Merry Christmas, and good riddance to 2009

Merry Christmas all. I hope that this has been a good year for you. Unfortunately, 2009 has not really been a good year for a lot of people. Professionally, its been pretty good for me. Halo 3: ODST did really well, the Bungie Store is finally back, Reach is well underway, etc. Other events, however, have made this a generally a shitty year. First, my wife gets laid off from Expedia in some mass layoffs they did. This causes us to have to drop down to one car, which was at times irritating. Then we went through a series of Jarrah getting "almost hired" for various jobs, only to find out the company went with an internal person so they didn't have to add new headcount. Then one of our Great Danes becomes very ill, and after a harrowing night in the vet hospital, a few days of recovery, and a huge vet bill, he's okay. Of course, now he has a $150/month injection to keep him from getting sick again.

Things just sucked more after that - my paternal Grandfather died - and while he had been sick for a while, I wasn't able to get back east to the funeral, which really sucked. And then in October, my maternal Grandmother died - at least I was able to go to that funeral.

Finally in November things began looking up. Jarrah got hired at a great company, I got a new car. Jarrah just stabled her new horse that she got as a gift. After a nice end of year vacation, we'll hit 2010 ready for a good year. This will, with a bit of luck, include a new house for me and my family.

Hopefully everyone has a better year than 2009.

Support a Good Cause

My wife regularly volunteers with the Phoenix Rising Horse Sanctuary in my area. They're doing a big fundraiser dinner / charity auction this year, so if you're looking for a good cause, please contribute.

Of particular note is a few donated items to the auction that are Halo related, including a couple of ODST and Reach posters that have been signed by the team, and a few copies of ODST and some other games I had lying around.

So, check out the web site, and we thank you for anything you can give.

On a lighter note...

Prepare to drop, ODST is coming. I won't be at the EMP for the launch event, though. Have to be at the office watching things peak - if anything is going to go wrong, it would happen on launch day. Have to be prepared, and all that.

Hope you all have fun. Just as a warning to all of you - take mass transit to get there. There is a Pearl Jam concert that night at Key Arena - parking and traffic will suck in the vicinity of Seattle Center. Do yourself a favor and take a bus or a taxi or a monorail (lol) or light rail to get there.

Healthcare

Hmm, been a while since I talked about anything really substantial. Oh, yeah, by the way, my dog is fine now, back to normal weight and activity - thanks for all the kind words.

So, anyway, healthcare. I was reading this opinion piece that was basically a warning about how the way healthcare is being approached is all wrong, and found myself nodding to it. Now, as I'm sure that some of you have noticed reading this, my views tend to lean a little liberal, but I'm generally part of that moderate group that politicians try and get. I've voted Democratic, I've voted Republican. Please bear that in mind before trying to dismiss my views as partisan bullshit, because they're not.

Here we go - all the healthcare proposals are currently just political theater that are poor attempts to solve symptoms, rather than really fix anything. They live in a world where they can't push the status quo too much or there won't be any support. As such, if any of them pass, very little would change for the vast majority of us. And while I'm all for helping out those who can't pay for insurance, there are real problems with the rest of the system for those of us who have insurance. Those problems, if not fixed, promise to be even worse if we also have to help pay for those who don't have insurance (which we do now anyway).

The problem, to me, can be easily defined as one of competition. Make insurance companies compete like a regular company does - regulate them at a national level, rather than by state. Remove their antitrust protection. Have some consumer agency rate each available plan offering (kind of like your credit rating), so consumers can easily compare them in terms of coverage and pricing. We also should probably provide a listing of the minimum standard of coverage, and require everybody to have that at least. Give benefits to employers who go above the minimum.

Maybe divide up the people who can't afford it into 4 or 5 regions, and have the companies compete every few years to be the one serving insurance to that region's government-provided healthcare. Anybody else can buy into the "region" plan that the government negotiated for them, even if it is just for secondary insurance to cover what their primary doesn't, or if they prefer it over their employer's plan.

Sure, light on details, I know. But here's the point. This kind of system isn't socialist at all. It has our established insurance providers compete for customers in an open market. That kind of approach would take time to change things. But the key is push the status quo out. Once that happens, the businesses evolve or die in the new marketplace, and eventually, the new ways to make money become the status quo. Sure, that way may have its own problems, but if we can set it up properly in the beginning, maybe we can make it so those problems are ones where we spend more on heathcare than anybody else, while getting less for our dollar. This happened when we deregulated airlines, and the phone system, and broke up standard oil. Sure, not all of the changes from that were good - but change breeds innovation, and with the proper hand, it might be the ticket here.

I'm always a fan of using the negatives of something to do your work. Using the massive population of forum posters on bungie.net to do the work of finding spam (while also causing it)? Check. Using capitalism and competition to fix a status quo that stakeholders don't want to change? Yes please.

Asher Update

Asher is finally starting to be his old self again. He may have lost a lot of weight (he's 115 lbs now, he should be 150 lbs) - but he's been eating a bunch, and we're feeding him 4-6 meals a day of high-fat content stuff to get him back up.

The vets diagnosed him with Addison's Disease - an adrenal gland disorder that causes the gland to not produce a very important chemical that can have all sorts of bad side affects - renal failure being a particularly bad one. They couldn't figure it out until they fixed his kidneys, luckily, there appears to be no permanent damage and he pulled around after three days in the ICU.

Now, he has to get a special injection once every 25 days (more or less) that compensates for his gland disorder. $150 a bottle, less than 2 doses per bottle. I figure it is better than putting him down, especially because he's so young.

It is good to have my favorite dog back. Now, he just has to eat to get his weight back up.

Asher is very ill

The last 24 hours or so have sucked. One of my Great Danes, Asher (the younger male), has been showing signs of illness, and he's lately turned for the worse. He became very lethargic, stopped eating, and was dehydrated. A visit to our vet resulted in a trip to the local emergency vet care clinic and ICU, because blood tests showed his kidneys were having difficulty and he was severely dehydrated, and also had lost about 10 pounds in the last 3 weeks.

The ICU people have him on IVs, but he didn't really respond overnight like they initially thought if it was the neurological disorder my vet originally thought it could be. That left three options - infection, toxin, or cancer. Toxin was unlikely given that the other dogs are fine and are in the same area as him. So, they just did an ultrasound to check out his abodmen. Luckily, no signs of cancer, and the kidneys appear outwardly healthly.

That means it is probably an infection. Unfortunately, finding out which one is not easy. They already have him on hardcore antibiotics, but kidneys take time to recover, and the most likely infection takes about 10 days for confirmation (my vet already sent out the test because that was her alternate diagnosis in the event that it wasn't a neurological disorder that it initially appeared to be). In the meantime, the ICU is trying to get his kidneys propped up. He's eating and drinking again, so that's good. But it will be 24 to 36 hours before we know if the antibiotics and IV fluids help his kidneys. If we can get past that, they can give him targeted treatments once they know exactly what infection it is, but it won't matter unless his kidneys start working again.

So, I'm better than I was an hour ago, when cancer was a real possibility. Now, though, we're just waiting. We'll probably be visiting him later today. This seems a lot for a dog, but this dog we've raised since just a puppy, and he's only 2 and a half years old. He's such a good dog too, gentle, kind. I'm just kind of numb right now.

In addition to all that, paying for this care is expensive. So far, we've not reached the point where we have to say "that's all we can do, he's a dog, and we can't spend all our limited resources on him". But I dread having to make that decision... I mean, it would have oddly been easy if they had found he had cancer. Asher would have had little hope for meaningful recovery, and it would have been a mercy to stop there. But now, we don't even know what kind of infection it is - and I'm not willing to to say "stop" when treating him for 36 hours could easily fix him as good as new, despite the significant expense.

This, of course, is just adding to the stress my wife has over not having a job right now. She's holding together remarkably well, though. I'm trying as best I can to be a source of strength for her. Sometimes, I worry I'll give in to the worry, but I don't have that luxury when she needs me.

Please keep us and Asher in your prayers. He's such a good dog, no, the best dog, he deserves a long and happy life.

Survivalists think my wife is a hippie

Apparently, so random survivalists think my wife is a hippie. I'd explain, but my wife does it so much better.

Oh, and for the record, we were just fine when that happened. But really, if you knew her... you'd understand why that thread is so hilarious. For example - she really wants a gun (or a pink taser), but I won't let her get one. The irony here is pretty high.

Innovation without Imitation is a waste of time

If you've ever used the term "innovation", you really should watch this. It is Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs talking about what's he's learned.

The best line in there is the title of the entry. Think about it for a bit. The best innovations are things that leverage imitiation to its fullest - learning from the past efforts, their mistakes as well as trimumphs. His example is good - iPhones may be cool, but they don't work without the knowledge of touch screens, programming, circuit boards, materials, mass production, etc.

More close to home - a lot of people who hate on Halo like to say it "has been done before". Sure, it has a few neat ideas, the Internet goes, but mostly just cribs from PC shooters. Congratulations, you just describe almost every game ever made, or everything ever made that's any good. Innovation, with imitation from those who came before. That's not a bad thing... if anything, that's just good sense. Never let common sense stand in the way of a good troll, though. That ruins the fun.

Thanks to my wife for pointing this video out to me.

My Wife Produces!

Times are tough. You know they're tough when you're doing everything right, and you lose your job anyway because your company fucks up or decides to think short term shareholder gain. No, not me - I'm talking about my beautiful wife. Jarrah got laid off in February from Expedia in their big raid against their in-house talent. Slash and burn. Lots of good people lost their jobs there.

So now, she's been looking for a job. She's got a great resume (she's a producer/project manager), lots of good experience on big time projects, etc... but the problem is that people are in hiring freezes everywhere. That is crazy frustrating to me, and I'm not even the one looking for a job, so I can only imagine what she feels like.

But let me tell you, she handles it like a champ. She's sending resumes out, getting callbacks, taking classes toward new certifications in stuff that sound difficult based on their acronyms... it really is just a matter of time. To all the companies out there in the Seattle area looking for producers, you're missing out without her. Act fast before this offer ends!

One day I hope to be fabulously wealthy so she doesn't have to work at all. So, before my "lottery retirement plan" (hehehe) kicks in, be sure to snap her up! A producer like her is not a common thing, so don't let her amazing abilities go to waste!

World of Warcraft is Broken?

In an effort to keep making regular posts to make this place somewhat interesting, and because I have nowhere else to discuss this, we're going to talk about World of Warcraft. I know, I know. Too bad.

Up until recently, I had been a long time subscriber, running around with my single character. I don't play alts, I played one character, doing the solo content, some dungeons, and even a raid or two more recently. I didn't try and min/max my character, I didn't pick the best spec, I picked my spec for fun and flavor: I've been a demonology warlock in WoW since before the first class revision, so I've seen the lowest of the low and the best of that class. And it was fun, even when I hit max level and didn't really raid, because of the social component, and because there were enough "extra" things to do that it made a great default game when I had nothing else to do.

I say "until recently" because a month ago, I cancelled my subscription. I'll probably resubscribe when the next expansion comes out, but I couldn't really play the game anymore. It wasn't because I was out of things to do... patch 3.1 was about come, and despite not really raiding, I could always do some dailies and professions and whatever.

The problem I hit was I couldn't ignore how broken the end game was for WoW now. You see, Blizzard's idea of the endgame is "raid, and when you're finished, farm, grind, and roll an alt while you wait for us to add more content." Think about that for a minute. You invest all this time into building a character, after you manage to go through the tremendous effort to go through whatever the current "final raid" is, you either just keep running the same area over and over again, grind some repeatable quests, or start a new character. You're expected to run in place or start everything over.

That's bullshit. Why do I have to wait for Blizzard to make content? There is no possible way they can keep creating content at a pace that will satisfy their users. They know, and I know it. So why do they keep pretending like that problem doesn't exist (yeah, I know, millions of subscribers, but this is a philosophical discussion)?

This is where they need to invest in some user generated content. And I'm not talking world-building, necessarily - you don't need something like City of Heroes' mission architect. Look at EVE Online - they created a sandbox, and the players basically call the shots. Other games are adding the concept of exploration, where players travel to areas that are somewhat "randomly" generated, and can do things there, then come back with something to show for it. See Star Trek Online's exploration model and how they're trying to make sure the game always has something over the horizon for you.

The point here that Warcraft is the biggest, most well funded MMO. Why are they still going with a "add content onto the end" model? I mean, having that stuff is all well and good, but they need something that's a little more self-sustaining. With their player size, I don't understand why they're not doing more to allow players to affect the world.

A tall order, I know. But they really need to break this "boom bust" cycle WoW seems to have with the lull between patches of content. This is especially true if they're making the content more accessible. If it is easier to get to all the content, that means more players are going to run out of stuff to do sooner.

Final Fantasy XII (no, not XIII)

So, a few videos of the demo for Final Fantasy XIII popped up on YouTube. Still not really enough info for me to comment on it, although it did bring back horrible memories of playing FFXII.

You see, I'm a fan of jRPGs in general. I recently finished up the main quest of Star Ocean 4 and, despite the horrible crash bug and atrocious voice acting/dialogue, enjoyed it quite a lot. This was mainly due to the incredibly fun battle system. Basically, you control one character (you can switch instantly), others are AI controlled. The game has combos, blindsiding, position matters, etc. It also has all these little "battle trophies" for doing things like reaching thresholds in damage, consecutive hits, and more. Great fun, even on non-bosses. And since the enemies are visible all the time, you can choose your battles (although in practice you'll want to engage every one).

Now, I've played every Final Fantasy except the MMO. I've liked all of them, except XII. This bothered me, because not only was everybody telling me how awesome this game is (check its metacritic score), but it had obviously high production values, decent localization, and was very generally well polished all around. Plus it was Final Fantasy, right?

At first, I thought my dislike was for the plot and characters. I didn't really feel invested in what the characters were fighting for, and didn't care for the characters themselves. This probably was because Vaan (the young thief you primarily see the world through) was just a lame character. He's a side character masquerading as a main character. But hey, maybe that's just me, it happens. Besides, a lot jRPGs have dumb plots or really irritating characters.

Of course, that's the point. If it were just the characters and plot, I'd normally just play through. Final Fantasy VIII had a terrible plot and the main character was a whiny emo asshole. Seriously, Squall was kind of a dick. But the battle system was engaging enough, and the rest of characters didn't suck as bad as Squall, and the game held up much better... except the entire ending.

I must therefore place my blame for not liking FFXII on the battle system. Here is a game that recognized that non-boss ("trash") mobs can be boring to fight. Instead of fixing it so that these mobs are fun to fight, they created a system to automate these fights. Now, there is nothing wrong with making a way to better control AI controlled party members. Star Ocean 4 could have benefitted from that. But Star Ocean 4's combat is fun. Their effort obviously was put into the combat system. FFXII had this complex Gambit system that could be interesting, then they locked most of it away into slow paced skill grid and completely forgot that their battles are still boring! In order to have any fun at all, you have to powerlevel and open up your skills so you can access the more advanced skills/gambits. This made the game feel just glacial in its pace - like a bad MMO without other players.

With FFXIII on the way, it appears that they're not keeping any of that system. Apparently they've decided to use the old Active Time Battle system, but make the time gauge in that the limiting resource of gameplay, rather than magic points or skill points, etc. I hope there are other things beyond that. But even if there isn't, it already looks more interesting than the combat FFXII presented me.

Hopefully the plot is a little more fantastical and less political intrigue.

We Didn't Start the Flame War - CollegeHumor Video

This particular video on collegehumor.com should be sent to anyone new to Internet as an introduction.

Also, I think I'll start sending this to people who ask me what dealing with the Bungie.net forums is like sometimes.

Michael Phelps vs Kellogg

Hit the title link for a good dose of perspective about Michael Phelps and his extra-curricular activities, courtesy of Saturday Night Live.

What the hell is wrong with you, California?

Anybody care to explain to me why two people getting marriage is such a big deal? Hit the think for someone far more well spoken than me ask the question better.

Let's review:

If you don't approve of gay marriage, don't have one.
If you don't approve of sex before marriage, don't do it.
If you don't approve of abortion, don't get one.
If you don't approve of violence or sex in entertainment, don't buy it.

I can go on like that for a while.

On this topic - I think the fundamental problem here is that the word "marriage" has come to mean both the legal contract in the the eyes of the government and the sacrament of marriage in the traditional religious sense. So, here's an easy solution - the government of the USA shouldn't recognize marriages of anybody. Rather, all marriages should be called "civil unions" in the eyes of the law. The participants can still of course marry according to their own traditions and beliefs, but as the government should make no law respecting one religion over the other, it can't really tell people what marriage is. So, "marriage licenses", the legal contract between two individuals to become essentially a joint entity in the eyes of the law, are now "civil union license." Now, everybody is equal in the eyes of the law - straight, gay, whatever. Marriage returns to being a purely religious institution and nobody can have stupid initiatives or propositions to remove the right of private citizens to do what they want.

Hah, could you imagine if I was actually a politician and said this? Shit would quite literally hit the fan.

It always amazes me that Republicans, the party that supposedly believes in small government, little regulation, etc., is in bed with the religious right, who want to use the government to enforce their beliefs on everyone else. The religious right should go read their bibles again - they're kind of missing the point of Christ, I think.

Hard Drives and Consoles

So, Kotaku has a little story about why the Xbox 360 has no default hard drive and the PS3 does. They've got a few spin filled quotes with a bunch of fanboy comments, I thought I'd translate, if only to have an excuse to update.

The Xbox 360 doesn't have a default hard drive because hard drives don't get cheaper over time for the most part, they just get bigger. Normally, that's desirable for hard drives, but not if your making a console to minimize cost. Microsoft looked at the Xbox, realized that maybe four or five games actually used the hard drive in an interesting way (Halo and Halo 2 among them) for something other than a giant memory card, and figured that if they make the hard drive optional that eventually they'll probably be able to get the console down to $150 or less. Realize they were looking at the PS2 at the time.

The PS3, on the other hand, was looking from the point of view of having a Blu-ray drive. This drive, although having huge capacity, is sloooooooooooooooow. They had to have built in storage to let developers compensate for that, or risk having their system be plagued by ultra slow loading times that even their best devs wouldn't be able to circumvent. In some respect, this will hurt them, because they won't ever be able to drop their price to PS2 levels... hard drives won't go down that low. Of course, the blu-ray drive probably won't drop very fast either, so the point is moot - they can't reduce the price anyway, so why not throw a hard drive in?

Anyway, the point? Kotaku should realize that almost no devs used the hard drive in the Xbox. That's a big reason why MS saw it as an expendable, unnecessary luxury that was killing their bottom line. I'm hoping that for the consoles after the PS3/Xbox360, that they both have optional hard drives, but have some kind of large built in storage that is only for caching. Then the optional hard drive can store all the DLC, but everyone can still have their caching.

The trick, as always, is finding something both fast and cheap enough. But whatever the case, it should be enough so that loading screens mid-game are a thing of the past.