On a week that my mother bought what she expects to be the last car she owns, not expecting to be allowed to drive (by me) after she’s 80, it looks like she might be able to buy a car that (mostly if not entirely) drives for her by that time.

Reading over the article, which is quite long, thorough, and awesome, I had several thoughts on the future of the technology and implications.

Stop n’ Go Traffic

I was reminded this week of an awesome example of the emergent nature of stop n’ go traffic in a non-bottleneck/accident environment.  A video of a circle of cars that begin equal spaced but because the nature of humans begins to undulate.

One would hope that the automation of driving would put an end to the annoying of such.  Prediction 1: I think it won’t (without legislative force or technical cooperation).  I suspect that the varying granulation of the differing softwares among cars, and also likely setting of comfortable follow distances will cause the same emergent fluctuation of speeds.  The best way to counter this, in my opinion, would be to recognize a stop n’ go situation and limit the allowed acceleration after a slow down.  Just a critical mass of cars taking that approach could cause the behavior to not manifest.

Shared Cars

There are many car sharing services that have existed and currently exist, but if cars could auto-navigate without even a licensed driver as a passenger, it would make the ability that much greater!  But better than services that would require the overhead of a business, how easy would it be to borrow a friend or family member’s car?

“Hey Joe, I need to haul something, can I borrow your truck?”  ”Sure. I’m at work. I’ll send it over. Have it back by 5.”  ”Hey, I’m running late, can I send my car over?”

There might even be a group of friends with a pool of cars.  Schedule the SUV for the weekend road trip, or the convertible for the drive to the beach.  Prediction 2: (Also, hinted at in the article) Car ownership will drop.

Taxis

Of course, the ever present in New York and semi-used in Houston taxi cab could entirely disappear.  Or at least the human driven version of one could.  (Jonny Cab, a la Total Recall?) But everyones car will become a virtual cab.  Will the taxi cease to exist entirely?  I doubt it, the cab companies will have to reinvent themselves, but I think they will try.

And with car/cabs becoming ubiquitous, will we see the end of drunk driving?  Certainly not; the main issue of drunkenness is the bad decision making.  But hopefully it would be drastically reduced.  But the semi-automated car should be able to prevent a drunk driver from speeding or even crashing, while the fully automated car would bypass him all together.

Will we see the lessening of DWI demonization? Indeed, would Mothers Against Drunk Driving shrivel and die for lack of need, or would it morph into something that is more overtly neo-prohibitionist?  I suspect the former.

Bus Drivers

Of course, you would suspect the automating of buses.  Their large size leads to more difficulty in a human driving them.  Both public and private busses could likely be improved by it.  I’ve seen some questionable city driving of busses, particularly in sharing the street with cyclists.  And every few years there’s a tragic private bus crash that kills most of the occupants.

But will people be willing to ride in these large things without an attendant?  Or would bus owners be willing to send them out without a company representative?  Prediction 3: I think busses will still have an “attendant” minimally.  The “driver” would be trained in the operation, but perhaps not licensed as they currently are as a “large vehicle driver”.  He could become the tour guide or in-drive attendant for the passengers.

Mass Transit v Public Transit

There is a distinction among those who study public transit, between that and mass transit.  Mass Transit moves large numbers of people at once (trains, busses).  Public Transit does that and possibly involves smaller unit movers (public taxis).

There has never been a large implementation of non-mass public transit.  Van shares is perhaps the most common example of this.  The reason you have a bus to the suburbs is because you only pay one driver for 80 people.  If there is no driver, there’s no reason to wait for the bus to fill up.  Instead of one departure time you can leave at times staggered to fit riders’ convenience.

You could also group people by delivery location.  Rather than having one commuter parking lot, you drop them at various nearby locations.  Perhaps a grocery store.  And you wife you send you the car she was using earlier to come pick you and the groceries up.

Slug Bug

I had a whimsical thought while reading the article as well.  The software keeping you safe in the moving car could be able to identify makes and models of cars.  If it doesn’t happen in the future, we’ve all lost our humor.  The VW software of the future has to have an option to play Slug Bug with the riders.

Prediction 4: There will be in-car apps for entertainment.

Insurance

If/when auto-drivers become prevalent, auto accidents should reduce in both amount and severity.  Lessened severity may not necessarily imply lessened cost.  Will insurance costs drop?

There will be a realigning of liability.  Will this cause more litigiousness?  Will this cost insurance to rise? Will it offload to software/car companies?  Will we have to sign forced-mediation contracts with an auto purchase?

Or will insurance remain the same annoying costly thing?  Lots of variables here.

Tracking Others

Our cars will be able to observe lots of things.  License plates will certainly be identifiable with multiple cameras on every car.  Will they be recorded? Maintained? Who will have access to these?  Will we control them, or the car company, or the government? Would you be able to access all of them? Remotely? Could police get a warrant for a plate or a make/model identification, send out a message, and download all identification of it from every car in town?

Prediction 5: The government will want access to this information.  Will we let them have it?  It will be an argument of “well if you have nothing to hide” like so many other liberty loss arguments are.

Certainly there are a lot of minor hit and run offenses.  Usually involving non-insured drivers.  Or sometimes the equivalent, falsely identifying drivers.  And then there’s the bastard who lies to his insurance company saying it was your fault. Not to mention the aberrant ill acting police officer. Now you’ve got onboard video recording to cover your own ass.

Hacking the Car

The article mentions the phrase “hacking driving”, which is a very Google oriented view of the new technology: it’s a massive data set, how do we tame it.  But once it’s everywhere, there will be people “hacking driving”.  Which is to say, making their car do something it wasn’t originally intended to do, or even hacking yours to get it to do something it wasn’t intended to do.  What kind of laws and liability will arise from that?

The cars may not be flying, but if i’m able to sit back and enjoy while the trip is going on, that’s 90% of the battle.  The article mentioned that he didn’t think we’d be playing board games.  That’s exactly what i expect to be doing on a road trip. Gimme the 70s captain chair in a modern, small SUV.

I was quite interested at the details they included in the articles, many that would not be today.  And the fact that justice seemed swift back then – though I don’t have an article about the trial.

Five word summary to story: Stabbed in Heart with Icepick.  And if that hooked you in enough, here are the articles I found.

Dallas Morning News - 15 Aug 1923

MAN STABBED TO DEATH WITH PICK

E. L. Noble Charged with Murder Following Death of Stanley Label

Stabley C. LeBel, 44 years old, 1616 McCoy street, a salesman, was fatally injured when he was stabbed in the heart with an ice pick during an affray at 9:30 o’clock Tuesday morning at Main and Jefferson streets, near the Dallas County courthouse. Dr. W. R. McAdams of the Emergency Hospital, who was called to the scene, found LeBel dead when he arrived.
E. L. Nobles, 37 years old, 2826 Oak Lane street, proprietor of a mattress factory, went to the Criminal Courts building immediately following the affray and surrendered to District Attorney Shelby S. Cox. In a statement to Mr. Cox, Nobles said he stabbed LeBel “after being knocked down two or three times by LeBel.”
Nobles was charged with murder in a formal complaint filed in Justice F. H. Alexander’s court, after which he was taken before the Dallas County grand jury. Thursday was set by Justice Alexander as the date for preliminary hearing of the case. No bond was sought Tuesday by the Accused man.

and a day later . . .

Dallas Morning News – 16 Aug 1923

Nobles limped when he appeared at the courthouse. He said he was injured several months ago by falling from a house.
In a statement to officers Nobles said that he has been living apart from his wife for some time. He said that LeBel has been in his employ and that he asked LeBel not to converse with his wife He said that he was attempting to avoid meeting him when the affray occurred Tuesday. Nobles said that he found the ice pick on the street Tuesday morning after leaving a bank.
After making his statement to District Attorney Cox, Nobles was taken by Deputy Sheriffs Hall Hood and Walkter Taylor to the office of a physician, where he received treatment for lacerations on his forehead and face.
The body of LeBel was prepared for burial by the Loudermilk-Sparkman Undertaking Company. He is survived by a wife and four sons.
LeBel is survived by his wife and four sons, Andrew LeBel, Charles LeBel, Jesse LeBel and Ernest LeBel, and three brothers, E. E. LeBel of Fort Worth and W. W. LeBel and G. E. LeBel of Los Angeles California, Cal.
Funeral Services will be held Wednesday afternoon at 4 o’clock at the Loudermilk-Sparkman chapel, the Rev. P. O. Salee officiating. Burial will be at Oakland Cemetery.

As an aside, it seems that affray is a legal term. Though I suspect it is being used literarily by the newspaper.  I also wonder how much the “converse with his wife” was contemporary euphemism.

For completeness, the 4 brothers:

• Andrew Franklin Lebel (1903-1990)
• Charles Edward Lebel Sr (1904 – 1985)
• Jesse Loran Lebel (1907 – 1994)
• Earnest Arthur Lebel (1910 – 1990)

and 3 brothers:

• Charles Eugene Lebel (1870 – 1934) (not E. E.)
• Edward Carlton Lebel (1877 – 1929) (not G. E.)
• Stanley Cady Lebel (1880 – 1923)
• William Wright Lebel (1882 – )

There were also 2 sisters, not named in the article, who were 9 (Gertrud) and 15 (Florence) in 1900.  I can’t find any information about them after that. Don’t know if they pre-deceased him or not.

As I’ve aged, and the number of hours in a day seems continually less available, many of my interests have had to make way for others.  Most of the sporting teams I have followed have become more of a background interest.  On top of that, either my perception or reality has come to give me the view that many professional athletes are whiney spoiled asses.  (More so in basketball than football.)  This has tended to push my interest down to college sports over professional.

In 1994 I moved to Calgary.  At the time Bud Adams was trolling for a new stadium; the City was in an economic lull and saying “no”.  It was foregone, it seemed to me at the time and obviously in retrospect, that the Oilers would leave.  As it was, Canada didn’t have much coverage of the NFL and I just started ignoring the league entirely that year.

The next two years I spent in Washington and didn’t pay too much attention to the NFL except when I spent a sunday with friends.  I did attend one Redskins home game with my good friend Bill Cavender which was an awesome experience.

Back in Houston years later I rode my bicycle downtown for the NFL Franchise mascot announcement.  My preference of Toros was passed by for the Texans.  I went to several early year (sometimes preseason) Texans games.  I remember being deafened at one of the first games there.  I’ve enjoyed some tailgating there (something always lacking at an Oilers game).  But I’ve never scheduled my fall sundays according to the Texans’ schedule.

Now, after almost a decade, today is the Texans’ first playoff game.  To say the least: this city is excited!  I no longer have even a television I can watch live sports on.  So, I will be joining some friends at a sports bar a short 5-block bicycle ride away in the ‘hood.

Go Texans.

We had 16 or so summer staff living in one large cabin.  I was working maintenance, groundskeeping, and life guard.  The schedule was: wake up, eat breakfast, labor harder than i ever have (leaving me at 165 lbs.), lunch, half the time: labor in the afternoon, the other half life guard, dinner, kill 6 hours before midnight and bed time.  We had no chaperones or house rules, we were all college kids able to patrol ourselves.  Yes, I could write a whole book about that summer, pre WWW, pre cell phone.  But for now, just the music.

I often spent time in a truck with one of the regular maintenance workers, i forget his name. [Edit: after chatting with a friend from that summer, we've decided: Richard.]  He also often spent time in the evenings at the low water crossings with us.  Almost every night included lots of beer, sometimes with a claw foot bath tub full of ice.  Usually with us hanging out in the water.  (We ran the water moccasins out the first week.)  Infrequently, I and one or two others would end up at his house.  He had a single cassette tape that had two albums on in, depending on mood it was on one side or the other.

The B-52′s Wild Planet.  Released in 1980, I was a definitive part of my high school years.  It’s got so many iconic songs on it, that if you were being lazy at a party (and in high school we still played records at parties) you could just put this album on an leave it.  Party out of Bounds kicks it off and sets the mood, and Quiche Lorraine, Strobe Light, … it doesn’t contain their biggest hit, but it’s a full album full of good stuff.  I think I sang Private Idaho a 100 times that summer.

“Get out of that state,
get out of that state you’re in.
You better beware.”

The year before this the guitarist Ricky Wilson had died of AIDS.  This was still a new and uncommon disease (it would be another year before president Reagan even mentioned the word.)  It wasn’t clear if the B-52′s would survive that death.

Most summers are filled with recent releases.  Especially up to that point in my life.  But this one was marked by two album’s of the past.  This one: early 80s.  The other: early 70s.  And when the summer was dominated by local radio (the way it never will be again), it was usually about singles as well.  But this one was about albums.  Just these two.

Frank Zappa & The Mothers’ Over-Nite Sensation.  An EP released in 1973, it was the first popular output from that band.  This was my first extended exposure to Zappa. Later that fall Zappa would sit in front of congress, quote them the first amendment and excoriate them about the PMRC.  I so wanted him to run for congress.  We lost more than a musician when he died.

There was one song that often got fast forwarded to when we were on a short trip in the pickup truck: Montana.  It became my favorite track on the album and it definitely was my co-workers.  In retrospect, a man living in rural isolated hill country, two songs titled after rural states both with overtones of a spartan life.

An interesting and unique summer for me, 1986.  And some great music to bring it all back.

“Movin’ to Montana soon
Gonna be a Dental Floss tycoon”

My backup drive has been filling up and deleting old backs lately.  Not really a problem, but it slows down backups.  So, I checked to see if there was anything I could clean off of there.  I noticed 3 and 4 year old backups of an older computer that I have already migrated important stuff off of (and now just runs my TV).  So, I “moved the files to the trashcan” which doesn’t actually delete files off a disk, then “emptied the trash” which does.

An hour and a half later I was still watching it count the files (350,000 at that point), it was well past midnight, i went to bed.  I checked and realized it was a 1 TB drive, so it definitely had lots of stuff that could be removed.  Upon awaking, it was still counting, but luckily finished soon thereafter.  Ending at 3, 696, 106 files to be deleted.  I know because it stopped to warn me that some of the files were locked and asked if those should be deleted.

So, it started actually deleting them sometime after 10am and finished a bit before 7pm.  (114 files deleted per second)  Freed up about 400GB on my 1TB drive.  Or if you include the accounting before the deleting 1am – 7pm = 20 hours (52 files a second).

In the mean time I took my jar of change to the grocery store, dumped it all into the Coinstar machine and ended up with a $24.01 credit for the iTunes store – that’ll mostly pay for the $30 OS X Lion upgrade and it cleaned out my change jar.  One über-corroded penny rejected.

Takeaway: i need to do maintenance on the backup disk more often.

p.s. i googled “terabyte” to see what the most odd image i could find – that’s the one above.  Available as wallpaper, a hoodie, and a mug, just click on the image.

p.p.s. “hoodie” so hipster my spellcheck doesn’t know it

Facebook almost seem to make a point of making their app worse & worse with each “update”. – curlydena

Just a regular user of Facebook (I assume) making a very relevant observation.  I don’t follow curlydena (but i think i’d like to drink with her); it was retweeted by Damian, an iOS developer I met over beers and pool at WWDC 2009.  I’m sure it resonated deeply with him as it does with me.

It’s a truism in software that the more time and incremental development goes into a project the more fragile and ill-designed it becomes.  There comes a point that it’s worth it to dump the entire code base (or the majority of it, if you have well defined, implemented, and maintained abstractions).  Use the current project as a functional prototype and redesign/implement the product from scratch.

It’s hard to get middle and upper management to understand this.  The further away they are from being computer scientists the worse the problem is.

Apple is the only major software vendor that seems to appreciate this truism.  Time and time again they’ve reimplemented stuff from scratch and we are the beneficiaries of that.

It’s a lesson we can all benefit by remembering.  And perhaps Facebook should find a few good iOS developers (within or without) and reimplement their app from scratch.  (And ritually burn Three20 while they’re at it.)

The first test launches occurred when I was in high school.  I loved space and space science.  I always dreamed of being the first computer programmer to live on the moon – someone would have to keep those things running.  I attended a 2-week summer “camp” that was space themed at Texas A&M, Galveston in high school.  I wanted to return the following year, but was too old having just graduated, so instead I was an intern on the same program I’d attended the year before.

June Scobee was the head of the program and I loved working with her.  She happened to be married to an astronaut, so we got a lot of great access to things going on at NASA JSC.  I had talks with June about her husband and her son (an air force pilot at the time). At the end of that program I helped June move stuff back to her place and met her husband Dick, and shared an iced tea with him on his back porch: casual, friendly, Houston warm.

I was almost always aware of when there was a shuttle launch.  In the early years of the program it would still be mentioned on the lead-up, and interrupt most television for the launch.  But six months later, in January of 1986, I was returning from a test a bit before noon.  This was a time before mobil phones or social networks.  I remember the post-test relief walking across a sunny campus back to my dorm.  I exited the elevator on my floor to the area that was the TV Lounge.

It took all of 10 seconds before “it blew up, the space shuttle blew up”.  Initially, I though he was confused.  Then I thought maybe it was a launch pad fire. I tried to get him to explain it; all he could say was “it blew up”.  I sat.  The sinking feeling was deep, waiting for the news people to figure out what they knew.  The tone of their voices told me it was bad. Then I back-calculated the launches and remembered this was Dick’s launch.  The sinking feeling got deeper.

Then the replays.  It was bad.  I sat there for hours. I felt guilty for having forgotten when the launch date was.  Even looking at the smoke plume, it was surprising for them to finally determine the outcome.  It took a while.  I was glad the test was taken and no others on the schedule for a while.  I was surprised how much it effected me emotionally.

Four and a half years later I graduated and started working at NASA.  I was working in a department that was responsible for technology transfer to the general public.  I was the main programmer on a software-based training project.  It was for all SPACEHAB missions.  After 2 1/2 years at CSC working for NASA, I left for something else that enticed me more. The first SPACEHAB mission launched the year after I left.  A later one actually loaded the training (which included a simulator within it) on a laptop and took it with them.  My code has flown in space.

When I lived in Webster (near NASA), my roommate John D was an aerospace engineer, and a fluid flow specialist.  One task he had was to watch the launches from every single angle it was videoed from.  The local cable had a channel that did this, it took several hours to show them all.  He usually would watch it at home.  A few times I sat with him while he watched and he would describe to me what we were seeing.  What was expected.  What caused it.  What was anomalous.  What was problematic.  It was interesting.

Once in the early 90′s the shuttle landed in California and had to be piggybacked to Florida.  The 747 carrying it did a fly-by of JSC, we all went outside to see it.  It stayed the night at Ellington field, everyone visited.  We did too of course.

In a few weeks there will never again be a shuttle in space. It’s been an Era, and I’ve lived through it all.

art by fisher

I was listing to one of my regular podcasts on Saturday: 60-Second Science from Scientific American. [iTunes]  This particular snippet of science in the news was titled Box Jellyfish Eyes Aim at the Trees.  It seems that box jellyfish have 24 eyes, and four of them point above the water’s surface.  They use those four exclusively to navigate.  They live in mangrove swamps and use the tree limbs as navigation markers.

Box jellyfish, and most jellyfish, have minimal brains.  The multiple visual sensors allows less central processing by a brain able to pull out the variety of signals, redirect sensors to different targets when desired, and perhaps screen peripheral information to change task of a particular sensing organ.

For years, human language recognition tried to model language the way linguists understand it.  There were large breakthroughs in the area when massive computation became more available and we started treating it more like an engineering problem.  Solving the problem the way we thought we solved it seemed a good direction.  Early AI research has many similarities to this.

There have been a lot of robotic devices that have had one or two cameras for “eyes”, and we have done some work on image recognition from these.  Feeding this information (perhaps with other information from infrared or pressure sensors) to a central programming location.  Maybe an attempt to decentralize robot computation, and increase the number of sensors might lead to some interesting uses and solutions.

Just a thought.

Tornado outbreak now the worst US natural disaster since Katrina:http://slate.me/m8ZWnN – Apr 29 2011

My first reaction was “wow, those tornados were nasty.”  Which is, i’m sure, how it was intended. Then I thought “worst? what are they using to determine badness?”  Of course, this was somewhat of a second-level headline.  The main headline said it was the “deadliest US natural disaster”.  So the manager of the twitter account had taken the step from death = worst (i tweeted a response), which the author (Josh Voorhees) of the article likely didn’t mean to imply.

I’m sure the economic impact of Hurricane Ike was much greater than that of the recent tornados.  Tornados are pinpoint, one block can be toothpicks the next unharmed.  Hurricanes paint with big brushes, but thankfully we get advanced warning which mitigates deaths.  I’m would guess that Ike left more homeless as well.  (Death tolls: Katrina ~1800, Ike ~200, recent tornadoes ~300+)

Not wanting to figure a calculus for death vs. destruction, I soon focused in on “natural disaster”.  Hurricane Katrina, like Hurricane Ike, was itself a weather event, and caused a natural disaster.  But the Flooding of New Orleans was not a natural disaster.  It was caused by the breaching of a human-made levee, a combination of engineering and bureaucratic failure.  I would certainly not attribute all those deaths to “natural disaster”.

Was the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis a natural disaster?  Certainly the elements caused it to deteriorate, but I think all of us would answer “no”.

The recent earthquake-tsunami combination in Japan was certainly a natural disaster.  Was the subsequent Chernobyl-sized welt-down and the economic and possible death toll?  I would certainly say “no”.

So, I ask again, was the Flooding of New Orleans a natural disaster?  The only answer can be no!

One thing they do is have each gabfest participant “endorse” some cultural item each week.  Movie, television show, book, music, it can be almost anything, usually in the entertainment genre.

I often remember weeks later “there was that /insert item here/ that they mentioned” and I just can’t remember it.  My Google Foo is relatively good, but finding a list of them is not easy.  So, I’m going to see if writing them down myself will help.  I highly recommend making this podcast regular listening.

Feb 16, 2011; No. 126; ”Church of High Modernism And Puppies Edition”

Dana’s pick: Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, and writer Callie Khouri’s commentary track on the new 20th-anniversary Blu-ray edition of Thelma & Louise.
Julia’s pick: The 1940 romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner.
John’s pick: Thomas Mann’s essay “Herr und Hund” (“A Man and His Dog“).
Steve’s pick: Montreal bar Bily Kun (French).

All the world’s a stage.

Not on My Radar: On the Table

Carcassonne: Wheel of Fortune (2009)  This is a modification of Carcassonne (2000), a tile laying game.  I find the original quite fun and portable, and good for a various number of people (though it can slow down with higher numbers). For a while I was on a bit of a collecting binge for Carcassonne expansions, but some of them just aren’t that fun or elegant.  So the additions to this game slipped off my radar.

This is a nice change to the original and comes as a complete game itself.  All the tiles are nicely marked with a subtle wheel, so you can sort them out of you’ve combined them with other sets. The addition of the “wheel” which moves when a specially marked tile is played, the wheel is located on a central 16×16 sized location that you can play your tiles off of.

This is a nice change to the start game, from the highly suggested The River (2001) and/or The River II (2005). The Wheel of Fortune part of the game will score or penalize something each time it is moved.  It’s a somewhat random element, but not overly so.  I would definitely suggest this version to beginning gamers as a gateway type game.

Sator Erepo Tenet Opera Rotas (2008) – This game has been sitting around at one of my regular gamer’s house since it came out, and we’ve never played it.  It maxes out at 4 players, and we often have more than that.  It also doesn’t play ideally with 2-3 players.  I ended up at a table where someone had pulled this out.  It looked interesting. I played.

It was a great game and I really enjoyed it. Four players is a must.  You are trying to navigate swinging passages over a cavern.  You play cards to allow various movements.  It was quite enjoyable.  The text on the cards can be a bit difficult, but they are explained in the rules.

Merchant of Venus (1988) This is an Avalon Hill game and is long out of print.  Apparently there are various ways to play (according to the rules) but only one good way (according to the geeks).  I was invited into a 6-player version of this one.  It was quite fun, though it is dice-bound in its mechanisms and I was rolling abysmally.

The chits used for the game are appropriately antiquated pieces of thin cardboard, but it had some interesting navigational mechanics, and was basically an economic engine game.  It had some quite humorous items for the theme as well.

A day later I saw another group playing a recently custom-printed version of the game. It had quite a few nice updates.  Most of the artwork is apparently available on BGG.

Roll Through The Ages: The Bronze Age (2009) A dice version of a much more rigorous economic game.  I have been aware of this game since it came out, but I have not yet played it.  I ended up sitting next to high school friend Kevin in the registration line and he had a copy of this on his iPhone.

Despite the fact that the con was one day longer this year, and we got there a day early, the week seemed to blaze by and there were lots more games I wanted to play that I didn’t get to. Upon retrospect I played quite a lot of games.

The following list is not chronological, but grouped mostly into styles and my thoughts of them before and after the con.  There is a large industry convention in Essen, Germany a month before the BGG.Con.  It creates a lot of buzz about new games, and I usually arrive with a list, whether mental or physical, of things I’d like to try.  Even so, for the most part, I go with the flow and let games find me.

I did manage to find some of those on my list and get them on the table.  Others I didn’t for one reason or another.

Game of the Convention: Tichu

Tichu is actually a card game, and one I play quite often.  I have the opportunity to play most Sundays at our friendly gathering at the local watering hole.  We’ve infected about a dozen people with the game, and often will have 4 there to play.  I also recently infected one of my weekly game attendees (who already liked Tichu) to come to our week end gathering.

I originally was tipped off to Tichu at the con, but haven’t started playing it whole heartedly until the past year.  This year was the first year for them to have a Tichu tournament, and interest was so high the 32 2-person team brackets filled up instantly.  They doubled the size of the tournament.

I teamed with TG and we won our two first games and lost our third, which allowed us to make it into the 14 team, single elimination bracket.  We lost out first game there (to the team that ended up winning the tournament).  Every game we played was fun.  And I played before and after the tournament as well, with and without TG.

A 4-player partnership game that’s really a lot of fun!  I learned that I have been getting better at playing it, and that there’s a lot further to go on that road.

On My Radar, On The Table

I got a reasonable number of the games I was interested in on the table and played.

Rattus (2010, Henrik & Åse Berg) was one particular game on my list that I really wanted to try.  A new Essen release, it was on a lot of people’s list, and was in and out of the library quite frequently.  I got it once, read the rules, and was tugged into another game.  To be polite I checked it back in while I was playing.  I didn’t even get it back to the shelf before someone took it out of my hand to check it out again.  I managed to get it again later in the week and teach it to some others.

The Plague is overtaking Europe.  This is a 30-45 min. game and you are trying to get the most people to survive the plague.  It’s quite fun, a great filler (what we gamers call the mid-length ones), simple to play, with some reasonably challenging strategic options.

Antics! (2010, Gordon & Fraser Lamont) is one of the games I wouldn’t have been aware of from casual coverage of Essen, but I did run across when I was scouring the lists of new games.  I liked the theme and design, relative length (60-90 minutes), and after playing it I really liked the action selection mechanism.

In the game each of up to four players is an ant hill, hatching new ants, running out to grab bugs and leaves, and return them to their hills.  All the time building up their ant hills, which defines the other actions you can take in the game.  And beware of the anteaters.

i9n (2010, Dirk Strothmann) Pronounced eye-nine, the name is a shortening of information and it is a deduction game.  I have a love/hate with deduction games (Clue (1948) being the best known) and Code 777 (1985) being my most recently played.  I’m pretty good at them, but they often come down to being a stiff numbers game.  Is there actual strategy, or does your opponent just have better information? Is there theme, or just a unique way to “crunch the numbers”.

Code 777 is definitely in the “crunch the numbers” side, and i9n does a really good job of putting you in the theme of the game.  It also has a quite unique punchcard system, calling itself a “paperback computer board game”.  I’m very happy I played it (twice), but I can’t imagine wanting to play it a lot except to introduce such a unique game to others.

There are 6 traits of the ultimately valid oil well, and you start out the game knowing 2 of them.  But not exactly the same 2 others may know.  This is the biggest “what he knows v. what I know” of the game and can certainly make a difference as each of the other traits is or isn’t possibly revealed to everyone.

7 Wonders – (2010, Antoine Bauza) This game was screaming loud and clear from Essen.  There was a lot of buzz about it.  The version I played at the con was actually a pre-production version (though still pretty good).  There were two tables of this one in the “hot room”, and they were always full.  One good thing: it plays rather quickly; one downfall: it makes you want to play “one more time”.  Thus, it was hard to get a play of this one.  Late in the week I finally did.  Get 1 play.  Only to have 7 people take the table from us afterward.

I quite enjoyed it, I appreciate that it will play equally well up to 7, without too much difference.  And it fills the “Civ. building itch” in a relatively short game.  For its extendability to 7 in a realm where 4-5 player games dominate, I think it is useful in a game collection.

51st State (2010, Ignacy Trzewiczek) This post-apocalyptic themed card game had a lot of buzz from Essen as well, though I was not particularly pressed to try it out. It presented itself to me though, and so I did end up playing it.  Friend Greg taught this one (his a wizard at reading rules, and this one is slightly lacking). It was as I expected from my of the (generally raving) reviews.  Reminded me of Race for the Galaxy (2007), but with the addition of a lot of counters that get temporarily used each turn (and some that are kept). I’m not a huge fan of Race and, though I really liked the art and the theme, did not enjoy this game either.

A lot of people compare this game to Glory to Rome (2005) because it uses one similar mechanic of providing cards with different information on difference sides.  When you “tuck” the cards above, below, or on the sides they can indicate different things.  I feel that Glory‘s use is much more elegant and obvious that that in 51st State. And the game play otherwise doesn’t remind me at all.

Beer & Pretzels (2009) I came across this one whilst checking out this year’s releases, and got it to the table late in the week when there was an evening lull and we had people standing around.  It has one of the best descriptions on The Geek (likely from the box) and demanded being played. We procured one of the bar-height tables in the open area and made play.  It had the “purple expansion” in it, so we had 6-players.  (The Purple Expansion rules included “you should constantly make fun of the purple player. they’re purple!”)

I quite enjoyed it, and everyone had fun with it.  Even the ones who said they didn’t like it.  We “gamered” it up, making everyone throw their coasters onto the table from the same location.

After Pablo (2010, Nate Hayden) I ran across this one in my pre-con snooping, and the uncommon theme made me have to try it. Trying to become the strongest drug runner in the power void after Pablo Escobar’s death.  Three sections of the board: Colombia, Mexico, The Border. A variety of things to do.  Upon reading the rules, I thought I would enjoy it.   But somehow the game play just seemed to bog down.  Resource scarcity is common in the games we play, but it seemed overwhelming in this one.  I really would like to play this one again, but I’m not sure I’d put it on my “to buy” list.

Before we got to playing, a friend of the designer’s came over.  I’m sorry I didn’t run into him again, because there are several questions I had for him (most have faded since the play).  We were thinking that particularly we didn’t use enough DEA Favors to balance the game out – the brutal randomness took the balance out of the game when/how we played.  We also played with three players, and I think four would be preferable.

There’s a lot more in my list.  I’ll get to them later.

I’ve been out for Molly & the Ringwalds (work), and for Peter & James and Light Rock Express, which tend to be for socializing. I have seen a few shows, or parts of them, but it seems like it’s been since forever since I’ve gone out specifically to see live music.

Last night there was a three band CD release show at Rudyard’s: I Am Mesmer, Kelly Doyle, and Hillary Sloan.

I’ve seen Hillary many times, but not recently; I’ve been meaning to see Mesmer, and I didn’t know who Kelly Doyle was (until I read the pre-show write-up).

The large number of music related people in the audience told me I had picked the right place to be that night.

I was hanging out with TG who was testing her memory on how many names in attendance she could remember. She got several dozen.

Hillary Sloan started out and her material was very similar to the stuff I was familiar with, her band was good, she seemed perhaps a bit tired and self conscious about her performance, which seemed odd.

Kelly Doyle I recognized for his guitar playing with Clouseaux. He mentioned this was the first time he had fronted a band. Most of the songs were instrumental, with jazz, Eastern European, and pseudo-Asian influences. Odd time signatures were de riguer, but the music was fun and playful.

I Am Mesmer is an amalgamation 7-piece that smashes a lot of styles together. I have a hard time imagining a band like this forming anywhere else (maybe NYC). Two percussionists, banjo leading the band (when not playing the saw), two drastically different styled guitar players that blended well together.

I totally imagined this band filling the SXSW Continental Club Saturday morning slot after Allen Hill. It would be awesome.

Anyway it was nice to have a casual night out, see some friends I hadn’t in a while, and see some great and varied live music.

I’m a computer scientist by training, and my working career starts quite a ways back, but I was trying to do iPhone apps full time up until February of this year, when it became apparent that the income stream there was not gonna hack it.  I was in a similar situation in 2002, and I showed up at the Continental Club and helped Pete build the Big Top.  So, this time I came over again to see what was going on.

I was vaguely aware that the 3600 block of main had something going on, so came to see if I could get some mortgage money.  It turned out that the block had been obtained by a small group of investors, some directly involved in the Continental Club, some not.  The old building across from the Continental has been mostly boarded up since they moved in in 2000.  Labor Ready was here for maybe a year, before that other portions of the building had been office spaces.

They thought they were going to tear down the building, but first they gutted it.  When they took out the drop ceilings, they exposed an amazing wood roof supported only by piers in the middle of the building and wood trusses.  So, they decided to renovate it.

When I started working here in March, the place was partially framed; you could pretty much walk freely through the interior.  The plans for a while have been: a restaurant, a resale/vintage shop, a retail shop, a coffee shop, another retail shop (which ended up being Sig’s Lagoon’s new location – moving from the Continental Club building to here), and a combo barber/salon/tattoo shop.

I did various construction jobs here, mostly finish carpentry and fitting and placing windows.  The octagonal windows on Natachee’s (the not-yet opened restaurant) are my favorites.

When we got close to finishing out some of the spaces, the previous management plans for the vintage resale co-op had untangled.  Bob asked me if I’d like to own and run it.  It’s totally out of my realm of experience, but I’ve come to love this block (in the last 10 years), love the vibrancy of the light-rail city scape, and can totally see how great this are can be.  I want to be here and watch it grow into its potential and this seems a great way to do that.

So, though I have no experience directly in Resale, Vintage, or Retail, I think I have plenty of experience in Life and I’m leaning on that for my help in the new venture.  And a few other people who know what they’re doing. Every day is interesting and new, at least so far.

I almost called it Shirleyville, which I wasn’t too fond of for making it about me (it’s more about the vendors we’re getting in to me), but we ended up with Shop-o-Rama.  So, come visit when you can!

I do plan on resuming part-time iPhone development in the future.  But for now the hours I’m covering here only allow minimal effort in that regard.

But their micro image, known as a favicon, seems to be vestigial.  I never like the old icon, with a built in pointer on it.  I know the pointer was their whole logo, but the favicon could have done without it.  And they prob’ly want to “green it up” with the rest of their site.

KTRU is the only radio station I will tune in to listen to music anymore.  It hasn’t been a lot of late, but it’s comfortable knowing it’s there.  Student run, student programmed, and with a huge broadcast area, I hope it’s a beacon to non-conformist youth throughout the region.

That will all change soon.  The news of University of Houston purchasing the transmitter from Rice University leaked out last week when UH had to approve the “up to $10M funding” to purchase it.  The actually sale cost has been reported as $9.5M.  You would have thought their would be an announcement or some discussion over on the Rice campus before this happened.  The lack of discussion about the decision is the biggest punch in the gut.

In a day, the Save KTRU site popped up, and today is their first protest.  I saw a lot of student protests at The University of Texas in the late 80′s, but I don’t remember any of them getting what they wanted.  I don’t think this sale will be stopped either.

KUHF which is owned by the UH system is anything but a student station.  They’ve been experimenting with their digital radio feed for over a year: providing one news/NPR feed and another classical music feed.  Since digital radio has caught on even less than laser discs, they desire another analog frequency to provide their dual programming.

The nonsequiteuse suggests Rice could better leverage their station to provide increased value to students, perhaps even UH students who don’t have access to radio air.  And KPFT has offered the Isle of Elba to the to-be-exiled KTRU in its HD2 channel.  Why wasn’t the KTRH/KTRC second digital channel offered to Rice as part of the sale? Rice alum Michael Duncan suggests a leasing agreement (Facebook login ridiculously required) in lieu of sale.  Spinning Indie has an interview with current KTRU Student Manager Kelsey Yule with some useful facts.

It will be interesting to see how today’s protest effects things, if at all.  I expect it to ultimately just provide the venting needed by those most directly wronged.

Ultimately, I think terrestrial radio as we know it is doomed.  I suspect that these towers and frequencies will be diminishing in value as we go forward.  How long it is until all such content is provided via non-terrestrial forms (wifi, broadband: wireless or otherwise) remains to be seen.  I suspect that Rice may be making a smart sale.  Which isn’t to say they should sell it.  (If your child’s baseball card collection was worth lots of money, would you sell it out from under him/her?)

The Future is Change.  Change is painful and people don’t like it.

I hope not, but I fear this is Goodbye, KTRU, it was good knowing you.