Stumbling through vast clouds of mosquitoes. Also, fending off herds of caribou who are obviously in heat.

SPDCA: Status

As I think I mentioned, I'm not super happy with the direction Google is taking their chat/IM/Hangouts thing. Nor do I really care for the timelines from Facebook, or the arbitrary limitations of Twitter. But really, it's Gchat/Hangouts that's bugging me the most.

It's nice that they have video, voice, and SMS chat. And "offline delivery." And integrate seamlessly into the rest of the Google ecosystem.

But they fucking with something I didn't realize I missed until it was gone: Status Indicators.

... Why? I don't really know. Maybe it's because I spent my formative years logged in to an IM service. Maybe I don't care to see a feed, or a stream, or a timeline. Maybe I just want a list of the latest updates from people. At a glance. Maybe I'm just angry that even the old Gmail chat client only stored the history of your last three (or five?) custom statuses.

Anyhow. idkfa now has a sort of status mechanism (also accessible via the "Statuses" link in the top navigation). Use this however you see fit. If you want to post random movie quotes or song lyrics, great. If you want to post which album you're listening to currently, also great. If you want to tell us where in the world you happen to be because otherwise we would have no idea, that would also be swell (you know who you are). I've set up the item called "State Machine."

Status posts are not included in the "latest post" window, but will appear in searches and also appear "unread" if you haven't read them yet. If you want to exclude the "State Machine" item, you can remove it from the results with "-item:17"

"What am I doing, why am I doing it?"

I am the Unicorn Wizard / Riding for justice on a comet of stars (www.youtube.com)

This is the most intriguing Wikipedia article I've read in a while: Moravec's Paradox

New Escape Characters article, "Pain Wizards," July 6th, 2013.

Guys I just watched The Captains for the first time and it is the finest example of documentary film-making I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing. I don't know why I took me so long to get around to it, but you must RUN not walk to your nearest Netflix and see it immediately.

I would pay good money to watch a 3 hour long special chronicling the daily activities of Avery Brooks. Watching him and Shatner talk metaphysics in circles while he occasionally dabbles in some free jazz improv is a pleasure not to be missed.

Tarkin's Diary (www.firsttvdrama.com)

Enjoy.

SPDCA: The Ouya Game Console

The success or failure of a Kickstarter project to secure my backing depends a lot on what buzzwords the project can combine together into a single concept that speaks directly to my core principals.

Things that I have funded so far, based on my selling buzzwords:

• Torment: Tides of Numenara (www.kickstarter.com): "Planescape: Torment," "RPG," "Patrick Rothfuss"
• Project Atma (www.kickstarter.com): "Geek," "Chiptunes"
• Anamanaguchi (www.kickstarter.com): "Chiptunes," "Fantasy"
• Ledo and Ix, Season 2 (www.kickstarter.com): "Penny Arcade," "Nintendo," "Adventure," "Animation," "Posters"
• Cody Monkey Save the World (www.kickstarter.com): "Jonathan Coulton," "Nerd-friendly," "Code Monkey," "Comic"
• Penny Arcade Sells Out (www.kickstarter.com): "Penny Arcade"
• Ortus (www.kickstarter.com): "Medieval fantasy RPG", ah... well, really, that was it.

And finally, the Ouya (www.kickstarter.com): "Android," "Open," "Game Console"

With the exception of Ortus (which was, admittedly, my first Kickstarter backing, and my worst decision), all of the projects I've backed have been funded, and I've had some degree satisfaction from it. All backing I've done has been around the $10-20 range, and usually only ranging upwards if I'm interested in a poster, or something that requires shipping.

The backing I gave the Ouya console was $99. I did this because it valued the things I find the most wrong about the games industry (closed platforms, extreme distrust of gaming, lack of innovation, lack of diversity). It embraced open source software, claimed to have open hardware, and appreciated the notion of customization and compatibility. I also funded it with the expectation that it would probably never succeed, as it seemed too obscure to gain traction. I guess I was wrong.

I was impressed to see that the Ouya project had been funded, and with remarkable financial support. However, almost a year later, when the box arrived, it sat for a couple of weeks before I even opened it. And even more before I finally plugged it in last night. The timing was poor: it's summer, I'm biking, I have projects, and there were other games that I had wanted to play.

I finally opened it and plugged it in. The device is surprisingly tiny (about the size of a coffee cup). It came with a single Bluetooth controller, an HDMI cable, and a power cable. When it started up, it started performing firmware updates, during which it displayed randomly chosen quotes and quips that reminded me of the quote generators from my own projects of yore. It was endearing.

Something that bothered me, though, is that despite having a Ouya account, and being a Kickstarter backer, I was required to enter credit card information before I even accessed the console. I don't understand the justification for this, being that the majority of the games are try-before you buy. That I would have been locked out of the device for not having a credit card bothers me a good deal.

Once past that, I decided to test out a few games. Towerfall is one that most of the game review sites I visit spoke well of. I queued it up for download, and bid my time visiting some of the system options. I had heard that one could plug in or even associate PS3 controllers with the game console. I attempted to do so, only to find that the association process disabled Bluetooth entirely, and required a reset of the game console before I could get the Ouya controller back into place. I was interested to see this fixed (as I would have wanted to have multiple PS3 controllers paired), so I spent some time troubleshooting. Apparently, there is a "bug" such that plugging anything into the USB port of the Ouya causes the Bluetooth radio to go out. That, to me, is sort of a killer bug. I know they're working on firmware updates. I would hope that is something that could be fixed in software, as otherwise that is a critical hardware flaw.

Playing Towerfall and a number of other games, I was pretty impressed. There could be some interesting things done with the Ouya, particularly with the resurgence of "retro" gaming and graphics from indie game developers. There are also available console emulators that allow you to play a number of NES games (with more console emulations to come).

I like that the Ouya happened. I want to play with it more, experiment with it, and potentially turn it into a media server. However, I don't know how well it will do to compete with the bigger game consoles. The PS4 and Xbox One are trying to make "openness" a selling point, and with their improved hardware, name recognition, and already-signed veteran development studios, it will be hard for the Ouya to compete. In addition, Valve has plan to come out with a Linux-based Steam platform, with modifiable hardware and access/support to its existing games library. Right now, the Ouya has only the Android games that were easiest to port from their mobile phone counterparts.

But hey. It's $100, compared to the $300-$500 price tag on the bigger consoles. As the community develops for it, it'll likely have all the goodness that things like Linux or Raspberry Pi have to offer. If people starting coming up with custom firmwares, or allow booting from external media, it could be an interesting/portable computer. Or it just be a neat idea, collecting dust in my basement.

SPCDA: The Last of Us

I'll try my best to operate without spoilers, but, eh, there's only so much I can do.

I've been making a lot of little, poor choices lately. Shining example: my clean laundry (read: underwear) is downstairs, and my bedroom and bathroom are upstairs. For some reason I refuse to rectify this, and every morning I have to furtively dart downstairs in a towel, pajama pants, or yesterday's underwear in order to collect enough items to finish dressing.

I laugh at this a little bit, but also chide myself. I'm 28 next month. This is, perhaps, not the sort of thing one does, and certainly not something I'd be proud of should somebody observe this in action. When I think on it, and things like this, my concluding thoughts are, inevitably, who would you try to impress otherwise? It's just you.

It's sort of a defeating thought, but eventually things get done. I'll eventually get the laundry upstairs (about the time for the next cycle to begin). I'll eventually get the house vacuumed. But for now, especially summer, I just have other things that are more interesting, or at least, better hold my focus.

Somewhat recently I bought a blender. A nice one. And I've been, well, blending, a whole lot. So much so that I really, really should have been worried about the hepatitis contamination that occurred in the frozen strawberries and blueberries from Costco. So much so that I've probably gone through two dozen bags of individually quick-frozen strawberries since April. I've dropped ~12lbs down from then. Victory comes in slurry form.

About the same time, I also had the misfortune of buying alcohol from Costco. No, no, no hepatitis there. The issue being: I bought what I thought to be a sufficient amount of beer, vodka, and liqueurs for a group of people, and they weren't drank (nobody's fault). My attempts at outright leaving it at other's houses never ended in success.

And so... so I've been working through them, making room in my fridge. Slowly. And usually combined with strawberries, blueberries, bananas, yogurt, and spinach. It's actually not that bad. It doesn't necessarily help with the diet, but it helps if I'm lacking inspiration for programming or writing. Maybe the alcohol sterilizes the berries, I don't know.

Anyhow. All this to say, the first night I played The Last of Us, it was too hot upstairs to do anything. I decided to make a cool booze smoothie, and play for a few hours. I sat on my coffee table, across the room from a pile of clean underwear. I sipped, and waited for my PS3 to update.

I don't want to spoil the beginning. Or the rest of the game. But damn... I'm not a parent. But I know parents. And I know their kids. Were I a parent, I might have had to turn the system off that night. Maybe the vodka dulled my emotional distance emulation layer, but the game starts off intense, and doesn't really ever stop. To quote Jerry Holkins:

Children carve something out of you, a place for themselves; people can twist the knife in that spot, and it just bleeds and bleeds.

The Last of Us is an interesting game. One that I'll probably be talking about for a while, or at least, hanging it over people's heads until they play it and I can finally discuss it freely. I've described it as a combination of the game Dead Space intersected with The Road. It is hyper-violent (particularly when you die, and you die often, though it isn't a grind). It is challenging at parts, especially those that absolutely require stealth, or where you've managed to paint yourself into a corner by expending too much ammo.

The shining part of this game, however, is its character development. Joel and Ellie feel like real people, and their fears and perils become your own. Which makes navigating a terrifying post-apocalypse all the more harrowing.

The Last of Us is also interesting for what it represents in gaming overall. It is a game that, though crafted with the polish of a big-budget game, is very apparently targeting what is now the average age for a video game player (37, says Wikipedia). This isn't a criticism, but a nod that the gaming industry and the gamers are maturing. The Last of Us isn't even the first game to ask these kinds of questions, and hopefully will not be the last.

Having finished the game, it has left me reflective (and sleepless), much like any good book, movie, show, or game. I wonder about what's important, about what I have to do, and what matters. About what I would do if nothing mattered. Or if only one thing mattered.

(scratches neck) I have some laundry to fold.

Initiate super-shameless plug sequence...

For those who are avid readers, or just want to watch a 5 minute video:

http://youtu.be/169x9OSZCDY (youtu.be)

My friend Elle and I are starting up a Vlog (hoping to get picked up as regulars for Geek and Sundry). It's about books and everything related to books. Succinct huh!

Comments are greatly appreciated (we're compiling content for future episodes), and if you like us, please follow the link in the description to our voting page on G&S.

Super-shameless plug complete.

I applaud whoever slipped goatse into the photo booth - its grainy enough that when you look at it on fullscreen, you cant tell what it is. But, if you look at it in thumbnails, there it is!

no mom, i dont know what that is. Lets delete it

Regarding PRISM, and the "whistleblowing" of Edward Snowden, exposing the NSA in their ability for warrantless surveillance:

This sort of thing is, of course, fascinating to me. It at once affirms my paranoia, my distaste for "the cloud," and my overall fear of government-sponsored computer espionage.

This item is not new, however. This type of technology has existed and been in place since 2007 (www.pbs.org) (and likely long before). While acknowledged in court, it had failed to find any significant public attention (discarded at one point in the interest of security, I think).

The conversation about the legality, ethics, etc., is a lengthy one, and probably one I'm not really equipped to argue. However, I can comment on some of the interesting technical pieces. For instance, this diagram:

As the horrid PowerPoint rounded box says, traffic on the Internet follows a least cost path. The cost of a path from one point on the Internet to another is a metric measured in time, error rates, and manual overrides to determine which paths will be taken given a source and target.

For example: you're an Internet router, and you have a choice among routes A, B, or C. A is fastest, so it usually wins out over B or C. However, if A goes down (fails), it chooses among B or C until the cost metric for A can be established to be cheaper than B or C. This makes the network failure resistant, meaning that it can route around failures without human intervention.

The above example works when you replace A, B, and C with names of countries (or continents). A small African country wants to route a packet to Latin America. To route this packet, it looks at the metrics for the routes it has available. For the diagram above, it has the choice among a 343 Gbps link to Europe, 11 Mbps link to North America, and 40 Gbps to Asia. However, the metric for cost is for the full path, not just the "ways out." It will take into account the massive capability of the North America/Europe link, as well as the North America/Latin America link. Rather than the Africa ->North America -> Latin America route, it will take the Africa -> Europe -> North America -> Latin America route because it is determined to have the lowest total cost.

The PRISM application (and those like it) exploit the fact that for most inter-continental traffic, the US and/or Europe ending up being the lowest cost route, and thus, pass traffic along. Being able to collect, aggregate, and analyze this data is made possible purely by the fact that our external Internet infrastructure (note: not necessarily our internal, Internet-to-your-home infrastructure) is considerable. Other continents route through us because we are cheaper.

A fun part of this is that the route metrics I describe above can be manipulated. The routing devices I describe are all configurable devices, and the speeds/metrics they advertise to their neighbors is purely configuration not determined by any physical or hardware limitation. When they set up the devices, they input the values that say "I can handle this speed." Which means that it can be changed, and other routers have no choice but to route their data accordingly.

China has done this one multiple occasions, during which they will advertise things like, "We have better speeds, so your routes should use us instead," during which if we do not have the routes statically configured on our end, we will happily route all of our data through China.

This exploit is purely based on how the Internet was designed, and isn't a flaw (unless routing metrics are lied about). Aside from being installed at the right "observation" points, the US has always had this ability, as we are the "default" route for much of the Internet. When the Internet is passing through you, there's value in seeing from where and to where things are going, and depending on the case, may have data mining or intelligence significance.

Weirdly, thinking on this a bit more, I've actually built systems like this before. At one point, our customers asked if instead of having to call into us, we could provide them with a "top talkers" report (a listing of "Who is pumping the most traffic over the last N minutes?") This information was only available by way of the programming interfaces on our devices, which we would never give up to our customers, but we still needed to find a way to provide this information without wasting time on phone calls.

And so, we had our routers report a stream of data back to a centralized server, where it could then be received, analyzed, and made available to our customers via a secure portal. Our coding ensured that all customer data was strictly separated, and only a certain number of customers were even provisioned to have this feature.

The data itself wasn't particularly interesting. At least, not in the details. However, when combined over time, we could see things like malicious botnets, DDoS attacks, iTunes, Youtube, etc. (whatever was using the most traffic at the time). Being that we were only telling the customers what was going on on their own network, there were no ethical questions raised (aside from those like me being able to see the data).

The mechanism here would have been exactly the same. They may not be able to see content, but they can see where you are coming from, to where you are going, and however much. It would not seem important at small details, but given the granularity of searches or the intelligence of the pattern recognition, you could very well catch things like news events, uprisings, etc., as they are happening.

Also, fun side note: the Read/Unread mechanism on idkfa was used on the "Top Talkers" report to be able to track/discard/identify new messages versus repeat messages.

I feel like many of my conversations go this way (www.youtube.com).

From Mr. Hughes:

(i.imgur.com)

Jensen Danger Hughes, born 7:45PM (Pacific Time).

Congratulations to all involved.

Photo update:

(i.imgur.com)

It is perhaps wrong to look up subcontracting personnel on LinkedIn when you have reason to be frustrated with them.

It does give me some comfort, however, to know that they are wearing a pirate hat and a stupid grin, and that somehow, it all makes sense.

Illiterate coworker is pissed off at the Red Wedding episode of GoT. Doesn't understand why.

Ah, Captain Picard helped save this woman from abuse (or helped her find the strength to leave). And they hugged.

Patrick Stewart is one of my favorite old white guy actors.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2333629/Emotional-moment-domestic-abuse-victim-thanks-Patrick-Stewart-saving-life-hugs-conference.html (www.dailymail.co.uk)

whyyyyyyy did we spend all this money on Fonality HUD if none of our admins will use it? It makes it simple enough even I can figure out the phone system (first time ever). oh, admins.

What has Patrick Stewart been doing with his life (nymag.com)?! For. Serious.

I'm constantly tired, hungry, and my balls hurt.

On the plus side I've biked most of the distance to work every day so far this month, and with 551 miles ridden as of this evening that puts in at #44 of all 18,000 or so riders in all of the Seattle area. I also feel like I've lost about 10lbs so far this month. I guess it's worth it in the end.

The Kings of Summer (www.funnyordie.com)

This has a very Stand By Me vibe.

Somewhat randomly last night I ran into someone from high school. It was the annual team captains party for bike to work month at Pike place Brewery, which I have always tried to go to because its free beer and sometimes free jersey's and the like.

At the beginning of the evening I saw this gal who I could swear I recognized, but couldn't quite place the name or location. With each beer a new detail would come back. Beer 1, definitely someone from high school. Beer 2 Mr. Millers AP Gov class. Beer 3, Dan Gillespie's older sister... you see where this was going. At this point I still wasn't sure if it was actually our Valedictorian Erin Gillespie or just someone who looks basically like what I assumed she would look like after 10 years.

Beer 4, when me and my buddy were heading out, my friend stops me and says "I gotta know, is that really the person you think it is?" So yeah it totally was. Pretty damn random, we chatted for a fair bit, probably more than I ever talked to her in 4 years of high school actually.

Funnily enough this whole conversation happened next to a table where a rep for Cliff Bar was set up. Ended up chatting with that gal for another 20 minutes or so and scored a bunch more tasty bars before heading home.

Driving along, listening to the radio, and on comes an ad that asks "Are you a nerd? Do you know Klingon? How many digits of pi can you recite?" (and some various other stereotypical nerd markers). They're advertising a speed dating event for nerds at TGIFridays.

That's interesting. I don't even know. Other than I'm getting more and more offended at nerd-centric advertising because I think being a nerd differs from person to person and we don't all have the same experience. I have seen most of the Star Trek episodes and movies from most series, but I don't speak Klingon. I can however quote 18th century English lit ad nauseum. And I know more about the different types of fibers and the animals that bring them to us than I should confess to. Nerd is a wide variety of experiences. I don't know any digits of pi, but I can name the lines of English royalty for quite a ways.

Anyway, if anyone wants to go and report back, I will pay your registration fee. I have to work late that night. Plus I'm not single and that would feel dishonest.

http://www.meetmeforlunch.net/index.php?content=register&eventId=125 (www.meetmeforlunch.net)

Huh. (deaddrops.com)