Ramblings From the Xibological Perimeter

Ikariam.   Way too addictive.  Reminds me of mudding back in the day.   Just too much of a time sink.   Gaaah.

Admittedly, I'm not 12 anymore, but damn, how can anyone over 12 really succeed at these games? Developers need to include a difficulty setting of "Easy" for old farts like myself. It just seems insane that you spend $50 for a game and then you get stuck halfway through, never able to unlock the really fun areas later on.

I've been trying to "catch up" and finish my Xbox games so I can "justify" getting the Xbox 360. Heh. Anyway. Here are my gripes.

Burnout Revenge: Awesome game. Actually made it Elite status, which is amazing for me. Still, first 70 cars you unlock in this game all look the same and aren't all that interesting. The "cool" cars, you only unlock near the end, and many of them are impossible to get. Like, in one city you're racing at 209 MPH with traffic coming at you before you can see it, barriers that force you to crash, and tons of blind turns. I crash about 10 times per lap on that level, and if you crash more than once or twice, you'll never catch up to third place, thus never be able to pass the level and unlock a car. Even if you manage to stay in the lead all the way to near the end of the race, the game will crash you and the other five cars will pass you and cross the finish line. Incredibly frustrating and not fun! Come on Critereon, bring back the FUN!

GTA Vice City: There's one level, Death Row, where you have to enter a junkyard and rescue your buddy and get him out of there. The junkyard has a dozen guys while rifles that don't miss, so you turn into swiss cheese every time you enter. I've tried about a hundred times, and only four times have I actually made it to my buddy. And then got killed within 3 seconds on the way out. It's impossible for me to pass this level. Usually if I try something 100 times, I get really good at it, but not this, for some reason. And this level is halfway through the game, so I can never enjoy the rest of the game, as there's no way to skip the level nor a useful cheat to get me through it. Why so hard? Why make games so hard you can't enjoy the later levels? Pisses me off.

Hell even Lego Star Wars is guilty of this. In one level you're going around in a circle shooting laser cannons and generators; if you're perfect, you can destroy a generator and its two laser cannons in about 15 seconds. There are four sets, and you're given only 60 seconds to complete it. If you make ONE mistake, you won't have enough time. Once, I got so close, I only need a half-second more. But no, I can't get past this level, either. Furthermore, the game is focused on the lame episodes I, II, III; however if you unlock all the levels without dying and collecting maximum lego pieces (again, impossible), it unlocks episode IV, which would really make the game worth the money. Now THAT would be a fun game to play, episode IV, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker-- nevermind, it's impossible to get there unless you're a 12 year old perfect robotic gamer.

Really, I should stick to RPGs. They're a lot more forgiving of mistakes.

A truck drove by me on the street today while I was walking to work and it splashed some water in my
direction-- a rather large splash, a mighty wave of water. But I'm okay, it's okay. Scary, but I made it to work alright.

*whew*

Ah, the power of search! Lycos was among the first, but amidst the hype Terra bought it and failed to promote it. Strangely enough, it fell in popularity... and it used to be a contender with Yahoo! Speaking of which, Yahoo! used to use Altavista, but Altavista wanted to be its own search portal, so Yahoo! dumped 'em and switched to Google. Since then, Altavista has languished. Then Google decided they wanted to be their own portal, so Yahoo! dumped 'em and switched to Inktomi, a search engine that they acquired a while back. Will Google fail now that it's on its own?

In other news, today Ask Jeeves announced it's buying Interactive Search Holdings, which in turn owns iWon (CBS's failed attempt at a portal) and Excite (another contender that failed). Ask Jeeves is holding on. Why'd they acquire these properties? They're paying cash and stock, and it seems like a strange way to blow $!50M in cash. We'll have to wait and see what happens.

I've just learned that the Deutsche Bank build is going to be knocked down. For those that don't know, this is one of many buildings that was damaged two and a half years ago in the World Trade Center disaster. The south tower of WTC fell on this 40+ story building and carved a 14-story gouge in the side of it. For years the fate of this building has been up in the air.

The problem was that because of the recovery efforts, the building was left exposed to the elements for many months, and black mold infested the building, making it uninhabitable. The bank decided at the time they would rather knock down the building and start over, than fix the building as-is, because the mold requires a reconstruction of every floor. The insurance company objected, saying, the building could be saved, and it would be cheaper to defeat the mold than to blow the building up and start over. Sometime last year or so, they appeared to lean towards restoring the building, and they replaced the structural beams and girders that were knocked out by WTC. For the past 2.5 years, it's been a giant black block at the south end of the WTC site, covered in black mesh.

The city wanted to use the land as part of the WTC reconstruction, and entered negotiations with the bank and their insurers, to see if they could buy the property. Finally, it appears they've officially decided to knock it down. Ironically, Silverstein will most likely not get a large enough insurance settlement to rebuild the entire WTC site, so this will become a vacant lot. It will probably stay vacant for the next several years, unless the city or the Port Authority buys out Silverstein and decides to rebuild the site earlier.

Meanwhile 7 WTC, which had the simplest insurance settlement, is being rebuilt, and is already 7 stories high. The Freedom Tower might start work next summer. Maybe. Possibly.

I just came across Necoro, a robotic cat made in Japan. Costs about $1500, similar to Aibo, but more furry. Click the link to view some quicktime movies demonstrating the product: Necoro!

Atari!

Infogrames bought the license to Atari's name and some of their library a few years ago. Since then they've added a few new games under the moniker. Now they've finally done the smart thing and adopted the name for the whole company, to leverage the greater worldwide brand recognition of ATARI... which I think is way cool.

http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030507/media_infogrames_2.html

So today is "Earth Day". Happy Earth Day everybody! Let's all celebrate earth! FEEL the cool crumbly goodness as it rolls through your fingers! SMELL the flowers the come out of the soil! STEP on the earth that holds you up every single day! Wheee... (next up: Air Day)

SonicBlue bought the Rio, which was first major MP3 player, and developed ReplayTV, a DVR that competed well with Tivo. But they didn't have the right financing nor the fiscal maturity to manage their budget, and went bankrupt. It didn't help that Rio never got over its meager 64MB memory, in spite of modern technologies putting 2GB into a CompactFlash card...

Well anyway today in an interesting turn of events, D&M Holdings has acquired ReplayTV and the Rio. D&M is better known for its audio equipment brands Denon and Marantz. Hmmm... unfortunately D&M doesn't trade publicly as a real company. There is a D&M Holdings on the Pink Sheets (DMHOF.PK) but you generally should avoid the Pink Sheets. Oh well...

The way these things go, the product with a respectable brand (in this case ReplayTV) will bounce around from owner to owner until it ends up being a minor side product of a major conglomerate.

The Dolphins of War! Your favorite dolphin may be a navy reservist serving in the gulf. You never know...

Dolphins to Search Persian Gulf for Unseen Threats

My first reaction yesterday when reading about the Space Shuttle on cnn.com was "aww". Sad, very sad. I remember the Challenger disaster oh, too clearly, even though it's been 17 years. Back then, the space program was put on hold, and it felt like forever, but they finally started moving shuttles again after two years. Still, the Challenger disaster was the end of the space age, in my opinion. After that, it was nothing but satellites and maintenance, very little new exploration. Sure, there's been the occasional interesting mission to Mars, but manned space flight pretty much dead-ended with Challenger.

So, relative to Challenger, Columbia doesn't seem to hurt as much. Maybe because it wasn't the first time, maybe because Columbia was really old, and maybe cause I generally feel like that the space program has been reduced to so little that there's not a lot to lose anymore. Our space program is almost not there, and the fact that an antique spacecraft was still in service is just more evidence of this. Growing up, I alwasy thought that new inventions would continue in the space program, with faster, better craft and more adventures. Instead, they just kept re-using the same old craft until it eventually failed one too many times. Sad.

Still, relative to the still-recent events of 9/11, the loss of seven astronauts, people who completely understand the dangers of their mission, is not so bad. We'll mourn the loss, but we will move on, and hopefully a stronger space program will eventually emerge.

Yesterday we went to Game 4 of the big match between Kasparov and Deep Junior. I always though Kasparov was pronounced KAS-por-ov, but it's more like kas-POR-ov. Go figure. The match itself was bizarre, it was present by this 3D technology company, X3Dworld.com, and we alll were given polarized glasses to watch the match on a big screen. The 3D effect was very impressive, if exaggerated, but the polarized lens technology has been around for decades, so it's certainly nothing new. The chess players (well, Gary and Deep Junior's handler) were actually in a separate room on a separate floor, far, far away from the noisy and absurd masses gathered on the 9th floor of the New York Athletic Club. This is a posh kind of place that used to Not Allow women to enter, and you can certainly feel the history in the place. Oddly enough, the paintings were all done in the past three years... paintings of people I didn't recognize. The large room had additional monitors around it for watching the game, in pairs. The left monitor view the game, flipping between a live overhead shot of the keyboard and a live computer representation (with clocks) of the game. The right screen showed an analysis board (computer representation). GMs Maurice Ashley and Yasser Seirawan ran a continuous play-by-play analysis on the analysis board, but they failed to predict Gary's move 95% of the time. Gary's moves were often quite surpirsing, as were Deep Junior's. There were many other GM's in attendance, some of which were invited to the podium as honored guests to comment on the game in progress. This included GMs Benjamin, Susan Polgar, Shabhati (sp?) and several others. It was neat seeing all these GMs I've only read about in Chess Life or books they've authored.

The game itself was horribly long. Like, six hours. It started quickly... one second we're listening to the commentators describe the event and then suddenly Deep Junior's move appears on the screen without any fanfare. They sped along the first fix moves and then Gary went into a deep think... like 15 minutes! And then he executed a move which took Deep Junior out of book... on the 6th move! It was incredible. This slowly led (through inverted moves) to a hedgehog formation, where the 5th rank stayed empty most of the game. Since both players were playing extremely defensively, it dragged for hours. Eventually Deep Junior pushed a pawn to b6 and Gary got in trouble, and he never was able to get rid of that pawn. Eventually though he did manage to execute a series of brilliant exchanges and (even though a pawn down) force a draw. We left at move 59 and the game ended at 61, but we were starving and couldn't wait anymore. Plus at move 59 it appeared that Deep Junior would drag it out forever, and we really didn't want to wait out the time controls which would have forced the game to end at 10:30. But sure enough by the time we hit the sidewalk it was over. So I don't know if Gary came down after the game and commented on it or not. Just our luck though, to go to a game that's twice as long as the first three.

Shipov has more analysis of this game at WorldChessRating.com, but for now, here's the game in PGN:

Deep Junior - Kasparov,G [B44]
1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 e6 5.Nb5 d6 6.c4 Nf6 7.N1c3 a6 8.Na3 Nd7 9.Nc2 Be7 10.Be2 b6 11.0-0 Bb7 12.h3 0-0 13.Be3 Rc8 14.Qd2 Nce5 15.b3 Nf6 16.f3 Qc7 17.Rac1 Rfe8 18.a3 Ned7 19.Rfd1 Qb8 20.Bf2 Rcd8 21.b4 Ba8 22.a4 Rc8 23.Rb1 Qc7 24.a5 bxa5 25.b5 Bb7 26.b6 Qb8 27.Ne3 Nc5 28.Qa2 Nfd7 29.Na4 Ne5 30.Nc2 Ncd7 31.Nd4 Red8 32.Kh1 Nc6 33.Nxc6 Rxc6 34.Kg1 h6 35.Qa3 Rdc8 36.Bg3 Bf8 37.Qc3 Ne5 38.c5 Nd7 39.Qxa5 Nxc5 40.Nxc5 Rxc5 41.Qa4 R5c6 42.Bf2 d5 43.Bxa6 Bc5 44.Bxc5 Rxc5 45.Bxb7 Qxb7 46.exd5 exd5 47.Qa7 R5c7 48.Qxb7 Rxb7 49.Rxd5 Rc6 50.Rdb5 h5 51.Kf2 Re6 52.f4 g6 53.Kg3 Kg7 54.Kh4 Kh6 55.R1b4 Rd6 56.g3 f6 57.g4 hxg4 58.hxg4 Kg7 59.Rb3 Rc6 60.g5 f5 61.Rb1 1/2-1/2

Deep Junior's moves of Kh1 and Kg1 were howlers, the audience laughed, the commentators were completely dumbfounded, and no one had any fucking clue what the players were thinking. "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is obviously a move that the players are thinking about 12 moves deep that we can't possibly fathom." Hee.

So the babe I'm cheering for on "Joe Millionaire", one of the many silly TV shows I like to watch, turns out to be a former softcore porn actress! I guess that's only fair, since Joe Millionarie himself is actually an underwear model. This story was all over the Daily News today, but a more detail story with complete pictoral can be found over at TheSmokingGun.

I'm enjoying Joe Millionaire a lot more than The Bachelorette, although it was amusing, I admit, to see the one bachelor pad in New York City. A crowded, messy, tiny studio over in alphabet city. He had so much junk slammed up against his kitchenette, that he could barely server up a glass of water! And the lame story about someone else messing it up while he was gone just had "loser" written all over it. Dude, spend the $50 for a maid service!

The one thing I hate about livejournal is that it's not an open forum. Sure, you can post comments on someone else's goofy ideas, but if they take the slightest offense, they delete your post, or kick you off their friends list, and basically censor you out. This impedes a free exchange of ideas.

A few times I see postings I would love to comment on, ranging from the elderly wise advice of big brother Xibo, to the frantic ravings of my right-wing/conservative opinions...(Such as: Give war a chance! Lower taxes NOW! And for the love of pete, GET A JOB!)

But I enjoy reading the posts of my newfound lj friends too much to risk alienating them with my rants and (probably unwelcome) advice, so mostly I stand quiet. Ah, for the good ol' days of USENET, where people would post goofy opinions and real conversation would start...

Gucci has a new print ad that features a supermodel showing offer her pubes, which have been shaved/waxed into the shape of a "G". The ad, of course, won't appear in the prudish U.S., but will see various play over in Europe, where everyone walks around nekkid and boinks on public park benches.
Read the story over at Vogue's UK site. Warning: not WORK_OK. Oh go on, take a peek anyway.

A few weeks ago Kramnik, the world's second-highest ranked chess player, played Deep Junior, the highest-ranked chess computer, to a draw. Deep Junior is supposedly considered to be much superior to Deep Blue (and Deeper Blue). Now, Kasparov (the highest ranked player in the world, and considered by many to be the best chess player ever) is taking on Deep Junior in a best-of-eight competition.

Last night, in a short game, Kasparov handily spanked Deep Junior, forcing the computer to resign after 27 moves. For Sergey Shipov's analysis of last night's match, check out this story at WorldChessRating.com. The games are also supposedly being broadcast live at x3dworld.com, but I haven't figured out how this works yet. I wonder if I can get tickets to one of the games.

Hooray! E*Trade's Chairman & CEO has been FIRED! This asshole took $80 million in pay in 2001, while the stock tanked, the company ran losses, and the company ran layoffs. Why was he rewarded so? Because he was in charge and he had the board of directors (mostly personal friends of his) in his pocket! It was a big scam, and now he's set for life! Oh man... So glad to see him go.

E*Trade was such a promising company. Then a few years ago they went from an anti-broker advertising campaign to an investing-is-bad, sell-everything campaign. It was pathetic. The company actually fired their ad firm last month, only to hire them back! Sheesh.

I wish the old E*Trade would come back. Making investing available to everyone, not trying to scare everyone into a bear market.

ten fucking degrees today

ten

I can't feel my face.

In Asia, online gamers outnumber online shoppers 2-to-1. (Reuters story) This is in stark contrast to the U.S., where most people are shopping amazon.com or porn sites to buy the latest Harry Potter or Hairy Putter. I can certainly understand the addictiveness of online gaming, and I suspect over time more and more people will get involved in it here. From muds to Everquest to Xbox Live to online chess to Jennifer Government, people love getting online and playing.

Speaking of NationStates, I would love to create a game similar to it, but better. Unfortunately I don't have a book to promote, so it's hard to get the incentive to develop such a game, but the appeal of playing it is certainly there, and thus the appeal of running such a game is all the more present. Hmm...

It's cold outside! Walkting to work this morning, it was only 13 degrees outside! Like, brrrr! My ears were frozen by the time I got to work. I hate winter. Why can't wall street be located in Miami?

And if it's going to be cold, why can't we have a couple days below 10? Below 10 degrees, soap bubbles freeze in midair. People don't believe me, so I want to give a demonstration, but it hasn't been quite cold enough to do this yet. Just cold enough to really piss me off. Arg!