Tea Leaves

I bought a new disk drive to use with my shiny new iMac, specifically for use with Time Machine. Picking out the right drive to buy was itself educational.

There’s a tendency in geek circles to succumb to what I call measurebation, which more or less means to compare products solely by their feature lists. You pick the product at your price point that has bigger numbers on it, and you’re done. The problem is that this approach often ignores the tangibles.

Yes, tangibles. Some commentators like to refer to attributes such as industrial design or build quality as “intangibles.” That is because they are stupid. Build quality is no less tangible than, say, CPU speed. It’s just harder to put on a box.

When selecting my backup drive, I had two specific tangible qualities, apart from price, in mind:

(1) It had to store “enough” data. How much data is “enough” was negotiable.
(2) It had to be perfectly quiet. This was not negotiable.

The sweet spot in external hard-disk based storage right now, if you’re only looking at price and capacity, is a terabyte. Nearly every manufacturer makes a terabyte unit at what can only be described as an astonishingly low price. You can walk into your local Best Buy and walk out with more storage than we ever dreamed of in 1990.

The problem with these terabyte units is that most of them are really little RAID arrays of 2 500 Gb disks. 2 disks in one assembly means they put out more heat. That means they require more active cooling systems, such as fans. That means they are all, as near as I can tell, too loud for my purposes.

I eventually settled on a Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750Gb drive. Manly men feel offended by this drive’s creative industrial design, decorative orange light, and trying-a-bit-too-hard “friendliness.” All I know is: it is dirt cheap, physically small and elegant, it worked out of the box with a minimum of fuss, and it is absolutely, beautifully, perfectly quiet.

If I wasn’t worried about getting saliva on my data, I would kiss it.

Amusingly, now that my monster video editing station is set up and configured, my camcorder has finally died the death. So it will be a little while before I can pick up a replacement and start making booze videos again. Sic transit gloria Canon.

The Steelers beat up the Bengals.

The Patriots completely crushed the Redskins.

Finally, the Red Sox finished off the Rockies to win the World Series again. Who would have thought.

I was trying to record the new PBS series The War in HD on my shiny new HD Tivo. The first few episodes came in fine, but the most recent repeat only recorded in SD even though the program guide said it was on the HD version of WQED. So I tried setting up a single recording by hand, and after it finished, I looked at it and it was a completely different program than was listed in the Guide. Some cooking show. No Ken Burns.

So tonight I am flipping around, and I compare what is on the TV with what is listed in the guide, and I realized that my Tivo is showing the programming listed for WQEDDT (200) on channel 220, which is WQEDDT2. Meanwhile, channel 200 is showing what should be on 220, or maybe the regular analog channel 13. I can’t really tell. In any case, this renders the Tivo service completely useless since you can’t actually record anything that is listed, you get the wrong channel.

I want to know who I should kill for this.

We were in Seattle for a long weekend this past week. This is the first time I’ve been back since a trip about ten years ago. As before, Seattle is a great food town, especially for seafood. And, in the last ten years they have finally learned how to make a cappuccino. Here are a few places to try.

Coffee

First things first. Seattle has this reputation for bringing “good coffee” to the rest of us barbarians in the rest of the country. I don’t know about that but I do know that the last time I was there you couldn’t get a good cappuccino. All you could get are what I will call “Seattle” cappuccinos all of which involved some super hot coffee at the bottom of a foot tall column of milk foam.

Happily, this has all changed. Just toddle your way over to Victrola Coffee Roasters and get one of these:

Not only do they have some espresso blends that are as good as I’ve ever had, they also know how to make a cappuccino. They do have the arrogant temerity to call it a “traditional” cappuccino instead of a “canonically correct as God himself intended it” cappuccino, but I will forgive them this for the quality of their coffee. They have nice mugs too.

The Uptown still has better girl/boy watching though.

Ramen

After your coffee breakfast, you should head over to the International district via the REI store and go directly to Samurai Noodle. All you need to know is this: at this place you can get a bowl of pork broth filled with noodles. That by itself would be perfect, but then you can top it with pork slices and green onion, then some extra pork slices, and on the side, pickles, an egg, rice, and more shredded pork. If there is a better definition of heaven I don’t know what it is.

They have some other stuff too, but I was too mesmerized by the pork to notice what it is.

Cameras

Full of ramen, you can hop a bus over to Glazer’s Camera shop. Here you can play with all the hardware that you can only look at pictures of on the web. You can see if that EOS 5-d will fit in the Domke 803 bag comfortably (answer: yes). You can go through all of the Gitzo carbon tripods and open and close the legs to see how they feel (answer: sticky). Finally, you can fondle the Leica M8 and think about what it costs (answer: as much as an EOS-5d outfit plus a custom road bike).

I also looked at the new Canon G9 point and shoot. This thing handles nicely, although the time between “point” and “shoot” is still a bit high. The more exciting thing about the camera is that somehow Canon have figured out how to get decent high ISO performance out of the shitty small sensor. Or at least I think they have, from the limited number of sample images I tried.

Tea

Tired from camera browsing, you can hop a bus back to the Ballard area and sit down at Floating Leaves for an hour or so and linger over a couple of pots of tea. This place has a wide assortment of great Chinese tea and others that aren’t as good (OK, I’m kidding. OK, really I’m not kidding). I like the House Oolong a lot. It’s a green oolong and is fragrant and velvety smooth. Yum.

Oysters

After tea, you can head back over to Happy Hour at Elliot’s Oyster bar. This is something of a tourist place, being on the waterfront and all. But it’s a bar with about two dozen different kinds of oysters plus a big and foofy drink menu. We got a couple dozen oysters and chatted up the shucker for a few more free samples. Go go gadget Baywater Sweet. I also got a sickly sweet girly drink that they call a “rum sidecar” which Pete informs me is really a “daiquiri” in the same way that I sometimes sneer at him and inform him that jesus, the running is in Madden 2006 is much easier than Madden 2004.

I can’t say whether the drink was any good, but it was sweet enough for Karen to drink some and not spit it out. I suspect it was too girly.

Pike Market

There is not much to say about Pike Market except that if you like food you have to walk around this area. There is food everywhere. There are Russian meat pies at Piroshky Piroshky. There are French pastries at Le Panier. There is the lovingly crafted cheese and such at Beecher’s. There is Uli’s sausage, the fresh salmon, the smoked salmon, the crabs, the fresh donuts at Daily Dozen, the oyster omelet for breakfast at Lowell’s, and finally, surprise of all surprises, real Chinese pot stickers at Mee Sum Pastry just outside the market. I could go on all night.

The best time we have in Seattle is taking advantage of the East Coast jet lag to walk around the market as it gets set up. As the sky turns from dark maroon to blue, the Chinese women put out flower arrangements and bok choy, fish go out on ice, rounds of cheese are stacked in tight columns, the guy at the Chukar Cherry stand puts out the samples and the grills and fryers start to fill the hall with the odors that will tease and tempt the throngs of tourists and locals in a few hours. You can watch it all unfold for a while and soak it all in, then head over to Lowell’s for their homemade corned beef hash and go into a carb coma. No better way to start the day.

I’ve been wanting to do this recipe as a video blog, but due to an uncharacteristic bout of responsibility, I sent Sony back their loaner HD camcorder and I just haven’t been able to work up the enthusiasm to use my somewhat dilapidated Canon. So this is a story I will have to tell in words.

Earlier this spring, in my article Rehabilitating Vermouth I extolled the virtues of vermouth, particularly sweet vermouth. Too many people who should know better refuse to give vermouth its due. The proper martini is as much about good vermouth as it is about good gin, and if you believe otherwise you are a visigoth.

The problem, of course, is in finding good vermouth. Cinzano is serviceable on the sweet side, but not really transcendant, and Noilly Prat is the standard great dry vermouth. But can’t we do better than that?

Ingredients

It turns out we can. I’m happy to report that, at least as far as sweet vermouth goes, the solution is to buy American. Quady winery’s Vya sweet vermouth is a revelation. Redolent of cinnamon, herbs, and properly balancing sweet and bitter, it brings a much needed freshness to this oft-neglected class of drink.

The Vya is a bit expensive ($17.99 for a 750 ml bottle at my local liquor store), but if you taste it side by side with one of the European brands you will agree that it’s worth it. It stands up on its own over ice (as always, I suggest a glass of vermouth and a small plate of anchovies and good green olives to really open your eyes.) But it works well as a mixer, too, and the classic drink we think of when talking about sweet vermouth is the Manhattan.

The Manhattan, like the Martini, has suffered from spirits inflation over the years. Perhaps because the vermouth on most people’s shelves is stale and syrupy, the typical Manhattan you’ll find in a bar is really a big glass of bourbon with a few drops of vermouth and a disgusting maraschino cherry. We can do better than that. Here’s my contribution.

Manhattan

Peterb’s Manhattan

• 1 shot Rye Whiskey. I’m using Old Overholt for this at the moment. I use rye simply because I prefer the bitter edge to that of bourbon.
• 1 shot Vya sweet vermouth.
• 2 dashes Angostura Bitters

Stir with ice. Serve (optionally, strain after stirring into a glass without ice, and garnish according to your preference).

There’s a school of thought that thinks a manhattan should be served with an orange slice. I’ve never liked this. It’s inappropriate and utterly beside the point; I can only imagine that the person that came up with this also dreamed up the idea that one should put a sprig of parsley on a steak. If you think you would miss the orange, however, let me suggest an alternative: add to the finished drink the merest splash — just a drop or two — of Cointreau.

Enjoy!

The American conception of Italian masculinity is somewhat out of step with reality. 30 years of Italian-American gangster movies have firmly ensconced the idea of Italian men as sort of irrationally hyper-macho. The truth is a little more prosaic. Any native Italian woman will tell you: Italian men are mama’s boys.

I say this without rancor or intent to insult. It’s not inherently negative, it’s just the simple truth, to the point where the Italian government offers tax breaks to men to move out of their mothers’ houses already.

You see the effect of this in many ways, great and small. One of the most obvious is in the Italian attitude towards sport. In Italy, winning by cheating isn’t just considered acceptable, it’s pretty much par for the course. This gives observers with more British notions of fair play conniption fits. To be perfectly clear, let’s zero in on the difference: the British cheat just as much as the Italians, but they pretend to feel bad when they’re caught. That Italian sports figures don’t bother to do this drives the British newspapers completely insane.

But it makes perfect sense if you put it in context: these are men whose entire strategy for dealing with reality is “make Mom deal with it.” In the sports context, that means “convince the ref.” And if someone other than the ref doesn’t like it, too bad.

Just last week, A.C. Milan goalkeeper Dida took an embarassingly transparent dive, for which he was suspended for two games. Milan, shamelessly, has appealed the suspension. Uffa, mamma!.

Today, Kimi Räikkönen won the Formula 1 drivers’ championship. The constructor’s championship was already gifted to Ferrari earlier this season, by an FIA management that follows a “Ferrari wins at any cost” refereeing policy. Two teams were, apparently, playing fast and loose with the rules, but the stewards decided to not penalize them. McLaren is appealing that decision while claiming to accept that they were beaten, but the point is made: What would have happened if the situation had been reversed?

If those cars needed to be disqualified to ensure a Ferrari win, no one anywhere on the entire planet doubts for a moment that they would have been disqualified.

Thanks, mom.

You will recall that last week my wife and I called Microsoft to get a shipping box for my dead Xbox. That converstation lasted 45 minutes and included no less than six corrections to the shipping address as read back by the woman on the other side of the phone who apparently did not really speak english at all.

Well, the box arrived that the beginning of this week. The only problem: it arrived at the wrong address.

We found this out when the poor person who received the box called left a message for us at home in the middle of the work day. Sad to say, we didn’t get back to them her in time, and she mailed the box back to Microsoft before we could get in touch with her again.

But my intrepid wife called them back, being the only one I know who is both brave and stupid enough to navigate those waters again. Incredibly, she got someone who speaks English and had them read back the shipping address that was in their system.

Let’s say the correct address was something like this:

Peter Blogger
Google Hall, room 475
3500 Forest Street
Pittsburgh PA

Here is what would have been in their system:

Peter Boggler
Newline Google Hall
350 Fords Street -475
Pittsburgh PA

Brilliant. She spent 10 more minutes giving him the correct address, and with any luck my service box will be here next week.

Assuming they fix it, I’m not really sure what I’ll do with the Xbox when I get it back. Part of me wants to fire up TF2 and Portal to see what the fuss is about (no, I don’t have a PC, and no, I’m not using Steam). But, part of me is ready to just cancel Live and put the box on Ebay. I can probably live without TF2 or Mass Effect, and it seems to me that if Microsoft doesn’t give two shits about me, I really shouldn’t care about them either. I mean, first they don’t care enough about their hardware to actually make it work. Then when they acknowledge that it’s broken, Microsoft doesn’t even care enough about the quality of the customer service experience to hire English speaking phone support people to service their English-speaking territories. My pent up dork anger makes me want to tell Microsoft to go to hell. But, my overly realistic pragmatist side says that they’ve already gotten their attach rate out of me, so what’s the difference.

I guess all of this rumination of premature anyway, since I still don’t actually have the service box yet. More later on this channel.

My hands are still a bit chopped up from this weekend, and I’m still in a bit of pain, so pardon me in advance as I prepare to overstate my case.

When I moved into my house, one of the things I liked about it was the cute little brick walk leading up to the front porch. It’s a bunch of concave bricks tiled next to each other, with no mortar or anything holding them in place. Very natural looking, very nice.

But, as I believe I have mentioned before, I’m not quite so good at maintaining my yard. In fact, I suck. In my neighborhood, I’m “that neighbor.” Oh, my neighbors don’t actually hate me, they’re all way too nice for that. But let’s just say I’m sure they would all love it if something really nice happened to me, like say I got a very lucrative job far away, forcing me to sell the house to someone who actually knows the first thing about maintaining his yard.

So now, several years after moving in, my nice brick walk is full of weeds and grass. And unlike the rest of my wild-grown yard, this particular thing sort of bugs me.

It’s been this way for a few years, although not as bad. I’ve made halfhearted attempts to fix the problem, but none of them have proven to be long term solutions. A while ago, walking through the neighborhood, I noticed a local couple removing all the bricks on their walk; it was the same type of walk as I had. “Hi, can I ask what you’re doing?” “Sure,” they replied. “We have trouble with weeds growing in the cracks here. You see, when these walks were first put in, the bricks were laid on a sort of barrier. Well, over time, that barrier degraded and broke down. So we’re taking them out and lining the underlayer with this awesome material, then we put the brick back. So no more weeds.”

I walked away impressed at the perspicacity of these fine people, the ants to my lazy grasshopper. “If only I had that sort of motivation,” I thought to myself, “my house would look so much nicer.” The next spring, I walked past their house with the newly lined walk. Weeds had sprouted all through their newly lined walk. My step lightened by the spring of schadenfreude, I returned home relieved that I hadn’t slaved over putting a new liner in.

The core problem is that there is nothing in between the bricks except air. This means that, over time, dirt will flow in with the rains, and then once you have dirt seeds will sprout. So a lining underneath the bricks won’t help. There is only one permanent solution to this problem, and it is called “concrete.”

I’m not ready to pour concrete yet — that’s just as much work as weeding, really — so today I went out and weeded a goodly portion of the walk. Pulling the grass and weeds isn’t really an option. The only way to do the job is to lift out the bricks in a row, clear out the grass and dirt that has grown in between, scrape out the dirt that fell onto the bottom so the bricks don’t stick up, put the bricks back, and then optionally put dirt or sand back in the gaps so it looks nice.

There are people who thrive on this sort of thing. They write 6,000 word articles for the New York Times Magazine talking breathlessly about the thrill of getting their hands dirty, of the feel of the terroir and the resonance of childhood summers spent on the coast of Maine. They speak of life lessons learned that they hope to pass on to their innumerable children — inevitably named Tyler or Cody or Dylan. They speak of the satisfaction of building something with their own two hands, and of the raw physicality of manual labor. They speak, above all, of the Good Earth.

I am here to reply to these people. On behalf of the geeks, introverts, technophiles, naturephobes, and all of those who don’t enjoy these sorts of activities, I am willing to stand up proudly and say: Fuck the Earth. The Earth is home to all sorts of stinging ants, filthy soil, germs, and children named Dylan.

There are those who say that what we need more of is science. I respectfully disagree. What we need more of is paving.

I’ve used many keyboards in my time on this Earth. I think the very first one I used was attached to an old manual typewriter that I used to use to type up certain homework assignments in junior high. The first one that I used that was connected to a computer was the collection of square calculator keys that Commodore called a keyboard on the PET 2001. After that, there were the TRS-80s, the Apple II, the VT-100 in the high school, the Adm-3a, Tektronix, and some horrific unified APL terminals at Umass, and who can forget the Concept 100s at CMU.

And all these before I ever owned a computer of my own.

Over the years I’ve had some favorite keyboards. I think that the original IBM RT workstations had the best keyboard that I used while in college. The Sun keyboards were also a favorite because for a long time they held out against the evil of the “business” keybaord layout which moved the CTRL key down into a hard to reach corner rather than placing it above the left shift key where God Himself intended it to go. Over time, I have come to peace with this mutilation of the perfect layout, but only after I trained myself to stop using Emacs for everything.

Later on, after a few bouts with wrist tendonitis I went through a phase where the only keyboard I would use was made by a company called Adesso and had a track pad stuck into the wrist wrest so that I didn’t have to use a mouse. At the time, the buttons on most mice were on the stiff side and aggravated my hands. This was also my “split layout” phase. Eventually I concluded that split keyboards just make it harder to commit the crimes against touch typing that are my normal mode of working, so I stopped using them.

I have always liked wireless keybords, and used nothing else for a couple of years starting in 1998. I stopped using them around the time Bluetooth was foisted on the world and could never make myself happy with all that pairing and unpairing. I started using laptops almost exlusively for several years. The Dells at the time had nice keyboards. There were always the ThinkPad enthusiasts, but I never liked the exaggerated depth of those keyboards, not to mention the stupid pointing stick.

During my latest Mac phase, I’ve had to put up with generally inferior keyboards. I used a couple of Ti Powerbooks as my only computing machines for a couple of years and eventually got used to the square mushy keys, but I never really liked them. The Aluminum Powerbooks and Macbook Pros were an improvement, and the cute little semi-chicklet keyboard on the Macbook is also pleasing. The Apple desktop keyboards have traditionally been abysmal. I have several complaints about them, some of which are specific to the Apple product and some of which apply to desktop keyboards in general:

1. They are too wide. I never use anything on my keyboard to the right of the right shift key. As far as I’m concerned that whole area and just be chopped off. I’ve always hated desktop keyboards because they put my mouse too far away, and I like using my mouse. Laptops made me happy for a long time partly because I like trackpads and partly because when you use a mouse it’s not too far away.

2. The key feel is mushy. I’m not sure what kind of membrane switch they use, but I could never get used to it when typing fast.

3. They have this clear enclosure underneath the main keyboard assembly that does nothing but collect dirt, hair, and other gross bodily detritus. It’s really disturbing.

What I always wanted in a keyboard was something that used a laptop layout, so it wasn’t too wide, and which had light but positive action so it’s easy to type on without tiring out old fingers. I tried the Happy Hacking keyboard for a while, but didn’t like it. The key action is unpredictable and the keyboard doesn’t have the function keys, which I don’t like. For the last few years, I’ve been compromising with the Matias mechanical switch keyboard. This thing has the stupid too-wide desktop layout, but it makes up for it with the best key action that I’ve ever experienced. The keys take almost no pressure at all to activate, and when you hit bottom there is a reassuring mechanical <click>. Unfortunately, I work in a fairly open office, which means that everyone on my side of the bulding can hear me type. I decided that these problems were worth the great key action, and I stopped looking at keyboards for a long time.

Imagine my surprise and delight when Apple, of all companies, revamped their Bluetooth keyboard and made it nearly perfect. The keyboard uses switches that feel like the ones in the current Macbook laptops (not the Macbook Pro). I like the key tops and the switches, but others might not like their semi-chicklet nature. For me, the action is light enough to not tire my hands, and even if the tactile feedback is not as sure as the Matias, it’s good enough. What is finally perfect about this keyboard is the size. Finally, the useless keypad boat anchor on the right side of the keyboard is gone, replaced by what feels like ten inches of reclaimed desk space. Better yet, the huge clunky transparent enclosure is gone. The body of the keyboard is about as thick as two or three credit cards and is covered in that new shiny Apple metal skin. Finally, the battery tube on the back tilts the thing at just the right angle and in a final design flourish, there is a hidden green LED that tells you when the keyboard is on and when it is doing the dreaded Bluetooth pairing dance.

So far, I only have two minor complaints:

1. The “media” keys are not laid out the same way as on the laptops. Oh well. At least the fn-key row is there, so I don’t have to lose my precious Exposé key, even if it is on F3 rather than F9.

2. The square CTRL key is hard to hit. I have this problem sometimes on the Macbook too, but it’s not too bad.

Overall, I think this keyboard is a design triumph for the small-handed keypad hating users of the world. The thing is shiny, small, thin and superbly functional. The Consumer Rule dictates that to hedge against the future, I should purchase five of these, once I make sure that the keys break in well.

The two Petes collaborated on this article. If you can guess who it is written in the style of, you win nothing, but may feel either proud or ashamed, at your discretion.

It was in a karaoke bar in Saitama that I first met Kobayashi Hikaru-san. This was not your high-end bar, like you’d find in Shibuya, or Harajuku, or any of the other hip spots. This was a thoroughly middle-class establishment. That didn’t stop us from proceeding to get very, very drunk along with a couple of his friends. I spent most of the night ignoring the interview and getting hit on by two very cute girls who gave me their keitei numbers.

It turned out that one of the cute Japanese girls had recognized me from the publicity photos for my band. I had started the band with a few buddies who noticed me jamming absentmindedly in the hallway of my apartment building in Harajuku. I was playing on the old guitar that I had left over from my punk-rock days. I had brought the instrument over here on a lark having felt pangs of nostalgia for my high school days and simpler times as I packed my suitcases to make the trip across the sea. So now, here in Japan, I have a cool band and this makes cute girls recognize me and hit on me even in dumpy karaoke bars. This is one of the reasons that I am so lucky. I live in Tokyo and relate the highlights of my wonderful life to you back in the States.

I hummed the first few bars of the victory theme to Dragon Quest III in Kobayashi san’s ear, and he smiled knowingly. “Yes,” he said. “This is why Microsoft will never succeed in our market. They just don’t understand us.” I smiled knowingly and sipped my vodka and Pocari Sweat. It’s a good piece of music; not as good as if it were sung by Nomiya Maki, formerly of The Pizzicato Five, but serviceable. It always made me feel somewhat sad, a little wistful. In the midst of the victory theme there is an element of sadness, sadness like I experienced when I was back in Illinois and I got into that fight with Billy Connor over whether Tekken or Virtua Fighter was the more realistic fighting experience. Bill punched me in the nose, and I ran home bleeding, vowing to escape Illinois and all that it represents. He’s probably selling used cars in Skokie, while I spend my afternoons playing pachinko in Akihabara. Yeah. Even if bittersweet, it’s still a victory.

“We will be playing golf next Wednesday and would be honoured if you would join us,” said Kobayashi san. “What is your handicap?” This would be delicate. While I have nothing but respect for Mr Kobayashi, lead designer of Jack the Giant Killer, I had already committed to direct a cosplay drama depicting the redemption of Bowser. “I’m a 72,” I said. “But only on Congo Canopy.” There was a long silence, and he sipped his scotch. “Congo Canopy, I see. Perhaps another time.” Kobayashi san was letting me off easy. Sometimes what is left unspoken has a power stronger than a thousand shouted words. His game, seemingly just a cheap Donkey Kong knock off, shows this wisdom. The first level, where Jack climbs the entangled vines, at first seems baroque and labyrinthine, but that is just on the surface. Beneath the Aubrey Beardsley veneer (”the curves intuitively know / Which aspects of nouveau to save”) is a sparseness and a power that, in the end, are nothing less than a metaphor for the world in which we move: the birds and snails nipping at our heels, trying to make those of us who are trying to ascend plummet to our failure. Hikaru Kobayashi understands the fear of failure. So do we all.

Feeling full from the drinks, I excused myself. In the bathroom, I sidled up to a urinal and voided my bladder, thinking about Mr. Kobayashi and our conversation. Suddenly the full weight of it hit me: I had insulted him. Jack the Giant Killer had always been viewed as a knock-off of Donkey Kong, and this always overshadowed its brilliance. He thought that my thoughtless mention of Congo Canopy was cruel mocking. I shook, washed my hands, and rushed back to the bar, but Kobayashi-san was gone. His friend with the bleached hair, the one who looked a bit like Vaan from the brilliant (and completely unacknowledged in its brilliance) Final Fantasy XII shrugged and gestured vaguely toward the door, then walked through it. I wandered out into the chill autumn Saitama night.

In the second level of Jack the Giant Killer, Jack wanders through the clouds trying to cross the bridge to reach the castle, but lions and birds get in his way. Boorish schoolgirls in seifuku block my path. I gently nudge them out of my way without even a gomen. Did they understand what I had done? No. Completely ignorant of their own culture, they had probably never even played Dragon Quest III, had never once visited Baharata or Portoga on a quest to defeat the Baramos. Being rude wounded me, but I had need of haste, as much haste as I needed when Zoma opened the pit to the Dark World. Pushing my self-consciousness down, I squared my shoulders and ran.

As I pushed my way through the throng, a soft rain began to fall. It was a mist at first, but as I was able to gain speed, the cold drops pelted my face, each a painful reminder of my earlier insolence. I leaned my head forward and gained a measure of relief from the onslaught of cold dampness. I ran for perhaps two or three minutes this way, and the rain grew only more insistant. Then, as I looked up, I realized that the bleach haired marker that had been my beacon was gone, having melted into the crowd like Solid Snake in the shadows. I stopped and tried to regain my bearings, my gaze darting back and forth across the street, but in vain. Kobayashi-san and his companion were lost to me, and with them any chance I had at redemption. How long I stood there I can’t say, but later, chilled to my bones, I turned around and shuffled slowly back to the bar, hoping to drown my sorrow in drink and the false merriment of karaoke.

The last time I met Mr. Hikaru Kobayashi was at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, a fractured morass of gift bags and courtesy hostesses wearing corporate logos on their metallic underwear. Apropos of the atmosphere, we spoke of nothing but empty courtesies, brief platitudes on the high quality of his company’s releases, and commiserated over how hot it was, “Atsui, kyo mo atsui desu, neh?”

When at last a break in the crowds left us, mercifully, alone for a moment, I quickly leaned over and looked him in the eyes. “Mr. Kobayashi, I just want you to know that I have always greatly enjoyed your games. They are as dear to me as Dragon Quest III.”

He smiled, murmured a polite thank you and protested that I was too kind, and then turned and walked away.

As we hinted at yesterday my Xbox 360 melted over the weekend. I had happily worked through the single player of Halo 3 and was playing the occasional multiplayer match when the box started crashing randomly. Then it booted to the red lights. Then it recovered for a day. Then it booted to the red lights again.

After that, the worst part of the experience came: I called Microsoft. Don’t let this happen to you.

Actually I lied. My wife called Microsoft for me. She does some of this legwork on occasion because she has more experience dealing with customer service organizations than I do. I knew we were in trouble when I got to her office about 20 minutes into the call and she was still on the phone. Worse, she looked like she was ready to reach through the handset and strangle whoever was on the other end. See, Karen is basically a professional support script navigation expert. Nothing fazes her, and here she was in a complete red faced fist thumping frothing at the mouth rage. This meant only one thing: the creature on the other end of the phone was a creature of pure malevolent evil.

I thought maybe the support person was giving her crap about the Xbox not really being broken, so I valiantly intervened and picked up the phone and explained very carefully how the machine had failed. This seemed to placate the exceedingly polite but completely incomprehensible Indian woman on the other end of the phone. She then launched into the rest of the call script. Remember, at this point we had been connected for about twenty minutes. By the time I hung up the phone, I had talked to her for another twenty minutes.

In this time, we passed the following 45 bytes of information to the nice woman in India:

1. Serial # of the Xbox

2. Shipping address for the coffin.

3. A phone number and email address for contact.

That’s a rate of about one byte per minute.

Meanwhile, I had the pleasure of listening to what must have been 80 pages of canned dialog in her script.

1. She told me that my shipping address was some street in Pittsburgh whose name ended in the word “newline”. I couldn’t figure out what Newline Studios had to do with my Xbox. Finally, I realized that reading me the literal newline in her address record. But, even after five tries from Karen she still had the street name wrong. I gave it to her again.

2. We verified that I had called about my Xbox having hardware failure and that we had gone through the troubleshooting script. She checked this with me four or five times.

3. I would send my Xbox to Microsoft, and if it was found that the hardware failure did not occur, they’d send it back to me unrepaired.

4. If they found something else wrong, I’d have to pay for a repair.

5. If they found that I had modified the Xbox in any way, they’d send it back to me unrepaired.

6. She gave me a reference number that I should use to refer to the repair. I should include this reference number in the shipping box. She then told me various things that I should not write on the shipping box. Words like “Microsoft” and “Xbox”. She repeated this a few times to make sure I had heard.

7. She then re-verified all the steps, waiting for me to acknowledge each paragraph of text.

8. Then she talked for another 10 minutes about subjects that I no longer remember. I think maybe I had stopped listening at this point, and just set the phone down on the desk, saying “uh huh” once in a while into the handset. I know this is rude, but I had reached the end of my tolerance.

Here is what is astounding to me about this. Sony has given Microsoft a free run at the hard core game console market. They have left the door to the frat-house open and provided all the hookers, booze and coke needed for a huge kick-ass victory party. All Microsoft had to do was walk through that door, and yet they have completely failed. Not only did they release hardware into the market that fails more often than the graphics drivers in a Windows PC, they have added to the insult by making the process required for replacement the most painful customer service experience that I can recall in the last ten years. And this includes dealing with the god-damned phone company.

Way to go Microsoft Entertainment Division. You deserve a pat on the back. Maybe when my Xbox comes back all fixed, I’ll sell it on Ebay. Meanwhile, I have some Notes and Jigsaw pieces to collect.

Early on Saturday psu let me know that his Xbox 360 had given up the ghost. He had been hoping to get the Red Rings of Death at least since mine died a few months ago, and they sent me back a cooler, quieter model. Still, he was a bit nonplussed, and at a loss as to what to do without his beloved Halo 3. “Maybe I’ll play Banjo-Kazooie,” he joked. “Of course, I’ll need to buy an old Nintendo 64 first.”

Little did he realize that I never pass up a chance to get another piece of obsolete computer equipment out of my basement. I packed up the N64 (along with Banjo-Kazooie and a few other games), and brought it over. And while I was packing it up, a funny thing happened.

Last Christmas my nephew (let’s call him “Vaan”) was visiting my house. He was too young to play BladeHunt: DeathSpank 2: The Revenge, so instead I showed him how to operate the N64, hooked it up to an old TV, and promptly forgot about it.

When I went to pack up the Nintendo this weekend, I noticed it was a little warm. You see, Vaan, being a youthful little scamp, had irresponsibly left the device on. I, being lazy, had not bothered to check to make sure that it was off. So this Nintendo, which is more than 10 years old, had been left powered on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the last 9 months.

I didn’t even turn on the TV to make sure it still worked. I yanked the cables, stuffed everything into a shopping bag, and went to Pete’s house. Where, of course, we plugged it in and it worked just fine. I never experienced even a moment’s doubt about whether it would work.

Now, I’d like you to think about this for a few minutes. I have several co-workers who have held off on buying an Xbox 360 because they are waiting for Microsoft to make one that won’t melt down. When I owned my original 360, I would never play games on it with the media cabinet closed because I believed in all seriousness that if I did, it might burn down my house. I put it to any Xbox 360 owner out there: does anyone believe that if they left their Xbox powered on for 9 months straight that it would still function? No. No one believes that.

I’ve written at length about the competitive advantages consoles have over “gaming PCs”. There are a number of variables here, not the least of which is cost, but if I had to boil it down to one simple factor, it is this: the game console is an appliance. Its value proposition subsists largely in the fact that it is supposed to just work.

Some console manufacturers, in their understandable quest to encourage hardware turnover, have placed a bet on HD-capable machines, systems that can render and display incredible graphics. Software publishers have embraced these platforms, enjoying the benefits of republishing the same games with higher resolution art assets. But it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the simple truth that HD gaming in 2007 comes at a cost higher than simply adding together the price tag of the hardware and software. We pay a price in convenience. We pay a price in power consumption, shelf space, and revoltingly ugly industrial design. We pay a price in noise pollution in our living rooms. Most of all, we pay a price in peace of mind. Imagine if every time you turned on your oven, you had to worry if today would be the day that your oven would stop working. That’s what everyday life is like for an Xbox 360 owner.

The Xbox 360, the PS3 and the Wii are all obviously more complex devices than the Nintendo 64; at a minimum, they have moving parts. I’m certainly not saying that I want the architecture of game consoles to be frozen in 1996 forever. The key point is this: industrial design and computer architecture have something important in common. They both require making intelligent tradeoffs. I’m sure that the designers at Microsoft and Sony were acutely aware of what they were asking consumers to give up in the name of pushing a few more pixels and gaining a foothold in the living rooms of HD early adopters. The gaming press, intriguingly, doesn’t seem to discuss these tradeoffs in any continuing or rigorous way. They simply take it as read that the only option is to buy newer hardware, even when that hardware is defective.

The ongoing success of the more conservatively and cleverly designed Wii (and the continued success of the PS2 even while its successor languishes on store shelves) suggests that the average consumer understands these tradeoffs, even if no one in the industry or its vanity press is willing to acknowledge them.

Design matters. In the marketplace for personal items and appliances, design can matter even more than a list of features. Competitors in the portable music player industry learned this the hard way.

The game console manufacturers are learning this hard lesson now.

Here’s what you used to do to buy a TV. You would go to Sears, look at the TVs, pick one that seemed to be the right size, take it home, plug it into the cable or antenna, and turn it on.

Because the consumer electronics industry has your interest and convenience as its highest priority, today I can write a 1500 word essay on how to buy a TV in the modern world. That’s called progress.

The Easy Way

There is really only one question you have to ask yourself to navigate the TV purchasing maze:

How big a screen do I want.

There are various ways to answer this question which I will not get into. Most people know the answer instinctively. Now, if your answer is 50 inches or larger, then what you want is a big rear projection set. If your answer is smaller than 50 inches, then what you want is an LCD or Plasma. That’s all you really need to know.

The Hard Way

The first thing to remember about the HD standard is that all HD televisions come in a standard resolution. The best thing about this standard is how there are actually around five standard video formats and how their names don’t really make any sense. Let me summarize:

1. 480i. This moniker is generally used to refer to the resolution of a standard TV. The 480 refers to the number of “lines”, or scanlines, on the screen. The “i” means that what you actually see on the screen is two interlaced images of 240 lines each. DVD playback is generally at this resolution. On a DVD, each line is 720 pixels of resolution. I’m not sure if this is relevant to the analog broadcast format or not.

2. 480p. This is the same resolution as the above, but no interlacing. Each frame is generated all at once, rather than by flashing odd and even lines at you quickly. Many DVD players will convert the 480i signal to 480p on playback. This sounds simple, but is in fact a whole subject for technical dorkery.

3. 720p (1280×720). Some LCD, Plasma and related rear projection sets use this as a native resolution.

4. 1080i (1920×1080). This is what most people think they mean when they say “HD” these days, and it’s the highest resolution broadcast format. Note that in deference to CRT televisions, this is an interlaced format. Most of the new digital TVs (LCD, Plasma, etc) are inherently progressive, and so convert the signal internally to “1080p”.

5. 1080p (1920×1080). I’m not clear on what this means. There are multiple interpretations and multiple standards. According to the obsessed, the Sony PS3 is the only real HD game machine, since it will output this signal even though no games can render at this resolution at full frame rate.

Broadcast HD is generally in a 16:9 aspect ratio, while the old broadcast format was in 4:3. This confusion causes people to do strange things like insisting on watching the 4:3 material stretched out to 16:9. I guess if you like all your people short and fat this is OK. To add to the confusion, most movies don’t use either of these formats. This leads to people posting to the support formums asking why their copy of The Matrix has black bars on it, and wasn’t their HDTV supposed to get rid of that. Don’t let this be you.

The next thing to remember is that there are several competing technologies for taking a video signal and showing it to you on a screen. These break down into three buckets:

1. Direct view. These are the CRT, LCD, and Plasma screens. These tend to be bright and quick sharp, but they also tend to be expensive or impossible to build in large sizes.

2. Rear Projection. These generate a tiny picture and then project that picture to a big screen that you look at. The digital version of this uses small chips to generate a high resolution image which is then projected. Because you don’t need to build a huge solid state panel, these are much easier and cheaper to build in the larger sizes.

3. Front projection. Like RP, but you hang the screen yourself instead of having the screen be attached to the TV. This is for people who are into this sort of thing.

Generally, for a given screen size and resolution, projection sets are much cheaper than direct view sets. This is the basis for my purchasing rule above. A 50 inch rear projection set will probably be about half the cost of an LCD or Plasma panel in the same size and resolution. You can’t even buy a CRT in that size, and CRT rear projection is all but dead, much to the chagrin of the old timers.

The Rest

Having picked a TV at the right size, the last puzzle is deciding how to feed the TV with HD content. Currently there are several sources of HD content:

1. Live TV. You can pick up many local broadcast stations in HD with an antenna at very high quality if you are close to the center of a city with several such channels. I personally could only reliably get CBS in Pittsburgh. To actually understand how to receieve these broadcasts, you have to learn a lot of weird acronyms like ATSC, QAM, OTA and such. Buying a Tivo is easier.

2. Cable, DirecTV, DISH. All of these services have HD channels. All of these services also have out-dated and archaic delivery models, weird pricing schedules, and shitty customer service. To make up for it, DirecTV and DISH both make you pay ludicrous sums of money to upgrade your existing hardware to receive HD channels. I’ve been a DirecTV customer for more than ten years, and my reward for this is having to pay for a new dish and HD receiver, whereas most cable companies will just give you a new set-top box, assuming you can get them to your place.

3. HD DVR. I can’t watch TV without a Tivo. Any DVR which is not a Tivo is probably some piece of shit that the cable or satellite company wants to lock you into. Don’t fall for it. Of course, getting your HD Tivo set up can be something of a trial. But it’s worth it.

4. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. These standards are both cynical power-grabs and generally retarded. Players and media are expensive. Selection is non-existant. There are also no ripping tools, so you can’t, ya know, do the thing, at the place, at your convenience. Yet.

5. Upscaled DVD. Upscaled DVD looks almost as good as “real” HD, but with normal DVDs that are more convenient in various ways. The upscaled picture will tend to be noisier, especially in dark scenes, but it’s really not all that much worse for most purposes. Plus, ya know, the thing.

6. Game consoles. Unfortunately, the two consoles that put out an HD level signal are both crippled pieces of crap that either completely fail after a while (my Xbox 360 just died) or don’t have any actual high resolution games that are any good (hello, Sony). At least the PS3 makes a decent DVD player and doesn’t sound like a jet engine.

So there you have it, the simplest guide that I can think of for how to buy that new TV you need. My advice for you is to only have read the first section of this article, and also to think twice before wasting a lot of money on something this complicated. You could always just buy a computer instead. Computers are pretty simple machines by comparison.

I finally couldn’t take watching HD sports over the air, so I dropped some cash on the new Tivo HD. If you weren’t paying attention, this is the $300 box that does most of what the previously $800 and now $600 Tivo Series 3 does. You can get dual HD tuning, a disk big enough for all the programming I’ll ever need, and that same stylish and streamlined Tivo interface.

Of course, there is only one problem with this vision of Nirvana. You have to get the cable company to your house to set up the CableCard. And the cable companies hate CableCard.

CableCard, you may recall, is a standard that essentially puts the security and tuning hardware from one of those old cable boxes into a little card about the size of a PCMCIA expansion card for a laptop. The cable companies were mandated to allow the use of these cards in third party hardware so that you as a consumer are not locked in to their cable box hardware, at least in theory. In practice, the cable companies hate these things. They would like to be providing the complete cable TV experience end to end. And in theory I am sympathetic to this cause. Controlling the whole user experience can be a good thing if you are competent enough to be able to build a good user experience in the first place. Unfortunately, the cable companies are not so competent. Therefore it falls to companies like Tivo to make TV usable again.

So we called a couple of weeks ago after one-clicking the box on Amazon. Right on time, well, right within the alloted four hour window, the guy shows up. Right away things go bad. His work order is for the wrong cable package, the wrong wiring (we needed one more wire), and for the Piece of Shit Comcast DVR instead of two CableCards. This is because it is too expensive for the cable companies to either

1. Hire phone people who can take your order and transcribe it correctly.

2. Hire Web people to build a web site that can in fact tell you what packages are available in your area and allow you to order those packages online so some barely literate minimum wage lackey can’t fuck up the order.

Anyway. The cable guy goes back out to his van to find the cards. He comes back in and starts going on and on about how the CableCard hardware never works right and how he’s barely ever done any installs and who knows how it really works. I can’t tell if this is just an act to make me break down and use the Piece of Shit Comcast DVR or if he is truly intimidated by this hardware.

The actual install of the cards went fairly well, except that the home office had to completely rewrite the order and our account status to be able to activate the cards. There was a lot of reading of numbers over the phone and some waiting on our end while the phone operator also opined about how complicated CableCard is and how she didn’t know how it is supposed to work. It’s like they don’t want you using it.

Once activated, I didn’t realize that I could test all the channels coming over the wire without redoing the Tivo setup, which takes about half an hour. The result was that while we are receiving the HD channels fine (woohoo! go Patriot…er, go Steelers!), I didn’t notice until after the installer left that we had been given the wrong cable programming package, so the kid channels that are nearly the entire and only reason to have the Tivo in the first place simply don’t exist according to our tuner. Hopefully one more call to Comcast will fix this, assuming they can understand our moon language instructions and write them down correctly.

Think about this for a second. After a long phone call and an hour with the guy in my house, I still ended up with the wrong set of channels. This, combined with the fact that the Tivo Guide data is always buggy and the fact that no one seems to be able to build a web site that can confidently and correctly tell me what is on TV at any given time at my house is, to me, an obvious and deep reason why the broadcast TV industry just doesn’t get it.

They think that the data model for what is on TV is made up of a four values: title, location, time, and channel. Really, all any end user cares about is the name of the show. Why should I care that The Bionic Woman meets Paris Hilton in the Simple Life comes on at 10pm on channel 437 in Pittsburgh but at 8pm on channel 577 in San Jose? Why should anyone need to keep track of this? You should just be able to talk to some TV oracle, type in the name of the show, and have it appear on your television at some point in the future.

Instead, you have to fight a byzantine maze of local channels, premium packages and special broadcast deals with the various sports leagues only to end up in a situation where the Red Sox game starts at 6:40, but the Tivo will only start recording at 5:30 because some nitwit typed in the data wrong a week ago and now they can’t fix it.

Which is all to say, I’m happy with my Tivo. I think it’s probably the best user experience that you can have with modern television. But at some fundamental level it’s still completely wrong and stupid. This is a sad sad reflection of how badly the TV and consumer electronics companies have screwed the pooch.

I finished the single player campaign in Halo 3 this weekend. There is almost no point in writing anything about the experience because the game has taken on a life separate from normal critical evaluation. There is really only one thing you need to know about Halo 3 and it is this: Halo 3 is Halo, only bigger.

I was going to deploy the standard Spinal Tap reference at this point, but I’ve already used that line this year and it would be ironic to repeat myself in this context. Still, the statement applies here probably more than anywhere else. Everything about the game is really just more Halo with the knob turned higher:

The set pieces are set on bigger platforms with more enemies shooting more bullets at a faster rate as you frantically try and find any tactic that will keep the fight in front of you. Instead of throwing grendades into groups of two or three grunts, you instead toss them into a group of five or six who then fly though the air, all their limbs flailing independently. Where you might have fought one or two banshees at a time before, you know how to deal with half a dozen at once, plus a couple of extra tanks.

There are more vehicles to drive over more extensive pieces of terrain. There are bigger tanks to defeat, and you are rewarded with fatter, more satisfying fireballs when you do so. There are more frenetic runs through burning structures that are on the verge of total collapse. They seem to know instinctively that we love that shit.

There are more brutes. More Flood. More backtracking. More identical hallways (except at strange angles, you’ll see what I mean). More multiplayer modes. More annoying and confusing checkpoints. More more more. There is more of everything, except flying. There isn’t more flying, because flying sucks, so they got rid of some of it. That’s good.

There are more cut-scenes, but fewer well-written lines of dialog. The game ties up the plot in a reasonably satisfying fashion, but the level of the narrative never quite makes it past High School Comic Book. On the other hand, this is a video game, so what do you expect (hint: Bioshock didn’t do it either. We can argue about that later).

What shines through it all is the same excellent combat engine. When you are really tuned into the game, you circle strafe and bunny hop and shoot and beat down your foes in a beautifully rhythmic dance. Then you chuck a grenade into the fray and watch the stragglers scatter and start the whole thing over again. The reward for your work is hearing your enemies scream in pain and then watching them fall on the ground accompanied by the occasional limb flying through the air. This is what I play the game for, and this is what Bungie has delivered.

If you love Halo, there is more to love. If you don’t really care, there is nothing here that will make you care. The game is not the best game EVAR. Neither is the game just a shallow refinement that is more like an expansion pack than a standalone game. The game gives you more Halo goodness without ruining anything that made Halo good. I think this something of an achievement given how many other games have tried to follow the “better graphics, bigger everything” formula and failed miserably to preserve the core gameplay (I’m looking at you Madden Football).

The bottom line is that the graphical improvements, the cool new features (online co-op!), the movie capture mode, and the refinements to the multiplayer all add up to a fantastic upgrade to a game that was already one of my favorites. There does seem to be a contingent of the “Gamez R Artz” crowd who like to gripe that Bungie didn’t try to push the gameplay or narrative in some different directions. I think these people are delusional. As I said before, the Xbox and the people who play Halo do not need Haloshock or Halo 6: Mexican Tactical Combat. We just want Halo, but with more Haloness. This is what Bungie has delivered and for this they should be congratulated.

Here’s hoping it’s really finished. I’d love to see where Bungie could go given the freedom to actually try something new.