Chuck

body { look-like: ass; }

Much like an invasion of Iraq, redesigning the theme for my website always sounds like a good idea at first. It’s only after hours of horror and a mounting death toll that I realize what a mistake I’ve made. Unlike the current administration, though, I know when to pull out.

Insert usual spiel here: it doesn’t look anywhere as cool as I’d imagined when I started out, some stuff is probably broken, CSS is really frustrating, boo hoo.

This time, though, it’s not just Internet Explorer that it looks bad on; it’s Windows. Back when I installed BootCamp on my Mac, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was about Windows that makes me feel cold inside. Now I realize it’s their font handling. Going from a Mac (especially running Safari) to an XP machine is like going from an illuminated manuscript to a calculator watch display. I spent a good bit of time getting all the font spacing exactly how I wanted, then ran it under XP to see that it looked like the output of an old dot-matrix printer where the page had been ripped out halfway through.

And I must’ve hit some breaking point, because I realized I really, really don’t care. Buy a damn Mac, people! Or get an RSS feed reader! See if I care! And get off my lawn!

But at least there’s one bright spot. For years now the internet has been abuzz with speculation about what music I’m currently listening to, and I can finally put those rumors to rest. At least, when the plugin works.

I could watch “Heroes” for just one day

Entertainment Weekly just ran an article about Rosario Dawson in which Kevin Smith calls her a “hot geek.”.

Which to me is like saying “compassionate conservative;” it just doesn’t exist. The terms are mutually exclusive. For those of us who were nerds back when being a nerd meant something (mostly it meant rejection and shame), this whole new movement, what with your X-Men and Spider-man movies being big-ticket productions and movies about hobbits winning Oscars, is a disturbing trend.

Only the most naive of nerds would see this as welcome, fulfilling some life-long fantasy that someone who looks like Rosario Dawson would walk into his gaming session in the back of the comic book store and confess her love for him in perfect Klingon. The cold hard reality is that when someone who looks like Rosario Dawson can speak Klingon, then there’s even less need in the universe for someone who looks like you.

So sorry, Mr. Smith. You’ll still be welcomed into the Dragon Con with open, sweaty arms, but your friend will have to stay outside. We have a cosmic order to maintain. Open the gates too wide, and you get stuff like “Heroes”.

For all I know, “Heroes” was a true labor of love by a dedicated, hard-core comic book fan who’s wanted to do a story like this ever since he was a teenager. It sure doesn’t come across like it, though. Watching it, you don’t get an image of a dedicated artist passionate about telling a story, but a group of NBC execs passionate about cashing in on the success of the X-Men movies and “Lost” and too unoriginal to do anything other than copy the format of every other “disparate people brought together by supernatural circumstances” package series.

The whole thing has a junior-varsity, C-list vibe to it. Even starting with the opening text crawl, a completely unnecessary prologue that threatens this is just the “first volume” in an “epic story.” Then the pompous, overblown, and completely unoriginal title credit: “Chapter One: Genesis.” They’re getting the comic book feel down, but unfortunately it’s an Image comic book.

And it just goes on like that. It’s not horribly inept or offensive, just completely unoriginal, unsubtle, and ham-handed. You’ve got two-dimensional characters in stock situations doing uninteresting things. Everybody talks in exposition. The mysterious, intriguing villain is neither mysterious nor intriguing. The performances are mostly competent but completely unremarkable (which is a feat, considering all the awful, clumsy exposition-heavy dialogue the actors have to deliver). It’s all Generic Television Superhero Product.

For me it was all summed up by one scene: our Japanese character, who’s named Hiro, because you see that’s clever, is having a conversation about being a loser with his salaryman friend in a karaoke bar, because you see they’re in Japan, and on stage are two guys doing the “I Want it That Way” bit. It was a dull, pointless conversation between stereotypical characters in a totally stereotypical situation, with an obvious and clumsy and already-outdated and not very clever topical pop culture reference.

There was one moment at the very end of the pilot that had a halfway-intriguing twist and almost made me curious as to what happens next. I read on that NBC site, in an interview with the creator of the series, that the idea for that came from his friend Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of “Lost.” Reading that just made me kind of sad for the guy, that his one original idea he has to admit came from somebody else.

I don’t think I have enough pity to keep watching the show past a second episode, though. If I want to watch a series about people with strange new powers in a real-life setting, I’ll watch “The 4400” or “Smallville.” If I want to watch a series about a bunch of disparate people brought together by unnatural circumstances, I’ll keep watching “Lost.” Or maybe I’ll just read a real comic book.

Feels Like Home

Appearing One Night Only at Candlestick Leaving your family to fend for themselves during a major illness sucks. Waiting in line 45 minutes just to get through airport security sucks. A two-hour layover at Washington Dulles sucks. An hour-long flight delay sucks. Waiting 30 minutes for your baggage only to find that it’d arrived on an earlier flight and had been sitting in the overflow area the whole time sucks. But finally getting back home is awesome.

I had three months’ worth of luggage and was feeling wacky, so I decided to take a cab back from the airport. The driver was silent except for saying that the door didn’t work so I had to get in from the other side. The entire drive he listened to crappy house music on the stereo and bobbed his head to the beat like a rooster, all the while swerving from lane to lane and cutting people off.

As soon as we got on 101 and I saw the sign for Monster Park, I knew I was finally home. A while ago I voted for that pointless referendum to keep it named Candlestick, but there’s something inexplicably cool about seeing a freeway sign for Monster Park.

Even though I know it’s named after a ridiculous company that’s made a fortune selling overpriced pieces of wire, and that there’s years of history attached to the name Candlestick, nothing says “home” like driving up the freeway and getting an image of Godzilla and King Ghidra duking it out on island across the bay.

To the Moon!

Not only is the honeymoon over, but I think a trial separation is in order. The fan on my MacBook Pro is making grinding and clicking noises that get gradually louder, culminating in an ear-splitting crescendo about 20 minutes after boot-up.

The thing has run ungodly hot ever since I got it, but what with all the reports of Apple logos burned into users’ thighs, I just assumed that was standard operating procedure for the MacBook. Now I have to wonder, Fox News-style, Could Improper Ventilation Be Putting My Data at Risk?

Now I’ve got to limit my computer access to 5 or 10 minutes at a stretch until I can get the thing back to California and back everything up. Then take it to the Apple Store and have one of their geniuses inflict their attitude on me.

Apple sucks.

Maybe I should get a new iMac.

A Funny Thing Happened in my Pants

I finally started to dig through all the shaky video I took at Disney World, finally taking advantage of all the iMovie and iDVD and iWhateverElse I’ve been paying for with every OS X update.

It’s reasonably fun, but it sure takes a hell of a lot of time. And I’ve learned it’s crucial to save early and save often — the files are so huge it took 30-45 minutes just to make a back-up, and one crash of iMovie wiped out everything.

I started with the video I took of the Team Possible game at Epcot. I somehow managed to make it seem a lot more dull than it really was — I suppose I’d gotten numb to all the sights around Epcot by that time, so I ended up just videotaping the phone’s screen. You didn’t spend as much time staring at the screen in the real game, I swear.

Another funny thing: when I was looking through the video, right at a really cool point in the game, it cuts to an extended shot of my stomach. Then it cuts to the inside of my pants pocket. For like 10 minutes. I’d managed to get the record/don’t record mixed up, and missed a big chunk of the game. I could say that I finally know what it’s like to be in my pocket when I’m walking around, but I don’t know that that’s such a good thing.

Anyway, here are the videos I’ve put up so far. I can put up the others if anyone’s interested.

Prologue: Head to Canada, get your Kimmunicator, watch the briefing video.
UK Briefing: Head to the UK and find your secret contact in the window of the Toy Soldier store.
UK Plans Phone Booth: Receive a mysterious call from the Ministry of Meterology, who’ll help you’ll find the secret plans to Duff Killigan’s weather machine.
France Hideout Gargoyle: Plant a tiny bug on the gargoyle inside the lobby of the cinema in France, use it to eavesdrop on Senor Senior, Sr. and Senor Senior, Jr.
Finale: Final showdown with Dr. Drakken.

The Honeymoon’s Over

Bleh. I remember when a new announcement from Apple would have me visibly excited and reaching for my wallet.

I even waited around today for Pacific Time to catch up so I could see what all the hoopla was about. And the experience was like when you have to go see that distant cousin who’s a straight C+/B- average student perform in her school production of Singin’ in the Rain and the kids do a passable job, and the parents are genuinely enthused about it, but you’re just sitting there thinking you’ve got the DVD of Singin’ in the Rain at home and they do a much better job and you’d be better off not wasting your time watching a half-rate production of it.

The original iPod nano was just bad-ass. I never got one for myself because even I couldn’t rationalize it, but I was sorely tempted. And Apple had finally gotten their whole line from desktops to laptops to MP3 players all consistent and looking classy. The new ones are ugly aluminum all tarted up in iPod mini colors.

The “real” iPod has been improved, supposedly, but nothing groundbreaking going on there. It’s still just an MP3 player, and it’s still way inadequate for watching video.

And the whole new “iTV” thing; what’s up with that? A video server that apparently only connects to iTunes running on a different machine. So you can pay $15 and wait 30-45 minutes to download High School Musical in a format only playable via iTunes, and stream it at 640×480 resolution with plenty of compression artifacts visible on your living room TV.

Whee.

iTunes has been genuinely improved. In particular:

The really cool freeware app CoverFlow got bought by Apple and incorporated into iTunes. It’s one of the coolest Mac-only apps out there, but never made sense as a separate app, and Apple integrated it just about perfectly.
iTunes will download cover art for you, another thing that there’ve been about a billion freeware apps written to do. I haven’t had a lot of luck with it so far, but I assume it works.
You can finally back up your library to disc right from iTunes. Even better, you can choose to backup only what you’ve bought from the iTunes (no longer Music) Store, and you can do incremental backups.
It’s got an album cover/song list hybrid view that makes a lot more sense for browsing.
Reportedly, it’s a lot better at handling iPod synching, but I haven’t yet tried it.

On the downside, it’s got the “new look” that Apple’s going towards with Leopard, and it’s all muted and ugly as sin. Or, ugly as the new iPod nano.

They’re going to get my money with the new Leopard point release, but I’ve got to say I’m not that impressed with that, either. Nice try, Steve. Wake me up when you come out with the iPod phone.

Hoist up the John B sails

I finally got back to Georgia from Orlando on Friday night. Even after a month and a half in Orlando and being very ready to leave, it still ended kind of abruptly. It would’ve even been nice to have one more day there as a non-working guest, instead of just one minute being at Epcot and then the next being at the decidedly non-magical Orlando airport.

For the past week or so, I’ve had “Sloop John B” going through my head non-stop from the moment I wake up. And I’m sure that as soon as I get back to San Francisco, it’ll seem like Georgia went by in a blur, and I’ll go back to missing my family, and wishing that I could help out more around here.

But dammit, I want to go home.

It’s been over two months now; I think I’m entitled to sleep in my own bed. I always imagined I’d make a great World Traveler, but I think to do that, you have to be able to stay away from home for more than a few weeks without panicking.

I’m headed back to SF this Sunday. Technically, this would be a perfect opportunity to fulfill my plan to drive cross country — I had a one-way ticket out here, no job waiting for me back home, and some extra cash from having other people pay for my meals for the past two months. But driving from Atlanta to SF would take at least a week to do it right, and as I’ve mentioned, I want to go home.

Our President Has Stones

Say what you will about George W Bush, the guy’s got balls. After invoking the memory of the brave dead, he described our enemies:

We have learned that they are evil and kill without mercy, but not without purpose. We have learned that they form a global network of extremists who are driven by a perverted vision of Islam, a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance, and despises all dissent.

Mixed in with the frequent Fox News-like warnings of enemies “determined to bring death and suffering into our homes,” he has the stones to mention “tolerance” and “moderation” so many times you’d think it was the Democratic National Convention.

Even though his administration and its policy of Rule By Fear has emboldened the extremists driven by their own perverted vision of Christianity. The ones who have been working around the clock since September 2001 to turn “tolerance” and “moderation” into dirty words. Words that are spit out as insults, terms almost as profane and stomach-turning as “liberal.”

The key is moderation, we learn. You can’t achieve a real totalitarian ideology that despises all dissent by flying planes into buildings. You have to work at it over time. Chip away at civil liberties. Turn your citizens against each other. Make sure there are plenty of groups left within the populace to foment fear and distrust — if Muslims aren’t available, there’s always the homos and atheists and liberals.

And make absolutely certain there’s always a nebulous enemy out there in case anyone has the temerity to point out that you’re destroying your country’s scientific development and notions of personal privacy. Just point at the Middle East, shout “Booga Booga! Bin Laden! Homeland Security!” and you’ve turned a concerned citizen into an Unpatriotic Enemy of Freedom.

Even after building his speech on the bodies of the victims of the World Trade Center attack, he has the nerve to admit that Hussein had no direct connection to 9/11 but still insists that the invasion was essential to keeping al Qaeda at bay.

So the question is whether it actually takes balls to go on national television and lie to your constituency, or whether it’s just evil.

Wet

I got this weekend off, so I’m cramming into two days all the stuff I imagined I’d be doing when I first heard I was going to be spending a month at Disney World.

Even though I’ve been to Disney World more times than a normal person would admit to, I still see something new every trip. This time (as a guest, anyway), it’s been the water parks. Today I started at Typhoon Lagoon and found my new hands-down favorite thing to do in the entire resort. It’s called Castaway Creek, and it’s a river that runs around the entire park with various places you can get in or out. You get on one of the inner tubes and let the current take you gradually around the entire length of the river, under bridges, past waterfalls, through caves, and into a misty rain forest area.

It’s awesome. From now on, whenever anyone asks what I’d rather be doing, my answer is “lying and floating.” I intentionally left my watch and cell phone back at the hotel, but I estimate that an entire circuit around the river takes thirty minutes, and I must’ve gone around two and a half times at least.

I also rode the new “Crush’n Gusher” water coaster they’ve installed, and it was fun enough but no big deal. I would’ve hit the other slides and then taken another couple of hours in the river, but they closed the park on account of approaching thunderstorms.

The thunderstorms finally hit once I was on Big Thunder Mountain at the Magic Kingdom. (I’d stopped by Epcot and rode Mission: Space, and it was every bit as headache-inducing and uncomfortable and anti-climactic as I’d remembered). The rain washed out any hope of riding anything else, since it drove all the people into the ride queues and I didn’t feel like waiting, but it cleared up long enough for the fireworks. All totaled it was a pretty good day. Still not as fun as going to the parks with other people, but there’s something to be said for doing whatever you feel like doing on your own schedule without having to wait (or make them wait for you to finish smoking).

Tomorrow I’m planning on riding Expedition Everest again, then heading to the other water park Blizzard Beach. At the moment, I’ve got the kind of tired that comes only after a day filled with age-inappropriate activities, so I’m going to dream about fireworks and inner tubes and Gary Sinise spinning me at 4Gs.

You Still Know What I Did Last Summer

The Orlando Sentinel put up a video covering the Team Possible game at Epcot, and it came out pretty good. You can watch it here (assuming you’re running Windows; I can’t figure out how to get it to play in Safari).

The video has a lot of interviews with the VP of Imagineering R&D talking about the game, interspersed with shots of kids playing it and of several of the effects in action. I’m still planning on going through the game with a video camera sometime next week, but I doubt I’ll do as good a job capturing the effects as the professionals did.

Tropical Depression

When I’ve been to Disney World before, the trips have never been quite long enough, and I’ve wondered how long it would take for me to get tired of all of it. It turns out the answer is two and a half weeks.

Entering week three here, I can say that this is the most surreal business trip I’ve ever been on. Last week I took off a couple of hours in the middle of the day to get my hair cut. That involved taking a monorail and boat ride to the Magic Kingdom, going to the barber shop on Main Street to find a long line of little girls waiting to get their hair done up like princesses, riding Pirates of the Caribbean until the crowds died down, then having two children stare directly at me the entire time I had my own hair cut. (I opted out of the princess glitter or colored hair gel).

Today as I was eating lunch, a fife and drum corps marched through the restaurant. Most days during my lunch break I stroll around to see lute players or taiko drummers or belly dancers. Breakfast meetings are interrupted by Minnie Mouse or Goofy coming out of nowhere and patting you on the shoulder. I’ve picked up a bad cookie-sandwich-a-day ice cream habit, and I’ve got the gut to show for it.

Yesterday I got off work a little early to come back to the hotel and do laundry. On the way in, I saw the hotel’s waterslide, which I’ve seen for years but never had the guts to try (I’m not that strong a swimmer — I wasn’t afraid of drowning, just of looking like a total idiot flaling around in a kiddie pool). So I went and tried it, and it was a blast. And I fell asleep as soon as I got back to the room, then ended up having to stay up until 2 AM to get all my laundry done. (With temperatures and humidity in the high 90s, I’m going through laundry really quickly).

I get the feeling the entire remainder of the trip is going to be like that — struggling to get the most mundane tasks done, being pulled in opposite directions by my innate impulse to always get my life into the most boring routine possible versus my brain’s built-in short-circuit that keeps freaking out that I’m in a theme park and not riding more stuff. The end result is that all the people on vacation are the normal ones, and I’m some alien floating through them trapped halfway in some dimensional rift.

Hurricane Ernesto is supposed to come through tomorrow, and try as I might I can’t seem to work it into a metaphor. I’m homesick and desperately want to sleep in my own bed and see my friends and eat some non-theme-park-or-fast-food, but that doesn’t quite count as “depression.” And I am wondering exactly what I’m going to do when this project finishes in a couple of weeks, but I can’t say that’s “a storm brewing” or anything that dramatic. I guess my mood is hitting central Florida and fizzling out into general surliness.

I put up pictures from the second half of the game, that’s pretty much it except for the finale and prologue. Be forewarned that if you were planning on coming to Disney World and playing the game, you shouldn’t look at the pictures, because they give away the whole thing.

Last week, a former coworker from LucasArts came down with his girlfriend to visit the other programmer on this project, and they all invited me to tag along to stuff after work. It was a lot of fun; it makes all the difference going to the parks with people who just seem to get why Disney is cool. You can read about their trip and see a lot of great pictures of the Polynesian Resort on her blog.

And although I’m definitely on the tail end of this trip, there’s still some stuff here I want to try. I haven’t been to either of the water parks yet, and I’m hoping to get some time in before I go. My kiddie pool water slide experience has given me false courage to go to a water park without fear of looking like a total spaz. Plus, I’ve got a savage farmer’s tan going on, and I really want to even it out.

And someday further out, I want to save up enough money to come back and stay at the Polynesian. I’d dropped by before but never appreciated it; now I see that it’s as if they took Disneyland’s Tiki Room and built a huge hotel out of it. It’s still got just enough of the early-70s vibe around it, too, with the Atari 2600-esque colored stripes around the wooden roof. Also, the pool has a volcano water slide. The place ain’t cheap, but ever since I started going to Disney World 35 years ago, I would look at the Contemporary or the Polynesian and say, “someday we’re going to have enough money to stay there.”

You Know What I Did Last Summer

It looks like it’s finally safe to talk about what I’ve been working on for the past year. (With the reminder that this is a personal blog and neither I nor this website is a representative of the Disney company. I don’t speak for them, they don’t speak for me, etc.)

It’s a playtest for an adventure game in Epcot’s World Showcase based on the Kim Possible series, using wireless devices to give you the next clue to solve your mission. This Disney fan site has a description of the game with pictures (and yes, the creepy guy standing in front of the Kim Possible logo is yours truly). I’ve taken my own pictures of the first half of the game; the next half will come whenever I get a chance to play through it as a guest again.

As a fan of the Disney parks (and, yes, of the Kim Possible show), I think it’s just a brilliant idea, and I was sold as soon as I first heard the concept. The playtest is going on for the next two and a half weeks, and the results are still being analyzed by all the different divisions of the company. But on a personal note, I think it turned out pretty cool, the work that the guys at Imagineering R&D put into it is amazing, and it’s one of the two projects I’m proudest to have worked on.

The coolest is seeing kids around the park playing it and getting excited about it. And the family who was leaving the finale, and the dad came back upstairs to give the whole team the thumbs-up sign. Working in “normal” videogames, you never get that kind of instant feedback, and wherever the project goes after the playtest ends, it’s just cool seeing something in the park and working and seeing people enjoy it.