Tea Leaves

Honestly? I didn’t think this would work. But I tried it anyway, and it is six kinds of awesome.

• 2 cups cream
• 1 cup milk
• 1/2 cup sugar
• Two heaping tablespoons “green tea slurry” made from cheap green tea powder.
• About a cup of blackberries and blueberries, crushed by hand.

Whip for a bit in a blender before adding it to your ice cream maker (if, like me, you are a cheap bastard and have a cheap ice cream maker).

The odd thing about this recipe is the purple berry juice cancels out the green color of the tea slurry, and you end up with something that is sort of an unearthly glowing ultra-white. It has the bracing bitterness of green tea, mixed with the tartness of the berries. It’s great.

Now, here’s the thing about dwarves: they’re not like you and me. We wake up, we shower, we get dressed, we go to work, and while we’re doing all this, sometimes we get an idea. “I should write a cookbook that focuses on pomegranates,” we think, and then we get out of the shower and towel off and we don’t write the book. “I should create a mosaic depicting Washington’s terrible defeat at Fort Necessity,” we think, and then, almost always, we reach our bus stop, we step off the bus, and we go on with our lives.

Dwarves aren’t like that. They have lives, and jobs, just like us, and they have normal ideas that don’t come to pass, just like you and me, but sometimes — often enough that the Dwarves have five different words for it, all of which translate, roughly, to “touched” — a dwarf gets a particularly strong idea, an idea that he can’t shake. “I should write a cookbook that focuses on pomegranates,” the dwarf will think, “and I will make the cover from pomegranate peel. And the ink will be made from pomegranate juice, and the pages shall be made of the finest papyrus, and the pages will be bound with a single thread of gold. And the book shall be called ‘Berrydowned’.”

The dwarf’s co-workers might say to him “Hey, Arast, why did you stop hammering?” and Arast will say “Fuck you,” walk in to a grocery store, kick everyone out, and spend the next nine hours obsessively examining each pomegranate to find the perfect materials for his cookbook. That’s what dwarves are like.

This is a story about two dwarves in the fortress of Bekemlogem, “Springpainted.” One of these dwarves became a legend. The other died miserably, starving in the dark. The first dwarf’s name was Nish Oddomshetbêth. The second’s was Urist Kûbukrinal.

Bekemlogem was an unusual fortress, built as it was in the middle of a swamp. Dwarves, by their nature, are not fond of swamps. There’s too much mud, for one thing, and too much water. There are many adjectives one can apply to a dwarf, but “moist” is not the first that comes to mind. This was not just any swamp, but a swamp that, as near as anyone could tell, was over an aquifer. An aquifer can make it hard to mine safely, and no mining means no profit. The leader of the expedition to found the fortress, a merchant by the name of Stukos Oddomsanreb, had to do an awful lot of fast-talking to persuade people that he wasn’t crazy. “There’s a caldera there,” he insisted, “which has to be solid rock. We can tunnel down near the caldera, and mine under the aquifer. If we’re careful, there’s nothing to worry about.”

Stukos was a good man, but not a persuasive one. Only 6 other dwarves left the safety of the mountainhomes to try to find their fortune in Stukos’s swampy paradise.

The funny thing about this is that Stukos turned out to be mostly right. There was solid rock near the caldera, and although their miners had to be careful to not accidentally take a bath in hot magma, they were able to dig down below the aquifer and establish a workshop, where they began growing mushrooms and carving crafts in order to trade with anyone crazy or stupid enough to visit them out in the middle of the marshlands. Soon enough, they started attracting immigrants.

The swamp was peaceful and quiet. There weren’t even any goblin attacks, and when was the last time you heard of a fortress that wasn’t attacked by goblins? Even the goblins, it seems, were smart enough to not come to the swamp.

Nish, a glass-blower by trade, had arrived at Bekemlogem on a spring morning and was promptly informed that out here in the country they didn’t have much call for fancy things like glass, that stone was good enough for plain-spoken honest dwarves, and that we don’t have any sand around here anyway, so here’s a crossbow and you’re in the army now, son.

As I said, there were no goblins in the swamp, which was good, because there weren’t any bolts for Nish’s crossbow either, and even if there had been bolts, there was nothing to shoot at. Military service at Bekemlogem mostly involved standing around outside, swearing, and sweating, not necessarily in that order. Occasionally one of his squad-mates would offer to wrestle, to relieve the boredom, but this just made Nish feel even more uncomfortable, especially since this particular squad-mate always wanted to wrestle naked, “to keep our uniforms from getting wrinkled,” he said.

So mostly Nish just stood outside in the swamp, sweating, and thought about beer.

Nish thought about dark beer, light beer, frothy beer, flat beer, ale, lager, porter, and stout. He thought about beer mugs, beer steins, beer taps, kegs of beer, a beer mug, tall glasses filled with beer, coasters that you could fling at people after you’d drunk enough beer from that stone beer mug, and a table for putting the beer mug on, except there needs to be a little bit of something on the bottom of the mug to make sure it doesn’t scratch the table. A bit of turtle shell would be perfect. He thought about drinking beer on cold days, nice days, rainy days, hot and sticky days, when your hand slips on the beer mug and you drop it, spilling your beer, which is bad, so you’d want to have a good grip. Maybe you could nurl the handle? No, no, too boring. You want something textured. Something you can really feel. Bones. You could wrap the handle in small bones. But you’d have to position the handle so as not to obscure the carving on the mug, the carving depicting the founding of the first Fortress.

It was around this time that Nish dropped his crossbow and began slowly walking towards the nearby outdoor workshop, like he was in a trance. “Hey, get back to your post!” said his captain, Momuz. “Fuck you,” said Nish. He walked in to the workshop, elbowed the master stonecrafter in the face, picked him up by his breeches, and threw him out of the building. Momuz put his head in his hands, and moaned, as the realization hit him. “He’s touched. This is going to end in blood.”

In fact, it didn’t end in blood. It ended in a lovely beer mug, engraved with an image of a dwarf raising a scepter, that Nish called “The Undignified Worries,” which when you think about it is a truly appropriate name for a beer mug. Nish never drank from anything else for as long as he lived. On unveiling the masterful mug — and its artistry and craftsmanship were undeniable — Nish was honorably discharged from the army, was given his own workshop and a generous stipend, and basically allowed to do whatever the hell he wanted for the rest of his life. When not in his workshop, “whatever the hell he wanted” turned out to be drinking beer, from his mug, inside.

No, it didn’t end in blood, but Momuz can be forgiven for thinking that it probably would. The funny thing about ideas — dwarven or human — is that there’s no strict requirement that they be practical. We can all imagine building a hot-air balloon to fly to Jupiter, or making a bicycle entirely of bacon, or, to take an example from Minnie the Moocher, a diamond car with platinum wheels. But when a dwarf is touched by the idea of a car like that, he doesn’t stop to think “this isn’t practical.” Instead, he starts looking around for diamonds and platinum.

What happens when a dwarf can’t find enough diamonds and platinum to build his car? Someone dies. Every time.

Sometimes, the dwarf will go mad, grab the nearest weapon, and start cutting down anyone he comes across. This is what Momuz expected when he bemoaned Nish being touched, because that’s what usually happens. Momuz, being captain of the guard, was likely to be the first person killed. An insane dwarf can usually take down four or five of his comrades before being killed himself. It’s a lot easier to kill when you aren’t afraid of dying.

Strangely, this outcome is viewed by most dwarves as the lesser of two evils.

Sometimes, instead of going on a rampage, the thwarted dwarf will kill himself. Suicide is not a part of dwarvish culture, and they would be bitterly offended to hear me describe it this way. Their word for this sort of death translates roughly to “melancholy.” The melancholic dwarf stops eating, stops drinking, and simply wanders aimlessly around the halls, sometimes for months, until she or he eventually dies from starvation and malnutrition. This is infinitely worse for the dwarves than the violent outcome, which at least is over quickly.

The key thing to realize here is that to the dwarves, the failure of a touched dwarf to create his artefact is a failure of the community, not a failure of the dreamer. “If we had only dug deeper, and worked harder,” they think, “we would have had enough diamonds and platinum for her to build that car. The vision of that car was a gift from the gods, and we were too shiftless and lazy to be able to claim it.” The melancholic dwarf, dying slowly in public, is a constant reminder of the community’s inadequacy.

Which brings us to Urist, a name that to this day will make the dwarves of Bekemlogem weep in shame and shake in self-loathing. Urist was an engineer, a shy boy who one day was touched. True to his nature, Urist snuck downstairs to the lowest levels of the fortress and, in the deep, quietly and shyly claimed a mechanic’s workshop that no one was using. No one noticed he was missing at first, but when they finally found him in the deeps he was surrounded by sketches of something, and refused to say a word. His sketches had rock, and bone, and cloth, and he was surrounded by pieces of rock of varying sizes. The town elders brought him the cloth they had, but none of it was right. They didn’t know how it wasn’t right; Urist wouldn’t say. It was four months until the next caravan would arrive. There was no way that Urist would be able to make whatever it was he was trying to make. And so the dwarven elders of Bekemlogem, perhaps thinking of their children, whom dwarves love as much as we love our own, did the unthinkable.

They walled Urist in his workshop.

Urist made no attempt to escape. He just stood behind the workbench, calmly watching each stone as it slid into place. The masons, their cheeks red with humiliation, would not meet his eyes.

When the last stone slid into place, he sat down and, quietly, waited to die. It took fifty-two days. He never made a sound.

Abstraction is the activity that lies at the core of much of computer science, and computer hardware and software engineering. Understanding what the word means is thus at the core of understanding both how and why computing systems are are put together and evolve the way they do. It is also a large part of the key to understanding the mind of the engineer, because more than anything an enthusiasm for clever and aesthetically pleasing abstractions is what drives people to become engineers in the first place.

So what is abstraction anyway? In my mind the you can boil it down to the following overly simple definition: Abstraction is the act of giving a short and easy to remember name to something that is long and complicated. By doing this, you absolve yourself of needing to remember the long and complicated stuff.

The Internet provides a convenient example. Suppose you want to explain to people what “Abstraction” is. You could do a lot of research and thinking and then write several hundred words down on a piece of paper. Then, when anyone asks you could read the paper to them. But this can get long and tedious. So, instead, what you could do is post your several hundred words on the Internet in a special place and then just hand out this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction

or maybe

http://tleaves.com/?p=1081

Then people can just follow keep the link around and read the words by themselves. This, I claim, is abstraction at its core. We have taken something long and complicated and turned it into a single easy to remember name so we don’t have to think about the other stuff anymore.

If you spend any time around computers, you see abstraction everywhere. Building a circuit to perform arithmetic on 32 bit fixed point numbers is complicated and hard. So we build the circuit and then hide it behind a few dozen bit patterns that represent instructions for load, store, add, multiply, and so on. Bit patterns are hard for humans to remember, so we further encode them as assembly language mnemonics. You will soon find yourself writing the same sequences of assembly language over and over again, so we package these up as a set of libraries and functions that all applications can use and call that an “operating system”.

Operating systems further abstract the physical hardware that might be connected to a computer so as to make it more easily shareable by multiple applications. The most obvious example here is virtual memory. Most people think of virtual memory as “paging”, but it is really something deeper. All physical hardware defines a fixed set of names at which we can store program data. These are “physical addresses”. If application programs were forced to always use physical addresses they would constantly have to argue with each other over where they could be loaded and which areas of memory were free for use or not. This is tedious and error prone.

Virtual memory allows every program to pretend that it has some fixed set of addresses that start at zero and go up to whatever. Further, they can pretend that they have this whole address space to themselves. The operating system then takes care of making sure that programs don’t end up using the same physical memory or otherwise destroying each other. Again, we simplify high level code by introducing an abstraction layer that essentially does name translation.

The higher levels of software applications also have their own collections of abstractions. Some are important enough to have special names. I work primarily in desktop software with a fancy graphical interface. These applications tend to be constructed out of three abstractions that like to think of each other as black boxes, although it never works out.

1. Model: how the application stores the basic units of the user’s data. In a text editor, this would be text and layout. In a video game, this would be the models and assets that the engine uses to represent the state of the game. You get the idea.

2. View: how the application displays data for the user. This is the visible part of the user interface.

3. Controller: how the application responds to user commands. This is the less visible part of the user interface. It determines which sequences of actions are legal in a user interface and thus what workflows it can support. A good rule of thumb would be to say that the view side draws the button and the controller defines what the button does to the model.

Thinking about applications in this way allows software engineers to not have to consider every single possible detail whenever they sit down to solve some problem or fix some bug. First, you can isolate it to the black box you need to work in. Then you can work on only the concerns that are relevant to that box.

Of course, abstraction boundaries are not perfect, and the details of the boxes tend to leak out, which is what makes fixing software complicated. Still, it is amazing the extent to which people that work on different parts of the system can be completely isolated from each other. The model guy might understand hundreds of details about how the application encodes the various data on disk, but know nothing about how it is later rendered on the screen for the shiny demos. Similarly, the graphics guy just knows how to write code to draw. The stuff he needs to draw is always just there, because the model guy has taken care of it for him. This isolation can be strong enough that people can work for years on applications and not even know what the basic feature set is. I’ve seen it.

The essential service that abstractions provide is that they allow you to be lazy. Rather than remember how physical memory is managed in a machine you just ask the operating system to take care of you. Similarly, instead of knowing how you write the blue and red widgets to disk, you just call into some API defined by someone else on your team and then go scream at them when the code does not work and starts to show up on crashlogs in the bugs you have been given to fix.

This capacity for increasing laziness is a wondrous thing. But, it can also get us into trouble. We can be blinded by the power of our wonderful abstractions and lose track of the problems we had set out to solve in the first place. Worse, we can surround ourselves with abstractions and, assuming they will solve all our problems, not really think about the problems at all and thus never really solve them. As incredible as it may seem, I am writing here that it is possible to be too lazy.

But, we’ll leave those thoughts for the second part of this long winded pontification, which will explain the Distraction part of the Abstraction Distraction.

Today I took Route 48 south from McKeesport, a road I’ve been meaning to drive for a while, just to see what was there. And I managed to find some great images.

Click on the next one to enlarge:

I’m still deciding whether they’re good enough to warrant going up onto Flickr.

Wow I love this stage. And who can’t appreciate the brilliant tactics that CSC used to completely obliterate the rest of the race. They put on a clinic in team bike racing. Go watch the stage to see how it’s done.

While in the mystical land of New Jersey, I went to a wonderful liquor store: Joe Canal’s.

There are strict rules in Pennsylvania governing purchasing alcohol in other states. Therefore, believe me when I say that this was merely a visit for entertainment. I did not purchase many bottles of wine at reasonable prices. The wine that I did not purchase was not of a staggering variety from around the world. I did not take advantage of the discount Joe Canal’s gives when not buying my mixed case of wine. Nor did I peruse the wide selection of fine beers at reasonable prices, which you could buy one bottle at a time instead of in a case. I certainly did not bring back several bottles of Luxardo Maraschino for my friend Nat.

Michael Brenner

I did chat briefly with one of the store managers, Michael Brenner. I am still trying to integrate our conversation into my understanding of the world. For example, when I mentioned some comparatively esoteric spirits, he knew what I was talking about, and knew where they were. He even was able to talk intelligently about what they tasted like, but this would imply that there are liquor store employees who are educated about the product they sell. Isn’t that crazy? It’s almost like I wandered into a Bizarro world: a store that is interested in the product they sell.

I spent, all told, about an hour at Joe Canal’s, picking up and lovingly caressing the bottles that I would have bought, if I didn’t live in Pennsylvania. The staff was quite understanding. They even let me take a few pictures.

Let me give you another quick example: in Pennsylvania, you’re basically lucky to find one ruby port in any given store. (You’ll find several “late bottled vintages” and more expensive Portos, but I subscribe to the theory that the “middle tier” of Portos is actually overpriced and mediocre. I’ve hinted at that before, but it’s really the subject of another article.) In a Pennsylvania State store, the only ruby port you’ll find is Cockburns, and at $12.99/bottle it’s overpriced. You can special order a few others, but there’s a 6 bottle minimum, and they’re also overpriced at $13/bottle.

Selection!

In addition to a nice array of late-bottled vintages and vintage ports, Joe Canal’s had 4 different ruby ports on the shelves, and at least two white ports. All of them were $10 a bottle. I did not, of course, buy one of each of the ruby ports, planning an upcoming orgy of inexpensive but quality Porto and stinky blue cheese. Why would I do such a thing? Just because it would mean that I could try each of them in turn, and then plan to buy a case of the one I liked when I returned to New Jersey next month? Such thoughts are beneath me. They never crossed my mind. Even now, I feel slightly sick at the implication that anyone might drive across the border from Philly to shop at a liquor store with a better selection and lower prices than a PLCB state store. Pennsylvanians are above that sort of chicanery.

When I mentioned my recent fascination with Japanese whisky, Michael said “Well, we have the Yamazaki; it’s the only one you can get from wholesalers.” Walking through the aisles, we soon came to the display with the Yamazaki 12 and the Yamazaki 18. The Yamazaki 18 retails for $121 at the PLCB, and is only available by special order. At Joe Canal’s it was an impossibly-inexpensive $80, and available on the shelf. Of course, gentle reader, I don’t need to tell you that I didn’t buy it. I didn’t drink deep its peaty resonance, reveling in both the luxuriousness of the liquor, and in the fact that I had just saved $40. No. I could have done that. But that would have been wrong.

As I drove away from Joe Canal’s, my trunk completely empty and not filled to the brim with inexpensive wines that were tasty and a good value for money, I sighed a deep sigh. Perhaps some day I can come back again, to that magical land of tasty wine, and intelligent people who know how to talk about it: New Jersey.

Tonight a recipe that will do you no good at all. The Penn Avenue Fish Company has had head-on shrimp lately. These are huge shrimp which are for once sold whole. This means you can cook the shrimp with the head still on. They taste better that way. What I did was just drop them in boiling water until they told me they were done. The second time I got nervous and left them in a bit longer and they were overcooked. Don’t let this happen to you. When the shell changes color they are pretty much done.

So I needed something to dip the shrimp in.

Cocktail sauce is not my expertise. I decided to make my mom’s peanut sauce. She used to make this for cold noodles a lot, but you can do other things with it.

Start with a couple of tablespoons of hot water. Add to this a couple of table spoons of peanut butter. The best kind to use is JIF or Peter Pan or something. You can’t use the stuff that is nothing but organic ground nuts because the fake stuff has emulsifiers in it that hold the sauce together. If this bothers you, get the Whole Foods version of JIF. It works about as well.

Get a whisk and whisk in some soy sauce. How much? 2 glugs. Enough to give the sauce enough soy sauce flavor. Enough so that the consistency is right. Not so much that things get too salty or you kill the taste of the peanut butter. The finished product should be thick enough to stick the food, but still more like a liquid than a solid. You just have to keep mixing and adjusting until it looks and tastes right. Of course, you’ve never made it or tasted it so you don’t know. Thus, this recipe is useless.

In any case, for dipping sauces that want a bit of sweetness, you can now add Hoisin Sauce. This will thicken the sauce a bit and give it a sweet aftertaste. When you get those fresh spring rolls the dipping sauce they come with tastes like my peanut sauce with Hoisin in it and peanuts on top.

Adding chili oil is also a good variation.

Adding citrus or a bit of vinegar also works well.

For the shimp, I added a bit of hot sauce and some lime juice. I liked it. Karen thought it was a little too strong for the shrimp. It would have been great on spring rolls though.

For the classic cold peanut noodles, take the base sauce without the Hoisin and add a bit of sesame oil mix it up to coat cold cooked noodles. My mom used to use spaghetti. Any sort of similar noodle will work. Add scallions on top and maybe cucumber cut into thin sticks if you are not lazy.

Now what always confused me is why people are always calling that dish “sesame” noodles. I guess there must be a way to make it without peanut butter. Oh well.

The request was simple. Tape 2 hours of content from Versus every day from noon until 2pm so that I could watch a nice summary of the daily Tour De France stage without undue stress. The two hour summary is the best because it won’t get cut off due to the vagaries of live programming, and unlike the 8pm repeat, it does not feature two neanderthal retards doing the commentary.

Of course, even with all of the world’s 21st century technology brought to bear, this simple task proves to be impossible. This is why broadcast television is doomed.

What I found when I opened up my Tivo this afternoon after work was two hours of CNBC droning about oil prices. The machine mocked my by putting the Versus logo over this for the first minute or so, even though it was clear that what I was watching was CNBC. No Phil Ligget. No Paul Sherwen. No Stage 11 for me today since there is no fucking way I’m going to watch those two frat boys in the 8pm broadcast drool all over themselves.

I made that mistake already a few stages ago where the sum total of the commentary on the final sprint could be summarized as

“Uhhh, guuhhh, ooooh, guuuh”

That is a direct quote.

So what has caused this insult to my person? The best guess is that in their infinite wisdom Comcast has made sure that I will never be able to retrieve the content I want because they have shifted the channels around without informing anyone. The result is that until the Tivo catches up, it is completely fucking useless.

What all this reminds me of is the airline industry. Here you have another entrenched set of businesses that only survive because they own something (their routes) that which would be expensive for someone else to obtain. In the case of TV the thing the retarded incompetant bastards own is the content and the means to limit the distribution of said content to specific times and places. Thus, since Comcast moved their channels I can’t ever watch what I wanted to watch because now the bits are on the floor somewhere.

What I don’t understand is why Comcast (and to some extent Tivo) want to make this so hard for me. Presumably they make money by delivering the content I want at the time I would like it. It seems irrational to me for them to constantly treat their customers like dogmeat. Unless of course they are taking their business models from the airlines.

If I were smart I would give up. But I have an irrational attachment to live sports which makes this impractical. I guess it’s time to try Verizon FIOS. It’s pretty sad when your customer service record makes Verizon look attractive. Good job Comcast.

It’s been an up and down time at “Chez Les Deux Petes” and one of the things on the downswing has been my motivation to actually write anything, good or not, to put on the site. So as I tend to do in these times, here is a collection of short thoughts that I never managed to turn into full on wank sessions.

Hit: Decent Potato Salad

I’ve never been able to make potato salad. There is something about it that just eluded me. But then I was half paying attention to the latest Alton Brown episode on the TV and I saw him drizzle vinegar on the cooked potatoes and stick them in the fridge for a few hours. Brilliant! Potato salad has been solved. Just have to try it with a Cuisinart-made garlic mayonnaise next time.

Miss: Chicken Fried Steak

Tried to make chicken fried steak. Instead I got sort of a soggy chewy mess. Clearly this is going to take some more research.

Hit: Grinding Diablo

Part of the reason I have not written anything is that my thumbs are too sore from clicking on the trackpad as I slowly grind my way through Diablo. How many games make it possible to replay areas just for the fun of turning more bands of minions from hell into jelly?

Miss: Costco Chicken Packs

We were told to bring food for 20, which was a bit of an overestimate. As usual, we overestimated how much 20 people could eat. So we ended up with three huge cases of plastic encased chicken parts. This is the first time I’ve seen food wrapped in blister pack. In addition, the chicken is not of this earth. It comes from some strange alien chicken world where the humans and chickens must be much larger. I am never buying chicken at Costco again.

We didn’t even crack open the “emergency” steaks.

Hit? NCAA 2009 Demo

The demo seems to play OK. They’ve fixed, almost, the play calling screens. The hot route and audible UI is fixed. The game almost feels responsive. But I’ve been fooled before. No conclusion here until Madden comes out.

Miss: Nerdcore response to E3 Presentations

Every year now it’s the same thing. The intertubes are full of streaming video of the E3 presentations and all you can conclude is that none of these companies knows how to do a product rollout as well as Steve Jobs. It’s really sad.

But what is worse is the constant whiny river of vitriol that flows out of the “hardcore gamer” set about how lame the E3 announcements were. What do they expect? Do they expect all game companies to be as good as Blizzard? Do they expect ponies?

Most of the recent wrath is again aimed at Nintendo, who for yet another year have “abandoned” the important core gamer set in favor of making bathtubs full of money by creating products that everyone likes, not just the male 18-34 year olds who already spend all their time on Xbox Live or playing World of Warcraft. We’ve gone over this before so I won’t repeat myself any more than I already have.

Hit: Pancakes

Take this recipe. Make sure you mix the dry ingredients really really well. Use a bit less buttermilk and replace it with a bit of low fat milk. Avoid shitty electric griddles that don’t get hot enough. The result will be thick, light, fluffy pancakes that soak up syrup like a sponge. Pancake heaven. Now if I only knew what Dottie’s used for a spice mix.

Miss: Adventures in Data Loss

My laptop hard disk decided to head crash while I was cloning it to my standard backup clone drive. As a result, I also had no backup clone drive at the time. Thus, I had to spend an excruciating weekend laboriously reinstalling everything I normally use on the laptop and setting it all up again. Usually the MacOS migration utility does this work for me, and I like it that way. It’s by far the most useful thing that MacOS does. I’ve only done this sort of rebuild twice in the almost 7 years I’ve been back on Macs.

Hit: Paranoid Redundant Backups

Happily, the head crash did not wipe any data I really cared about. The music is somewhere else. The work stuff is mostly at work. And most importantly, the photos are periodically backed up in at least three places at any given time, so the week of pictures I thought I lost were actually in backup disk number three in my office. Let this be a lesson. There is no level of paranoia too high for your picture archive.

I also bought a second pocket drive for laptop Time Machine use. And made a second clone disk in case this ever happens again, so I can at least try to boot the laptop the next time I am completely screwed.

Hmm, now that I have written this little missive, I guess I’ll go back up my photos again. See ya.

Those of you who know me well know that as far as I am concerned, the entire point of software development is to enable me to be as lazy as humanly possible:

This has presented a problem when wanting to use DOSBox to play great old DOS games, such as The Summoning. In order to play them, first I have to start DOSBox, then I have to type something. Whenever I think about doing this, there’s a little voice in my head. The voice is saying: two buttons?

Fortunately, someone has come to my rescue, and released Boxer, which bills itself as “Mac-friendly DOSBox emulation”. And it works.

Essentially, for each game that you want to Boxify, you tell Boxer the path to its directory (once). Then you rename that directory in the Finder — say, from “RRTYCOON” to “RRTYCOON.boxer”. That associates the directory with Boxer. From that point forward, when you want to play Railroad Tycoon, you just double click the icon over RRTYCOON.boxer, and Boxer takes care of the rest. It’s a neat little hack. And I was playing old DOS games — mostly The Summoning and Warlords II — all weekend long.

If the freakish and wonderfully single-minded “Beard Papa” chain of Japanese cream puff shops had any locations in the Pittsburgh area, I would weigh about half again as much as I do today.

That is all.

First, I would like to take credit for peterb’s little epiphany about Internet distribution in our last episode. I found the Blizzard download store while poking around for Diablo 2. Generally I try to avoid Blizzard because they make The Game I am Not Allowed to Play(tm). After watching the completely incredible demo video for Diablo 3, I was intrigued by the idea of a polished dungeon crawler. But one thing still stood in the way: I generally don’t like to play games on my computer. It’s not worth the hassle.

I figured I would give Blizzard a chance because Blizzard is not just any PC gaming company. They have a long track record of producing incredibly polished games that are also well supported in the long term. Sure, they make an infinite stream of money with World Of Warcraft but the original Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo series are all still supported and all enjoy a reasonable level of sales even 15 to almost 20 years after their release. I think this is unusual.

Blizzard’s new download store is also unusual in the industry because the downloads do not have any aggressive DRM on them. Unlike Steam, I can download the binary and then play it wherever the hell I want without the spirit of Gabe Newell watching over me.

Blizzard also has a reputation for using art direction to make their games look good instead of trying to rely on high end technology. The result of this is that they tend to be extremely conservative in the hardware that they require for their games to run. Even their newest games usually have relatively mild hardware requirements. I think WoW would even run on my crappy Macbook with no real graphics card, for example.

Finally, Blizzard is unusual in that they release all their stuff on the both the Mac and Windows platforms at the same time. They should get some kind of “long suffering developer lifetime achievement award” for sticking with Apple for as long as they have. It can’t be easy.

I was willing to give Blizzard a chance with this game because they have met what would be my minimal requirements for proving that a gaming company doesn’t think I’m a drooling moron:

1. The game is easy to purchase.

2. The game does not have any stupid copy protection that will fail in some stupid way.

3. The game will run on my hardware and my operating system.

4. The game is well produced and polished, not some piece of shit that needs 15 patches before it is any good.

Even with all this going for them, the whole enterprise still almost failed. I found out the morning after I downloaded the Diablo 2 installer but before I could play the game that the new Apple operating system had broken the game on some machines with some hardware. It looked for a moment like I was doomed. But then a miracle happened. The change in the operating system apparently did not affect my graphics card, so rather than crash immediately, the game allowed me to run around the countryside smashing enemies to bits with a click of my mouse.

I happily click-click-click-click-click-click-click-clicked by way through a few areas. Satisfied with my achievement, I then closed the game for the night.

All of this brings up two final questions in my mind. First, as Pete asked in his piece: if Blizzard can do this, what exactly is the rest of the industry doing while they gaze at their navels and drool over new shader programs? Second, if even a company as good as Blizzard can nearly get screwed by any minor OS update, what real hope is there for the general purpose computer as a gaming appliance? I would be sad to have to give up this particular game at this particular time. But I will drop it in a heartbeat if the game makes me do any work to play it.

I guess might go get Starcraft and maybe Warcraft III as well.

Different people do different things with their vacations. Some people ski. Some people windsurf. Me? I catch up on all the videogames I’ve been meaning to play.

I realize that this may confuse my readers. Don’t I already spend all of my free time playing videogames? The answer is: no. I am, regrettably, an unrepentant workaholic, and as much as I enjoy playing games (and writing about them), it ain’t my day job. That takes priority, then come reviews that I’m paid to write, and then comes this blog, along with several other hobbies and artistic outlets of roughly equal priority. The truth is, lately it feels like I’ve been writing about games more than I’ve been playing them.

So now that I have a chance to breathe, I’ve been catching up. A number of publishers sent me some games to review, and I have a few longer-running games that I wanted to dig into. Then something curious happened that made me pensive.

There’s a game developer and publisher called Blizzard. This is the company whose World of Warcraft enables their employees to spend every day rolling around naked in fat sacks of cash. Blizzard has always been an intriguingly non-evil company. They have a stable of games that are developed around their own properties, rather than just licensing titles. Their games are always very finely polished and well-supported. And they nearly always release their games simultaneously on Windows and MacOS, which has made them near and dear to my heart.

Blizzard just announced the latest installment of their Diablo series, Diablo III. Along with this, they made Diablo II available for digital download, at a price competitive with what you’d pay in the stores. Back in the day, I didn’t own these games — my roommate did. So I bought Diablo, and the expansion, and Starcraft, and have been happily playing them.

So here I am, on vacation. I am 500 miles from the nearest Best Buy, which might be out of stock of the games I wanted anyway. I can make a snap decision, at 10 pm at night, to buy a game, and three clicks and one longish download later, I have achieved gratification. The publisher gets paid. The consumer gets satisfied. Everyone wins.

There’s just one question left to be answered. I direct this question to those of you who are publishing games that are not available for digital download. I direct this question to those of you who publish games that, idiotically, require me to keep your stupid CD or DVD in my drive while I play. I direct this question, in other words, to the other 90% of the “PC gaming” market. The question is: What the hell is wrong with you?

This transaction with Blizzard leverages several of the advantages the PC has. It uses the hard drive so that I don’t have to have a physical token (beyond the machine) to play the game. It uses the network to deliver the game to me, so I don’t have to drive around to three different GameStops before I find the product I want. Meanwhile, on another planet, Atari is still selling games with cd-checks and Securom in them because, apparently, they don’t want to sell games that run in laptops on an airplane. Or in VMWare virtual machines on Macs. Given this attitude, I can only presume that when the CEO of Atari wants to fry an egg, the first thing he does is look for two sticks to rub together so he can make a fire.

Copy-protection shills and industry apologists will throw around excuses for this incredible business failure. They’ll natter and whine about how Diablo II is an old game, anyway, and that’s why they don’t have to worry as much about piracy. But as a consumer, let me tell you: the fact that the game was old was not an issue. If this had cost $50, instead of $20, I still would have bought it. You can find Diablo II on any Bittorrent search engine, but given how easy it is to pick up a legal copy, why bother stealing it?

When talking to dyed-in-the-wool PC gamers, there’s an attitude that would be charmingly naive if it wasn’t so corrosive: it’s the idea that, in the end, winners and losers in the marketplace will be determined by “the best technology,” where “technology” is narrowly construed to mean the most pixels pushed per second, or the best physics simulation, or what have you. What the companies that are actually winning in the marketplace have figured out is that taking care of their customers is just as important as pushing pixels.

Treating your customers like enemies might have worked OK when most people who bought video games were teenagers. In today’s game market, it’s simply a recipe for disaster.