It’s way past my bedtime, but I finally finished Myst IV. I’ll admit I made heavy use both of the built-in hint system and a walkthrough I found on the Web. Partly, this was because Revelation had the same problem as Exile: at times, the necessary path or puzzle piece was too hard to find, or it turned out to be in a place I thought I’d checked, but I hadn’t clicked in exactly the right place.

I also “cheated” because I found many of the puzzles far too tedious. One of the things I liked about the original Myst, and especially Riven, is that the process of solving the puzzles also caused the story to unfold. What I found about Revelation was that I would enter an age (or part of an age), wander around for a while, learn the story points, and then be stuck with three or four complex and annoying puzzles, that I had figure out before I could move on and learn more about the story or characters. Usually I “got” what the puzzle wanted me to do, but I’m not determined enough—or not clever enough—to go through the process of figuring the right solution. I almost prefer looking up the solution, so I can get on with the game and cool new things. In that respect, I was a little disappointed; Revelation’s plots and characters had a lot of good setup, but once the plot got going, there wasn’t much in the way of meat, and the climax and ending felt especially weak.

I’ve never been good at puzzles. I like to feel clever, and being on the receiving end of a puzzle usually make me feel a little dim. What I really like is giving puzzles, since then I already know the answer, and I can feel smart (it’s too bad I don’t have a gift for inventing them, either.) Knowing that the solutions were so quick at hand probably made me more likely to use them; if I’d had to play the game without access to the hint guide or walkthrough (like with Riven), maybe I would have gotten through more of it on my own. On the other hand, maybe I would have given up and put the game on a shelf for a couple of years, as I did with the original Myst.

Did I really “play” Revelation? Probably not. On the other hand, I played enough of it to make myself happy, and it did last me two weeks of evenings, which is pretty good. Myst IV: Revelation did have some fun and interesting points, but the gameplay was mostly the same as Myst III: Exile, with a less detailed story.

Overall rating: B

A few years ago, I remember concerns that teaching children math with calculators would leave students unable to do arithmetic without them. I think a bigger problem is people who can’t even handle simple subtraction with the calculator.

I had another fun encounter with a retail employee today. I stopped at Subway on the way home. After semi-competently putting together my order, he punched some buttons on the register and undercharged me by about two dollars. I pointed this out, at which point he got confused and called over the other employee (I think he was new), who entered the correct information into the register.

After exchanging some bills, there was still the fractional part of my bill—12¢—left to settle. He opened the cash drawer and stared at it for a while. At the suggestion of the other employee, he tried the calculator, with little success. I helpfully suggested that the change was 88 cents, but this apparently confused him more. He mumbled something about being “bad at math,” told the register I had tendered exact change, took three quarters out of the drawer and closed it. He then took another quarter out of his own pocket and gave me whole a dollar in change.

Both the calculator and the register would have given him the right change, if he’d been at all competent at using them. I tried to tell him the answer, but apparently converting “eighty-eight cents” into three quarters, three pennies, and a dime is too difficult a problem.

The volume of comment spam this weblog receives has been steadily increasing over the past few months. My last legitimate comment was nearly a month ago. Last night alone, I received 153 comment spams. I don’t want to deal with it anymore; comments are no longer accepted here.

I’ve been playing Myst IV: Revelation for a week or so now. I’ve been stuck for the past few days, so I decided to try the game’s built in help system. After reading some of the relevant tips at “Hint Level 1” I am now more confused than ever.

I don’t think I’m ready to give in and try “Hint Level 2” yet, though.

I’ve been playing Railroad Tycoon 3 for the past few weeks. I didn’t play the demo of this one (I don’t think there is a Mac demo, although the online mini-game is pretty fun), but bought it on impulse when I saw the Mac version on the store shelf.

So far, I am quite happy with the game. A few things I’ve learned:

Continue reading →

Laura keeps talking about how we live in the hood, but still:

On September 24, 2004 at approximately 10:26 PM, Mountain View Police Department responded to a report of a shooting in the ___ block of _. __________ ___. near ______ ______. A group of Hispanic male pedestrians were fired upon by the occupants of a vehicle southbound on __________. One of the pedestrians, a male in his late teens, was shot in the chest and subsequently declared dead at the Stanford Hospital.

This is quite literally right across the street from where I live. I didn’t know about it at the time, but one of my neighbors mentioned it to me in the resident center the next day, and Saturday evening I noticed a lot of people hanging around lighting candles on the street as I drove by. The police department’s press release notes that “an impromptu shrine has been set up by family and friends of the victim,” which I’m assuming is what I saw.

On the radio just now, I heard an announcement asking anyone with information on this particular incident to call the Tip Line. I’m always surprised at how much infrastructure Mountain View has, actually. It doesn’t feel like a large enough city to have enough crime to need a Tip Line. I guess it’s a pretty big city, though: 72,000 residents in 12 square miles. We have five fire stations, too, and an excellent park system. Laura and I go out to Shoreline Park every so often, and recently we biked down the Stevens Creek Trail—I’ve been driving on Stevens Creek Drive for years, but it never occurred to me that there might actually be an actual Stevens creek, which is a really nice ride.

Another problem with game demos is that they can make the final game too easy. I’ve discussed before how games each have their own skill that’s obtained via practice, and can usually be applied to any level in the game. Since demos are often composed of a sampling of levels, of varying difficulty, if you can beat the entire demo, you’ve acquired enough skill at the game to beat the hardest level in the demo—without having had to beat all the intermediate levels. This causes two problems: Not only are the demo’s harder levels incredibly difficult for the demo-player (since you don’t have the benefit of approaching them gradually), but once you have gotten them down, when you go back and play the real game, it’s too easy.

Case in point: I just purchased Marble Blast Gold after having beaten the demo levels. I managed to make it through all twenty-four of the game’s “beginner” levels in under an hour, beating the “gold time” on many of them.

Right now, TiVo Suggestions has six episodes, in a row, of Barney & Friends.

Myst IV: Revelation is due out September 28th. It’s coming out simultaneously for Mac as well as PC, which is good news after the disappointment with Uru last year. There’s a demo on the site. Since we know how much I like game demos, I downloaded it. It does not bode well for the Mac version of Revelation, unfortunately:

• I downloaded the zipfile, expanded it, and found a Mac OS X app package that wouldn’t launch. Not a good first impression. I poked at it a bit and discovered that if I set the executable bit on the binary inside the package, it launched. I imagine that the program they used to zip up the files (the demo is for both Windows and Mac OS X) didn’t set it up correctly, or maybe if I’d used a different expansion utility, it would have worked, but the fact that I’m using the default browser, with its built-in zipfile-expander, on the latest release of Mac OS X, and it didn’t work—I downloaded the file twice, just to be sure—isn’t good.
• After I launched the demo, I found that the interface didn’t seem to work right. The cursor is far too slow at the main screen, and once I got into the game, I couldn’t seem to figure out how to do very basic things. If I use the magnifying glass to get a close-up of an object, I can’t figure out how to zoom back out. I can’t seem to figure out how to use the objects at the bottom of the screen, either. I seem to remember that in Exile, there was a key I could hold down for those, but I couldn’t find it here.
• When I click the camera button (at least, I think it’s a camera) the game freezes. I have to force quit, and then there’s a dialog on my screen indicating some sort of internal file access error. Not good.

I tried a few times to get more than a minute or two into the demo, and finally gave up. Not a good overall experience. It feels like nobody bothered to even do a cursory test of the Mac version of the demo before putting it up, and that’s not a good sign. If the same lack of basic testing shows in the released version, it will be completely unplayable. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, though; I’ve been looking forward to Myst IV otherwise. I had mixed feelings about Exile, and I suspect this will be more of the same, but I’m betting it’ll still be fun.

For many years, I’ve been wanting to find a copy of the LEGO Trains Idea Book (#7777). When I was a kid, I remember having it, and must have looked through it for hours on end, my imagination running wild with the plastic trains. But I haven’t seen my copy for years, despite repeated searches through my parents’ house, and the book, published in 1981, has been out of print for years. What copies are available for sale online are $125 and up. There’s a pretty active LEGO train community online, and a number of tantalizing links claiming to be scans of the book, but I never managed to find any, so I couldn’t even revisit it through images on the computer screen.

This weekend I was at my parents’, and I actually happened across it, hidden under a pile of papers at the bottom of a bookshelf. It’s pretty beat up, taped together and a few pages missing, but I wasn’t expecting to find it, so that was pretty exciting. Ironically, I did this evening actually manage to find a complete set of scans of the book. Which I no longer need, now that I have the book. Or vice versa.

As I write this, I am for the first time riding a Caltrain Baby Bullet express (I’d been on the trains before, back when they were in regular local service before the express service began). They’ve been running since June, but since my work shuttle is only one station stop away from where I live, the express train essentially doesn’t exist in my limited world. In fact, most of the time I just bike to my destination train station and skip the train part of the train ride altogether. So being on a long-distance train, let alone one of the fancy new ones, is a new and different experience.

No matter how silly the “baby bullet” moniker is, the express trains are a great thing. You can tell that by the sheer number of people onboard, compared to the ridership of the local and limited trains I normally take. People definitely want the faster service. I did. I’m going up to San Francisco to have dinner with Laura and attend an “Understanding the Law School Experience” panel at Hastings. I had been planning to drive up to the City, but at the last minute, I glanced at a schedule and realized that I could hop on the train, transfer to BART in Millbrae, and be at Hastings at the same time I was only hoping I would make driving, if there wasn’t much traffic. With no traffic and guaranteed available parking, I could no doubt make it faster by car, but the guaranteed consistency of the train schedule is a huge plus. As it happens, I’m going to take an extra ten minutes or so, take the train all the way to 4th & King, and then walk to Hastings, but I like the idea that all the schedules—shuttle, Caltrain, BART—worked out that I could make it all the way from Cupertino to Market street with less than fifteen minutes of standing and waiting for connections.

I’m also enjoying the Baby Bullet accommodations, compared to the regular Caltrain gallery cars. I’m on the upper level, sitting at a little desk, with a big window next to me. The upper-level seats on the gallery cars are too narrow and hard to reach for me like them, and the seats are almost all too crowded to use a laptop comfortably. So I like this. Part of it, of course, is that I’m on the train long enough to actually relax and get things the way I like them (which would be true of a gallery car, too, especially if I could snag one of the seats with more space). So I’ve got my computer out, the headphones are unfolded and I’m listening to music, and I have a nice cold bottle of water that I bought at the trackside stand at Mountain View before boarding. Another thing I like about the Baby Bullet trains is that each car has a restroom.

As a technology-is-cool demonstration, I’m going to post this using my phone as a Bluetooth modem, using GPRS to connect to the Internet from the train. AT&T’s data rate make that too expensive for me to do often, although if I was spending two hours on a train daily, the unlimited monthly data plan would probably seem a lot more attractive than it does now, spending half an hour on the bus every day. Of course, it’d be nice if the train had wireless Internet onboard; apparently Amtrak California is experimenting with it on one car of one Capitol Corridor train. But let’s dig out the Bluetooth dongle and give this a try…

(Hey, wow, we’re already at Millbrae. Seems like I just boarded, and we’re more than half way there. I like this train.)

Occasionally, I get the desire to play a new game, and so I figure that rather than pay for one, I’ll just download a demo and play it for a while. Unfortunately, I tend to get hooked and end up buying the game anyway. On Wednesday, I bought XIII, a cel-shaded first-person shooter, after having played the demo last weekend. Finished it today.

Pros: The gameplay was fun. It had the right combination of action and tactics to make it interesting, but it wasn’t complicated enough that it required deep thought or terribly intricate skill (of course, I played it on the easiest setting). The cel-shading was cute, although I stopped noticing after the first few minutes. I did like the “comic-strip” style, though; one nice thing is that all the sound effects had visual cues on-screen, so that it was completely playable with the sound off, perfect for a crowded bus. Finally, it features the voice talents of David Duchovny and Adam West.

Cons: A bit too violent for my taste; the feel of the game made its way into my dreams at least one night. The game didn’t feature enough places where I could save; I felt like I had to repeat too much of it over and over again. There were a few too many spelling errors. From what I can make out from the credits, it was designed in France and Quebec, but you’d think the English translators would have at least double-checked their work a few times. I guess it’s par for this sort of game, but after spending $40 on the game, I was a bit nonplussed to be done after only four days of playing evenings and on the shuttle to and from work. My last game purchase lasted over a month, so this was a disappointment. Finally, the ending was stupid.

Overall rating: B-

What I did find interesting were the subtle differences between the demo and the final game. I’m used to demos that are identical to the final product with most of the levels removed. This one was much more obviously done while the game was still in final development. The demo is missing features like saved games (I was glad to see them after playing the first half of the demo levels a few dozen times), there are more keys, for things like switching weapons or using a med-kit (probably added after game testers complained), and although the gameplay is the same, the on-screen graphics are more polished.

As of this writing, the iTunes Music Store has recordings of “City of New Orleans” by fifteen different singers. There’s Steve Goodman, who wrote the thing; Arlo Guthrie, who first made it a hit; other popular artists like Willie Nelson, Judy Collins and John Denver. Last week, though, the Music Store added a version of the song by a name I was not expecting: David Hasselhoff.

Apparently he’s quite the music star in Europe. He was Germany’s best selling artist of 1989, and this album (which yes, I bought) is apparently doing quite well also; it debuted at #11 on the Austrian charts. Huh.

Lately, I’ve been biking to the Mountain View Caltrain station instead of the San Antonio station. I’m renting a very nice bike locker from Caltrain at San Antonio, which is situated perfectly for my commute; the six-month rent is due this month, and since I no longer bike to the station, I don’t think I’m going to renew. I’ve been parking my bike at Mountain View at some of the outdoor bike racks at Centennial Plaza (“Class III Decorative”, according to the city’s bike parking map), but that’s sometimes full, and I don’t really like parking my bike outdoors anyway; my seat’s already been stolen twice. Caltrain rents bike lockers at Mountain View as well, but they’re completely at the wrong end of the station for me, and it’s a very long station to walk the length of.

The other day, I discovered something new: “rent-free bicycle shelter spaces in the new station building are also available.” What’s ironic is that I would never have known about this, except that someone (not me) illegally locked their bike to a nearby tree, and the police attached a note threatening to tow it, along with helpful hints about where to legally park, including this bit of information. Well, it sounded good to me.

This morning, I woke up early, went down to City Hall—you would think, by the way, that the City of Mountain View‘s Web site would tell you the location of City Hall, but it doesn’t—and paid my $25 deposit (what happened to “free”?) to get a bike shelter space. Then, of course, I went down to the depot and discovered that the PIN I was given didn’t unlock the door. It took another ten minutes on the phone (and my not knowing how to operate the lock) with the Department of Public Works, and almost missing my shuttle, before we found a different PIN that would work.

But now my bike is safely locked away in the depot, and I don’t have to worry about bicycle-seat thieves, crowded bike racks, or long walks down the platform.

Back in high school, our U.S. History and English teachers got together and assigned us to write a short story in a well-researched historical American setting. Mine was in Boston of the 1770s. One of my characters was an officer in the British navy, and I really wanted to describe his appearance. But I was never able to find a source to tell me what color the uniform should be. I spent hours and hours in various libraries, poring over books, trying to find some hint, with no luck. It was probably there, but my seventeen-year-old self didn’t know how to find it. In the end, I made something up, and got marked off for having a detail with no source.

For kicks, I searched Google just now for “18th century british naval uniforms“. The very first hit tells me that “the British Royal Navy has been the basis of most of the world’s naval uniforms from the time they adopted their dark blue officers’ uniforms in 1748.”

Now they tell me.

An interesting footnote: The Mac I wrote this story on, nine years ago, is long gone, but I still have a copy, copied from hard drive to hard drive over the years. So I tried opening it just now. I wrote it using Word 5.1, and Word 2004 opened it without complaint, but while it retained all the formatting information perfectly, it replaced the actual characters with little boxes. I was able to recover the text (ironically enough, the Windows version of Word was able to open it perfectly), but this sort of thing makes me nervous about electronic document preservation.

In the interest of completeness, I’ve made a PDF and put the thing online. If anyone wants to read it and find out if I got the color right, feel free. Personally, I’ve been too embarrassed to get that far into it.