Somehow, I think Facebook's ad creation code isn't working properly.

Yeah, some dude who overdosed on colloidal silver is totally related to learning a new language.

I'm sure language tutors don't hate him. Probably.

Isn't this like changing IBM's name to HAL? Oh, that's just a dumb movie idea. Couldn't really happen.

Nope. It really happened. A123 Systems, the bankrupt battery maker bought by a Chinese firm, changed their name to B456 Systems.

Diablo 3 Director was oblivious to market forces and human nature.

Lesson learned. Diablo 3 Director Jay Wilson: Auction Houses 'really hurt' game

Wilson said that before Blizzard launched the game, the company had a few assumptions about how the Auction Houses would work: He thought they would help reduce fraud, that they'd provide a wanted service to players, that only a small percentage of players would use it and that the price of items would limit how many were listed and sold.

But he said that once the game went live, Blizzard realized it was completely wrong about those last two points.

As someone who is still a very regular player of this game, I can attest to having to be as good at the actual game as I am at the "other game" known as Auction House. You have to be aware of market trends, player habits, and timing item sales before new patches go live. Sounds like options trading, doesn't it?

This is why I was very happy about the latest patch which introduced new crafting recipes and materials that allow for uber gear, but not being allowed to sell those items in the Auction House. Literally within hours of the new patch's release, several items' prices crashed, others skyrocketed, and the commodities market (crafting materials and gems for socketing) was reset into a whole new environment. I loved it: watching futures, options, and commodities trading affect prices in real time.

I'm not surprised that this idea of limiting exceptional crafted items to personal use occurred after Jay Wilson stepped down. Also, there are now wholly new markets in lower player level gear in the Auction House for veteran players trying out new classes. This is closer to what Wilson was hoping for, instead of what he got in the first few months of Diablo 3's release.

Oh, and yes, I am still an uber, uber video game playing geek, if you needed to be reminded.

Seriously, why hasn't this been done before? "Honda Odyssey rolls out with a built-in vacuum."

HondaVac.

 

Ecumenism can be a tricky proposition.

Despair pervades all...


October 25, 1969 — see The Complete Peanuts 1967-1970

I guess all the crimes in Ohio have been solved - Punxsutawney Phil 'indicted' over spring forecast

Charged with misrepresentation of Spring.

Bill Deeley, president of the Punxsutawney club that organizes Groundhog Day, said Phil has a lawyer and would fight any extradition attempt by Ohio authorities.

Zynga does trial separation with Facebook, but staying together for the kids.

Newly independent? Zynga's website removes Facebook login requirement.

Zynga players can still log into Facebook on Zynga.com if they like, and as you can see on the site, the Facebook logo and login box are still prominently displayed. But players are no longer forced to use that process to partake in Zynga's library of games.

Game for cats now game for penguins.

Trying hard not to comment on usefulness of iPads... Penguins Play on an iPad

An idea whose time has come...

Need to punctuate your social network post with an appropriate animated gif? Google is here to help! Bring on the cat GIFs! Google adds animated filter to image search

And here I was, only 7 years ahead of pop geek culture, using open source software to make my own. I guess I'll have to find something else to be trendy about. What is going to be popular in 7 years that cracks me up now? Must ponder.

After almost a decade of youths using phones as pocket watches, what's the point of a paired device on their wrists?

It's official -- Samsung is working on a smart watch. But what about Apple? -- at.cnn.com/2WJ5Kr2 #tech #CNN
— cnntech (@cnntech) March 19, 2013

The Dick Tracy watch only captured the imagination when people used phones, for, you know, talking. I can see a niche market for sports enthusiasts tired of strapping their phones to their upper arms or bikes, though.

These Germans seem to think that people actually don't own the money they put in banks.

Saving money in a bank is now just another revenue stream for central banks: German opposition wants big savers hit harder in Cyprus deal

The Greens and Social Democrats are only arguing about how much money they should be taking, not whether should be taking the money at all.

Yeah, that was a pretty rough Milan-San Remo course.

Head here for an epic gallery in tribute to an epic day of racing at Milan-San Remo - bit.ly/ZSUU6Q #MSR twitter.com/TeamSky/status…
— Team Sky (@TeamSky) March 17, 2013

They actually had to stop the race in the middle to take out two climbs with snow on them, bus the riders to the point past the last snowy descent, release the breakaway, and then the rest of the peloton 7 minutes later.  What did past Milan-San Remo editions do when all those teams did not have buses and trucks to hold the cyclists and equipment? Reroute on the fly? If there were enough police presence, that would work. Congratulations to Gerald Ciolek of MTN-Qhubeka for outlasting Sagan and Cancellara.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Obligatory Irish Nyan Cat.

All the Chavistas seem to drink the same paranoid water.

Venezuela's Maduro urges Obama to halt "plot" against rival reut.rs/WwWlZC
— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) March 17, 2013

Oh, just randomly saying that Obama wants to kill his political opposition leader to spark a coup. Sounds like someone else has some coup plans before the election.

Cyprus just took 6.7% of everyone's cash in Cypriot banks.

European banks have begun to melt down: A stupid idea whose time had come

And if you have over 100K euros deposited in a Cypriot bank, they took 9.9%. And to make sure nobody had time to take their money out before the levy happened, they did it over a bank holiday. But at least you get shares in the bank that robbed you. Good luck trying to sell those shares for a profit anytime soon, though.

Confirmed: I am not Joaquim Rodriguez

Well, duh. But what I mean, is that I am not a punchy climber who can accelerate on steep ramps out of the saddle. On a hilly course with 6 ramps that takes about a half hour for me to do, I was 2 minutes faster spinning in the saddle yesterday than I was taking all the ramps out of the saddle in a bigger gear. Oh well, at least it's a good workout on muscles I don't use that often.

Don't like what Google did to Reader? You'll have another reason to ditch a Google product.

The Chrome browser that is - Google yanks ad-blocking apps from Play Store, points to developer agreement

Well, those ad blockers were poorman versions of the real ones for Firefox anyway. Lest you forget that Google is an advertising company, not a search company, this should remind you.

Translation: No buyers. - Anschutz says sports company no longer for sale

This also means there probably won't be a new NFL stadium in downtown L.A. for many years.

Last week, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said in a television interview that Anschutz had to find a buyer for AEG first before moving forward with what he termed as "uphill climb" involving the stadium effort.

Time for Apple to get serious about merging MacOS with iOS.

Google's Andy Rubin steps down as head of Android, replaced by Chrome OS head

Microsoft jumped first, with WP8 sharing the same kernel as Windows 8 and Windows RT, and adoption rate mirroring slow uptake of WinXP notwithstanding, the software company is very serious about staying the course with its operating system.  Sorry, Googlers, much like everything else in Google Labs, your early adoption of Chrome OS was just for data collection.

The main reason I'm skeptical of life on Mars even in the past: Life is tenacious, in all its forms.

Curiosity rover: NASA finds new evidence life may have existed on Mars

Finding evidence of past riverbeds, which means a component of life as we know it on Earth was present, water, is nice, but not anything to get excited about. If we find evidence of something that was the cause of a planet wide extinction level event, then I'll stop being so skeptical. On our own planet, 99% of species went extinct in less than a million years 250 million years ago, yet here we are still talking about it. Life is tenacious.

Maybe now, Nibali will stop complaining about non-teammates not working together on climbs.

Vincenzo is all smiles now that he's clinched overall victory in Tirreno-Adriatico, but he was a bit of a whiner when he claimed Alberto Contador wasn't helping with the pace a few days ago.

Feeling slow in the winter? Blame the cold air because it's denser.

Temperature affects air density, which has a linear relationship to air drag, so yes, you are slower when it's colder outside.

You raise an interesting question and you’re observations are correct. The drag force on a cyclist is provided by the following equation: D = ½ p V2 Ap Cd where D is the drag force (N); p is the air density (kg/m3); Ap is the frontal area of the cyclist (m2) and Cd is the drag coefficient (dimensionless).

As you mentioned, air density is affected by temperature, pressure, and also by humidity. Temperature has a much more pronounced effect on air density than humidity: cold air contains more molecules per cubic meter. If the air pressure is constant at 1000 kPa, then the air density at 25 degrees Celcius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) will be around 1.169 kg/m3 while at -5 degrees Celcius (23 degrees Fahrenheit) the air density will be 1.3011 kg/m3 — about 10-percent higher, and the drag would also be increased by 10 percent.

Air drag is also affected by you wearing more stuff, like a jacket, and your muscles can't get as warm either, so now you have a whole bunch of excuses..., eh, reasons for being slower in the colder air.

Good news (for me). Clone Wars cancelled!

Disney is cleaning house. They're probably finding a way to change it up and broadcast on their own channels.

I really don't care since I stopped watching this show 2 years ago after they botched the political system of Mandalore (kind of important, since the clones think of themselves as Mandalorians), rewrote the whole concept of the Dathomiri Night Sisters (extremely important, since Dathomir is the planet Han Solo won in Sabacc tournament to give to Princess Leia as an engagement present and where rancors are from), and flat out ignored the reasons for civil war between the Mon Calamari and Quarrens (also important for Admiral Akbar's back story). Three strikes and I was done with the show.

Did the curated compatibility view list in IE10 just become a black list instead of a white list?

The Modern IE 10 browser is becoming flash-capable by default starting tomorrow. Most of the time, this wasn't an issue, because IE 10 was always flash-capable, but just blocked sites requiring the flash plugin by default. Instead, it employed a compatibility list of websites using flash, and the most heavily trafficked sites were on it. Some sites, such as YouTube, allowed for html5, so again, barely an issue. Now, it looks like Microsoft just flipped the white list to a black list, and everything's hunky-dory. Oh, except if you were one of those "smarties" who hacked the white list to put your favorite site on there before the curators put it on there for you. Congratulations to you. You were king of the Internet for 5 months.

I'd rather line up to see Tardar Sauce too!

Forget Elon Musk or Al Gore. Here's the real star of #SXSW, whose fans are now lined up around the block #GrumpyCat twitter.com/cnntech/status…
— cnntech (@cnntech) March 10, 2013

I can't stop looking at this tweet from Weird Al

Bird music vine.co/v/bw7jBaTru12
— Al Yankovic (@alyankovic) March 8, 2013

That was a close call for Berkeley landmark Chez Panisse.

Small fire damages Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley

A fire broke out early Friday morning at the famed Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, but a sprinkler system may have saved the entire building from going up in flames, Bay Area TV stations reported.

I like the idea, but my Roomba is nowhere near as well behaved.

There should be one or two petals stuck in the corners, with the poor little bot sulking near a baseboard totally run out of juice.

Risk-averse venture from publicly traded media conglomerate...

Eddie Murphy and Judge Reinhold will be reuniting as Axel Foley and Billy Rosewood in the pilot for the possible CBS series "Beverly Hills Cop."

I have a bad feeling about this. "This" being the premise behind the next Star Wars trilogy.

In a story about how hard it was for George Lucas to give up creative control of the Lucasfilm properties, we get this detail:

At first Lucas wouldn't even turn over his rough sketches of the next three Star Wars films. When Disney executives asked to see them, he assured them they would be great and said they should just trust him. "Ultimately you have to say, ‘Look, I know what I'm doing. Buying my stories is part of what the deal is.' I've worked at this for 40 years, and I've been pretty successful," Lucas says. "I mean, I could have said, ‘Fine, well, I'll just sell the company to somebody else.'

What did we learn? George Lucas already had ideas on what the next trilogy will be about, and it concerns the main 3 characters from the first trilogy, Luke, Leia, and Han, since Lucas wanted to make sure actors from the original movies had some kind of place in the new movies.

Next, we already know from the writing for The Clone Wars animated series on Cartoon Network that Lucas cares not at all for the contributions of the authors in the expanded Star Wars universe of books, graphic novels, comic books, and video games.

Finally, we know how horrible the writing and general direction of the Star Wars prequels were, so, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, that Lucas won't be involved at all in those details might be my only hope that fans get a fair adaptation of the later events in the Star Wars universe. But since the general treatment and artistic themes would exist in sketches from Lucas himself, and it would be a grave insult from the current production staff not to incorporate them somehow, I still have a bad feeling this.

Update: I'm not the only with a bad feeling about the next trilogy, but RJ is definitely better than I am at gaming out the worst case scenarios.

Is the video game industry following the movie industry in creative decline?

Provocative question, but the last few years for movie releases have been sequels, more sequels, remakes, and adapted screenplays, with more expensive ticket prices masking the actual decline in number of tickets sold. Does this not sound like the video game industry?

Sure, I like being reintroduced to rich, deep worlds like the Elder Scrolls or Fallout, refighting characters from old games with better graphics, or even seeing beloved games ported to new platforms, but what about new stuff?

I think there is a real interest in brand new properties without the huge marketing budgets necessary for mature titles from publishing houses who are part of publicly traded media conglomerates, otherwise the coverage of Kickstarter funding for Indie games would not be so breathless or hopeful.

If the established titles start costing so much, and taking so long to come to market, and then have mediocre sales, how long before we'll be waiting 15 years for those games to be stuck in an emulator pack like all the Sega Dreamcast games?

Apple has always been about creating markets, not responding to demand

Analysts are champing at the bit trying to get Apple to make cheaper phones or go into low profit margin markets like consumer electronics. But this is the what happened to Apple in the late 1990's, and marketing guru Steve Jobs had to come back and show them how to sell good-looking well-made computing devices.

So, now what? Steve Jobs is dead, Apple TV is a little hockey puck that runs iTunes, and the iPhone is never going to be more than a 5 inch screen. Apple needs to create a market from the stuff that's already out there, and I think they need to stomp hard on Google's version of augmented reality.

Google is already using Google Now on its Android operating systems, and is soon introducing Google Glass for upwards of 1200 bucks. This is obviously in Apple's price range. So, what happened to Siri? How about using those cameras on the iDevices for something other than Instagram? This is what should be next for Apple.

Well, they could also start making beautiful ergonomic input devices instead of their crappy keyboards and mouses. I'm sure people would buy those...

Yeah, I was screaming fast!

Can you believe it? Going past that magnetic anomaly at 17 mph. Heh. Oh, that max speed up there at 75.5 mph? Um, no I did not go that fast this morning. Maybe something like 37 mph on a nice downhill, but no, not even close to 75 mph.

Fitness Progress Report: Common Denominator - 3

It's been two months back on the bike, so I took stock of my current fitness and performance compared to my fitness baseline of 2010. Right now, I'm putting in numbers on my daily workout routes just at the bottom of my top 33 percentile of times. I'm averaging times in the top 1/3. That one-third number is going to be important for the rest of this post.

Things to note: I'm only riding about 100 miles a week right now. Compared to a typical week at my peak fitness in 2010, I'm doing only 2/3 of the work. Yet, already my performance compares to numbers that took me 6 months of hard work doing 150 miles or so a week.

In 1/3 the time (2 months versus 6 months), doing only 2/3 as much work, I'm in the top 1/3 of performance results. Common denominator: 3.

One other thing I noticed this week: on climbs and false flats, my cruising speed is already the same as it was after 9 months of training in 2010, yet my average speed is still barely in the top 1/3 of results. The difference is my cruising speed on descents and flats is still much lower than at my peak. I believe changing my pedal cadence to a much higher rpm last year to avoid tendonitis in my right knee accounts for this, and while my neuro-muscular rhythms have adjusted to the effort on the hills and ascents (read: I got used to the pain), my rhythm on the flats and descents with the higher cadence is not maximizing my effort (read: need to feel more pain). Also, I'm 12 pounds lighter than I was in 2010, so that messes with my terminal velocity on the longer descents. Boo.

Not mentioned: Hey, write your own damn code instead of copy-pasting everything.

Getting Crafty: Why Coders Should Try Quilting and Origami

“We’re treating software development as a craft, and I tend to think of the term ‘craft’ as an intersection of art and science,” says Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins. “The crafting stations are representation of that.”

Well, that's all nice, but how do you convince developers on deadline that the best practice is to write your code from scratch instead of, let's say borrow, previously written code that seems to work alright?

Is the editor trying to make a pun on Good Samaritan? "Good Saramotins finishes fifth in Strade Bianche"

Please don't do that unless someone else made that play on words.

The Dude Bikes. The Dude Abides. How's that go?

Yesh.

Poland, bringing out the big guns.

Or, at least, the World's Biggest Revolver.