Ghost In The Machine

It’s not easy to talk about mortality. Aside from being born, dying is the one guarantee every single person has in life. It’s a pretty abstract concept most of the time: we’re here now, but one day, we won’t be. Sometimes we may think of it in terms of simply being left alone, out of contact with our friends and family, but at some point I think we realize that it’s more then that. We’re not the ones who are left alone; we’re the ones who do the leaving. If we’re lucky, we get advanced warning after many, many decades of life, and can depart after having put our affairs in order. If we’re unlucky, we have to leave at the worst possible time, not only leaving people behind, bewildered and lost, but also a lot of lingering presence that continues on without us.

Last year, we lost a friend on Black Friday. He had to go in to work that day, and left early on a chilly and icy morning. He was killed in a head-on collision with another driver who was determined to have had fallen asleep at the wheel (I suspect that he had been out for the Black Friday sales that morning, and was returning home). He left behind a wife and two young children.

What he also left behind is a presence. He was a technical support specialist by day, gamer by night, and like many of us who work in technical fields and spend a lot of free time online, he left a decent sized footprint. I received an email today from LinkedIn with their occasional “maybe you know these people?” opportunity to grow my own professional network, and my friend was listed there, with his company name and his position. I fired up Steam last year, shortly after the accident, and remember seeing his name and icon in my friend’s list. Same with Raptr. He had a local account on my Xbox. When I returned to City of Heroes a few weeks ago, I started right next to a holographic projection of his character in the Architect (the last time we played CoH, we had all played a mission arc that he had spent weeks creating). Last night I was working on my daughter’s computer and I saw an installation of Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator that had been installed on 11/1/2010, the night we had all gathered in my basement to try it out, and which we recorded to get a free copy of the game. He’s in that video, forever on YouTube.

I know I’ve signed up for hundreds if not thousands of accounts all across the internet in all of the years I’ve been using it. I get emails for products and services I don’t ever remember having signed up for until I examine them more closely, but I’d be damned if I remember my registration information, or even the reason. I have subscriptions and accounts for active outlets like online games or services. I’ve got payment information at major online retailers. They all fill my inbox from time to time with deals, reminders, or automated birthday wishes. Of course, I’m also active on several social networks, and inactive on several more. Most of these are out of sight, out of mind, and if I were to pass on tomorrow, these services would continue on auto-pilot, sending me emails, showing my status – such as it is – to my friends and family as if I were only AFK for a little while.

I try to be cognoscente of this, and keep whatever account information I have in a central location in case my wife needs to access it to cancel accounts and to notify interested parties. Generation X is the first generation to really have to deal with this kind of post-life issue, and we, our younger generations, and even some generations that precede us now not only have to deal with the traditional end of life activities like life insurance and funeral services, but also to ensure that our spouses or significant others aren’t being nickeled and dimed by online subscriptions that they don’t know how to cancel.

I certainly don’t mind happening upon these shadows of my friend, although it makes me painfully aware that they’re dormant and coldly automated, and will continue to be so for as long as the services are in operation. I also feel a pang of regret when I make the decision to remove an association with him that’s under my control, like the Xbox account or the Steam association. I feel that it’s necessary but also cruel to cut these ties that served us all so well in the past. But I know that I’d want my loose ends to be tied up should I unexpectedly depart, and certainly wouldn’t begrudge anyone I know from doing to the same to me.

It’s Official: I Give Up

I yield.

I’m done with the Windows Phone. At this point, it’s like having the choice to be any kid on the playground, and consciously choosing to be the one that gets beat up by all the rest of the kids. And the teachers.

It’s not good enough that that the device is pulling in as third place. I checked the market this morning, and found three new apps based on the Kama Sutra. Seriously? This is the shit that people are making? Where the apps designed to compete with what’s on iOS or Android? The only quality stuff is coming from Microsoft themselves, and they can’t and shouldn’t be expected to prop up the ecosystem.

I’ve also been waiting for my Mango update, which is now a month and a half behind everyone else. There are good apps available, but they’re ticking over to 7.5 with each passing day, which means that I can’t use them, and with every passing day, I’m less inclined to use or even remember them.

It was this Unity news that really solidified it for me, though. You may know how much I like Unity, and hearing David Helgason say that Unity wasn’t going to support WP7, and the way he said it felt that I was being denied a whole refreshing boatload of content because I made the wrong choice. No one likes to be smugly told they made the wrong choice. No one wants to realize that they made the wrong choice. But I’m man enough to admit it.

I don’t know where I’m going to go after this. I’m dissatisfied with all three major smartphone players, and have learned that I don’t need 1,000,000 possible apps to feel that I’m getting my money’s worth. I do want some apps, and I want those apps to be decent quality. I guess that leaves me at Android’s doorstep again. I’m not due for an upgrade until February of 2012, so there’s time for SOMEONE to win me back. I’m open to influence.

Pimp’n Apparently IS Easy…For AT&T

I’m getting a bit more then a little fed up with the lack of update for my phone (I know…QQ). They had originally said it would be available in October. That didn’t happen. Now the update is “In Testing” and in the hands of AT&T, and the scuttlebutt is that it’ll be “Mid November”. That’s still a good month and half after everyone else got it, and considering more and more apps are made available or are being updated to require the 7.5, it’s edging me out of an already sparsely populated/low quality marketplace.

So like an ass, I went to AT&T’s website to see if I was eligible for an upgrade. Nokia’s Lumia 800 is nice looking, but I was considering the HTC Titan, but it’s not on AT&T. Despite the issues I’ve had with Samsung devices, I can’t deny that the Focus S is mighty attractive. But I’m not eligible for an upgrade until February of next year, so that put the breaks on that.

Of course, that doesn’t stop AT&T from trying to ram the iPhone down my throat. On the main account page, there’s a block extorting me to “upgrade to an iPhone!”. No thanks. Been there, done that, etc. So I click on the “Check upgrade options”, and what do I get? A huge fucking page dedicated to the iPhone!.

So it’s pretty obvious that despite having Android and Windows devices in their arsenal, AT&T is still pushing the iPhone very heavily. Now, this may be some contractual obligation they inked (in blood, of course) with Apple, but the favoritism makes me annoyed and sad, and only lends credence (to me, at least), that there’s a very specific agenda at AT&T corporate to push iPhones. In that light, it’s not unpossible that there’s a agenda on the sales floor to push iPhone or Android phones, based on the salesperson’s personal preference.

That being said, I have a tinfoil hat to fold, so please excuse me.

I Am Disappointed With LEGO

This is kind of a sister post to the one I posted at Levelcapped regarding the demise of LEGO Universe.

I got to thinking about the target demographic for LU, and why it didn’t click with enough people who thought it was a decent enough adaptation of a well loved product like LEGO.

I’m a long time user of LEGO products. My brother and I received many a LEGO set for Christmas and birthdays, back when they cost a fraction of what they’re going for today. Sadly, the integrity of the sets were never maintained; our parents always threw the contents into a massive cardboard box, mixing everything into a LEGO stew that would later demand several minutes of raking pointy-cornered bricks around like a plastic rainbow Zen garden in the hunt for the smallest pieces manufactured by the LEGO company. But it was OK, because we preferred to make our own creations, and every set added to the mix was just more materials to use for the next, great creation.

That’s what always made LEGO great: the ability to create whatever you wanted. It was brick and mortar for the pre-teen set, where the limited selection of geometric blocks were combined to make a starship, a futuristic home, or a motorized model of K-9 from Doctor Who (I kid you not. I was really proud of that one). Sadly, I think LEGO has lost sight of that, and I’m not sure why.

I look at the LEGO sets now, and I see a lot of the same kinds of sets that we had as kids. City sets with fire stations and airports, or futuristic sets with spaceships and aliens, and more. But when I look at the pieces, I’m appalled. There are far less “general purpose” pieces, and more “specialized” pieces, parts that can only be used for the things that they’re designed to be used for. Maybe it’s a wing for a bird, or a single piece wall of a castle. These pieces can’t ever be used for something they’re not, because a bird wing will always be a bird wing, and a castle wall will always be a castle wall.

The way I see it, LEGO has moved from a company that makes something that is about the sandbox aspects of free building to a company that makes something that is trying to provide a structured and specific themed experience in every box. They’ve stopped making “building blocks” and are now offering “playsets”.

I also believe that this is the rotten wood that was propping up LEGO Universe. I tried LU and it wasn’t what I expected or wanted. I wanted to play with LEGO bricks. What I saw was a translation of their “action universe” mentality that we see in their current playset offerings. It had LEGO sensibility, along with made their console titles so popular (Star Wars, Batman, Indiana Jones), but in order to build, I had to earn bricks. Each and every one. It wasn’t a matter of unlocking one brick and having an unlimited supply of it; one unlock meant one piece, period. The meat of the game was all about adventuring in a pre-built world where the most expression you could have was to destroy enemies in a shower of bricks (which you couldn’t pick up), or to build something very specific from a pile of jittery blocks on the ground. To say that it was disappointing would be an understatement. I suspect that I am not alone in this assessment.

LEGO can take their product any way they want to, of course, and it seems that they believe that the best way forward is to give their customers a specific, guided experience. I suppose that’s OK, but it’s not going to fly in my house. Sadly, my daughter isn’t as into the blocks as I was at her age, but I did bring my massive box of LEGO up from my parent’s basement for her to have. She’s very creative, and when she does get to urge to play with the LEGOs, I’d rather she have the formless, undetermined blocks to work with instead of someone else’s notion of what she should be building.

Why Science Sucks

Not really. But apparently for many, it does. It does for me too, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why – about 15 years of thinking about why.

I have a B.S. in biology, specifically, marine biology. I got this degree from the University of New Hampshire’s College of Life Science and Agriculture, which at the time was one of UNH’s biggest programs. This covered general biology, specialized biology, aspects of pre-med and pre-vet, ecology, animal management and a whole suitcase worth of agricultural and plant science studies. The only other school that really outdid or rivaled COLSA, I believe, was the business school. Needless to say, there were a lot of students attending UNH for life science degrees.

I knew things were going to get rough when, during the first year, first semester survey class, the instructor pulled the old “look to your left, and then your right; two out of the three of you won’t earn a degree from this (COLSA) school” bit. That was actually rather frightening at the time, because we all thought we were there to be scientists. The idea of washing out of this dream, presented only days after we moved into our first dorm room, was terrifying because that meant we’d have to come up with another major, go undeclared liberal arts, or leave school. What really made me sweat, though, was when the COLSA freshman’s “dirty secret” was revealed: the majority of people had chosen marine biology as a career because they wanted to work with dolphins.

I kid you not. That is an actual statement, and not a representation of a trend. People applied to this school, packed up, left home, and decided to devote 4 years of their lives (minimum) to life science because they wanted to work with the most “charismatic” marine mammal in the world, and thought that a degree in marine biology was the first step towards achieving that goal. Although I wasn’t specifically there for that specific purpose, I , too, had an idea that I’d like to work with marine animals. Maybe studying migration patterns, or even behavior of goldfish. I really didn’t know; I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do, and I somehow decided that marine biology was going to provide the specifics as the studies progressed.

I was wrong. So friggin wrong that I might as well have said that I wanted to work with dolphins, too. What we got was a lot of staring into microscopes at Daphnia, which is about as far from a dolphin as the Earth is from the center of existence. There was a lot of book work. A lot of writing. I don’t think any lab I had involved anything larger then a hot dog, certainly not anything as large as a dolphin. At some point, I realized that I felt let down, and even cheated. This “science” wasn’t what I felt I had been lead to believe it would be, and I’m sure the pod of dolphin-lovers felt the same way.

Students in high school aren’t prepared for what science really is, at least not the “hard” sciences like biology and chemistry. Any advanced focus on “science” in high school is really a focus on “engineering”. The NYT article linked above talks a lot about making robots, or toothpick bridges, or safe-egg drops. This is good for students who decide they want to make the next iPod, but anything beyond that is far more esoteric, and I’m not fully convinced that America’s high school teachers are really qualified to prepare a student to understand exactly how life and chemical sciences work in the real world. I don’t blame teachers, don’t get me wrong. Engineering is a straight arrow; 2+2 will always equal 4, so once you know it, you know it. Life and chemical sciences are about discovering what’s not known, which requires the fostering of the ability to engage in critical thinking, and in problem solving. Moreover, scientific method requires that the scientist be willing, able and, in some cases, to actively seek out failure. In science, disproving a theory is just as important as proving one, but high school isn’t about teaching one how to accept failure; it’s about teaching students how to succeed.

Another thing they don’t tell you about the world of science is that it can be a barrel filled to the top with douchebags and assholes. I was told later on in college that learning how to do science is really only about 25% of what you need if you want to do science. The other 75% is who you know, and once you know the right people, what you accomplish. Science is very results driven, more so then what we expect from stereotypical business office culture. You need money to do the science, so you need to apply for grants or beg at the right feet to get it, and you need to prove that you’re competent enough not to squander it by having done previous science, or by getting an established scientist to put in a good word for you. There’s a lot of back-stabbing, ass kissing and pettiness involved in “doing science”, which is something that I absolutely, positively refuse to engage in. Because of the amount of students in COLSA, there weren’t enough lab opportunities to go around, so it was brutally difficult to get into a lab, even to just wash glassware (which I actually offered to do in one lab, just to get my foot in the door. I was denied).

At any rate, I left college with the degree I intended to obtain. I barely obtained by degree; it required some last minute credit shuffling and some summer classes to shore up my flagging scores in math (math which wasn’t really needed for the biology part, incidentally). I then went to work at a liquor store, and then in tech support, and now work as an application developer.

In the end, I’m both happy and sad I’m not in the science field. I make more money now then I would if I were in the scientific research field, and engage in 98% less of the behavior I’d be expected to engage in if I were in the scientific research field. I can work from anywhere, for anyone, with a minimal set of tools, and I can create great things. But I miss the every day learning and the process of working towards discovery of the unknown. That’s what science is presented as: an honorable dedication to the discovery of the unknown, but what’s really unknown is the reality of how science is done in the modern world. For those who only want to discover, it’s a horribly disappointing world of politicking and sometimes hanging one’s dignity up like a piñata in service of someday gaining the freedom to actually do science the way you thought you would when you graduated high school.

Windows Phone: Things Are Getting Better…?

I rarely have anything to say that isn’t gaming related, which ends up on Levelcapped, so this has turned into a Windows Phone-centric blog for the time being. It’s not a total conversion; it’s just the current topic du jour that I seem to have things to say about.

This time, it’s news about improvements. First is official improvements. Nokia has announced two new WM7 phones: The Lumia 710 and the Lumia 800. Nokia’s offerings were Srs Bsns because they apparently have a pretty decent aesthetics track record, and these phones don’t disappoint. The 800 especially. Sadly, the 710 is the only one currently (or coming soon) available in the US at this time. Still, Nokia is plastering ads for their WinPhones all over the place, apparently. Here in the US, HTC’s Radar had a TV spot during Modern Family, which I’m told is kinda funny. There’s also a new commercial showcasing One Note note synching on WPs. In looking at the WP ecosystem, it’s apparently very popular everywhere but the US (and, reportedly, Australia), so increased visibility is good in regions where it’s already popular, and especially here in the US where exposure has been limited at best…absent at worst.

Drawing a circle around previous posts and annotating it, there seems to be a real burst from the community to get WP on the radar (!) of several companies who have either waffled or who haven’t shown interest in providing a WP app alongside their iOS and Android offerings. CNet had a throwdown between the iPhone 4s, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and the Lumia 800, and seriously knocked the WP device on the weakness of it’s marketplace, which prompted WMPoweruser.com to highlight some high-profile apps that are conspicuously absent from the platform. It seems that some folks in the community have had enough, and have created a website called I Heart WP7. This site is designed to call attention to apps and developers who have shunned the WP platform, and to provide WP users a way to “gently harass” these folks for a WinPhone version of their apps. It’s a confusing situation, as I mentioned in the last post, because we really don’t know if these companies are flatly refusing to release a WP version, or just aren’t sure if it’s worth their while. Efforts like those of I Heart WP7 are allowing users to line up to inform these companies that yeah, it’s very much worth their while to support the platform.

So I guess things are getting better for WP7, although I’m still waiting for the Mango update, a full month and change after most everyone else got it. This puts a lot of cool new apps and updates out of reach, which is rather infuriating. I like the Lumia 800, but it has no front facing camera. The Samsung Focus S is on the horizon, which does have a front facing camera, but I had a Galaxy S and currently a Focus, and both have had issues: the former with the GPS, and the later with receiving OS updates in a timely manner. Assuming this warming trend continues, I might consider keeping on with the WP platform the next time my contract is up for renewal, but it’s going to take wider developer support, and more “modern” hardware features to allow me to consider it.