Helmety Debate

Have you ever tried to contribute to a gamers' online forum? Mixed in with the strong emotions about the most trivial things about gameplay, are the horrible mispellings and mangled grammar we've come to expect from l33t speak and lolcatz. What's hard to figure out, though, is whether these kids are doing it on purpose, or are actually functionally illiterate. Well, functionally semi-literate, since they can read; it's the writing that will expose them as drooling mental midgets. Now, imagine one of those conversations with a keyboard drooler and an older gamer who finds it normal to spell correctly and write in complete sentences. Okay, now imagine that conversation read out by a couple of speech synthesizers. Oh yes, hilarity ensues. (Very strong language content warning, even if it does sound like Stephen Hawking having a frustrating day.)

"IM GON PUT A AGNRY FROWNY FAEC IN EMAEL"

High School Athletes Can't Have Java

Earlier, high school athletes couldn't have wings, since they banned all the active ingredients in those "energy" drinks except caffeine. Well, they just closed that door. You know, I didn't begin to drink coffee regularly until I got to college, because it was common knowledge that the amount of caffeine in cup of coffee was bad for developing children. Nevermind all the cola we drank, but whatever. Then Starbucks came around, and then all the little high schoolers wanted to look grown up next to the college kids studying at cafes. Starbuck's grew so fast that they had a little stunt of closing their stores for three hours a couple of days ago to teach the staff how to make espresso. Um, weren't you supposed to do that when you hired all those part-timers? I'll drink Starbuck's bagged coffee, but I'll never drink espresso at one of their stores. Well, at least the investors were fooled by that PR gimmick.

So, caffeine reappears as a banned stimulant in athletics. I remember when it was banned in international sport. Olympians were always yawning, cyclists were sleepy, and they all had to worry about how much chocolate they ate. Well kids, grow up fast and get to college! Then you can have a morning cup of joe before your next track meet.

Never Use Cable ISP's Again

In the ongoing struggle between P2P file distribution services and cable companies acting as ISP's, specifically Vuze (which created and uses the Azureus bittorrent client) and Comcast, which has admitted to forcibly blocking uploaded packets (which slows down a bittorrent swarm, but does not actually block the content), George Ou from ZDNet shows why people should never use cable networks or WiFi broadband services if they plan on using bittorrent clients. DSL and Verizon FiOS networks are unaffected by the upload stream since their network architectures are different, but the issue of Net Neutrality comes up, since different ISP's, the cable guys, are effectively degrading service for certain kinds of software, which a subscriber can only get around by upgrading their cable service. This is exactly what the Net Neutrality types want to fight against: tiered services for certain kinds of content.

Now, the free market guy in me wants to let the businesses fight it out and run their networks how they want to. But the consumer has to have access to information and not get caught into a service that they end up not wanting. Broadband, right now, is a free market, since there are many choices and kinds of services a consumer can subsribe to. Not so much for the rural people, but they can choose digital satellite broadband if the DSL service is not available. However, full disclosure to customers comes first, instead of a buried "no server" clause in the terms of use. If more people find out about cable's network practices, especially their practice of hiring seat-holders to allow their employees to make a friendlier audience at a FCC hearing, then the consumers can gravitate toward companies that can handle their networks better, and the cable guys will have to spend the money to redesign their networks to keep customers and attract new ones.

Electron in Motion

Big news out of Sweden: they've used atto-second light pulses to "photograph" electrons for the first time. Now, you're going to get a lot of uninformed science stories about how these are the first pictures of an electron, but that's a lot of hooie. Pictures of stuff are the collection of photons on a macroscopic scale after they have interacted with a surface. These "pictures" of an electron are actually just the energy distribution of photons after interacting with an electron after having been stripped from an atom. The "new" stuff here, is using these incredibly short light-pulses to interact (or collide, although in quantum mechanics, nothing actually hits anything) with the electron, and then guide those pulses to a detector. Take a look at the atto-second light pulses on the detector:

Each dot of brightness in the picture represents the energy of an individual photon, but at least you can see the quantum nature of the energy levels (there are places that the photons just cannot appear), that a light wave is a three-dimensional object (well, four if you want to be really technical), and that the electron interaction has added patches of cyclical brightness with its own frequency (these atto-second pulses come from a laser, so they should all have the same energy or brightness). Very cool.

The Incomplete Circuit

Remember last week, when I thought a certain portion of the finishing circuit around the Rose Bowl for the Amgen Tour of California would be complete by race day? Well, I guess the rain this week made it difficult to close up the 50 foot open trench on the side of the incline. So, Pasadena decided to put barriers around it instead.

They started putting up those barriers today, and they should encompass the entire trench. What's bad, is that this trench is almost at the top of the little climb, so it's just one more thing for the riders to worry about. It's also supposed to rain on Sunday, but I don't know if they'll have the 40 mile an hour headwinds that they had yesterday, which caused some of the riders to abandon due to hypothermia. They averaged only 18 miles an hour over 135 miles. Usually it's about 27 or 28. Brrr!

Helmety Handyman

Last week, I shared a commercial for the new customization tools recently introduced to Halo 3. That commercial was shot, of course, by the Rooster Teeth Productions, (in)famous for their Red vs. Blue series. Well, they got paid to do that commercial, but then they had to do their own version, with the real characters from Red vs. Blue. Target audience: gamers and internet geeks. You'll see...

"Straight up the middle? That's like hittin' them from behind, but in front!"

Soon...

More information here.

China Banned Martini Lunch

Just how much were Chinese government officials drinking during lunch, that one year after they banned civil servants and party officials from imbibing alcohol during the work week, liquor manufacturers and restaurants have to sue to reinstate lost revenue? Either these people are huge drinkers, or it shows just how many people work for the government in some fashion, or claim communist party titles. If it's the latter, I can see why the revenue fall might be significant.

Wet and Cold, Again

Recently, I was complaining about a mini-heatwave, but today, we get rain, again. Purple toes are bad, right? It's like, California is trying to have real weather, or something. Thankfully, I packed my water-proof glove liners, so no problems with responsive braking and shifting. And you can tell some kind of bike race is coming to Pasadena: the campers and RV's have already shown up at the Rose Bowl parking lots. Soon, we'll have the schloogs and schmenges getting all liquored up so they can run next to the riders up the hills around here. Can not wait.

Toshiba Throws In The Towel

Just last week, I was predicting the hi-def disk format war to end very soon. This was based on Net-Flix choosing an exclusive format for its hi-def movie rentals. Later in the week, Walmart announced its decision to sell Blu-ray exclusively for movies and players. Over the weekend, Toshiba execs floated the rumor that they would announce ending production on HD-DVD disks and players, and today, their investors reacted to the rumor as if it was very good news. The article mentions the surge in stock price, and also consumers waiting for the format war to end, which was actually prolonging the format war, since the open market was not showing a clear winner from straight sales. Toshiba learned a hard lesson about marketing a new media format, something which Sony had learned about twenty years ago. Something not mentioned in the Reuters piece, Toshiba's new media format direction: high-capacity flash drives. We've been sticking disks the size of CD's into slots for twenty years also, but with the prevalence of portable media players much smaller than those disks, who do you think is better positioned to grow into that market sector?

Versatile

Is there a more useful word than "dude"?

Dude, I don't think so!

Secret Paths

If you know where to look...

Customer Satisfaction Lab

A long time ago, about a year after the first Halo was released for XBox, the PC version went out on the market. But this wasn't just some lame-o port, oh no. Bungie made sure that the PC guys would have some extra incentive to pay even more for this version than the XBox guys. They called it CE for Custom Edition. Like many of the 3D rendered PC games out there now, tools were added to make your own custom maps, custom missions, even custom behaviors. I've seen video of Master Chief doing a pirouette! And you could save video of your gameplay on your PC. Whaaat? Who'd want to see any of that crap? Well, machinima was born out of these customized PC versions of games, and in fact, the two most popular Halo shows, Red vs. Blue and This Spartan Life, got their first taste of internet viral distribution from websites set up to distribute the better maps and missions.

As the console market has embraced the concept of internet-connected gaming, Halo 3 also wanted to bring customizing your games to the masses. You can't make new maps, but at least you can do whatever you want to the battleground. So, here's a little commercial shot by the producers of Red vs. Blue letting people know what to expect.

"Now that you've been stuck, how would you rate your anxiety level?"

China Scared of Spooks

And I'm not talking about the espionage kind. It's always a little hard to predict just what Red China will censor next. Obviously, any kind of dissident opinion against the central government is on that list, but sometimes complaints against corrupt locals are not. Besides, we know that communism loves re-education camps, so we should not be surprised at the Chinese shaping their culture in Beijing not to spit and piss on sidewalks, how to smile in public, and also how to stand in line. It's not known whether they'll let their citizens go back to "normal" after the Olympic Games. However, we got a hint of the scaredy-cat communist party when they got Blizzard to change the graphics for dead bodies and the walking undead. So perhaps this video ban on ghost stories is more in line with their attack on the afterlife and religious thought in general.

The Pasadena Southwest Passage

After finding out yesterday and today, that two of the three Grand Tours are excluding Team Astana, the Giro d'Italia and Tour de France, I was more than a little pissed. In fact, ASO, which owns the Tour de France and several other French races, has excluded Astana from all of its races. This makes it impossible for Alberto Contador, the Tour de France winner, to defend not only his Grand Tour title, but also his Paris-Nice title from last year. Unsurprisingly, the Spanish organizers of the Vuelta a España have welcomed their young Spanish cycling superstar, so no problems there. It seems to me that the Tours' response to the doping violations of Astana last year, especially those of suspended blood dopers Vinokourov and Kaschechkin, are more of a way to make sure another team led by Johan Bruyneel doesn't win again. Bah, whatever, at least the Amgen Tour of California doesn't care about witch hunt tactics like this. Of course, last year's winner is a native Santa Rosa boy, Levi Leipheimer, so I'm putting Astana's inclusion on the race roster in the same batch of motivations with the Spaniards asking Contador to come to the Vuelta.

Speaking of the Amgen Tour of California, it starts this Sunday in Palo Alto, and will make its way down to the finish in Pasadena. And what a finish in Pasadena: 6 circuits around the Rose Bowl! Now, I pretty much do this ride everyday, so I was excited to see what the actual route would be. After finding the route slip, I plugged in the circuit into Google maps, and well, just take a look.

View Larger Map

At point A is where the race dips down into the bowl, racing down Salvia Cañon, and then begins the 4.5 mile circuit, 6 laps totalling 27 miles. I did this circuit twice this morning, and it is not easy, especially with all the climbing on the southern end. I was also pretty worried about the hairpin turn down at the bottom. Take a closer look at that hairy left turn uphill.

In traffic, dealing with cars, that was pretty bad. On race day, it will be much better, since all the traffic will be closed off. But on any other day, there's an uphill left turn onto Holly to cross the bridge over the Arroyo, with a left turn signal, no less. You cross the bridge, and then you have a steep straight climb, before you have to cross a wide street to make that left turn onto Grand. Thankfully, it's downhill after that. Oh, you see that pretty sharp right turn at Point B? I took a picture!

Yeah, the riders better not take that turn too fast, or pow! Right into the fence! If you look hard enough, you can see the Aquatic Center's pools and the Rose Bowl itself in the distance. The last worrisome turn is at Point C, with a hard left onto Rosemont. There it is!

Now, Rosemont is fun going down it. It's pretty much a railgun that launches you down into the bowl. But on this circuit, the climbing's not quite done yet. The route sends the riders up a short, steep incline before another short, steep descent into a left turn up at the north end. That bit of incline is at Point D, and unfortunately, Point D has looked like this since November:

You see those orange barriers? The cyclists have to go right through those things, according to the planned route. With little more than a week to go, the construction better be complete. Actually, the work does look very close to done, so maybe they will be ready. Then the riders take a couple more left turns, and then they do that route 5 more times. The finish line is somewhere on West Drive, south of the Salvia turn, so I'm going to guess it's at the intersection of West and Seco. That parking lot, Lot K to the locals, has plenty of room for booths, stages, and parking for the team buses.

The last stage of the Tour of California begins in Santa Clarita, and joins Angeles Crest Highway for the descent into La Cañada. It's just so fun to know that the roads through La Cañada and Pasadena are pretty much the roads I see on my bike everyday. Cool stuff.

What Happened to Six More Weeks of Winter?

Apparently, Punxsutawney Phil's prognosticative powers apply only to climes east of the Rockies. The temperature here in the San Gabriel Valley at 9 AM? 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Again, I say:

PHBBBBBBT!

Science Marches On in Space!

The following video is exactly why we put people in space: What happens to an alka seltzer tablet when added to a sphere of water?

It's interesting to see that the surface tension of the water sphere can almost totally contain all the carbon dioxide contained in one tablet. (via Science Blog)

The Format Wars Closer To The End?

Maybe Sony is going to finally make up for the failure of Beta over VHS: Netflix opts for Blu-ray high-def DVDs. There's still some heavy fighting to do, because of the reach of high-end gaming consoles. No one can discount Microsoft's presence in the format wars, since they have backed Toshiba with their HD-DVD player in the XBox 360, and Sony's PS3 is a very distant third to in market share to Nintendo's Wii and the Xbox 360. However, Netflix's move will surely push hi-def disk player sales for Blu-Ray compatible machines higher. What will be Toshiba's next move? But I can't shake the feeling that one other player out there will squash both of these formats, in which Toshiba is actually better positioned: ultra high-speed internet access and huge flash-based hard drives. Will broadband connected DVR's win out over both of them in 5 years? Interesting times, interesting times...

My Backpack's Got Jets

Okay, I usually can write something funny to introduce the Helmety Goodness Fridays video, but today's video has all the good jokes in it. To mentally prepare, just imagine what an Usher video would look like if he put on some Mandalorian armor...

"Well, I bounty hunt for Jabba Hutt to finance my vette."

The Holy Hill Climb

We survived Holy Hill! We decided on the Inverness climb and descent, and the climb was not as bad as I thought it would be. A little steeper than Lida and Glen Oaks, and just a little bit longer than Lida, it wasn't bad a climb at about 630 feet. The descent was fast, but we only had to worry about cars on St. Katherine before we turned down Inverness again. And yes, there were little Catholic schoolgirls up at the top. No, I did not hit on them. Shame on you for even thinking such a thing!

We were just climbing that road.



And there are some little girls messing with a video camera.

Route Recon

Say you want to go up a steep climb tomorrow, but you've never done it, and you don't know how tough it's going to be. Also, there'll be someone else joining you, who also has never gone up that climb, but would benefit from some kind of foreknowledge of the route. What to do? Well, with cell phone cameras well-nigh omnipresent, just pop it open and record your short drive up that hill. Please, let passengers do this only, not the driver...

So, we start at the Rose Bowl and want to climb up to Sacred Heart Academy. As a sidenote, this all-girl Catholic school was the closest sister school to St. Francis High School, the alma mater of my friend Mike and mine as well. Ah, memories... Anyway, there are two routes up the hill, from the north and the south. St. Katherine starts in La Cañada from the north, and goes all the way up to the school. Inverness starts in Pasadena from the south, and joins up with St. Katherine right before it meets up with the school. Which one is better? Let's go to the tape! Commentary provided by Mike and Joe.

Notes for the St. Katherine Climb: We'll have to do a small bit of climbing with Linda Vista to get to La Cañada start location. Also, there are quite a few left turns, so we'll have to be alert for oncoming traffic. Road surface is atrocious. There are quite a few steep spots on long, straight climbs.

Notes for the St. Katherine Descent: This descent is technical and fast. Married with the awful road surface, several long declines into blind corners, and the steep slope at the bottom of the hill into a busy stop sign, make for a white knuckle, forearm cramping descent.

Notes for the Inverness Climb: This climb is much more relaxing than the St. Katherine one. The ride to the start is much shorter. The road surface is almost entirely well-paved. The road is narrower and discouraging to car traffic. There is one bad uncontrolled intersection with a left turn, but it's not at the top of an incline, so safety won't be much of an issue.

Notes for the Inverness Descent: This descent is also fast and technical. However, the lack of traffic and smooth pavement are definite pluses. There are two extreme hairpin turns near the bottom of the descent, coming off of steep slants, so expect to leave several layers of rubber on your rims. Not as white knuckling as the St. Katherine descent, but the arm and hand cramping might be the same.

Which route do you like better? Personally, I prefer the Inverness climb and descent, and have to heavily recommend against the St. Katherine descent. A viable option would be a St. Katherine climb with an Inverness descent, but the road is just so much nicer on the Inverness side. Which one will we take? Tune into tomorrow, if we survive!

Frank Discussion on Immortality

It's a bit of a boring day, unless you like poring through all the election data. I picked all winners, except for my local city tax continuance. A utility tax was set to expire, but nooo, people wanted to keep handing their money over to the city. Go figure. So, to remind us that all of these events are fleeting, let's listen in on Sam and Max's conversation on the nature of your average weiner. Vegetable, mineral, immortality through preservatives?

"PBS is nothing but government-sponsored lies! Hot dogs don't decay, everybody knows that!"

Sam and Max Again!

If you enjoyed PC games in the 1990's, it was quite an exciting time as the technological development of the gaming industry was really revolutionary. Without us geeks messing with video card jumpers, writing batch files for distinct game boot-ups, and running separate diagnostics for specific mouse and joy-stick setups, we wouldn't have the mainstream gaming market, with those state-of-the-art consoles, that we see today. Sadly, a certain gaming genre did not survive the chip revolution, as more and more people were concerned with graphics capabilities for action games, first-person shooters, and sim-games. That genre was the puzzle adventure game, which lives on in today's role-playing games, but not as the sole focus. Gone are the great scripts, funny scenes, and suspenseful reveals. Lucasarts was the master of those games, and I always feel a twinge of nostalgia when I look through my old PC game boxes at The Secret of Monkey Island and its sequels, and the Indiana Jones titles. I never played Grim Fandango, and I feel all the lesser for missing it when I had a computer which could play it. But, by far, the most audacious, silly, and rude of those Lucasarts titles was Sam & Max Hit the Road.

Now there was a game that had ultimate replayability, honored the kitchiness of roadside tourist attractions that are uniquely American, and was just down-right hilarious as its main heroes, Sam the detective dog and Max the voracious sharkbite bunny, interacted with each other and the game environment. Thankfully, the fastest growing gaming sector, casual gaming, is rediscovering the old puzzle adventure genre, and repackaging those kinds of games in episodic titles. And the failed and frustrated sequel to Sam & Max was resurrected by Telltale Games, releasing "episodes" for quick, funny PC gaming. I have not yet played any of the games, but now that I've found out how the game engine and voice acting appear, I will definitely be picking them up. So, here's a preview of what the new Sam & Max can do for your funny bone.

"Hey Sam, why are we here?"

Duuuude...

That's Mishter The Dude-shter to you!

Deregulation Raised Phone Prices in California

You would have thought that Californians, at least, would have been wary of deregulating utilities, especially after the electricity mess that got Gray Davis booted out of office. But no, we haven't learned. Phone service prices have actually gone up, after the state government voted to deregulate that business sector. Again, this comes from the misunderstanding and misapplication of free market forces. And it always comes down to the illusion of choice. Sure, you can go with AT&T because they have lower-priced bundles of broadband internet and land-line phone access, but then their caller ID, call-waiting, and other extra services went up. But surely, the other guys' prices would go down to lure more customers, right? No, they also went up, and they will continue to go up to the amount that the market will bear. Why? It's not a free market. You can't choose Verizon for local phone service, AT&T for call-waiting, and Sprint for caller ID. You have to get all those things from the same guy. So, surprise! They jacked those prices up because they have you trapped, and will find just the right rate to keep you annoyed, but still paying, but not annoyed enough to switch to someone else. Maybe these elected officials should take some elementary macro economics classes so they won't make these kinds of mistakes.

Pentagon Trying To Save Money...

...but Congress won't let it. That's a switch, isn't it? It seems that certain politicians have fallen for the old "illusion of choice" canard that huge companies like to trot out to confuse and evoke those free market passions. But, in this case, the tax payers are still shelling out all the development money for the second engine trying to "compete" with the original choice. Um, there's no savings there, especially when you only have one customer, and he's already paying you, to develop a "cheaper" product. Yeah, competition in the free market will bring savings! Usually, that's the case, but only when you have lots of customers and lots of competitors. Here's how an economist would explain the "competition" between Pratt & Whitney and GE:

Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a research group known for close ties to the Pentagon and industry, said in a report to be released this week that the benefits of competition on a second engine had been overstated by some in Congress.

"When workloads shrink, the potential for economies of scale are reduced," wrote Thompson in a closely argued piece.

Like I said, a misapplication and misunderstanding of free market practices.

Helmety Heroes Past Their Prime

Have you ever admired a public figure, only to have your impressions be so thoroughly unfulfilled when you actually met him? Was he also reliving the past, had a bad temper, and seemed to have lost his cognitive reasoning skills and motor functions? I guess our heroes really do belong in the past, or should only stay young in the movies...

"That's a bad Master Chief. You come back here right now, mister!"

As an aside, I really do hope this video does not turn out to be a metaphor for a John McCain presidency.