The Stranger'sBrad Steinbacher, fearful of squirrels, points out a squirrel problem in California.
Only those who don't know me as intimately as a spouse or sibling will be surprised that once, about five years ago, I spent all of my spare time online in a massively-multiplayer combat flight sim known at the time as Dawn of Aces. The sim, based on World War 1 air combat, appealed to a specialty audience, and given that the developers' company experienced something of a wild ride on Wall Street in the day and offered a mass-appeal product which used the same code, Warbirds (same deal, but World War II - much faster and more powerful planes, planes that don't disintegrate around you in flight if you attempt to adjust the family jools), fell into near-oblivion. For the past five years it has been nursed along only by the fading devotion of a few afcionados and in particular one Matt Davis, who by sheer dint of obsessive-compulsiveness became the operation's key graphic and historical designer from his remote compound deep in the wilds of untamed Texas.
The developers have been located in 'the Triangle,' in Research Park, North Carolina, for years. Every time I visit my folks I think about dropping by but don't, largely because my peacenik pinko commie worldview is most unlike that obstreperously and understandably displayed by my fellow aviation obsessives, century-long beneficiaries of the grandest sustained state industrial investment campaign the world is ever likely to see. Despite our irreconcilable religious differences, we loves us the aeroplanes.
Thus, I have been happy this week to discover a marketing tie-in between Dawn of Aces and the film Viv and I observed this weekend, Flyboys. The film's marketing budget provided the developers with the budget to develop new WW1 based content inspired by the film for the game. The long-moribund MMOL arenas are running about 30 participants at any given time, and that's enough to make a dawn patrol fun once again.
Rumour has it that tomorrow will see the open release of new flight content, including the film's Nieuport 17 and additional planes. I am seriously considering taking time off work in order to familiarize myself with the game as it stands now.
Currently, the WW1 stuff has been rolled into the WW2 stuff (in a separate online arena) and with nearly no-one flying the older planes I have not been able to justify the cost of a subscription. Now, though, I'm in for a month or two. What's amusing and amazing me is relearning the ins and outs of this extremely technical game. Happily, I can still recover from a stalling spin in a Camel, which means there is a certain amount of bicycle-riding involved. What I don't recall is the plethora of slash-and-dot invoked keyboard commends, the esoteric raw-text configuration files, and the deep magic of determining, designing, and implementing one's personal joystick button-command-set.
Never a brilliant pilot, I am happy to note that I am able to fly sustained furballs under a realistic flight model tonight, on my second day back in the cockpit. Prior experience tells me the importance of having both my stickset and damage awareness well in hand before heading out to meet my fellow obsessives in the internet skies.
One additional factor which initially appeared promising but tonight frustrates must be addressed: five years ago, I played this game on a 21“ screen, a very nice display for its' day. Currently, we employ a DLP projector for numerous entertainment purposes, including DVDs and the like. I had harbored great hopes for the sim on the screen, which displays the view from a Camel cockpit at approximately life-size. Alas, the default colors associated with the games' informational displays are uniformly illegible when rendered into NTSC colorspace. It stands to reason that they are editable via the proliferation of raw-text config files; yet to date, the collapsed social network affiliated with the game provides no clues or cookbooks.
Ah well. It's up to me to see if this crazy thing will get airborne again. Contact!
Rumors are flying today about a speculated January introduction for the long-sought iPhone. Lucky for me, it's supposed to be Cingular-only.
Supposedly, October will see one or more introductions of new Treos to Cingular as well.
I don't think I will need to choose between the iPhone and a Treo. It seems unlikely that Apple would introduce a phone with a full alphanumeric keyboard, and I am certainly a subscriber to the notion that one should generally avoid Apple's 1.0 releases, particularly hardware ones.
In addition, Apple's introductory price points for almost any new line have been unreasonably high for my taste. It would also stand to reason that Apple would use the new device to steer more subs for .Mac, something I'm not keen on either.
So I will certainly be a wait-and-see type when the iPhone eventually heaves into view. That said, once the line is well established and matures into the three market segements that nearly always appear in Apple product lines, I will certainly adopt the product.
That is, if Apple ever releases it.
Well, Viv and I made the arduous trek to far Lynnwood to see Flyboys last night. Presumably due to the unorthodox funding model employed by the film (the producers made the film with their own money), the film has terrible distribution in the Seattle area, playing only far-edge suburban screens. That said, the film is a very old-fashioned war movie and the values seen in the piece may be more inline with suburban America's than Capitol Hill's.
The film's two-hour plus length was not problematic, for me, however peculiar a choice it may be. The film's production values are absolutely top-notch, the acting is professional and on the whole I felt that the generally cool reviews the release has garnered to date undersell the film.
The film's appeal, of course, is primarily in the visual recreation of the experience of World War One air combat, and again, I feel that the party line seen in most reviews undersells what is actually on the screen. There are about four lengthy set-pieces and I found each one absorbing and free from irritating technical gaffes. One interesting digital addition to the visual vocabulary of the dogfight is the smoke trails the rounds leave in the air.
Despite my happiness with the spectacle, there are of course what I take to be a few adjustments to the historical events. Only one really bugged me:
An opening sequence shows a main character watching a newsreel in a Texas theatre and a reverse angle displays a segment on the newly-formed Lafayette Escadrille. The planes displayed in the segment appeared to me to be Nieuport 28s, a place which came into service after the events seen in the film. I suppose I may have mis-viewed them, as the rest of the film is relatively insistent on historical accuracy in details of setting and technology.
The other adjustments that appear to have been made are all apparently in the service of making the film more cinematic. First, nearly all the DR1s seen in he film (the famous Fokker triiplane), are bright red. It's my understanding that that color was actually only used by one pilot, the famous Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, and that the majority of the DR1s in service actually employed a base color scheme of a streaky green camouflage. I could sure be wrong on this one though, as distinctive color schemes are well documented for a large number of pilots.
A further adjustment is the repeated use of spoken or shouted dialog while in flight between the characters. In reality, while one might very well shout in an attempt to communicate, the combination of engine noise and airspeed in an open-cockpit plane makes unaided verbal communication an impossibility.
Finally, there are repeated shots depicting planes in very close proximity for seconds at a time, right on one another's tails, as the pilots hold fire in hopes of getting a solid shot lined up. While the tracking and firing details appeared satisfactory to me, it seems worth noting that these moments of close proximity did not make up the majority of time in this sort of combat; for each close-distance encounter a pilot often had to engage in long minutes of careful jockeying for position.
A kind of corollary to this is what appears to me to have been exaggerated performance characteristics of, in particular, the Nieuport 17s that are the featured planes in the film. N17s are in my opinion the most beautiful airplane ever made; however, they also exhibited a tendency to lose wings in steep, high-speed dives, an activity shown repeatedly in the film without such a consequence.
A further corollary is the repeated depiction of planes in relatively close proximity to the ground - a run of bombers appear to drop their payload from 500 feet or less; a Zeppelin is seen over Paris from above, the Eiffel Tower clearly visible in the distance, and an apparent altitude of 2000 feet. While the aviation technology of the war limited operations for most planes and zeppelins to under 20,000 feet (if I recall correctly, the Camel's ceiling was about 13,000 feet), attaining maximum altitude was always a key aspect in successful sorties. In particular, Zeppelins were often able to operate above the reach of most anti-aircraft weapons. A low-altitude daylight raid on paris as seen in the film strikes me as exceedingly improbable.
Despite these entirely understandable adjustments, they clearly do make the film more cinematically legible than it might have been, and as noted, I entirely enjoyed it.
Cringley has some interesting things to say about Apple's announced iTV strategy. He makes a big deal out of using iTV to bring video-based iChat to the living room TV set and talks some trash in Redmond's direction.
What's funny about this to me is that I have my Mini set up with my old Firewire iSight for just this purpose, and we use it to talk to my folks at least once a week. It works great, but it's not a mindblowing extension of the technology by any means. Despite that, I think Cringley's argument, that Apple is aiming to capture the base platform for convergence, possibly by integrating their tools into the sets themselves, makes a great deal of sense.
How To: Back up your music using iTunes 7 - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).
I'm otherwise inordinately suspicious of the update and have not done so on any of my machines. This sounds like a pretty decent carrot.
Old Joy - Review - Movies - New York Times. Why is this flick opening in Manhattan? Sounds lovely!
Chávez Calls Bush ‘the Devil’ in U.N. Speech - New York Times. This made me laugh so hard while driving home from work I nearly had to pull over, blinded by tears.
Hey, what's that smell?
Austin 360: An oral history, from Scratch. The Austin American-Statesman looks at the once and future Scratch Acid. I have (apparently all) the vinyl, loved it, and never saw the band. Don't know ifI missed the Seattle show or not.
by Anna Seward, 1747-1809
My angel sister, though thy lovely form
Perished in youth's gay morning, yet is mine
This precious ringlet!--still the soft hairs shine,
Still glow the nut-brown tints, all bright and warm
With sunny gleam!--Alas! each kindred charm
Vanished long since; deep in the silent shrine
Withered to shapeless dust!--and of their grace
Memory alone retains the faithful trace.--
Dear lock! had thy sweet owner lived, ere now
Time on her brow had faded thee!--My care
Screened from the sun and dew thy golden glow;
And thus her early beauty dost thou wear,
Thou all of that fair frame my love could save
From the resistless ravage of the grave!
Having just been flummoxed to discover five print jobs queued to the (phantom) local printer instead of the LAN printer, imagine my joy on discovering that one can drag and drop print jobs from one printer queue to another under Mac OS X!
Extensive, interesting article on the production of the upcoming Flyboys, which, you'll be unsurprised to note, has me in a tizzy of anticipation.
Speaking of old technology, when we moved I appear to have misplaced the SCSI plug adapter I was using to hook my seen-better-days el cheapo scanner to my workstation, rendering it inutile for the nonce. I have a cool but also ancient PCMCIA-to-SCSI adapter but there appear to be no OS X drivers for it.
No I haven't tried VPC or Classic to see if that would work.
The pisser is I actually KNOW the adapter works with my old Wallstreets, now decapitated and gutless in the closet. Yeesh.
Time to look at the multifunction doohickeys, I think. Hmm, let's see now... wifi + ethernet + fax + sharing, I think. I'd like to plug into a phone jack, turn it on, and be able to fax out, receive, print, or scan to NAS over the air. That shouldn't run me more than... what, about twenty bucks, these days, right?
After much research I have found it seems that Cingular discontinued the availability of CSD in December 2005, rendering my phone's built in faxing capacity useless. Let's hear it for feature contraction!
K7 offers free voicemail forwarding to email and free fax reception forwarded to email on one number. Related site Faxaway offers sending as well. Oddly, there does not appear to be an easy way to migrate a K7 account to a Faxaway account.
Unify & synch multiple iTunes libraries, at O'Reilly, via the (for some reason currently unreachable) BrainLog.
Spare a thought for the brilliant and funny B^2 this weekend. He's got a hard row to hoe just about now.
The Guardian: Is this Bush's secret bunker?: Our national underground cities, as seen by the Limey. Special guest appearance by the Smoking Man.
Erik and Kira Eat Bloomington: some young people set out to eat through my homwtown's eateries. It appears that not many places I once ate or drank at have made it on the list.
Interestingly, this photo leads one to wonder which Eric might be involved in this.
Of late, I have been having some real doozies among the annals of dreams. I am considering just dreamblogging, as what happens with my eyes shut is clearly of greater interest than that which occupies my days:
In a multilevel ramshackle building, possibly the former barn of an early twentieth-century factory-farming concern, a number of commercial concerns are ensconced, including a down-home Americana reinterpretation of a Swiss eatery, serving Swiss food with reasonable acuity and a pleasant “howdy, y'all” sensibility. In the extensive, cluttered checkout cowchute, i am pleased to note numerous items of genuine Swiss provenance such as generally-unavailable models of Victorinox knife and Suchard chocolate powder. To my disapproval and frustration, there is no irradiated milk available. In revenge, i steal a jackknife, and make my way to a higher floor, where a family, long friends of mine, has a rummage shop.
The family patriarch, ailing, has withered to a shadow of his former self, a wizened figure with enormous parchment skull atop the body of what might be taken for that of a starving infant. As i converse with one of the ancient's offspring, I am handed the feather-light mortal vessel, whereupon I am left alone with the elderly being. Naturally, the living skeleton ceases to be living moments later,and as I hold the corpse, the feather-light flesh and bones begin to flake away in my hands as I seek a resting site for the fragile remnant.
In so doing, I find a cigar box containing items I had attempted to husband through my life from earliest childhood, including such objects as a faux piece-of-eight obtained in the early seventies while visiting Florida, the mummified remains of a crab plucked from the beach at Mazatlan, a tooth lost at age eight, and the like. The box had gone missing (in my dream) while in the care of the family whose deceased progenitor I now held.
Upset, but of an inclination to let bygones be bygones, I finally locate my acquaintance and attempt to deliver my burden to him, whereupon the dessicated corpse crumbles into fine, very thin flakes. I catch the skull as it descends. As it crumbles in my hand I am left holding only the upper portion, roughly from the eye-sockets' midpoint up. Turning the delicate cup over, I note the floral profusion of complex, papery bone membranes we each carry in our sinuses. I hand the remnant to my acquaintance.
He thanks me with exaggerated gravity and takes a voracious, satisfied bite out of the fragment of bone. Crunching through the clean-breaking material, more delicate than eggshell, he then insists that I must join him. Together we crunch our way through the remains of his father, as tasty as potato chips or fried chicken.
Then I woke up.
More recently, Jon Stewart chauffeured me and my wife amusingly about Hoboken while deferring my repeated blandishments concerning the importance of appearing as a guest on The Daily Show. Apparently, we're old school chums or something. I just hope he never hears about the grandpa-eating thing.
I was looking at the rumor that Palm will release Q4 Cingular-only EDGE-enabled Treos this fall, and came across a forum post claiming that Cingular salesbots are noting that the release has been pulled. However, now I can't find it and there are numerous posts on a multiplicity of sources claiming a European release date of September 12 followed by an October release in the US.
So I turned to solving the problem of direct keyboard access to the Mini, our current media center box. Ideally, I want a compact bluetooth keyboard with an integrated pointing device. Compact(!) bluetooth keyboards abound, but none that I noted included a pointing device (although the ever-forward-thinking FrogPadders are apparently thinking about it).
However, two integrated multi-port USB-slash-bluetooth hubs are available, in theory. Unfortunately the $19.99 DTech hub appears to be safely ensconced in containers at sea, whilst the considerably more attractive (in a borg-y way) MSI hub, retailing at $89 but street-cheaper looks to be in stock here and there.
Alas, this still fails to solve my preferred mouselesscouchpotatohoodness (how does that work in the German?). Additionally, I note in fora reaction about the USB-slash-bluetooth hubs, there's clearly a market for a Bluetooth USB hub, wherein one might pair the widget and hang one's devices (est qu'il-y-a'n accent? Je n'sais pas) USB off the CPU sans wiring to the boîte.
Net result: Thrift and desire, one. Profligacy and entitlement, zero.
This week I have been exploring Google's own-domain web-apps (email and more!) and looking into the interesting Amazon aStore beta. To set up an aStore, you must first obtain an Amazon affliate ID, for which you may apply here.
I have a project in the kitchen which is likely to make use of the aStore app, and i deem it to be timely!
