More Than 12 Months Between Posts.

That may be a record for me.

I was recently diagnosed with severe sleep apnea and have been learning to live with a CPAP machine. It has been a little hit and miss over the last couple months, and have decided to re-purpose this space into a log of my successes and struggles with the machine. Not that anyone cares. Or is reading.

Anyway, it is currently just after 1am and I need to give the machine a second attempt tonight. I'm fairly congested at the moment and when I initially laid down about an hour ago I kept feeling like I wasn't getting enough air, which makes me claustrophobic and panicky. I took an allergy pill and it seems to have kicked in a bit so we're going to give it another shot. I need to talk to the doc about the congestion, which seems more or less chronic.

Will hopefully start posting my numbers here each morning. 

Ambush Interview Defense

Was just listening to an On The Media segment about the history and  uses of the "Ambush Interview" and believe that I've come up with the perfect defense to them. The goal of most modern ambush interviews is not to actually get an interview, but to get the spectacle of someone you've already established to your audience as being the Bad Guy in the narrative being off guard and flustered and not being able to muster coherent responses to your questions. The interviewer wants to see you angry or swearing or running down the block to get away, and if you blow your cool enough to actually attack the camera or the host, well that's just teaser gold. What you need to do when confronted with an ambush interview is give them none of that. Stare as blankly as you can manage straight into the camera. Do not speak and look around as little as possible. Utterly ignore the host, their questions, and anything else. A person staring into a camera with a completely disinterested look on their face is not good video (unless you're Magibon). You turn the confrontation of the interview into a literal staring contest. And as long as you can outlast them, you will win.

Housing Bubble Made Real

We're considering buying the house we live in from our landed lords, so I swung over to the assessor's web site to see what it was appraised at. See if you can spot the where the housing bubble began in this table of valuations:

	Year	Assessed Value
	2009	$146,900
	2008	$160,000
	2007	$151,900
	2006	$123,800
	2005	$109,300
	2004	$103,400
	2003	$84,500
	2002	$81,000
	2001	$78,600
	2000	$70,300

True story

"Nomi?"

"Yeah?"

"How much do you love me?"

"....Why?"

"Cause I left my book in the car and I don't want to have to put on clothes to go get it."

"You want to know if I love you enough to go out into the cold and rain and get your book, which you left there, so you don't have to put on pants?"

"Yes."

......

"What have you done for me lately?"

The Best Video Game Ever!

Had some friends over this evening, and while we were talking I fired up Super Mario World on my Wii's Virtual Console. While I played, one friend asked a question to the effect of, "Do we still play games like this one because it's truly a great game, or is it not actually that great and we just play it for nostalgia? I mean, when your [my] kids [who are 2 and 4] hit that magic video game demographic of 8 or 10 years old, will they look at this and recognize a great game, or will they see a crappy old videogame?"

This lead to an interesting discussion of greatness in videogames, and how if it's even possible, could a game objectively be described as "great" or "the best?" We came up some interesting things:

"The Best" anything is a highly subjective matter; Halo is widely considered to among the best FPSs out there, but one of our impromptu round-table members who is a big fan of the FPS genre cannot stand it, as he hates any FPS played on a console. We decided that "best of" contests would work the best within a given genre. I asked would it possible to come up with a list of criteria for each of the "canonical" video game genres in order to remove as much subjectivity as possible from a "best of" contest, and we decided that it probably would, but it was not a task we were interested in at the moment.

Someone brought up something that they had seen on XPlay, I think, about how one of the hosts was introducing some of the games from his childhood to his kids, and sometimes he could not remember why he liked a particular game so much, but other times he found games that he and his kids both had a lot of fun with. We decided that that was probably the fairest possible method, and the best video games could hope for was a certain level of "timelessness," something that can only be determined until a few more generations of people are exposed to the same game; if it was fun for kids then, and still fun for kids 25 years later, then it's probably a really good game. I suggested that, based on that criteria, SMW is probably more timeless than the original NES Super Mario Brothers and everyone seemed to agree with me.


One thing I've thought of since they all left: Since we probably can't fairly list out the criteria for "the best videogame ever," would it be possible list the criteria of a "great" videogame, either by genre or overall? I mean, not everyone has the same list of "best books of all time" but we could probably agree on certain things that make a book great; the same should be possible for videogames. It might be easier with games to list the things that a "great" game shouldn't have: sluggish controls, slowdown, things like that.

Godwins Law Ends Healthcare Debate

This is what passes for discourse on health care.

Via.

Google Books Snafu

The method that Google uses to scan books for their Google Books project is pretty interesting. Basically, they take a photo of each pair of pages as the book lays open on a table. Then they use software to digitally "unbend" the image so that it looks like a flat scan. Anyway, it looks like sometimes the person doing the scanning doesn't move quite quick enough for the camera. Check out page 492 and 493 of Charles Babbage's autobiography.

Looking around I found a few other examples from Tech Crunch and Mysterious Ways