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Today I introduced James to Flat Out 2, a racing game that involves destroying just about anything on the road -- your opponents, scenery, and so on.
After about a minute of playing it, James said, "Wow. This is like the Hot Wheels game I've always wanted."
Comcast:
Your DVR -- more specifically, the Motorola DVR that features twin tuners and gobs of hard disk space, sucks.
It doesn't just suck a little bit. It sucks lots. Like, in a universe dominated by the cold, hard vacuum of deep space, it sucks. It sucks like a hoover. It sucks like a black hole. It sucks like a lamprey eel.
It is, to borrow a phrase from The Simpsons, the suckiest suck that ever sucked.
It's slow to respond to remote control commands. The user interface sucks. There's no way to easily export content to a computer or handheld device.
Please, please, please, Comcast. Make it suck less.
There was an ad tonight for one of the entertainment news programs, noting that they were going to talk with David Hasselhoff. Now, being a child of the 1980s, I associate him with one thing: Knight Rider. I know that if I'd been a few years younger, the connection might be Baywatch instead. And if I'd been German, well, I might have a totally different connotation.
Apparently James does, too. There's some sort of generation gap at work. Because he heard Hasselhoff and said, "Isn't he the guy from SpongeBob SquarePants?"
OK, it's sick, and it's wrong, but I love it:
I remember growing up we had one phone -- one of those Ma Bell-issued square jobbers with the rotary dial. Eventually we replaced it with a similar phone that used a dial pad, once we got tone service. Those things were bulletproof and would probably survive anything short of a nuclear holocaust -- they were built to last. It had no features -- no programmable rings, no voice mail, no redial, nothing. But when someone called, it rang.
Nowadays I'm lucky if I can get 12-18 months out of the cheap pieces of crap I pick up at Best Buy or BJ's. Desk phones today, and for years, have been built to be thrown away. And while the manufacturers provide you with access to the rechargeable batteries of cordless phones, more often than not, it's more economical simply to replace the phone than it is to buy a replacement battery -- presuming you can actually find one that fits the proprietary or off-brand connector found within.
It irritates me, because for the most part, phones are poorly designed, poorly manufactured from cheap parts, and feature desperately awful user interfaces, especially the last two phones I've owned, made by Vtech and Panasonic.
What's worse is that they have feature bloat that makes Microsoft Office pale by comparison. Even $10 phones you pick up at the drug store are typically so feature-dense you'll be lucky to use 20, maybe 30 percent of their overall capabilities. Does anyone really use 100 preset numbers?
I understand completely that they're commodity electronic components made as cheaply as possible, but let's face it: We use our phones practically all the time, almost every day, and you'd think for all the exposure that they'd be better made and better designed. We deserve better, that's for damn sure.
"I plan not to lift a finger to help the State of Oklahoma if Senator Inhofe continues to reject global warming in the sorts of rude terms that he used with Al Gore last week. Same goes for the home districts in Texas of Ralph Hall and Joe Barton. The voters in Oklahoma and those particular districts in Texas are responsible for these clowns, and it is about time that they told them to put a lid on it.
"... In a democracy, the citizens are responsible. In the end, they can only plead that they were ignorant or misled or lied to or tricked for a few years. After that, it is their responsibility to get a clue and get rid of the officials who have been misleading them, or lying to them, or tricking them, and also the ones who are as dumb as a bag of hammers, as Senator Inhofe repeatedly reveals himself to be."
So there's this big housing subdivision in Plymouth, Mass. called The Pinehills. They advertise on a billboard on Route 3 South, just north of where Routes 3 and 44 meet.
The billboard says "House Guests Won't Leave."
That's supposed to be an incentive for me to buy a house there?
So the training I took last week certified me with Apple as an Aperture user -- an Aperture Pro. The training that I took this week certifies me as an Aperture trainer. It's very exciting. I'm still not sure what I'll do with my new found knowledge, but I'm grateful for the chance to use it.
Now, hopefully, I'll pass the trainer exam.
More details tomorrow or Thursday, in all likelihood.
I'm really more excited about this than I should be. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit it, but this is about the first professional technical certification I can ever remember getting. I'm glad it's for an Apple product, and one that I'm genuinely fond of and interested in. And given that Aperture is still a version 1 product, I feel like I'm getting in on it at a point where I can still get a handle on how the software works, how pros who are using the tool use it, and what the path should be for the future.
I'm in New York City through Wednesday. I saw our friend Alicia for dinner tonight and am getting together with a couple of colleagues for drinks tonight.
Whenever I come to NYC, I'm reminded of how much I love the city -- especially when I'm in Manhattan. There's an incredible amount of energy here. It's totally kinetic.
I can't ever imagine raising a family here -- I'm happy keeping our home and our kids far away from the city, any city -- but coming here is always a thrill, and I can certainly imagine moving here at some point that I'm living in an empty nest (if Bonnie is willing, of course).
It's just the little things that I love, partly just because there's the novelty of being in the city: Being able to take the subway just about anywhere, for example. Pretzel vendors on the street. Really awesome bagels and pizza.
Oddly, coming from Boston, I don't feel the same sense of antagonism here that I often get from Bostonians when it comes to New York -- the whole "Yankees Suck" thing. Growing up in Boston, you hear that New Yorkers are rude, they're annoying, they're too fast-paced, all this other crap. Personally, I find New York to actually be a pretty welcoming, friendly place -- certainly more so than Boston, and certainly more accessible. The city that never sleeps and all. You know.
I'm really hitting the limits of my endurance here. This one goes on for so long you'll have to click to continue, but if you've been reading the ongoing saga of our story with the town of Mashpee where it comes to our two special needs kids, you have to click through.
Shortly after Emmeline started fourth grade we requested that the Quashnet school in Mashpee perform what's called a Functional Behavioral Assessment, or FBA. This is sometimes done for a child who's had conduct problems, but it's particularly important for a child who suffers from an emotional disability like Emmeline.
An FBA is a precursor to another piece of documentation called an BIP, or Behavioral Intervention Plan. In Emmeline's case, Bonnie and I felt that having an FBA and BIP on file would make perfect sense. That way educators and specialists working with her would understand how her behavior affects her ability to learn and interact with teachers and peers, and they would have documentation describing what sort of positive interventions and strategies could be used to elicit good behavior from her, or, at the very least, divert her emotional outbursts from getting worse.
My daughter suffers from bipolar disorder, and she has an explosive, highly reactive personality. Having a BIP on file for her is, in my mind, the same as providing someone with an owner's manual for a complicated piece of equipment that has a chance to blow up in one's face. It only makes sense.
In November we met to discuss the results of the FBA that had been done. Bonnie and I agreed, as did our educational consultant, that the FBA was totally inadequate. First of all, it was done by one of Emme's teachers. FBAs are, by definition, supposed to be done by observation from a third party, preferably a trained psychologist, who witnesses the child's outbursts and tries to get a handle on what's causing them. Someone who's actively teaching her can't very well step outside of his environment and be expected to render an objective observation about the behavior's antecedents, especially if he was involved.
Also, the FBA was incomplete. Entire passages were not done. And the BIP consisted essentially of reiterating the school's punitive measures for dealing with behavior problems. No positive interventions were offered.
So we rejected it totally.
In January a rented psychology for the school (the previous staff psychologist left and got a job in a nearby town after the end of the previous academic year and hasn't been replaced yet) did an FBA, and we've been trying to schedule a meeting to discuss the results since then.
In a nutshell, there was a major screw-up on Friday morning concerning Emmeline's FBA meeting. Here is the history in a nutshell
Joan Collins (yeah, that's her real name) at the Quashnet school had arbitrarily scheduled the FBA meeting for earlier in the week, 3/16. That date wouldn't work. We agreed on Friday at 12:30.
I called our ed consultant to confirm; she said that time was fine. I called Joan back to confirm that time was good. She protested, saying that she already had a meeting scheduled at that time and that she never would have told me 12:30. She then insisted that 9:15 was the time to come in. Fortunately that time worked for Mary too, so it seemed as if we were safe.
When Bonnie and I arrived (apparently a couple of minutes after Stacy and Mary left, we were delayed getting the kids ready for school and because of the weather) we were told by the office secretary that our meeting had been "rescheduled" to 12:30.
Needless to say, Bonnie and I were pissed off beyond belief. We *insisted* that we talk to Joan, right then and there.
At first, she was adamant that she *never* told me 9:15 AM. After several minutes of heated discussion, she recanted and admitted that she may have made a mistake.
I told her that I wanted her to give us some other dates and times by e-mail that would work, and that I'd get back to everyone with the details to see what would work. Bonnie also pointed out that the FBA itself was rife with incomplete passages and that the observer's notes repeated whole passages twice. Joan promised to have the rent-a-psychologist look into it.
Hanlon's Razor is a corollary that says "Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity."
It's good advice, in my opinion, and it's a proposition I try to remember at times like this.
But as I explained to the school principal, Jeff Dees, following my argument with Joan, every misstep committed by the Mashpee Schools is seeming less and less like a genuine screw up and more and more like a personal slight aimed directly at us. Honest to God.
There has, from the start, not been a single thing we can point to regarding the special education of our two older children and say, "Yeah, they've handled this well."
Ironically, Jeff, who has been a big part of the problem where our son Robert is concerned, agreed with me. I have to give the man points for his honesty.
Some might call me a perfectionist, I suppose. But I'm just looking for a minimum level of administrative competency here, and the town of Mashpee is coming up sorrowfully short.
I was ruminating recently that I've now been reporting on Mac game news since 1994. Actually, that's when my first Web domain was registered. I think I'd been doing it for almost a year before that. So 14 years. According to at least some of the statistics I've read, it's entirely conceivable I could have served less time for murder.
Not that I'm complaining, mind you, but it's food for thought...
Well, that was one of the shortest business trips I've done in a while.
I left on Monday and flew back on Friday. Typically I try to stay through the weekends too when I fly intercostal, but I couldn't manage that this time around because Bonnie and I had plans to attend the Federation for Children with Special Needs' annual conference in Boston the following day, today, the 10th. It meant that I had to be up at 5:30 AM this morning, which was just wrong and painful a day after coming home from a trade show, but it's worthwhile.
Plus, they have WiFi. I'm posting this from the amphitheater at Boston's World Trade Center, waiting for the next lecturer to take the dais.
My iTunes alerts
Originally uploaded by flargh.
Here are three musical acts I never expected to see put together. Having said that, I've purchased all of them from the iTunes Store at one time or another.
I landed safely in San Francisco yesterday -- I'm here until Friday for the Game Developers Conference (GDC). I'm looking forward to it -- while I've covered GDC remotely for years, this is my first time actually at the event.
Yesterday was a really hectic day -- I had to pop into the office first thing, then I went down to the convention center, finally got around to checking into my hotel, and had dinner with an esteemed developer who I wanted to see. Somewhere I managed to fit in a call to Bonnie and unpacking, too. I had to get a refrigerator delivered to the room to store my Byetta. The hotel had initially told me it would be a $30 charge, but when they found it was for medication, they waived the fee, which I thought was nice.
Bonnie is having massive trouble with her Zodiac, a Palm-based PDA which, after two years of daily use, appears to be on its last legs. It figures that there has to be some major technical snafu when I'm 3000 miles away.
While I'm perfectly content to keep my iPod separate from my BlackBerry, the first time I've ever regularly used iSync has been since I got the BlackBerry. I could just never get the hang of carrying and using a PDA in addition to my phone and iPod.
I asked Bonnie if she wanted a smartphone instead, fully expecting that she'd say yes. I was bracing myself for having to go to Verizon and buy a Treo (she's a much bigger Palm PDA fan than I am). She surprised me by telling me no. Unlike me, she actually wants her devices separate from one another.
So Bonnie appears amenable to a simple, replacement PDA, so I might pick her up a Palm Z22 before I leave the city. It won't have Bluetooth like the Zodiac, but honestly, my experience has been that Palms and Bluetooth are more trouble than they're worth.
I've been getting pretty close to the storage limit of my 30GB iPod for a while now just with music. I'd pretty much given up on synchronizing other content like photos and movies. But over the weekend I did something I've been meaning to for a while: I synced the contents of my MacBook Pro -- my "daily driver" -- with my Power Mac G5, which has a separate music library I've compiled over several years and transferred from machines dating back to my blue and white Power Mac G3, which I got in 1999.
Given that history, I'm actually surprised that there was only 19GB of difference between the two systems -- about 2700 songs, I think, give or take. But that's enough to push my iPod music library to about 50GB, which is much more than this poor 30GB can handle.
The problem is that it seems whenever I use my iPod, I go for the one or two songs, albums or artists that iTunes doesn't copy over as part of its automatically managed iPod playlist. I suppose I could get smarter about using iTunes, but where's the fun in that, when I know there's an 80GB model that could comfortably contain everything I have, including videos, photos (including full-res photos from Aperture), games and the like!
Robert has been getting phone calls from his friends at school (and elsewhere) almost every day. The majority of them are coming from his school chum Joey, who shares his interest in video and computer games, but his friends Emma and Savannah have also called.
Anyway, it's gone from amusing to irritating to infuriating to pick up the phone, see who it is, answer it, and then hand it off to Robert. So I gave him his own phone. Fortunately, a line already had been run to his room -- an extension from the main line that serves the rest of the house -- so all I had to do was put a phone there. Which I did. I gave him my old phone from my office.
So now he can check the caller ID, and he'll be responsible for talking with his friends. And I can stop having to get up every time the damn phone rings.
My Alma Mater
Originally uploaded by flargh.