the woman who proclaims that she tries not to overload her kid, and then has her seven year old in a dozen different after school classes and activities. There is the notion that private school, $5,000 vacations and $1,000 birthday parties are all “necessary costs.” I’m sure they are nice to have, but nobody needs them.

I think this is the point that people have to sit back and examine. People are losing the ability to tell the difference between what they want and what they need. All of the people portrayed above suffer from this confusion. Some have lost track of the important fact that they need a certain level of control over their kids and their lives no matter how much they want to just give up. Others have lost track of what their kids really need to learn and know and do early in their lives. They don’t need cooking classes, dozens of after school activities, and vacations to fancy foreign lands for “education.”

Distinguishing what one wants from what one needs is the sort of skill that parents are supposed to teach their kids. Apparently we’ve been falling down on the job.

As evidence of this, let me end by presenting you with this story of two lovely people who are also the two most self-aborbed assholes in the entire universe. You should be afraid to read that page, so I will summarize and save you the full trauma. Here, in an article in a national newspaper, is the story of two people who cheated on their former spouses while courting each other, then each got a divorce, and then got married and had a national newspaper write a long story about their wedding. The level of self-importance and arrogance needed to pull this off is simply staggering. I find it surprising that these two egos can even fit in the same universe as the rest of us.

…because my ancient laptop, through an unfortunate misadventure involving a Senegalese circus troupe, now has a cracked LCD.

My plan is to spend the rest of the weekend obsessing over whether I should try and fix this thing myself, or just give up and buy a new machine.