Scott Blomquist's space: Blog

Just met Don Luskin

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 01:21:35 GMT

Just got a chance to meet Don Luskin, one of the guys that ran the real event that inspired the Disney movie "Midnight Madness" that inspired the Florida event that then grew into the Stanford event and the Microsoft event that inspired the Michael Douglas movie "The Game". Good stuff. He's full of very interesting historical perspective.

Blog is moving

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 05:18:42 GMT

I'm moving my blog to what will probably be its final resting place: http://Scott.Blomqui.st. At least for a while, I'll mention new posts over there on here so that those of you who "subscribe" via Live Messenger will be kept up to date. As brilliant as the Messenger Gleam is, you're going to have to use a news reader.

Live Spaces could possibly win me back if they start allowing OpenID. I'd like to use http://Scott.Blomqui.st, which is Secured by Vidoop, although my prediction is that the "big guys" allow their users use their Live ID, etc. as OpenIDs elsewhere on the web, but disallow the use of external credentials in their walled gardens. Only time will tell.

Frontier airlines

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 04:02:46 GMT

Frontier Airlines is right when they say "it's a whole different animal". They apparently stopped accepting cash on flights and will now only take credit cards for alcohol, DirecTV, or movie purchases. Also, the Captain called the other pilot his Co-Captain, which is a fine title, I suppose, but it sounds a little like their First Officers have thin skin and need the ego boost afforded by an inflated title.

Craig's List, meet OpenID

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 05:29:57 GMT

I finally got around to posting a listing on Craig's List about a week ago. It had one of the simplest identity mechanisms I've ever seen. Instead of having to create an account, all I had to do before Craig's List considered me fully introduced was to provide an email address. A magic link was then sent to that email address. By clicking on that magic link, I could post my listing or to come back later to make edits.

OpenID would be the perfect middle ground between creating an account and their magic link email trick.

Technorati Tags: openid

Re-discovered a bug from a previous project

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 04:56:07 GMT

My current project (http://myvidoop.com) had a bug earlier where the user agent string from IE on my home computer is extremely long and causes the web site to behave incorrectly. I had the same problem when I was working on Live Image Search. In the case of Image Search, the long connection string would trigger our wimpy UI that supports downlevel browsers. On myVidoop, it was preventing me from allowing the web UI to connect to the back end server. Hopefully I'll remember to test this artificially in the future, because I never think about it as a problem until I stumble onto it.

Amazing mouse

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 16:40:10 GMT

Absolutely incredible new mouse: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=085

One tiny little letter

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 17:02:02 GMT

"unbeatable" and "unbearable" differ by one tiny little letter lexicographically, and by a whole lot more semantically. Sad that Outlook can't notice the difference...

The other Channel 9

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 08:19:43 GMT

Most of you have probably heard me rave about Microsoft's video blog for developers called Channel 9. It's named after my favorite feature of United Airlines—namely the ability to plug a headset into your armrest and listen in on the cockpit's radio by tuning to channel 9. As I was flying back for a visit to Seattle, our pilot did something that put the original United channel 9 in the same class of coolness as Microsoft's Channel 9. He invited us to tune in to Channel 9 for a 10 minute "talk show", where he proceeded to talk us through a bunch of trivia about our airplane and our flight. He talked about why we fly so high, why the cabin isn't pressurized all the way to sea level pressure, what it is that pilots actually do, and some performance numbers for our airplane.

One of the neater things that he talked about was that technically the only part of the flight that the pilots pretty much have to do is taxi and takeoff. He talked a little about Category III ILS operation, pointed out that both Seattle and Denver are equipped for Category III operations, and then went on to explain that the only reason they have visibility minimums for Category III is so that once your autopilot has you safely on the ground you can see far enough to safely taxi clear of the runway.

If you want to see just how eerie Category III operations are, there's some great video of a Horizon Airlines Category III ILS approach into Portland up on YouTube.

Update: we had clear skies down to a few hundred feet above Seattle, at which point it turned to very dense fog. As I was deplaning, I gave the captain kudos for his radio show, and said "speaking of category III, what was the RVR when we touched down in Seattle"? He told me it was 5500 ft. That was way longer than it looked, but I'm sure he was right. He said that they worried they'd have to do an autoland because the RVR number kept going up and down on them.

In Seattle this weekend

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 18:18:05 GMT

Hey, everybody. I'll be back in Seattle this weekend (January 27 & 28). Anything fun going on?

A typical day in Tulsa

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 04:43:13 GMT

I can't believe I'm coming up on the end of my second month at my new job in Tulsa. Here's a picture of a normal day for me.

I wake up around 7:20am to an NPR station. I love the little fanfare that Morning Edition uses to introduce their business section. One of these days, I'll figure out how to record it—I think it'd make a good ring tone. There's also this guy that talks about "the Oklahoma state temperature". He says "the Oklahoma state temperature is 34", just as if it's the same sort of observation as "the Oklahoma state flower is mistletoe" or "the Oklahoma state bird is the scissortail flycatcher". I don't quite understand how an entire state can have a temperature, unless we're talking Rhode Island. But I guess that's neither here nor there.

Like most cities in the plains states, Tulsa is laid out on an enormous grid with 1 mile between points. Also like most plains cities, it has a fabric of highways woven throughout the city (not "freeways" here, unlike the west coast). My drive to and from work is about 20 minutes. That's about twice as much of a commute as I ever had in Seattle. Unfortunately, I don't live right by one of the highways, or that could be 10 minutes shorter. The flatness here means that I always have 2 bars or more of cell phone signal instead of the 2 bars or less that I've grown accustomed to in Redmond or Bellevue.

If I don't sleep in, and can get out of my house by around 8am, I usually swing by one of two Starbuck's locations—most of my new coworkers will recall that I spent most of my first week trying to figure out where to get a good coffee in downtown Tulsa. There really isn't a good place to get a good coffee in downtown, so I bring one in with me from suburbia. Any snobs out there who feel like telling me that Starbuck's hardly counts as good coffee either can keep it to themselves—I'm completely fine with commodity coffee. I don't have the time to invest in figuring out why coffee that solves the 95% case isn't as good as the real stuff.

I get in a little before 9am every day, and park somewhere near the 4^th floor of the Bank of America building in downtown Tulsa. I take the elevator past the 8^th floor, which smells very strongly of bacon throughout the day. I get off on the 24^th floor and let myself into Vidoop's offices using a code on a keypad by the door. I stop by the kitchenette and grab some coffee and some instant oatmeal (and you thought free soda was cool…). I'm the first one there about half the time. The other half the time some of the business types beat me there.

My development team has a daily scrum at 9:15. I spend my day wandering back and forth between my office, and about half (maybe a little less) in the incredibly cool 24^th floor corner office that the developers get to share. When I'm at my desk, I have numerous ways to stay busy ranging from writing or reviewing technical documents, contributing to the business plan, studying up on all things Identity 2.0 (ask me about sxip, SAML, OpenID, CardSpace, or pretty much any other ID2.0 hot topic, and I'll probably be fairly informed and extremely opinionated), reviewing code, pitching in my own few-dozen-line code changes to our main product, writing email, taking phone calls from our early customers, giving design advice or constructive criticism to the developers, or taking time out to think "on paper" (which usually means either in OneNote or on my personal MoinMoin-powered wiki).

When I'm in the developers' office, I spend my time helping troubleshoot build issues, giving guidance on C++ syntax, helping choose technologies for new features and projects, beating Windows into submission for the Linux- and Mac-weenies that we have around, and keeping the team unblocked and having fun.

By shortly after noon, it's time to go get lunch from one of the several places around. One of my current favorites is a place called "Lou's Deli". Every time I go there, or even every time I think about their tasty meatball sub, I'm reminded of the scene in fight club where we get to meet the namesake of Lou's Tavern (Search for "who am I" on http://www.hundland.com/scripts/Fight-Club_third.htm).

We push on through the afternoon, and by around 7pm, some of the developers disappear for the evening. Most nights, we still have a few people around at 10pm.

I go home and get some sleep so I can get up to my alarm the next morning at 7:20am.

Settling in to my new gig

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 02:07:55 GMT

I'm settling in to my new gig and having an absolute blast. While I was at Microsoft, I had a couch that was blue with each of a green, a yellow, and a red pillow on top. That color scheme worked fine for there, but not so well at Vidoop, whose logo is red and white. I changed the slip cover out for a red one, and borrowed time on my mother-in-law's embroidery machine to make myself some pillows with the corporate shield on them. I didn't know I was capable of such a thing, but turns out they make it sound harder than it is.

Stupid then smart: Xbox 360 headset connector broke

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:36:20 GMT

I got an Xbox 360 message from a friend the other day telling me that my attempt at sending him a voice message sounded like 5 seconds of silence. I did some troubleshooting only to find that the tip of the headset's connector had broken off inside one of my controllers. That really pissed me off--I was less concerned about the loss of a headset than I was about the fact that I'd forever have a piece of headset connector stuck inside one of my Xbox 360 controllers.

Turns out that my worry was for nothing. The industrial engineering minds at Microsoft seem to have designed the controllers to handle exactly this contingency. If you first remove the battery pack from the controller that has the headset piece lodged in it, and then shove in an unbroken headset connector with the controller upright, the broken off tip will fall right out.

I'm pretty sure that this is the problem that Shodan1028 is describing over on the Gamertag Radio forums.

The return of fun flash crap

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:20:52 GMT

Attn: Maloney--you'll like this.

Only sort of a puzzle, but pretty fun: http://www.gamegecko.com/idiottest.php.

Everything's changing

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 10:51:32 GMT

I (and everyone I know) figured I was about the last person on the list of people likely to quit work at Microsoft any time soon, but a very interesting opportunity came along.

It's the kind of company that would rather that I not say much about just yet, but I'll say this: it takes something pretty special to convince me to leave my extremely fun, well-paying job at Microsoft working as the development lead whose team was responsible for the user experience on Live Image Search.

One of the things that make this opportunity special include an opportunity to work with my brother on a software project like he and I have always said we would someday. Another thing is that the company is headquartered in my home state, Oklahoma.

I really like Seattle, so I've never been in a huge hurry to pack up and move back to Oklahoma, but at least on some level I'm happy to have the opportunity to give something back to the state. Y'see, my last two years in high school were at a highly specialized public school called the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics. It's a 2 year residential school that's 100% taxpayer funded. The catch is that you have to apply for admission and get selected to attend. Oh, and you get an unaccredited diploma upon graduation since many of the teachers come from university teaching backgrounds and don't have secondary education teaching certificates. That doesn't matter too much--there's not a university in the country that doesn't recognize the quality of the academic program there.

Enough about my educational background. The bottom line is that the people of the State of Oklahoma gave me quite a bit, and I'm thrilled at the opportunity to give something back. (Related point: one of the themes that Representative Ernest Istook challenged Oklahoma's incumbent governor on was that Oklahoma's young people are leaving the state due to limited high tech opportunity. Here's another clip on the same theme.)

At any rate, my wife and I are packing up our stuff and moving to Oklahoma, at least for a while. I still think there's a high chance that I'll end up back on the West Coast someday, quite possibly working once again at Microsoft. But in the meanwhile, I'll try something else for a change. I expect to learn a lot. And maybe I can make an impact both at my new company and in my home state at the same time.

[Edit: make the mention of OSSM a link to the school's web site per bl00mie's suggestion.]

Beginning instrument training!

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 05:40:41 GMT

It's been way too long since I've flown, but I met up with my flight instructor today, and am signed up to get started learning to navigate through the clouds like real airplanes do!

Transparent screens

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 05:39:12 GMT

http://www.flickr.com/photos/w00kie/sets/180637/show/

Online mini-hunt

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 06:20:15 GMT

If you enjoy the kinds of puzzles I do, you should subscribe to Panda Magazine.

Even if you subscribe to Panda Magazine, you should try out There's a Moose on the Loose! The puzzles that I've solved so far are fun and seem well designed.

Funny: ultimate blog posts

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 06:03:07 GMT

Hilarious: http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71720-0.html?tw=rss.index

I can't wait for Flight Sim X

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 19:12:03 GMT

When Microsoft's next flight simulator ships, it looks like they're going to have some incredible features such as built in support for air traffic control and cockpit sharing. Here's a fun little YouTube video that shows off these features (and more):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsCpH7nqmS0

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 02:42:45 GMT

There's a book out called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension", which I'll have to pick up and read sometime. Meanwhile, they have a really unbelievably incredibly slick flash animation that helps you visualize what in the world the universe could possibly do with 10 dimensions.

Coolest flash puzzle game ever!

Sun, 28 May 2006 19:27:22 GMT

http://jayisgames.com/archives/2006/05/click_drag_type.php

Test from Word 2007

Mon, 15 May 2006 22:10:13 GMT

Apparently, I can post blog entries from Word 2007 Beta 2, just like this. Neat.

Still out of love with Apple

Sun, 14 May 2006 22:37:19 GMT

The story of the dead Mac Mini gets even better: I took the computer in to the Apple store. They directed me to get in line at the Genius Bar (what a silly name, but that's another entry). While waiting for an available Genius, the sales droid and I took my computer over to try it out on one of the floor models' power supplies. The computer still didn't work. And when the power supply got returned to the demo model it was borrowed from, it didn't work, either. So apparently, my comptuer is not only dead, but it kills power supplies.

When the Genius heard about this, he told me the story of the iPod Dock of Death. It apparently had the same superpowers as my Mac Mini--that is it killed anything that got plugged into it. He said that they had all sorts of evil fun with that before it was finally retired.

Out of love with Apple

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 19:51:15 GMT

I bought myself a Mac Mini the other week just so I could refresh my dreadfully obsolete Apple knowledge (last time I touched a Mac was probably in 1990). I literally asked the first salesman who made eye contact with me to show me the cheapest computer in the store. Maybe that's where I went wrong.

I got it home and played around with it. I even made it my daily use machine. It worked fine for checking email and surfing the web. I missed being able to play Windows Media file formats (apparently, there's no WMA or WMV codec available for MacIntel machines yet, but there's one available for PowerPC-based machines).

Overall, I think the experience has been mostly acceptable, but certainly not amazing. When I first got it home, the Front Row[tm] remote had a dead battery. That was a shitty out-of-box experience. I get asked to install component updates all the time, and may of them require reboots. I always heard that only Windows had problems like that. I changed my password at the command prompt, and it turns out there are some components that still prompt me for my old one. Overall, it's not the unbelievably smooth, completely defect-free experience that I was always told to expect.

And the ultimate offense? After having it for less than a month, it died. I came home from work one day and it was shut off. I have tried turning it back on to no avail. I'll be taking it back to the Apple Store to see how service works. I hope I have better luck with that than with the rest of the "seamless user experience" that I have yet to discover.

Perhaps I'm just not smart enough to use an Apple The Way That Jobs Intended[tm].

Work fewer weekends or your money back!

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 03:44:10 GMT

An article on siliconvalley.com that was talking about the recent class action settlement between video game publisher EA and some of its employees who were whining about being overworked has the following interesting thing to say:

in November, EA's Los Angeles studio tried cutting work hours with a process it called ``Five Great Days,'' which helps game developers to work five days a week -- instead of six or seven -- by setting major deadlines on Fridays instead of Mondays.

I'm shocked to admit that such an idea never really occurred to me. I've always personally been a fan of Monday deadlines just to give myself a couple of days of spillover at the end just in case I run over (which inevitably happens). It seems to me that if this Friday deadline scheme were instituted with appropriate self-discipline, the world really would be a better place with fewer weekends spent working to get things done on time.

Windows Live Image Search Beta

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 07:29:40 GMT

[Long, rambly post follows. It may provide some insight into why I haven't been posting as much lately as I have at some times in the past.]

Lately I've been working harder than I've ever worked before with some of the smartest, coolest people I've ever met on one of the most interesting projects I can possibly imagine. My team at work, MSN Search's Multimedia Search Team just shipped a beta release of our Image Search product and boy-oh-boy was all the hard work worth it!

Before I go any further, if you haven't seen it, go take a look. Start at http://www.live.com and type a query into the search box at the top of the page. Press enter and then click the Images tab. I think you'll like what you see.

One of our primary goals was to fix the rough edges that every other image search UI today share. We wanted users to have a clean, uncluttered display of as many thumbnails as possible with the ability to quickly see metadata for the images that they cared about, and to be able to continue to browse images while looking at the web pages underlying their search results. Based on the early feedback, it would appear that we succeeded.

But back on how cool the project and the people are. I've been working anywhere from 60 to 100 hours per week for the last 5 months with short-lived periodic breaks, but I feel more energized than I normally do even during less insanely busy weeks. I was starting to get nervous that Jennifer would give up on me, but she was very supportive, and I think she likes to energized-by-work me well enough to put up with some amount of personal deprivation. (I'm sure that near the end, she was starting to feel strung along and wondering if it'd ever end--we had a couple of times during the long push where we thought we had a ship date picked, and then something would go wrong to set us back by an indeterminate time. But she stuck with me, and I really appreciate her supportiveness.)

Almost without exception, the people on the project are some of the best I've ever worked with--cool under pressure, smart about all the things that matter, hard-working. I have to give special credit to my boss and our program manager. My boss Hugh is excellent at both the technical and the people side of things. It seems effortless for him to keep our team focused and working hard. Our program manager Julie is phenomenally smart and has a knack for keeping everyone outside our team aware of what we need and working hard on our behalf.

We have many more great plans for both Image Search and many other projects lined up, and we're already working hard to bring even more cool stuff to the world. Hey, team, let's keep kicking butt!

Fun with dice

Sun, 26 Feb 2006 08:32:54 GMT

Two really cool dice puzzles that have already been solved to death by bored mathematicians:

Nontransitive dice

Number three blank dice such that one of the dice (say die A) beats another of the dice (die B) more than half of the time, which in turn beats die C more than half of the time. Nothing unusual so far, right? Now make it so that die C beats die A more than half the time as well. Yes, put in simple terms, A > B > C > A. Mathematicians call these nontransitive dice.

Imagine the great bar bets that you can make with these: "choose any of these three dice; then I'll choose one; we'll roll 10 times, and whoever rolls a higher number more times wins $20--all you have to do is figure out which die is best."

For extra fun, design a set of dice that enable you to offer to take on two guys at once who each choose a die from a pool of 7 dice, and then you choose a remaining one that beats them both!

Try to come up with at least the 3 dice set on your own, and then check out the Tournament Dice article on Math Games for lots of fun information on both of the above schemes.

"Normal" dice with abnormal numbers

Next, number two 6-sided dice in such a way that if you roll them both and take the sum, it's the same distribution of sums as that of two normal 6-sided dice (i.e. 1 way to roll a 2 or 12, 2 ways to roll a 3 or 11, and so on). It's cheating to use non-positive numbers (otherwise, you could just add N to each face on one die and subtract the same N from each face on the other).

I found this one easier to contruct on my own than the nontransitive dice. Give it a shot and then see Wolfram's Sicherman Dice write-up for more details on this.

Amazing Honda ad

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 04:37:47 GMT

Visit http://www.honda.co.uk/civic/

Click "Watch Civic".

Enjoy.

Sergey "The Slaver" Brin

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 06:51:26 GMT

Absolutely stunning Sergey quote from ex-Google brand manager Doug Edwards on his xooglers blog:

Sergey once asked a large assemblage of Googlers what our greatest corporate expense was. “Health insurance!” was one answer shouted back. “Salaries!” “Servers!” “Taxes!” “Electricity!” “Charlie’s grocery bills!,” came back others. “No,” said Sergey. “Opportunity cost.” He explained that the products we weren’t launching and the deals we weren’t doing threatened our economic stability more than any single line item in the budget. It became a regular call and response at staff meetings and added to the sense that no matter how hard we were working, success was slipping through our fingers. Rather than cause employees to feel defeated, however, it became a rallying cry to redouble their efforts.

In other words, "The opportunity cost of our employees sleeping and having lives outside work is our company's greatest expense." How could that possibly encourage super-human commitment rather than induce demoralizing levels of despair?! Is this really a strong motivator if the prospect of having-a-cooler-project-at-work-than-any-spare-time-project-could-possibly-be is not? (I'm willing to consider the possibility that my mistake here is to assume that the average Google employee has a job as cool as mine in MSN Search.)

Arthur, I'm especially interested in your thoughts on this.

[Edit: fixed my misspelling of Sergey's name.]

Probably evil; almost certainly divisive

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 07:56:06 GMT

Tonight, I got an invitation to sign up on some website called http://www.officeballot.com. The premise is very simple: you sign up using a work email address and then get to rate your co-workers and provide written comments (good or bad) on them. It claims to promote meritocracy.

I, frankly, can't believe that there's any possible good whatsoever that could come out of this site. It seems to me that it will hurt some people, whether right or wrong, and it won't really gain anybody anything. I guess the good news is that I imagine most people would take the comments with the large dose of salt required.

I'll be quite surprised if they don't spend so much time, energy, and money fending off lawsuits that they fold up shop by the middle of 2006.

The wisdom of Earl Hickey's friend Philo

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 07:46:57 GMT

Tonight's "My Name Is Earl" yielded a brilliant quote that I feel certain to be able to use someday:

I don't vote, I already have a religion, and I hate whales.

Now, technically speaking, not all of those are true, but I figure it'll stun the person on the other side of my screen door enough that I can get back to whatever I was doing before they rang the doorbell.

Google's media halo is fading

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 21:09:17 GMT

Even if the tech press isn't, the MSM is willing to call "hypocricy!" on Google's recent behavior: http://www.cagle.com/news/Google/main.asp

How not to die while jump-starting a car

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 05:55:50 GMT

My friend Nick wasn't quite sure how not to die while jump-starting his co-worker's car. It's pretty easy not to die, really. Here's the skinny.

I notice that he had two main concerns. The first was how not to get electrocuted. The second was how not to explode while attaching clamps to batteries.

First: how not to get electrocuted. It turns out that you don't really need rubber, or dryness, to avoid getting electrocuted by 12-volt batteries hooked up to 14-volt alternators. Even when wet, human skin resists 12 (or 14) volts pretty well. You know the 9-volt battery/tongue trick? Without knowing the actual values, I'm going to estimate that 12 volts from one hand to the other passes far less current than 9 volts to the tongue. For a couple of reasons: 1) your tongue's job is to be wet--wetter than Seattle's wussy rain gets your skin, and 2) the distance that the current has to travel along your tongue is really short compared to the distance that it would have to travel along your skin (or through your skin and along your water-filled innards), and resistance is usually directly proportionally to the length of the conductor. So, seriously, there's no possible way you could electrocute yourself. I'd say that having non-insulated handles on the jumper cables is more of a threat to the battery (easier to accidentally short it) than to human life. Don't believe the car-battery torture scenes you see in the movies--Mel Gibson is such an over-actor.

Second: how not to explode while attaching the clamps. The biggest reason that the jumper cable manufacturers tell you never to complete the circuit by connecting directly to the battery is that there are usually some really tiny sparks produced upon completing the circuit, even when done completely correctly. (Think slightly bigger sparks than a shock from a doorknob.) In some very unusual circumstances, the battery in a car can be caused to electrolyze the water in them into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas. This is fairly difficult to do, and is not part of the battery's normal routine, but if you _happen_ to have a battery that built up some hydrogen and you happen to spark near the hydrogen, you could get a nice little hydrogen explosion that results in splashing sulfuric acid and lead-laced water all over you and your engine. (Think "ouch".) All it took was one jumper cable manufacturer realizing that they might get sued if this happens, and they quickly found a way to move the sparks to some other place where there is no chance of hydrogen build-up instead of some absurdly small chance.

Don't fear the jump-start. It seems certain that you're more likely to die in your car driving home from the jump-start.

Oooh, I'm scared now.

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:31:37 GMT

Was visiting a whole bunch of buzzwordful web sites this morning to stay up with current events. Grokster.com was on my rounds to see what had become of it (yeahyeah, not quite current events). Absolutely hilarious result pictured below.

What's sad is that having your IP logged by the RIAA probably is terrifying to non-savvy folks who went to grokster.com in order to download a tool to steal music. If they spent a few minutes thinking about it, they'd realize that they're not going to get sued or arrested because no one can establish intent to do anything just from visiting a web page.

Canada border guards walk out on the job...

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 07:09:37 GMT

Yeah--I know my title sounds made up. It's seriously not. According to the CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/bc/story/bc_peace-arch200601125.html

Dozens of unarmed Canadian border guards walked off the job at Peace Arch and the nearby truck crossing when they heard the heavily armed suspects were heading their way.

Supervisors stepped in at each crossing to protect the Canadian side.

A spokesperson for the Canada Border Services Agency said the guards have the legal right under the Canada Labour Code to refuse to work if they believe they are in imminent danger.

Okay, so let me get this straight. Canadian border guards are armed only with batons and pepper spray, and have the right to walk off the job at the first sign of danger, which they don't hesitate to exercise when they get notified by US authorities that armed men are on their way?!

Wow. I simply don't understand the unarmed part. I understand that Canada doesn't have many guns, but the border guards aren't protecting Canada against Canadians... Please help me understand.

Rotate the tires, please, HAL

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 21:23:26 GMT

Having reminded myself earlier today that it's time to rotate the tires on my vehicle, I also flashed back to when I was a youngster and first heard mention of "rotating tires" as a maintenence procedure. I simply could not understand how tires, which rotate a lot during routine execution of their duties, could be caused to wear more evenly simply by rotating them some more.

Cheesiest sounding book I've ever considered reading...

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 18:55:40 GMT

Cheesy from title to description. Anyone know if it's any good?

http://www.ereader.com/product/detail/20994?refid=45522&source=ERNR010306_M2

The Grand List of Console Role-Playing Game Cliches

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 15:20:41 GMT

Probably old news, but I got a huge kick out of this: http://project-apollo.net/text/rpg.html

Intriguing...

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 14:40:07 GMT

http://avantgame.com/key.htm

Doubt that I'll plunk down the $28, but this does seem like it oughtta deliver on its promises: "We guarantee that for as long as you search for your lock, surprising people and places will reveal their secrets to you. We cannot guarantee that you will ever find the lock that your key opens. If you do find your lock, please send word—and stories."

SeaTac's little-known third runway

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 05:29:28 GMT

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002621198_seatac13.html

Radar crashed, but plane did not

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 01:51:40 GMT

Insert software joke here.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/69B5A23CB6ACF3F1862570B5001C7AA4?OpenDocument

Amazingly cool illusion!

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 19:42:43 GMT

Unreal!

http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html

Survey incentives

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 21:41:41 GMT

Lately, I've seen a new type of spam-like thing emerging. It's always some email or web advertisement that offers you some incredible incentive (free laptop! free XBox 360! free beachfront house!) for your opinion on some completely irrelavent subject (should Bush be replaced? which is better WalMart or Fred Meyer? which Olsen sister is cuter?).

I haven't bothered to click through any of these, so I'm spouting off with incomplete knowledge, but I can't help but guess that none of these peddlers have any intention of giving you anything, and I know that they're not just interested in getting your opinion on the inane question that they dangle in front of you to tease you in to their web.

Have any of you braved the security risk to click through and find out how they convert your time into money for them?

The numbers in Lost

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 04:52:58 GMT

So, I don't claim to understand the numbers in Lost, but it's a rare episode where I don't notice some patterns. In this episode, the numbers "108" and "540" both came up. 108 is the sum of the "4 8 15 16 23 42" numbers, and 540 is 5 times that much.

Now, that's great, but what the heck do they mean?

NY Times puzzle extravaganzas

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 01:45:28 GMT

The New York Times started running somewhat-regular mini-extravaganzas* back on July 4, 2003. It actually succeeded in selling me a copy of the paper for the first one. After I found out that one was published online, I stopped rushing out to score a hardcopy, but I have followed along closely online.

I think you'll have to have a free NY Times login (or borrow a communal one from bugmenot.com) to get to the puzzles themselves.

Here are links to all of them so far (from newest to oldest):
The Old College Try (June 4, 2005)
Beat the Clock (December 31, 2004)
Let the Games Begin! (August 12, 2004)
Presents of Mind (December 25, 2003)
Patriot Games (July 5, 2003)

The thing about these puzzles is that, while challenging, they require no specialized puzzle-solving knowledge. In that respect, they're probably appealing to a much wider variety of people than the highly specialized puzzle events that I normally participate in. I have had a lot of fun with all of them so far, and I hope the Times continues this tradition.

*mini-extravaganzas, as defined by the National Puzzlers' League, are a number of puzzles having a theme or storyline, and usually with a final puzzle incorporating information from all previous stages.

Bill Nye the (political hack) Science Guy

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 00:51:21 GMT

When I tuned in to "The Eyes of Nye", I was expecting more of the same "science with a comedic nerd" style stuff that I got from Bill Nye the Science Guy (Science Rules!). Wow, was I disappointed.

I watched my first episode, Genetically Modified Foods, and was expecting a science education, but what I got was an agenda-filled political rant about something that happens to involve science. At least half of the episodes I've seen since then have also come with an agenda.

I easily agree with him on most of the positions he takes in the show, but I sure wasn't expecting what I ended up getting. Oh, and the show averages really glum, too.

I guess he kinda makes no qualms that it's something of a dressed up op-ed, as even evidenced by the title. And the way he closes. "<the sky falling! we're all going to die if we don't get smart!> At least that's how I see it, and I'll see you next time on "The Eyes of Nye"."

Now that my expectations have been through a violent, reactive reset, I still mostly enjoy the show. There's still the campy sense of humor (Science with Mr. Sanders is a particularly twisted (and hilarious) recurring segment of the show), and even mostly good science.

At least that's how I see it, and I'll see you next time on "Scott Blomquist's space".

Mooncurser's handbook thoughts (part 2/7)

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 00:37:52 GMT

[Wow--better get it in gear on this series of posts, or I'll forget everything I have to say about it!]

Read the first part of this series to get caught up, and then continue reading below.

I'll throw in a brief mention here of the application process for those of you who aren't familiar with Game-style events. Since it's impractical to host more than some small two-digit number of teams, and since there are often more teams than that who are interested in participating, Game organizers usually require some form of application for the event. Applications are usually evaluated principally on the amount of effort put into them. My team submitted a 16-page glossy magazine called "Shark Bait Quarterly". It'd take forever to explain all of the inside jokes, but there's lots of good stuff in there if you're just skimming through, too. Pay special attention to the Tips from the Baiting Masters at the bottom of each of the crew biographies pages. At any rate, it was a good enough application to get us in.

Since we made the cut, we were mailed a physical invitation about a week before the actual event. Up until that point, we didn't have much of an idea where the Game would start. The invitation itself looked like it was just a few pieces of card stock glued to each other in that common invitation-y way. We knew that more information had to be there somewhere, so we chose to dissect it. Turned out that the _real_ invitation was, in fact, inside the middle layer of the fancy invitation. It told us to make our way up to a hotel in Bellingham, WA.

On the Friday that the game actually started, we made our way up to Bellingham for a banquet in celebration of the release of the 42nd Mooncurser's Handbook. We were encouraged by Game staff to mix and mingle during the banquet instead of seating our entire team together at any one table, but they didn't explain why that might come in handy.

Leading up to dinner itself, they alluded to an executive in Galactic Consortium going rogue, but this was about the only plot development they did. It popped up one more time during the weekend, but in a somewhat weak way (we'll get to that later). I have to say, the near complete lack of a plot may well have been one of the only major disappointments for me in this entire Game.

After an all-around good meal (which it sure should have been considering the $300 per person participation fee), something spectacular happened. They rolled back the wall to the tune of awe-filled gasps from around the room, to reveal an elaborate set of games and activity stations. They quickly explained all of the activity stations, and more importantly that every activity was a group activity that required cooperation among competing teams. Every success in one of the activities earned your team additional information to use in solving one of several metapuzzles that would get your team hundreds of points.

The activities took the form of simple things such as stacking cups (yeah--of the CupStacking variety) with a plastic robot arm, answering Sci-Fi trivia questions game show style, and 4-way Dance-Dance Revolution. We had a lot of fun doing most of them, but despite a three-team coalition to solve the meta-puzzles, we didn't get any points for any of them.

By the end of the night, we had all done so much cooperating, that most teams had decided that alliances would be required to win the next day. We were eventually told that collusion was expressly forbidden, with one exception that would be explained later.

I'll explain that exception in the next installment of this series.

Interesting NBC radio ad campaign

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 23:18:51 GMT

Lately on the radio, I've been hearing what are probably 60-second ad spots for NBC's fall prime time lineup. It consists of one femaile and two male voices that somehow just sound young and hip. The voices spend 60 seconds just jabbering about what's on tonight on NBC in an exceptionally casual way. They comment on how much they liked the show last week, how hot the actresses are, and rumors that they've heard about this week's episode.

They even make mistakes and correct each other. For example, today one of voices said something about how some actress on Law & Order SVU won a Emmy, and one of the other voices corrected it to "no, it was a Golden Globe". But it was just like it would have gone down in regular conversation among you and your closest friends. I really mean exceptionally casual conversation.

The most amazing thing about this ad campaign to me is that it really does on some deep down human level make me want to be one of the cool kids that get to be part of their water cooler conversation the next time I catch them on the radio. It hasn't yet caused me to watch a show that I otherwise would not have, but I have to believe that it just might one of these times. Hell, I just might watch my first episode ever of SVU tonight. Just because my cool friends on the radio recommended it.

Even more behind, but having fun

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 21:32:20 GMT

On my vacation, I've come up with more stuff to do than I've actually finished, so I think I'm technically more behind on the stuff that I'm staying home to get caught up on. But I'm having fun falling doing it.

C*ckpit priorities

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:34:42 GMT

[Yes, the asterisk in the title for this blog is really really stupid. Apparently, MSN Spaces considers the word "cockpit" a prohibited word, but only in the title. Sigh.]

Yesterday, Jennifer and I took our friend Arthur on a flight around the area. At one point, we decided to do some landings and takeoffs at Paine Field in Everett, mostly for fun. As we were approaching the airport, I called up the air traffic controller to request a clearance to land. Just as he started reading me a landing clearance, Jennifer started talking to point out an airplane approaching us quickly. He was below us, and not a factor as it turned out, but it sure looked like he might have mattered. I got kinda mad because she talked over the controller and I knew that she knew to expect a reply from him. I told her rather harshly to be quiet so I could hear the controller and asked him to say again. As soon as I got the clearance, I paused briefly to think about the situation. Upon reflection, I let her know that I realized she did exactly the right thing. It's much better to know about traffic in the area, and have to ask the controller to repeat himself than to crash while giving the controller more sway over my priorities as pilot-in-command than he deserves.

Jennifer, keep up the good traffic spotting and always call out traffic that may be a factor.