BLOG by zaiss

The number of ads and other links in my GMail seems to be growing at a daily rate, but occasionally the random articles it pulls out of the ether are pretty entertaining, including this one.

Apparently, someone made an X-Box controller out of chocolate (does it work? Probably not for long-term use, as may be common for first-person shooter games… I know my palms get sweaty, they’d melt the chocolate). Well, this article details the folks at a European branch of Microsoft trying to make an X-Box console out of chocolate. Functional even.

Would you imagine a chocolate X-Box costing more or less than it’s metal counterpart? Chocolate is probably cheaper than standard X-Box parts, but does that much detail work bump up the price? While I think the venture is interesting, I could see myself slowly nibbling away at the X-Box over time (just one more bite… it won’t hurt anything…) until eventually it didn’t work anymore. Then it really would be a doorstop.

When making my portfolio, people cautioned me against using green because it’s really easy to pick gross colors in the green color palette. I went with green anyway, mostly because everyon else’s portfolio used a different color.

Well, I was hunting around on the web today, and I found a website that used green in, as Sandi would put it, a pukey way. Guaranty Bank uses green exclusively for their color palette… but there are different greens, and there’s lots of green. I guess the lesson here would be, if you use a “pukey” color in your design, to use it sparingly. Or avoid it all together, I suppose… but that would certainly be more boring.

Last week, I was approached about doing vocals for a song in the MHCI gig at the SCS Day talent show. The song was one I hadn’t been familiar with - Rage Against the Machine’s Bombtrack (lyrics here).

Now the song is just fine as it is, but I agreed with the other MHCI performers that I could probably pull it off better if I related a little more to the lyrics. So I decided to change them up a little bit, with Sarah’s help – and can I just say that two preppy white people modifying RatM lyrics is a pretty hilarious process…

Through much trial and error, we did manage to come up with some cool new lyrics. I think the effort paid off in the end. As for the performance, there was a small audio hiccup, but we came out ok in the end. I guess I’m a regular Zack de la Rocha. (”Or is it Sam de la Rocha?” Very funny. I know someone out there’s thinking that. Well, here’s what I have to say to that.)

[Edit on 2/23] Photos have been posted. Be sure to check out the comments for two good shots that KC took. Also, here’s another good one of me…

I just finished watching the movie The Island, and basically, I couldn’t roll with it. I can normally suspend belief pretty well with movies, but I couldn’t buy that an organism who had been alive for less than 5 years and had the mental capacity of an 13 year old or less could pull off everything that happened in that movie.

The worst part, though, was the overt Microsoft product placement. Usually I can look past this, but I was disturbed by the fact that the game used to keep the clones complacent (since the existence of clones with emotions was illegal in this movie) had X-Box written all over it! I can imagine that pitch. “Hey Microsoft! How’d you like to donate some X-Box equipment to help prevent these clones from becoming self-aware, and ensure that our organization continues to make its illegal profit? Good deal, huh!”

So as I watched the movie, I couldn’t help but think, “This horrible future reality is brought to you by Microsoft. ‘Where do you want to go today?’ If you’re a clone and you said, ‘outside’ - we’re sorry, that’s not allowed. Why don’t you play X-Box instead?” I’m so excited to start working there so I can usher in this awful future with all due haste.

Basecamp, a project management tool, has been around for a little over two years now; however, it seems like it recently received a spike in popularity (at least that’s my view, considering two different projects I’m working on joined up in the same week). It sounds like its the new gold standard in project management tools; but despite all the buzz, I haven’t been too impressed.

One of the big selling points for Basecamp is the fact that you can manage multiple projects at once. In my work at LotterShelly, I got the fun task of setting this up (since they have multiple projects going on at once). How long do you think it should take to create 20 different projects (not writing anything about them, just adding a project to the group of projects). 5 minutes? Maybe 10? It took me 30 minutes, and I was actually trying to do the task quickly.

Currently adding a project is a 5-step process that takes place over 4 screens. The path of my mouse looks something like this…

1. Click “Manage Projects.”
2. Click “Add New Project.”
3. Type the name of the project.
4. Click “Submit.” (It’s below the fold, represented by the dotted line.)
5. Click “Dashboard” to get back to the main page.

37signals, the company that made Basecamp, followed Nielsen’s Heuristics closely… especially Consistency & Standards. Each of the four screens in the process looks exactly the same, making it very tough to tell which direction my mouse had to travel on a particular screen. I felt pretty stupid getting lost so frequently in a simple task, and suddenly this simple task was taking a lot of time.

Adding insult to my new carpal tunnel injury, it appears that Basecamp only lists the first 30 or so characters of each project. The trouble - we listed our projects as “Client - Project”, so any 30-character-long clients with multiple projects that all looked like “Client - … ” in the Project List. Tough to tell those apart, yeah? So… I got to edit them all. Again. Repeat the process listed above. Another 30 minutes down the drain.

Here’s how Mac handles this same problem with its User Management bit in System Preferences:

It seems like this would be the ideal way to manage numerous similar elements… but I’m not the one making these decisions. Oh well.

If you explore my links in the right column, you may have stumbled upon Vince’s blog that he kept for the first few months he lived in Okinawa. I caught up with him last night, and apparently he’s been pretty busy doing some game design.

I recently wrote about a hopscotch game that I made in one week. In one week, Vince made Anna. I played through it last night, and I think it’s a pretty awesome game (a little short, but did I mention that he did this entire process in one week?).

My favorite part - the Towers of Hanoi puzzle (link requires Java). Back in the days of 220 (that was our room number in Scott Hall), we had a Towers of Hanoi model and we would practice it. So I flew through that puzzle super quick… but… the average gamer is probably not like me.

Vince talks up the game here, and it’s also showcased on AGS, where it has been nominated for a handful of awards, including best non-player character, Anna (which I find impressive considering that’s based entirely on Vince’s clever dialog).

I don’t know how it works on a Mac, but regardless, you should definitely check the game out. And give Vince applause when you love it!

Oh, the title… it’s a reference to an exercise on the first day of my Game Design class. The professor asked how many of us were game designers, and when only two people raised their hands, he said we needed to think positively. The interchange went like this (with cuing from the instructor’s powerpoint):

So yeah. Vince IS a GAME DESIGNER. Booya.

[Edit on March 12]

I saw Vince online today and wished him a Happy Birthday, a bit early. He apparently won the award for Best Documentation for Anna! It is pretty kick ass, honestly. Also - he said it works on Macs, just with a few problems. So Mac users… try it out!

My parents are closing on a new house in the next week or so, and I’ve never been more excited to get back to Omaha. I didn’t know this growing up, but apparently Hummel Park (the area in Omaha where the house is) is said to be pretty haunted. My dad did some hunting and found a couple pages that talked about it.

The thing I most want to try is the Morphing Stairs, talked about briefly on this PRISM page with a personal account given on ghosts.org. How intriguing! Any Omahans willing to go exploring with me next time I’m in town? For that matter, any Pittsburghers wanna road trip to Omaha sometime?

Apparently everyone on my floor has trouble with pests besides me, because I got what must have been my sixth note under my door this morning telling me that management will be sending someone in to spray for pests in my apartment. They’re stepping it up this time though. In this note, as if they were asking me to take a couple minutes to floss tonight, they asked me to:

1. Remove all items from kitchen drawers and cabinets.
2. Clear everything off of the floor of my closets.
3. Move everything away from the floorboards in my apartment.

Funny thing - that sort of comprises 90% of the things that I own. So here’s the tricky part… where do I put all this stuff, if pretty much every space in my apartment is off limits? And how do they think this wouldn’t be imposing? I don’t know if you’ve seen the size of my apartment, but there’s not exactly a lot of room to put everything in the middle of my apartment. At least they gave me a week to prepare, but still… surely I have better things to do. Plus, it’s not like it’s my fault that there’s a pest problem in the first place.