Call Me Fishmeal.

It's just a story.

2008-04-12T03:52:00.000-07:00

In 1987 I was a senior in high school and my mother was in the hospital with leukemia; a long, very painful experimental treatment would either cure her (but leave her changed for life) or she would die.

With the profits I'd made from my summer job, I had bought a $400 Technics portable CD player, one of the very first ones ever made. It was solid metal and heavy as hell, and the rechargeable battery pack was as big as the CD player itself and weighed twice again as much. It still plays perfectly to this day.

I was left with her lame car and a giant house to myself and not much supervision. It would have been many a teen's dream, but not mine, since I was truly alone; after I moved back to the States for the eleventh and twelfth grades I never once had a friend over after school, or went over to a friend's house, or went to a party, or a dance; I worked in my little computer lab from when I got home to when I went to sleep. I graduated with honors but didn't show up. I was programming at the time.

Some nights I would take my mom's (new-model) Chevy Nova out and just drive around the waterfront, listening to my little CD player. There were two discs in particular for when I felt most alone: Steve Winwood's "Back in the High Life" and Peter Gabriel's "So". Both artists were consummate musicians, at the height of their craft -- neither would ever make another album as successful. Both created incredibly rich soundscapes, and both talked about loss, and longing.

I don't share either album with people very often, these days, because I've discovered I am incredibly upset if my guests are anything below astounded by them. I require rapt attention, possibly sighs, if you hear the Blessed Two. I feel as if I am physically cutting away my skin and pulling it aside with tongs to show my viscera, the actual core of my being, and if my listeners are all, "Can we put on some GOOD music after this?" I just want to smite them.

To this day if I hear "Don't Give Up" I will cry. I may not bawl, but you can see little tears in my eyes. I can see the park on Lake Washington I would drive to. I can feel the slight cold of the wind through my not-at-all-fashionable windbreaker. I can see the giant CD player on its huge strap around my neck. And I feel the hurting, of wanting to not be alone. Of waiting it to be over.

--

The happiest and saddest part, I think, of liking someone of the opposite sex... really liking, as in, really admiring the person, thinking that she is, in fact, a really good person, a decent person, a person whose morals and smarts and sense of humor and accomplishments you actually think are amazing -- not just, like, "Damn, she got pretty tummy," which latter sentiment I have also fallen prey to -- the happiest and saddest part is that you become someone different when you feel this way.

I don't want to, and won't, use the stupid cliché from the stupid movie. But it's true. You make yourself into a better person, not to trick them into liking you, but because _they deserve it_, and _you want to be a person that deserves them_. The difference is everything.

It's the saddest part because when you lose the hope, the dream, the focus -- well, you want to hold on to that you, that better you, that you that you liked so much, the you that you were with her. It's inside you. Were you faking? No. You have it. Just continue being it. Just don't stop. Be more patient with people you see. Smile at them. Let tiny things go, ignore any little slight, be generous with praise. Be that person. You can still do it. Hold on to him.

--

An interesting, if bizarre, factoid about me is that I cry if I see kids under the age of 10. I also cry if I see child's toy aimed at under-10-year-olds. And, finally, I can remember only two or three scenes from my life from before I was 10: My dad reading "One Fish, Two Fish" to me to teach me what words looked like. (Read to your kids! It's more important than you think.) My parents in bed on a lazy Sunday and the kids coming in and hassling them. Running to get one of the Big Wheels in recess in kindergarden, because there were only a couple and if you didn't get one recess was lame. The other kids wanting to build a boat out of toy cardboard bricks, and me, the quiet kid who never spoke up, finally saying something: I have a plan. I can build a boat. Show us, show us, and I did, and for that one day, for that afternoon, I was the hero.

The rest of my childhood is gone. I don't know where that person is. He's very sad, though.

Yes, I'm in therapy, thanks for checking.

--

I listen to Steve Winwood again, on my expensive studio monitor speakers, the likes of which I couldn't dream of when I was 18. His album still sounds great to me, after all these years.There's a part of me that's conscious of all the time that's passed: that the rich, full sound I loved is now considered cheesy and overproduced, that nobody has heard of Steve Winwood in twenty years, Peter Gabriel is just another dude at TED, and that schmaltzy emotions are for angsty teenagers with zits and five-year-long erections.

But there is a little kid who has felt alone all his life, and he wants it to end. When will it be over? Will I die first? Why are you so old? What have we done with our life? Why are we alone? How did you manage to fail in this, the one thing that mattered.

There is a moment...

2008-03-24T00:51:00.000-07:00

There is a moment when you are touching a woman, innocently, you say, innocently, she says, but you are massaging her back, stroking her hair, running your fingers lightly over her face.

There is a moment when you think to yourself, "I want to kiss her, I should kiss, I am going to kiss her."

And you know that if you are wrong, you will feel stupid. And she will leave. And you will apologize. And everything will be spoiled.

But the kiss is still hanging there. Evolution is stronger than you. It doesn't care if you feel stupid. Kiss the neck, it says. She smells wonderful, and you should kiss. Necks were created to be kissed. They crave it. They are empty without it.

There is only one thing worse than her rejecting you, and that is if you do NOT kiss her neck, in this moment, right now. You have lived your whole life for this. You dream of this moment every day.

There is a moment when you kiss her, lightly, on the neck, and instead of leaving, instead of being outraged, she breathes. You hear her breath, you feel her breath. And you have lived your whole life for that moment.

TED2008 - Part 1: Gossip

2008-02-29T16:11:00.000-08:00

I am back, after a fashion. The night before TED, my new MacBook Air was stolen out of the lobby of the Portola Plaza hotel, leaving me in the dark for days, feeling incredibly violated.

My old, now kind of stinky-seeming MacBook Pro has been shipped to me, so at least I can connect to the sweet mother intertron, whose warm nectar I crave daily. Also, I can now track down the frakker who took my Air, so you better hope you wipe that disk good and don't ever connect to the net again. Or sell it to anyone who, like, has heard of me.

[My MacBook Air serial number was W880311W12G and the "MAC" or Airport ID was "001EC2B605B9". If you see this machine it is stolen and you should call the Monterey police at 831.646.3830 and reference case number 08-1077. Intertron powers activate!]

--

I should start with a story which sounds like bragging, but you will quickly discover, is actually me fulfilling my duties as a gentleman.

Last night at Crown and Pig and Whistle and Anchor bar I was talking with an attractive you woman TEDster, who, after I convinced her I was not gay (there had been a HI-larious Three's Company style mixup that's not actually particularly funny so I won't recount it here) she proceeded to lean over and whisper in my ear for five minutes about who she actually WAS attracted to (said list not including me, if that needs to be made explicit).

After a few moments of this, I pointed out the irony that everyone else at the table, including my new rival Jonathan Hodgman, thought that she was leaning over and whispering to me because she was into me, not because I had become her new eunuch confidant. (Speaking of Hodgman, who KNEW he was such a ladies' man? He was surrounded by pretty girls the whole time. Of course, being the perfect family man, he acted the gracious gentleman -- you thought I was going to get him in trouble with his wife, didn't you? That's not how I roll. I've never even posted my really juicy ultimate cock-block story about LP from a few years ago, and he wasn't married then.)

So, being informed that it looked as though we were flirting, and her being a game sort with a wicked streak, she was all, "oooooh!" and turned fully towards me and put her hand on my shoulder and leaned in close to my ear, so her lips just brushed its tiny hairs with every word as she spoke, sending a little involuntary tingle up my spine with every warm, wet breath as she seductively whispered, "So, should I pretend I like you, like this?"

Then she bit my ear.

No, no, sorry, I'm lying: the hairs on my ears aren't "tiny" any more. They are stark white and surprisingly sturdy and grow to be, like, four feet long. I'm like fucking Yoda. I've gotten to the point where I don't even bother clipping them; I see my body as some kind of bizarre science experiment as it deteriorates and I'm actually curious to see how long any given hair in any given spot will get. A week ago I had an eyebrow hair that was, no shit, two inches long -- Mike tried to pluck it for me and I got protective of it, like it was my tomagotchi. Sometimes I have races between the hairs on my left ear and the ones on the right.

Anyhow, the point is, for anyone in the bar that night, I shall protect the young lady's honor by giving up the game -- she was, in fact, just making a scandal for scandal's sake; trying to help my pimp cred... an act of charity from a kind stranger. I'm not not not saying I didn't not not enjoy it -- any bone looks like top sirloin to a hobo, and it's been a too long since I've been thrown a bone.

MacBook Air: Rambling First Impressions (PG!)

2008-02-17T16:36:00.000-08:00

Lots of people have asked for my impressions, so I thought I'd post a more sober (literally) look at life with my little MacBook Air. With no cussing!

• It feels really nice, like a pebble. A large, smooth pebble, from a stream. This shape speaks to me, like the MOTOPEBL did, except that was a crappy phone and not a really nice computer.

• It is super-solid. It feels way more structurally solid than any laptop I've ever owned. I don't know if this like a synesthetic illusion because it is so beautiful, or because it has curved surfaces (== less flex!), or because it's just so darn light that there's not a lot of mass to flex.

• The prominent feet and rigity make the machine seem wobbly on anything but a 100% level surface. The antique wood tables at Zoka are not that perfect, so every time I type the machine rocks like a shopping cart at K-mart. Mushier feet, maybe? I dunno, you guys are the geniuses, you figure it out. But, seriously, wobbling things make me nuts. I'm going to start stuffing napkins under the corners of the machine, and that's not good advertising. [UPDATE: John Siracusa provided a great suggestion for this: the MacBook Air should have only three feet; three points always form a plane.]

• I love how the port door on the right opens and closes; it's a very solid-feeling mechanism, and very natural. Also, I feel like I'm in Star Trek (the new one).

• I don't run on battery much, but I've noticed it seems to take a billion years to charge it if it gets discharged, at least the first couple times. Odd.

• I got the 64GB SSD. It seems pretty awesome, but I can't fit my (legal) iTunes collection on it, even without movies, after I put my iPhoto collection on it and my source code and just a couple apps (Acorn, Twitterific, Zuma, iWork so far, MarsEdit coming).

• I'm moving over my old stuff as I need it. Copying stuff over AirPort is super-slow, but the ethernet adaptor is pretty decent. I tried to copy World of Warcraft from a friend's PowerBook (I have a legal copy, don't worry) and it was scheduled to take five hours, since she doesn't have 802.11n, even. Using the ethernet adaptor it was, like, five minutes. No surprises here, but the take-away message is, ethernet adaptor is a good idea.

• I don't try to access CDs or DVDs from my machine -- my previous machine didn't even have a working drive -- so I don't really care that it doesn't have one built-in. The external one is a thing of beauty and I almost want to buy it just because, but it doesn't work with other machines so that kind of stinks.

• The screen is so very, very bright compared to the (1st-gen) MacBook Pro. Games look much better. It's not something you realize you want until you get it -- you think increases in resolution or color depth are cool, but when you get a brightness upgrade this dramatic you realize AH! THIS is what I really wanted! Who needs more pixels when each of my pixels now shines so very, very brightly? ("I've seen things, you people wouldn't believe...")

• I think the machine's smallness is tearing up my neck. I'm sitting 8-10 hours a day working on this thing, and I end up looking DOWN at it more than my 15" MacBook Pro. I've had neck cramps since I got it, but I'm still adjusting, and I'm also in crunch mode with Delicious Library 2.

• It compiled Delicious Library 2 from scratch in 1'59". The 2.33GHz MacBookPro takes 2'04". SSD's LOVE compilations.

• SSD's love context switching, as well. Having an SSD is a lot like having 64GB of RAM in your machine. Sure, I'm going to lose in a Photoshop filter race with your machine, but I'm going to crush you switching between the 15 applications I have open right now. Again, it's not a surprise to say that if video editing or cutting-edge video games is your primary purpose, you'll probably find the MacBook Pro faster. But if you're writing software or just snurfing the web and running lots of apps, this machine is faster.

• Bizarrely, it still has a sudden motion sensor in it. Think about that for a minute.

• More bizarrely, if I drop the Air a foot (onto a soft, fluffy pillow on my bed -- I'm not an idiot) the sudden motion sensor will still shut down the SSD (tell it to park its heads?) and stop processing for a second. I think that's pretty funny. Hey, hardware guys: "SSD stands for SOLID-STATE DISK."

• I admit there could still be problems I don't know about with dropping SSDs, and I'm just being snide. I'm sorry, hardware guys. Still friends? Buy you a drink? Hug it out?

• I like using the "pinch" gesture. That's the only one I've really used. So far, it works great in Finder (icon mode) and iPhoto and Safari (just feels bizarre there, honestly) and two places Delicious Library 2 (shhh!). It's the right solution.

• The "swipe" gesture should have been mapped to "start scrolling and then after I stop the swipe keep scrolling slower and slower until you stop naturally or I stop you" like scrolling works on the iPhone. The Air team didn't ask me, but they should have. This would have been trivial to add to Cocoa (we added it experimentally once to DL2, may put it back). Sure I could file a RADAR bug on this, but isn't it more fun to complain on my blog like a prima donna? (Yes. Yes it is.)

• Jonathan Ive should design a laptop bag as beautiful as the Air, that just can contain the machine, a power cord, and a Wireless Mighty Mouse. I'd be in heaven. Nobody seems to have addressed the "I want a small, slim bag that can still hold a power cord without having a giant wart in the side" market. Like, duh, bag designers, STOW THE POWER CORD ABOVE OR BELOW THE LAPTOP, not STICKING OUT THE SIDE WHERE IT CREATES A TENT AND LOOKS UGLY AND BANGS MY KNEE.

• The Air runs World of Warcraft pretty damn well. Sure, I don't have, uh, specular water reflective anti-aliased spectroscopic quadrophonic roto-tilling turned on. But, you know, I can, like, heal things and run around and pick liferoot and run around some more. (PHEAR MY HEALING, EVIL-DOERS OF AZEROTH!)

• The Air's main performance limitation is heat, and mainly from the GPU. When it starts doing graphical things, it gets hot. When it gets hot, it starts venting out the bottom-back. If there's not enough clear vents (like, if you are in bed, and it's resting in your lap so the bottom vents are perfectly pressed into the fluffy down comforter) then it underclocks the GPU and you go into slide-show mode. This will happen in Zuma if you try hard enough, or if you're watching Hulu.com, even, but it's pretty easy to get it in World of Warcraft. Throwing off your comforter and getting nakeder with your Air is the only solution at this point, and also, it feels... so deliciously wrong.

• Note to hardware guys: don't put vents there, bokay? Laptops are for bed. Don't put vents right where the laptop touches my leg. (Aw, come on back, hardware guys! I still love you! Look, sometimes I just get a little angry, and when I've been drinking, well, you know my temper...)

• On the other hand, if this baby is plugged in and sitting on a flat surface, I can play Teh WoWz all day and it's great. (Not great for shipping DL2, so I don't do it, but I could. It's nice to know it's there, like a beautiful ex who still wants to have sex with you.)

--

This isn't a machine for everyone, nor should it be. Just as there should be three types of spaghetti sauce, you and I should not HAVE to agree on what we want in a machine. The machine should, instead, be designed to agree with us.

I admit my last post was a bit over-the-top; my point was supposed to be: "Look, this machine may not be for you, personally, but please acknowledge that there are people for whom it is perfect." For instance, Gabe told me he wants a new MacBook Pro, and I didn't try to push the Air on him (...much). He's an artist and a gamer. He wants pixels, and lots of them, and FAST. The MacBook Pro is going to run his Windows games faster than pretty much every laptop.

I will try to steer him towards the biggest MacBook Pro that has the LED backlight, because it's just SO DARN PRETTY. And if anyone offered a 128GB SSD, I'd be recommending that to all my friends who have cash to burn. Because it's the future, baby, and it's beautiful.

-W

My C4[1] Talk...

2008-02-09T17:18:00.000-08:00

Mr. Rentczchxh has posted my talk from C4, and if you would enjoy watching a talk without paying, you can watch it. It's on hype, and how I generate it, but it also touches on other topics concerning having your own software company, like making good software, bundling, getting into stores, having sex with cylons, &c.

Watch it!

Or don't.

MacBook Air Haters: Suck My Dick

2008-01-15T21:07:00.000-08:00

I thought of a lot of titles for this post, but, really, the first one that came to me seems the best.

I've read nothing but whining about the MacBook Air on Mac news sites since it came out this morning. Honestly, I just want to shake these people. Not, like, shake some sense into them, but shake them like you're not supposed to shake a baby.

The criticism all basically goes like this: "It's not like a MacBook Pro!"

No, really? Seriously? I mean, they introduced this new product, and it doesn't have the same specs as the MacBook Pro? God, that is bizarre. I wonder why they gave it a new name, and continue to sell the MacBook Pro, then, if it's not going to be exactly the same. I mean, that hardly makes sense, does it?

Ok, fine, there are some people who want, like, an extra battery Pack. But let's admit amongst ourselves that the overwhelming majority of people out there have never pulled the battery out of their existing laptops, and didn't even know or care that it comes out. In fact, if something goes wrong with their battery, this majority -- whom we'll call "NORMAL PEOPLE" for convenience -- will just take the damn machine to the store and get it fixed, whether it's user-serviceable or not. Because we don't want to hassle with it.

And there are people out there who do video editing on their MacBooks and want FireWire. Great! I respect your choice! You should buy a MacBook! It's an awesome machine! If you want to do that! Which I don't!

I've read journalists complain that you can't get at the hard drive in the MacBook Air. What? I have no fucking idea where the hard drive is in my MacBook Pro, and even if you drew me a damn diagram with labels and numbers and gave me a replacement drive I wouldn't open my machine even in exchange for a year with Zooey Deschanel. Ok, yes I would, but you get my point. I'm sorry, Zooey, I didn't mean it, baby.

Some journalists get so close to the truth it hurts, yet miss the large print. "OMG! The unit is all sealed and self-contained like the iPod!"

Yes... the iPod. That huge failure. Also, the iPhone. Stunning disappointment that it was. I mean, jeebus, why would Apple make ANOTHER device incredibly simple? Clearly the market has spoken, and it wants tons of ports and screws and geegaws and flippers... no, wait, no it doesn't.

You guys are TECHNOLOGY JOURNALISTS. You are GEAR HEADS. There is no shame in this, but, come on, recognize that what you think is cool is NOT what my mom thinks is cool, or what an executive thinks is cool, or what a lawyer who just wants to write a deposition on her laptop thinks is cool.

I'm a programmer. I just want a machine I can write software on. Once, I loved gadgets, too, but now I really just want a gadget that (a) works, and (b) is beautiful and easy-to-use. Sure, my iPhone doesn't have as many raw features as my lawyer's Blackberry + RAZR combined (she carries both). But I understand my iPhone, and I don't have to learn it, because it's learned me. I can take a photo in three seconds, and so can she (we tested) even though she'd never seen an iPhone before.

I'm not the freak, here. In this one instance. I'm with the majority. All software developers should be hailing the advent of the computer-as-appliance, because it means we'll be reaching into markets that are afraid of self-service machines.

I can't take apart my Kitchenaid blender. If they come out with a new motor, I'm screwed. It's not upgradeable! And when the motor blows (as it DID... grrr), I have to send it back. I can't take apart my car. When Lotus came out with a bolt-on supercharger, I had to (gasp) take it to the dealer to have it put in. Somehow I survived.

I don't buy a laptop because I want to replace its drive in a year. I buy it because it seems great and meets my needs today. If my needs magically morph over the coming year, I guess I'll sell it on eBay. Or pay Apple to throw in a different drive, or something. Honestly, I think we need to admit that just because machines get faster every year, doesn't mean that the majority of people need faster machines.

In two weeks I'll be writing Delicious Library 2 on a MacBook Air, every day. Because it's simple and beautiful, and I crave those things.

And all you haters can... well, buy one in six months, when you realize how nice it is.

--

Update 2/4/2008: My MacBook Air with 2GB of RAM and 1.8 GHz cores and the SSD compiles Delicious Library 2 from scratch in 1:59.4. My MacBook Pro with 3GB of RAM and 2.3GHz cores and an HD compile it in... 2:04.3.

MacBook Air FTW.

Are You a Genie in a Bottle?

2007-12-22T17:58:00.000-08:00

Oh...
You feel your brain's been locked up tight
Writing good code at only at night
Waiting for a job
To challenge you

You're cracking your knuckles, trying to code my way
But that don't mean I'll hire you right away
Laddy, Laddy, Laddy
(Lady, Lady, Lady?)

Yo yo...
Your mouth's saying hire me
Oh woe...
But my brain's saying let's see C

If you wanna work for me, laddy
There's a price you pay
I'm a stickler for design
You gotta write code the right way
If you want an ADA
I can make your wish come true
You gotta make a big impression
I gotta like what you do

I'm a stickler for design, laddy
Gotta write code the right way, money
I'm a stickler for design, laddy
Add, add, add, and then cut out

The iPhone's coming and AAPL's so not low
One more release of Library to go
Waiting for someone
Who impresses me

Fingers racing at the speed of light
And not just because I'm in a Twitter fight
Laddy, Laddy, Laddy
(Lady, Lady, Lady?)

Yo yo...
I only have one engineer to go
Oh woe...
But I'm still going to hire slow

If you wanna work for me
And then Apple someday
I'm a stickler for design
You gotta write code the right way
If you want to get low pay
I can make your wish come true
Send me sample code, laddy
And maybe I'll hire you

I'm a stickler for design, laddy
Gotta write code the right way, money
I'm a stickler for design, laddy
Send, send, send your sample out

Transitions and Epiphanies.

2007-12-18T04:45:00.000-08:00

It's been a crazy couple of weeks for me...

First off, Lucas Newman is leaving Delicious Monster -- as of January 1 he will be an iPhone engineer. This is an amazing opportunity for him, one I would never ask a friend to pass up. We remain buddies, although I'm running around Zoka these last couple weeks telling every girl I see that Lucas was secretly super-hot for her and is leaving now, which I think is starting to annoy him. Although, honestly, they'll probably all end up throwing themselves at him and he'll end up on top, again.

For those keeping score at home, this makes Mike Matas, Scott Maier, Tim Omernick, Drew Hamlin, and Lucas Newman that Apple has hired out of my employ. Yes, in fact, 100% of Delicious Monster's ex-employees are now working for Apple! You'd almost think Apple would start to pay me to train people for them. Oh, well. It's every kid's dream to work there, I can't say I blame them. Heck, I might work for Apple myself if they ever asked. And, like, wanted to give me EIGHTY ZILLION DOLLARS.

Also, seriously, if you want to work for Apple, you MIGHT want to, you know... GET TO KNOW ME.

--

Mike Lee is staying at Delicious Monster -- for now... DUM DUM DUM! You have to figure he's playing the various Apple teams off each other -- when you work at Delicious Monster, you don't jump for the girl that asks you to dance. Mike's all: "CoreAudio? Don't waste my time, sweetheart." "OS X Server? I'm sorry, you're not even getting an interview." "Ali Ozer and Scott Forstall got into a fistfight over me at lunch today? Now, see, these guys understand what kind of ball we are playing."

--

I realized tonight that I had yet another problem with CoreData, and it was a doozy, and not something where I could just put a hack on it. In fact, it was indicative of a fundamental architecture mismatch that I've been struggling with since I started this project.

So, this is a little vague, but I thought it might be important to document the process. Basically, when I bang up against a wall, I start looking bigger and bigger and bigger. Like, imagine I'm having trouble with a crumbling wall in an aqueduct -- my programmers brain does this: "Ok, why did I build this wall?" To keep the water in. "Why do I have water?" Because you need that to turn the water-wheel. "Is there some other way to turn it?" Not easily. "Why must it turn?" To power the grinder. "What needs grinding?" Corn. "Is there some other way to grind it?"

I'll get to truly huge things, where I start asking if the world even needs an app that catalogs books and DVDs and now boardgames when we could all be under five feet of water in a few years. Then it's time to take a nap and wake up and start again.

But my point is, you HAVE to question all the basic assumptions that led you to where you are, or you end up spending all your time writing the wrong code. I have always said that if you give me a perfectly spec'ed out program (one with a spec that can actually work, that I'm not going to have to modify as I go along), I can write that program for you in days. Always. The problem with coding is (a) fighting with frameworks, and (b) trying to figure out how the program should look, work, and interact even as we code it.

So we end up spending a lot of times fixing bugs in code that we really shouldn't have written in the first place -- code that doesn't really help the user, that just makes the app more complex, that is for a feature that never should have been put in, or is interacting with the user incorrectly and we're just putting spackle on a wall that's crumbling.

So here I am, tonight, running into my 1,000th bug with the fundamental mis-architecture in CoreData, which is that interacts with the UI layer and the disk layer / undo layer all using the same mechanism. They all rely on -didChangeValueForKey:, which is a huge mistake, because it means that, as a programmer, I can't sneak any data in -- I can't change a value without it creating an undo event.

Consider if, for example, I had a clock and its hands were CoreData objects. As they move forward through time, their position updates, so I'd tell them to update. And each time I did, an undo event would get pushed -- so the user actually could undo time.

This is obviously a contrived example, but it also points to the fundamental problem -- CoreData objects can't mix undoable and non-undoable changes.

So I've been struggling for three years now, trying to bend and hack and cajole CoreData's undo architecture into allowing me to do some actions synchronously and some asynchronously. (For instance, obviously, once the program has downloaded a cover from Amazon in a background thread, you don't want to UNDO the download -- it's not actually a state change, it's just a cache change -- yet, by default we end up with an undo event on the stack, in the MIDDLE of whatever the user is actually doing in the foreground.)

Fight fight gnash gnash complain complain. Tonight I hit on it. I needed to step back. Why isn't this working? Because undo wasn't designed this way in CoreData.

Well, I have undo in Delicious Library 1. It's not "magic" like with CoreData, but it works. In fact, now that I am thinking about it -- I've spent months and hundreds of lines of code trying to get CoreData's "magic" undo to work, when, in fact, there are really only FOUR actions that are ever undone:

1) Add a book -- undo to delete it
2) Delete a book -- undo to add it back
3) Change a property on a book, like its title or author -- undo to change it back
4) Make a loan -- undo to return the book
5) Return a book -- undo to re-make the loan

That's... about it. SO WHY HAVE I SPENT ALL THIS TIME TRYING TO GET COREDATA'S MAGIC SYSTEM TO WORK?

There's only five damn methods, at the top level, that need to participate in undo. It's pretty obvious I should be managing my OWN undoManager, turn off the one in CoreData, and just use CoreData for what it is EXTREMELY good at, which is minimal change tracking and fetching and storing data VERY VERY quickly.

Suddenly all these issues I've been having disappear. I don't have strange extra undo events on my stack when I fault in an object, because although CoreData might think my object changed, it's not driving the undo manager any more -- and when it goes to save, it's going to quickly discover there's no real substantive changes and just discard the whole event.

I don't have to try to work around some undo events by turning undo on and off, which required me to flush CoreData's transactions queue by hand, which was extremely sketchy because if you do it in some circumstances (eg, the middle of inserting a new object) the object will be corrupted.

--

I haven't started this yet -- I'll try it tomorrow. It's nice -- it'll pick up a bunch of the remaining issues I'm having in DL2, and should give us a good solid beta. The important thing here is, I was just too married to part of the code. I was so into using CoreData's magic undo that I kept going farther and farther to make it work, when I really needed to say, "Ok, this doesn't work in this situation, I'm doing my own undo in 40 lines of code."

Mr. Murray is Dead.

2007-12-08T15:56:00.001-08:00

I killed him today - 10 minute ago.

F.P. Murray Fuzzcat was a pure-bred Persian born to champions, bred by my sister (a veterinarian in California) to show or sell. His nose was deemed "too large" at birth, so she gave him to me, for mere room and board. Later in life, my sister would inspect him and reverse her decision -- he had "grown into" his nose and could have been a champion, had I not already taken his manhood. (Thom-hood?) I didn't have any interest in going to cat-shows with my little guy, but it made me feel good to know that the blood of champions throbbed through his veins.

When a cat dies you understand that most people, while being able to empathize with your pain, won't actually give a crap themselves. Murray didn't work for world peace. He built no homes for orphans, and his response to the Hurricane Katrina was indifference. He was a cat.

But, still. There are lives he touched, especially mine. My only memory of Murray is purring. He was the purriest cat I have ever known. Years ago I would take business conference calls in bed when major clients wanted to chat at 7AM and I wanted to sleep until noon -- I would lie there with my cell phone talking with captains of industry while Murray sat on my chest and purred at me. One time a vice-president for McGraw-Hill interrupted the conference call and interjected, "Wil, are you on a motorboat?" I shit you not.

When I was sad, Murray would lick my ears. When I was saddest, I would wake up and he'd be stretched out beside me, and his little paw would be resting in mine. When I'd wake up he'd sit up and purr at me, from just out of reach. I used to play chicken with him, and sit there staring at him and see how long he'd continue purring before I had to pet him. I'd always give up and give him a scratch before he stopped purring.

Murray had great taste in women, and I trusted his judgment on which ones to date. Upon first meeting Murray, one of my favorite lovers remarked, "You are just a little lover, aren't you?" She honestly loved Murray more than me, I think, and I honestly understand why.

Murray was a gentle soul. If I threw him in the bath for poopy-butt he'd just meow forlornly and try to leave -- I never got scratched by him so that it bled. He was so gentle with his claws that I would frequently forget he had them at all, and not clip them for years at a time, and then one day I'd notice they'd grown inches long and curved all the way around like the stereotypical wizened asian wizard.

Murray was 18 years old, and his kidneys were in advanced failure. There is no cure except an experimental surgery which transplants kidneys from a young, healthy cat into my ancient one. I could not justify that in my head. Over the last two days he suddenly got much sicker, and I finally realized he was done.

As I held him in the vet's office, they gave him a sedative and then the poison. I put my ear up to his nose so I could hear his breathing, and so he could smell earwax, which he really did love. I stroked his throat and with each little exhale I could feel the tiny rattle of a faint purr -- the last purrs he had in him had to come out.

My last words to him were, "Thank you, little guy."

On saying goodbye.

2007-12-05T00:41:00.001-08:00

There are so many clichés that, as I grow up, I find are really true. And with every one, I go through the same process:

"Gee, I've discovered this amazing and unique thing about humanity that no one has ever discovered before, but how can I express it in words... Hmm, well, in this case, I want to convey the idea that sometimes you want to express a sexual attraction to a person and have them confirm a reciprocal attraction, but you don't feel a level of attraction where you'd want to start anything long-term -- you just want an innocent exchange of physical compliments... If only there were some succinct way to say it, like, uh...

"Oh, I know: A kiss is just a kiss.

"Oh, wait."

[It's another cliché that every generation thinks they're the first ones to feel every emotion, and have every idea.]

--

"Youth is wasted on the young," my mom used to always say to me, which made me want to smack her, because *I* was young, and I was hearing her basically saying that she wanted to suck the life-force out of me and horde it for herself. That ship has sailed, mom! (I already did the opposite to you.)

Now I'm reasonably old, and I find myself thinking, "Damn, I wish I had all the time ahead of me that I had when I was 20, because I think I've finally started to figure out what life is about, and I was so miserable then, but now I'm worried that by the time I really get it down, I'm going to be enfeebled and not able to enjoy it... if only there were some succinct way to say this... some kind of saying... oh, wait."

Damn you, mom!

But the cruel irony of clichés is we're doomed to not understand them until the moment we re-coin them for ourselves. Just as you can't explain to someone why it's bad to stick their hand in a flame until they've actually felt pain, you can't explain love and loss and happiness and inner peace to someone who hasn't experienced those things, first-hand. And, by that time, their response will just be, "Duh, I know that now, you should have told me a long time ago."

--

Recently I've been thinking about nature of loss, and how we all want to deny to ourselves that it will ever happen to us. We want to believe that every love is our last love, that our cat will outlive us, that our job will continue to be a perfect fit forever, that our health will continue until we drop dead, which we won't ever do anyway, and that our friends will never move away or betray us or simply grow more distant over the years.

And, yes, all evidence points to the contrary. Most people think I'm morbid when I say, "You know, this relationship *will* end badly," and they won't discuss it further with me. But, honestly -- the very best we can hope for is that our relationship will end with one of us dying. And, seriously, that's going to suck for both the dead guy and the person left behind. Or we could hope to both die simultaneously, but, I dunno, that doesn't seem entirely awesome either. ("Hope you die when I do, honey! Good night!")

--

We are denial machines. This is what I've learned going to TED these last couple years -- there are several amazing talks on this, I'll point to this one by Michael Shermer on "Why people believe strange things":

And this one by Dan Gilbert on "Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?"

There are others which I can't find at the moment -- I encourage you to look around. And maybe I'm doing a disrespect to the incredibly intelligent people who've written these talks by restating them in my own words, but, hey, that's how I do.

So, the gestalt I got from TED was: we are "designed," as beings, to be unreasonably optimistic. That is, we have evolved an unrealistic optimism as a defense to the fact that everything good ends, and in fact ends badly. (By definition -- if we're enjoying something, we don't want it to end, but everything ends, and if we're not enjoying something, the good part has already ended, so QED.)

As we stood erect and grasped things and used tools and grew our brains, we became self-aware, and then aware of the finite span of our happiness, and our genes faced a dilemma (evolutionarily speaking): our race could either be hopelessly discouraged by the tragedy of life, or we could be kept a little bit stupid so we wouldn't think about it. But this is a logical fallacy: a false dilemma -- there's a third route, which I believe evolution took: she gave us with a blind spot. We are, fundamentally, illogical when it comes to our expectations of happiness.

There is another cliché of sorts, or perhaps more of an aphorism: "In 100 years everyone you love will be dust." This is simply a truth. But it's depressing. Right now your mind is busily throwing away that sentence. You are reacting to it as you would a bad smell. You might even be angry that I mentioned it. "Why are you burdening me with this? What the hell good did you just do me?"

But I'm not burdening you, not really. You're not going to be thinking about that sentence tomorrow. It's your defense mechanism -- well, it is if you're a lucky, normal person. There are lots of depressed people out there, and they have trouble ever moving away from those thoughts, so, sorry to you guys, but I bet you've already thought of that one anyway.

Let's consider depression, and also consider that the geniuses we revere today were generally very disturbed, unhappy people. Are we, in fact, evolved not to be too smart, because at some point when you crank up intelligence, you can't help but see past your blind spot, and start to notice that life is, in the end, futile? That no matter how much we struggle, we WILL lose everything; we will die. We will be alone when that happens.

So what, you say? Why not just enjoy the here and now? But I say this is a sham. You're lying to yourself. Because if I told you, with certainty, that you were going to die in 10 minutes, you wouldn't try to enjoy the here and now. You'd be crushed. Paralyzed. You wouldn't say, "Oh, boy, I need to make sure I really enjoy those 10 minutes! I'm going to eat an entire cake, screw the calories! Then have sex without a condom!"

--

I want to note I'm using a generic "you" here, in part to represent myself. Please don't take offense. I'm not trying to pick on YOU you, in particular. Nor am I scorning humanity from some mighty perch. I'm part of this sham. I get up every day and struggle to convince myself that, for some reason, things are going to get better for me, when, by definition, all the available evidence (eg, my life so far) suggests that things will be as good for me as they have been, and no better.

--

Imagine a society of rational beings (without our blind spot for how bad life can be) came to Earth to observe us -- ignore that this race wouldn't have developed space travel because they'd all be too busy staying up until 4am taking bong hits and watching "Chuck" on NBC.com trying to forget how miserable they are.

Now, imagine what they would think of our lottery. This alone pretty much demonstrates that we are unreasonable optimists. We know, KNOW, that the average person who buys lottery tickets will not hit the jackpot. That, in fact, they won't break even. Not "average" as in 51% of people -- we know the vast majority of people lose. We KNOW, and in fact are explicitly told at the point of sale that the odds are amazingly stacked against us, and we are pissing our money down a hole.

And, in fact, even if we were to win, most of us understand the cliché that "money doesn't buy happiness." We've seen the human-interest stories on lottery winners and cluck-clucked over the statistic that most of them report being less happy after winning the lottery, and a large number go bankrupt within a few years.

"But that won't be me!" we say. We are promised, guaranteed by the seller and by every mathematician that our odds are exactly the same as everyone else's, yet we make up new rules for ourselves, in defiance of all logic, that say we're going to win, and moreover enjoy it when we do. Dammit.

Because we need something to look forward to. We need the dream. Once, long long ago, there were two types of people: those who could fool themselves into thinking life was worth living, and those who couldn't. Needless to say, the second group died out really quickly. And the first group has had millions of years to perfect its technique for overlooking the bad in life.

--

Again, I'd like to interrupt myself and say, hey, unreasonable optimism is a really good thing for most of us, most of the time. I mean, I have nothing against being happy, whether it's reasonable or not. If you want to sing in the rain, well, it's a bit of a cliché, but I obviously have nothing against those. I will join you whenever I can.

--

But maybe -- and this is what I've been thinking about -- just maybe, we should be AWARE that we're fooling ourselves. Maybe we need to occasionally pull our heads out and do check on the actual position in the world, and say, "Yes, we need to believe in order to get out of bed in the morning, but we also need to sometimes consider reality from a very rational standpoint, and make sure we're merely singing in the rain, and not singing in a monsoon that is the precursor to a giant flood that's going to kill us unless we climb that hill over there right now."

I feel that way about things I blog about, like global warming or war or politics, obviously. In general, we want to trust our politicians to take care of us -- we need to -- but it is also our duty to examine the world closely every once in a while, and not be surprised if it's screwed up and needs another course correction before we get back to our comfortable denial. It's been needed many times in the past (this isn't even our first energy crisis this half-century), and we shouldn't feign surprise when it happens again.

--

So, yes, when I start a relationship, I tell the woman, hey, you know, in all likelihood this will end in tears. (You're sorry you're not going out with a prize like me, right? Mayhap you're surprised I'm still single at 38?)

But, wait... in my defense (possibly weakly) I'll point out: ending in tears is not necessarily bad. I mean, it's just there. It's a fact that we will end, it's simple probability that we'll end unhappily, unless you want to redefine happiness. So, let's spend a little time planning for it. Thinking about the possible endings. So we can mitigate the bad things that are fungible and probable, and go back to ignoring the rest.

Let's spend some time getting me life insurance, so if I do die, you can continue to live in my house. Let's think about what we'd do if we simply grow out of each other, so we can be civil if it happens.

And most importantly, let me say this to you -- my friend, my lover, my family -- in advance: if it does end, I want you to know I won't regret it. Because everything ends. We spend all our time denying it, and when it finally happens we think it's the biggest tragedy in the world. I know this -- I've lost or given up the most important people in my life several times now. Sometimes I lose sight of the fact that it was inevitable. And if we only let ourselves think about loss when it strikes, we're going to be overwhelmed.

How many relationships end where one person says, "I'm sorry I ever met you?" I've never felt that way. I'm never sorry, because you obviously brought something into my life; that's why I invited you in, in the first place. I'm often sorry that it ended (and sometimes not), but I always knew the end was there. I don't like loss, but an ending doesn't negate all that was good.

--

"Goodbye is hard to say." You knew I was going to end with a cliché, didn't you? I think the person who coined that one was thinking the same things as I am now, and came to the same conclusions, maybe. And that person said, damn, blogs haven't been invented yet -- is there some snappy saying I can come up with that will be remembered by the next generation, so they can avoid all the heartache I had?

Well, no. You can't avoid heartache. But you can understand that it's inevitable. And, sometimes, maybe that's what you need to hear. Yes, you're going to hurt. I'm sorry. Don't let it spoil everything good.

Movie Sequels We Need

2007-11-18T04:26:00.001-08:00

Who doesn't love sequels? Certainly no red-blooded American. But, sadly, some movies never get sequels. Why? And what can we do about it?

I think the only thing to do is for us to show truth to power, and point out these omissions. Maybe we can inspire some Hollywood hack who has lost his way. If even one sequel gets made that would have otherwise been an original idea, wouldn't it be worth it?

So, here's my list of sequels I need to see:

Independence Day 2: Oh Crap The Aliens Closed Their Firewall
I Also Robot, How You?
Lake Shmonsequence
The List Schindler Kept In His Other Pants
Fight Club 2: Helena Bonham-Carter Was Also Just in His Head
Vertigo 2: Carsick
American History XI
Three Kill a Mockingbird
Spider-Man 3: For Real This Time
Faster and Dumber or Dumb and Furious (mash-up)
Memento 2: More Super-Depressing Backward Stuff
A.I. 2: We Are Not Aliens We Are Super-Advanced Robots Read the Title Fucking Duh
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 2: We Still Do Not Require Any Form of Identification
The Piano 2: More of That Guy's Penis
Triple Indemnity
The Santa Clause 3: Now You Have To, Let's Say... Jump Up and Down
Reservoir Puppies (prequel)
The Sting 2: We Swear There Is No Twist Ending LOL
Braveheart 2: It's Different When You Know He's Crazy
Blade Runner 2: Just Kidding It's Really Just Another Cut of Blade Runner
W for Wowiamangry
Shrek 2 Oh Wait There Was a Shrek 2
Shrek 3 Also, I Guess, I Did Not See It
It Happened Again on a Different Night
The Conversation 2: Not That Crappy Movie with Will Smith That Was a Pretend Sequel
Garfield 3: 2 in the Head, 1 in the Chest
North by Northwest 2: If You See the Dairy Queen You've Gone Too Far
The Oranges of Anger
The Lion King 2: If I'm Lion I'm Dyin'
Big Fish 2: Now MY Son has Grown Up and He Hates ME for Being a Big Liar
Dial L for Larceny (prequel)
Rosemary's Second Child Who Didn't Get as Many Photos Taken of Her
Pirates of the Caribbean 4: Actually We Just Explain the Previous Two Films
Taxi Driver 2: Crazy Taxi (in conjunction with Sega)
Serpents on a Submarine or Boas on a Boat or Rattlesnakes on a Railroad or Cottonmouths in a Car (pick only one)
Glad I Ate Him
Blazing Saddles 2: Chapped Asses
The Princess Bride 2: Hollywood is Full of Whores
Sex and the City: We Really Aren't Very Sexy Any More, To Be Honest
The Gun Just Below That Top One
M.A.S.H. 2: Apparently Some People Have Forgotten That War Is Bad
E.E.T.: An Extra Extra-Terrestrial
Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: We're Boning Aliens
Deliverance 2: There's a Lot of Nerves Back There, It Can Feel Kind of Nice
A Streetcar Named Desire 2: A Lamppost Named Phyllis

Video Game Ideas: iPhone SDK edition

2007-10-18T03:26:00.001-07:00

We've got it! We got our SDK! Well, I mean, we don't HAVE it yet, but we have a promise, and a promise that times nicely with my being done with Delicious Library 2 and looking for something to do before I start on v3.

So what are we going to do with it? Sure, we're going to port Peggle (from PopCap), the BEST GAME EVER, and I hope there's a native version of Xeno Tactics (please write me if you know who can make this happen).

BUT WHAT ELSE! We need to take advantage of the incredible and unique features of the iPhone... So, I'm going to try something new in the comments, here, and encourage people to brainstorm with me, either with new ideas or refining previous ideas to make them more possible / more fun.

Let's look at the perfect storm of features the iPhone has brewing:

- Always on. No other handheld consumer device is always on. Laptops go to sleep, as do DS Lites. Always on means that if we write social software, our iPhone can find other iPhones to talk to for us based on some criteria, and then notify us as it finds matches. Welcome to the REAL social, bitches.

- Always with their masters. Nobody who owns an iPhone will venture more than 20 feet from it.

- Pretty damn popular. Sure, there is an order of magnitude more DSes, but iPhone is growing at a crazy rate. I see several every day at the café that I actually did NOT buy!

- A cool variety of inputs, including acceleration detectors and a touch screen.

- Really good resolution. Fairly fast graphics for certain subsets of drawing, but not something that'll run Quake 3 at a billion FPS.

- Great networking, including Bluetooth, WiFi, and Edge. (Bono to be included in the next version.)

- Doesn't require a cartridge per app, like Gameboys or Sony PSPs. All apps are resident in the iPhone at once, and multitask, so having a few casual, silly apps is much more likely. (Eg, you don't have to scream to everyone in the café, "Hey, let's all put in our social networking cartridge so we can break the ice!)

- Is not butt-ugly like Zune.

Idea 1) "My Pokémons, Let Me Show Them To You."

Imagine carrying all your Pokémon (or Magic, or whatever) cards around on your phone, and you can show 'em off CoverFlow-style, baby. If some other iPhone-wielding fool wants to step to your deck, you press a button for a WiFi connection (or bluetooth, even) and get to use your fingers to point to cards you want and throw them out on the playfield - it gives card battles a real tactile interaction.

How do your cards get in to the phone? Well, if you want to use existing cards, you scan them in with the iPhone's camera, and recognize the photo (compared to a database of cards) and add that physical card to the user's virtual collection.

Finally, you can trade virtual cards to people around you. For extra style points, you could list a bunch of cards you want and cards you don't want, and other iPhone users running the same client would just get notified that a potential trade is in their area. I imagine Gabe at the opera (yes, I like to imagine him going to the opera, ok?) and suddenly his phone starts buzzing and someone wants to buy one of his chimpochocs. "Honey, shhhh!"

Idea 2) "My zombie beats your werewolf. Or mates with him."

Like with the Zombie mini-game on facebook, all iPhone users could have zombie (or mutant, or zombie-hunter, or whatever) avatars, and whenever two iPhones get too close, they start to battle. It'd be super-funny if they did this on their own, so you could just be walking along and you and another dude's phones would suddenly go batshit making fighting and gurgling noises.

You'd win persistent points, which would be tracked by a central database on some website, so you could see who trumps who. Each time you fight someone who is stronger than you, and you lose, you wouldn't get points but you'd get some of their "DNA" on you, which your creature could incorporate to become stronger. But, there'd be diminishing returns for fighting the same person over and over -- essentially you get zero points for attacking a creature with the similar DNA, so you want to find diverse creatures. You'd be much better off wandering around downtown and fighting strangers, because then you'll get a lot more possible mutations for your creature, and a lot more points for victories you make.

Idea 3) "Screw Pokémon, We Make Our Own Collectible Card Game"

Like idea #1, but rather than screw with licensing, we make up a new game that's like Magic meets Pokémon meets all those other game Richard Garfield wrote or inspired. BUT, and here's the cool part, we just make up the base system, NOT all the cards.

Like, we say, "Oh, in this game there is POWER, and POWER can be fed each round into ABILITIES or SPELLS or ATTACKS, and the order in which these things happen is this and this and this."

THEN, we let people invent their own cards (in a high-level language we invent), most of which will contain exceptions to the rules or things which change the rules, because that's what's actually fun about these games. There would be some ground rules for developing cards -- eg, you'd have to win some matches to earn the points to do it, and your total card strength would be limited by how many points you are willing to spend. And you'd have to incorporate "flaws" with abilities or affects, too, so nobody could just say, "This card is free to play and requires no power and stops time and all your hit points go away."

Even so, obviously some cards would be unbalancing. So: there's a central repository for card ideas, and before ANYONE can play a card (in matches which count towards points) it has to be digitally signed by the repository. The community views new cards and votes on which ones should go "into production", (and which ones should be retired) and those cards are made available... BUT, you can't just buy 'em directly. There's a random element to getting cards, as there should be... one cool thing we could do would be to finally do what Garfield wanted, and have it so you win cards in battle. Like, the loser of a battle could decide if she wanted to allow the winner to pick her best card and get a two new cards randomly from the repository, OR just let the winner get a single new card from the repository herself, OR vote for a single card from the winner's hand to be banned from play. (This wouldn't immediately ban it, but at some point really unfair cards would get too many votes and leave circulation.)

Players would also be able to create "testing decks" -- they could use any number of any cards, legal or not legal, BUT matches with those decks look different and don't give any points or ranking. And, like, the iPhone takes away some of the graphic glitz, so it's clear you're just beta-testing your deck, you're not REALLY playing.

Idea 4) "Gnip-gnop"

If you go to the kind of parties I do, about twenty people at any gathering have iPhones. What if you made some fast, silly gams (drinking games, maybe?) involving the phones? For example, take something as simple as a ball bouncing between people -- you'd see it coming towards your screen, and you'd have to flick it away, and you could flick it towards other players, and they'd have to keep it going...

Or, imagine an iPhone game where you do that old sliding-picture-puzzle thing, where each iPhone's screen shows a section of a larger picture, and then everybody has to move around and stand next to each other such that the puzzle is solved.

You could do this with teams -- maybe have it so there's a message, and each iPhone shows a different letter, and you have to re-arrange the iPhones to figure out the message first.

Or you could show pictures on everyone's iPhone, but only two of them are similar, and those two people have to race to touch their iPhones together before a timer expires... I wonder if bluetooth signal strength is detectable on the iPhone, or WiFi signal strength -- whether one could actually tell if two phones are in very close proximity vs. 10 feet apart.

Idea 5) "Flash Mob Friends"

Not necessarily a game... imagine tying in to the iPhone extension that can tell where your iPhone is based on the cell towers around it, and using that as a way to gather groups. You could have a tiny app that simply has a button for what kind of group you would like to hang with, and others in your group would be notified if they are in a similar mood.

For instance, if I'm hungry, I could have a group of friends I sometimes eat with. So I press "Dinner Friends" and I go to Saluté, and everyone in that group can see where I am and that I am, in fact, actively getting dinner and would like company. They can IM me or just show up.

This is a lot like what I do right now for dinner, actually, except right now it's more aggressive -- I have to page like 20 people with "Hey, getting dinner, what up?" and they have to actively turn me down "OH, sorry, just ate." I think it'd be easier on everyone if it were more passive, "Hey, everyone, getting dinner, if you are hungry and available then ping me, otherwise cool." And without the urgency of a page -- just a status you could check, like in Twitter or iChat.

Open systems, closed systems, and the future of Apple TV.

2007-10-11T08:50:00.001-07:00

I own an Apple TV. (Yah, I'm the one.) I turned it on when I first got it, thought it looked really pretty, then turned it off and never touched it again.

BUT! I think Apple TV will be an amazing device, and a massive success for Apple... after they make a few changes.

Why did I turn mine off? Well, because in my TV room I also have a Mac mini hooked up to a 2TB drive. The Mac mini runs Front Row, just like the Apple TV, so it could be looked as a more-expensive version of the same device.

However, the mini also runs iTunes, so I can buy new shows on the same system on which I'm watching TV. With the Apple TV, I have to have my laptop downstairs and turned on, and buy and download a new movie on the laptop before I switch over to my Apple TV to watch it. Clunky! (The situation is worse if you have a Mac Pro with your media on it -- what are you going to do, run upstairs to the computer room every time you want to buy a song or show?)

And because the mini has a huge drive hooked up to it, it also acts as a content server to the rest of my house, so I can have a unified home for all my music and TV shows and movies, whether ripped or bought from iTunes -- it's my "Windows Home Server" without the Windows. Unlike with the Apple TV, which can't have an external disk, I never have to bring a second system into the equation, so the mini ends up being cheaper than the Apple TV, because the Apple TV requires a separate computer.

And now I don't even have to bother storing my movies on my laptop, which is great, because my drive is already pretty damn full of porn. Uh, I mean builds of Delicious Library 2. In fact, nowadays if I want to buy a new movie and I'm not downstairs, I remotely access my mini from my laptop using Apple Remote Desktop and buy it from the version of iTunes running on the mini, so it's right on my server where I want it. Again, possible because the mini is running a full OS, not just Front Row.

Note that a lot of the movies and TV shows I want to watch aren't from iTunes -- but since the mini is an open system, I can download Perian, an open source QuickTime add-on, and play movies AVI, FLV, MKV, DivX, and a billion other gibberish words. Hell, I don't even know what an FLV is. But, the point is, some of the content I want to play is in these formats, and Apple doesn't support them in QuickTime natively, so I can't play them on my Apple TV, since it's a closed system.

If a friend brings over a DVD, I just pop it in the mini and we watch it. The DVD player under OS X has a much nicer interface (and remote!) than any other player I've had, so I put my super-expensive multi-region player into cold storage. The Apple TV doesn't have a DVD drive, and you can't hook one up, since it ignores external USB devices.

For my personal DVDs, I can rip them using Handbrake and store them in my Movies folder, and Front Row magically finds them! No more pawing through stacks of DVDs! I finally have a DVD jukebox, the ultimate geek dream. The Apple TV doesn't allow me to install any third-party software. Heck, I can't even rip my CDs on the Apple TV, since it doesn't run iTunes and doesn't have a CD drive.

--

To sum up: Apple TV doesn't allow developers to get at its UNIX underpinnings. It doesn't allow for modifications of its system software. It doesn't allow people to hook up an external disk or a DVD drive. It's a completely closed system. And, as of right now, it's pretty much a failure.

Apple took a guess as to what features the market would want, and because Apple didn't allow for third parties to tweak and optimize what their system does, their guess had to be perfect the first time. It wasn't, and the Apple TV stays off in my house.

There appears to be a battle being fought inside Apple, on whether Apple will be a company that provides solutions or provides tools. iTunes and Front Row are solutions -- really great solutions, sure. They are very friendly and they solve very specific problems beautifully. But they aren't particularly extensible by themselves. We can't make new functionality with them. (Note that if we have access to the underlying machine, as we do with the Mac mini, we are given the tools to modify these solutions -- we can make Front Row play MKV files by adding QuickTime components, even though it was written before MKV existed. We can make iTunes play WMVs.)

Having a system be open, having it able to freely accept peripherals and new programs, turns it into a tool as well as a solution. Each customer can decide what she wants the system to be, and developers can create new solutions -- and if those solve compelling problems, the entire system will be that much more successful. And, at the end of this cycle, the makers of the original tool can integrate these third-party solutions, so the tool grows for everyone.

The amazing thing about the Mac mini vs. the Apple TV is it perfectly encapsulates the debate between providing solutions or tools to your customers. They are very similar boxes, from a raw-capability point of view, but one was closed and the other open. The Apple TV is a solution, and right now it's desperately searching for people who have the problem it solves.

With the Mac mini, Apple provided us with a mix of solutions (iTunes, Front Row, etc) and tools (expandability, compilers, access to UNIX, access to plug-in directories). And, as a set-top box, the mini is incredible. Now, obviously, I have no idea what the mini's sales numbers are, and Apple hasn't really pushed the mini as a set-top box, and it does cost more than the Apple TV, blah blah blah... but it's clear to me that if the Apple TV did what the mini does, the Apple TV would be a GREAT set-top box and home server. It would own the Microsoft Home Server so hard that Ballmer would wake up with a sore back.

--

Why doesn't Apple just fix their solutions themselves, you say? If we all want MKV movies so much, why doesn't Apple just include support for it?

Well, first off, they probably should, in this particular example. But Apple only has so many engineers on QuickTime, and besides it may not be particularly popular to add support for bizarro file formats from other companies, especially when Apple is pushing MPEG-4 (aka QuickTime) as the One True Wrapper.

Second off, third parties can afford to sometimes make very limited or kind of half-baked solutions to dip a toe into the water, and if those are popular they can be fixed up later. Open Source projects don't make headlines in the NY Times when they push a major release that has some bugs, so we collectively get to invent a TON of different things let the market figure out which ones are pursuing. Consider the original CoverFlow, which was originally just a (really cool) demo by a third-party, in search of a problem to solve. Now Apple's bought it and put it into everything it ships except for iPod socks.

Apple can't anticipate every change that is coming, or which changes will end up being popular. No, I don't think they should give up trying to do so, but I do think they should share the burden. For instance, I've never seen an "FLV" file. Let's pretend for a minute that Apple did spend a bunch of time writing an FLV component for QuickTime, instead of speeding up h.264 encoding or something. And then, it turned out basically nobody used FLV, and Apple wasted their time and lost other neat functionality because of it.

Now, the nice thing about FLV support being add in Perian is that Apple essentially has a bunch of suckers (I use the term lovingly) taking all the risk for them. If nobody cares about third-party movie formats -- well, Apple didn't spend any time on it. Shrug! If EVERYBODY cares about them -- well, there they are! Go download 'em! In fact, hey, these are open source -- Apple could just start bundling with them. No effort spent on Apple's part, but their marketshare just got a lot bigger.

This is the beauty of open systems. Apple has a ton of very talented designers and very smart engineers. But they shouldn't have to be the ONLY smart people in the world, who must anticipate everything every customer might ever need. It's asking too much.

--

This whole post is ironic because Apple pays its AppleScript evangelists to say exactly what I'm saying, but back to us developers: Add scriptability to your apps! You can't anticipate everything the customer will want, but you can make your app into a tool! Allow other vendors to tie into your system and everyone wins!

--

I expect Apple will rev the Apple TV soon. One thing they could announce is that you can now rent movies over the internet, or maybe they'll announce you can access the iTunes store from directly inside Front Row. Either of these would be nice, sure. But they'd just be more pre-made solutions -- maybe they'd be popular enough to make the Apple TV a decent success, maybe not. But we would never know what Apple TV could be.

What I want Apple to announce is that they are merging the Apple TV with the Mac mini, and making it a hybrid closed/open system - a machine that boots into Front Row but can be used as a standard computer if you press some magic keys. A turn-key solution that can be opened up by advanced users and developers. The first mainstream consumer device that is infinitely hackable.

The world is waiting for such a product. Apple's the company to do it.

Set me free inside an Apple TV, see what I do for you.

Video Game Idea: "Space 911"

2007-10-02T02:06:00.000-07:00

Themes explored: when does the player feel violence necessary, how do people's backgrounds influence this decision, and (major theme) that you HAVE to make a decision on this point, that you can't decide not to decide because reasonable people disagree and people will be hurt or happy either way.

Setting: you inherit a rescue-and-treat space facility from someone (your dead, estranged dad?). You are put in charge fresh out of med school. At the start of the game you are presented with a modified hippocratic oath which you must "sign" to go forward -- promising to "do no harm" before you can play the game.

Your base is a space hospital that is a stationary (at least at first) facility with a space ambulance / boarding vessel that is surprisingly tough. The hospital is asked to help in all kinds of space emergencies -- it's not just a hospital, it's a hostage rescue, fire-fighting, plague-containing, pirate warding all-purpose help-people-out kind of place.

The staff of the hospital consists of a handful of doctors who go on missions with you. What's special about these doctors is they've all joined the space hospital guild, which has a secret technology which only its members get, which enables them to magically teleport back to the hospital before they sustain enough damage to die. Thus, they are (for our game purposes) unkillable, but they aren't unstoppable -- you can't continue a mission if everyone gets killed and sent back to base, duh.

We want to keep the number of doctors small so the player gets attached to them (instead of having a party of zillions where you plug in and out faceless, nameless numbers) and feels that developing them is worthwhile -- trading them in on better models isn't an option. Also, when one of them quits in disgust, it should really hurt.

Big plot: Not-so-friendly, very advanced, very xenophobic aliens (a la Heechee/Gateway books) have decided the easy way to ensure their dominance is to spend several milleniums locked inside a giant time capsule and wake up occasionally, taking the good ideas from all life forms that have evolved, and then wiping them all out and letting new ones start.

The first thing that happens before they wake up is thousands of automated probes are sent out to all inhabited planets, and the probes start subtly screwing with the creatures on the planets to discover their strengths and weaknesses.

Phase one is the probes start dredging up each society's long-dead plagues and trying them out.

So, after a long period (thousands of years) of relative peace, the player is born into a galaxy that, for the last hundred years is falling increasingly into war and savagery, because the delicate balances of societies are being screwed up. Eg, planets that have become specialized in, say, robot creation, and don't even bother farming any more will find that they are all starving when the farming planets that supply them are attacked by plagues, and so in desperation they'll try to annex other farming planets that other advanced societies are depending on.

Plagues are becoming more and more common, and each plague is getting nastier than the last, because the probes are learning which ones work best.

In phase two the probes start exchanging information, and so plagues can't be contained any more, and need to be cured or the galaxy will be wiped out.

In phase three the probes start creating new plagues based on what they've learned, and so the player needs to find a supercomputer that can come up with cures as fast as the plagues are being changed, and get societies plugged into the computer.

Further phases (not finished yet) involve the aliens actually waking up and kicking butt, which the player will finally figure out and have to deal with.

Missions vs. plot: 911 calls come in, and each hospital (there are others in the universe) will claim them depending on the hospital's effective range and the mission distance. After a while any given call will either be claimed or just time out. The player should aim for 100% of the calls in her range to be claimed by someone, but since there are other hospitals she won't have to do all of them herself, either. But if the player ignores too many in a row, the other hospitals will get piled up and calls will start going unanswered. (Simulate this for real or fake it?)

A lot of the missions will be randomly generated, non-plot missions. However, many of these, if you succeed at them, will be changed by the game into plot missions. Eg, if you answer a pirate attack call and save the captain, it may just so happen that captain saw something anomolous in another sector that you should check out blah blah blah. If the captain dies, he didn't see anything, but maybe the next pirate call will contain the lucky captain who did?

The basic idea is, no plotline can be "lost" by the player failing a mission that leads to it, because we just define the missions the user failed to not actually be part of the plot, and only the ones she succeeds at are made available to the game's mission engine for inclusion in the plot. (Eg, the game engine needs a captain for the next part of a plot point, so it waits until the user gets one in the hospital, either as a walk-in or a rescue or what-have-you.)

There will also be walk-in patients all the time, some of whom may have interesting plot points but a lot of whom will just be background noise. The user shouldn't have to do anything with the walk-ins unless she wants to. (Eg, they'll automatically be treated, billed, and released unless there is something really unusual about them.)

Note that the plagues are sort of background noise at the start of the game -- the player has known of quaranteened planets all her life, and doesn't think there's anything odd about it. New plagues popping up is just a fact of life, just another kind of mission. But early in the game wise authority figures start pointing out that the universe wasn't always this way, that there are statistically too many plagues right now, that something is really wrong with the whole universe. Of course, there will be lots of paranoid theories of what that thing is that's wrong -- some will feel mankind has just lived to the end of its useful life and is dying of "old age", others will feel it's the inevitable triumph of microorganisms over macroorganisms that some people today think is inevitable, etc.

Actually, it should be at the start of the game that whoever who left you the hospital also leaves you a note that tells you that something isn't right in the universe, and that although the old hospital chief couldn't figure it out, she did start to figure out who had the right ideas, and that the player should contact Professor So-and-so as soon as possible and resume her quest to set the universe right.

Prof. So-and-so should probably be already dead, but there should be clues to someone else who can start explaining what's going on in the world. (This first plot person should probably only explain give information about the plagues and suggest ways to combat them, and hint that there must be a darker force doing this but not have any idea what or who it is.)

Mission structure: When the player goes out on missions (most of the game) she'll enter what are usually high-risk areas (often with combat going on) and have to make decisions about what kind of approach to take.

For example, if a pirate ship has boarded and taken over a freighter and has hostages, and the space ambulance docks, what will the player's boarding party do? THIS SHOULD BE UP TO THE PLAYER.

Some valid things to do:
- kill every pirate, then heal all the wounded merchants.
- heal wounded merchants as a priority but kill pirates if/when they interfere.
- sneak around and get all the wounded merchants out and treated without killing any pirates, letting the pirates have the ship but not the people.
- heal pirates and wounded merchants, stun pirates who resist, let pirates have ship
- stun all pirates, heal everyone wounded, give ship back to merchants.

Sure, the last one might sound the best to a lot of people, but it would also be the hardest -- the pirates don't want to be stunned, they're fighting with live ammo, and if they kill your team you lose the mission because you're teleported back to base and they'll surely get away before you get back to them.

Also, MORE IMPORTANTLY, people ARE DYING as you are traipsing around the ship. When you board a ship there will be people actively bleeding out, some of whom you can treat and stabilize but some of whom will require a doctor to monitor them or they'll just plain die. So, as you go through the ship, you'll have to make decisions every time you encounter a wounded person (pirate or merchant) -- "Can I spare another doctor to look after this person, will I be able to finish the mission with one less gun?"

Note that you WILL be able to group critical patients together and have a single doctor look after multiple patients, but hauling them around takes time and other people might be dying elsewhere, and also it gives the pirates more time to secure the ship. (Say it takes the pirates a while to get the engine codes cracked, so there's a period of time after pirates take a ship where they can't fly it, and that's how you managed to dock with them -- they are dead in the water for a while.)

There should be valid reasons presented to the player why she might want to do the mission each different way -- for example, the "kill-all-pirates" approach would result in the pirates having the ship for the least amount of time, and thus there would be less chance for them to actually get the engines restarted and actually make off with the booty. (Note that, since your ship is docked with the freighter, you can still take off and get all the wounded off after the pirates crack the engines, but you'll have a limited time before they go into hyperspace or your ship is scuttled and you're toast.)

Each approach should also effect how pirates in the area (and others) treat you in the future -- if you kill all pirates, then pirates will start to fear you and piracy will decrease, but when pirates do strike they'll be better armed, in greater numbers, and they'll attack you without mercy.

On the other hand, if you never kill a pirate they'll only stun your crew to keep them out of their way. And, if you actually heal pirates but otherwise don't interfere with them, then they'll completely ignore you (like the borg) and just let you go about and collect bodies and treat people (like the Red Cross during an ideal war).

Piracy is a big problem now because entire planets are starving and so all space cargo has become incredibly precious. There should be some sympathy for the pirates: "Our people are starving, we only want to get them resources so they aren't wiped out," but it shouldn't be complete, eg, they should still have killed innocent merchants and they are still taking resources from other groups that may be equally hard off.

CAST:

RODOP7 ("Dr. Roboto"): Giant, ugly, scary, loud (clanking) Robotic Doctor Prototype that is a couple hundred years old and the oldest healing droid currently in use. It's so antiquated that it doesn't have the ability to synthesize speech, it can just replay back 20 or so phrases that it has on "tape", like, "X is in trouble, you need to help him," and "Greetings, I am here to heal you, please relax."

The catch is Dr. Roboto has evolved a form of intelligence over the years, and so he "feels" very strongly that no human should ever die, that all men who are hurt need saving. He tries to express this by stringing his pre-recorded messages together in new ways, and as the game goes on he'll learn to play only parts of his messages (separated at punctuation points?) and string those together to express what he "feels". This will surprise the player, who after the first 100 times he hears the same sentences will assume Dr. Roboto is just an unthinking droid, just as everyone else inside the game believes.

Hideous radial arm saws on him. Patients are afraid of him. Rumors abound that he's a killer, or that he's just an organ-salvage droid for patients that are terminal, so nobody wants him to operate on them. He's also the best trauma surgeon that exists. HE CANNOT BE ORDERED TO HURT ANYONE.

At some point the player should find an encyclopedia entry about droid doctors: "Although robotic assistants have existed in the operating theatre since at least the diaspora, for the purposes of this article a robotic droid is defined to be a unit that is ambulatory, self-determining during a single operation, and self-contained. The first of these were created by X in Y, the Robotic Doctor Prototypes. Prototypes 1-3 had coordination problems and did not understand commands well, and as such got a bad reputation for losing patients. Although the fourth had these problems corrected, it was deemed a failure because it wasn't self-determining enough (fix wording!). The fifth had a very complex morality model that ended up being nondeterministic, and after being forced to make some moral choices that would be difficult for even a human doctor it got into a bad state and became, to anthropomorphize, a homocidal killer, further tarnishing the reputation of robotic doctors. It was later lobotomized and used simply as an autopsy droid and occasionally to harvest organs from recently-deceased patients. For the sixth prototype they ripped out the complex morality and put in a very simple logical routine -- always try to save anyone wounded, but always ask first. Strangely, there are no records of the tests or outcome of the sixth prototype, or whether it was ever put into active service. It is also unknown how the seventh unit varies from the sixth, but the seventh was the first robotic member of the relatively new space-rescue guild, and it is still in active duty at a backwater hospital, kept running as a curiousity and tourist attraction despite its incredible simplicity compared to modern droids.

After that [much better droids were built, much sleeker and more capable, blah blah]"

Subcloud LRLLRRLRLRRRLLRRR: Like a little raincloud. Can't talk, understands English perfectly. Operates by entering the patient through the lungs and using its particles like nanomachines. Incredibly good at viruses, cancer, poisons, not so good at massive trauma. Incredible at stabilizing patients, though (can physically just remove shock chemicals from bloodstream).

Communicates by forming itself into one or two symbol "emoticons". Color indicates whether it is asking a question, making a statement, or giving an order. So, a red up-arrow would mean, are we going up?

Name comes from the fact that all members of its species are actually part of the same cloud that can split into two at any point, and so they just name themselves by specifying their last position in the binary tree. THEY AREN'T TELEPATHIC. When two members of the species meet, they reform into a new cloud, exchange memories, and then (usually) split off again. Whichever subcloud was highest and leftmost in the tree is used as the basis of the new name, and they add L and R to that. (Thus, the player's cloud may change names during the game.)

Is willing to kill, but obviously is limited to choking and poison attacks. Since it floats it can do cool recon, but it can't pick anything up.

The Twins: two bodies, one brain, both bodies talk simultaneously but always express two sides of one idea, like:

"This mission will be very dangerous."
"The rewards for this mission are great."

Thus, it's hard to pinpoint exactly how it feels about any issue. [It's like Andrew at Omni.]

They can only be commanded to do things as a pair, even though there are two of them.

Lt. Indian: A human who experiences time in a "byte-swapped" manner from the rest of us. That is, in roughly ten-minute chunks, he experiences the future first and then now later. The result is he assumes you know things he'll tell you later, and he knows things you'll tell him later.

To code this will be tricky, but here are some sample ideas:

- You can't tick him off, because every time you start an argument with him, he just says, "Apology accepted" and walks away.
- You are told to get some tissue sample from him, and when you show up he asks, "Did you bring the tongs?" before you have a chance to ask him for it. He then explains, "Look, I'm going to tell you that you can't handle this sample without tongs, so where are they?"
- In combat, he always just randomly chucks grenades places, except it always so-happens that those places are exactly where the enemy will be soon. (Code this by making enemies by attracted to his grenades. If it so happens the enemy dies first, just chalk it up to bad aim on Lt.'s part.) On the other hand, sometimes he fires at thin air where an enemy was a few minutes ago.

[ ... other members, including one who is kill-happy ... ]

A central conflict is that some of your doctors believe in never harming anyone, while others believe that some people must be harmed if it saves more "good" people. You will NOT be able to make all your doctors happy -- these two doctrines are fundamentally incompatible, and no matter what you decide, one of your doctors will eventually leave your hospital in protest. You must decide where your morality lies.

Part of game play will be the missions, fought as in Fallout, and the other part will be managing your base and finances, like SimHospital. This combined model worked well in the original Jagged Alliance (without base building, but with finances and a staff that needed to get paid), and X-COM: UFO DEFENSE (spelling correct).

Both treating walk-ins or saving people from space will give you money with which to buy new equipment or hire new staff (nurses, etc), or upgrade your existing people (buy training for them, upgrade your robot, purchase nanobot upgrades for the cloud, etc), or buy better weapons, etc. You can dedicate more of your hospital to treating non-emergent cases if you want to play it safe and let the chronic patients pay your bills, but obviously you'll have a harder time dealing with the big emergencies that pop up as part of the plot.

If you do a good job in your sector, the government may grant you certain boons -- making you an official resource, giving you more interesting missiones, etc. Another possibility is that different space services (fleets) actually "subscribe" to different rescue organizations (instead of it being sector-based), so as you do better more fleets sign up with you. This would modify the above-described universe a bit -- in this version, civilian ships would carry a (VERY expensive) beacon which is tuned to your base, and if they ran into trouble they'd hit the panic button and the beacon would teleport your crew onto their ship, hopefully to save the day. So, each fleet would have to decide ahead of time which rescue organization's beacon they want to carry, and you could bid against other rescue organizations to put your beacon in various fleets -- but if you undercut the competition too much, you'll find you're not turning a profit with all the expenses of saving people (ammo, medical supplies, teleport costs, etc).

[ ... ending not decided ... ]

Go, NBC! You're SMURT!

2007-09-27T01:55:00.001-07:00

I own the entire first season of Heroes -- bought it on iTunes. Same with Battlestar Galactica seasons 1 and 2, and The Office.

Of course, I don't own Heroes season 2, because Mac users aren't allowed to download NBC's shows this season, and I don't have cable. I'm allergic to ads anyways. I've reached a point in my life where my time is just more valuable than that.

I'm a honest man, so I certainly didn't download Xtorrent and do a search for "Heroes S02E01", and 20 hours later, watch the HD version of the show, for free, with no commercials, on my Mac. I could have, sure. And the show would have rocked, and I would have saved $2, and NBC would have lost that money for no good reason.

You've got to grudgingly admire NBC's giant steel balls for thinking they can do the whole online thing alone, even though everyone else but iTunes has failed miserably up to now, and NBC's model is essentially just crappy broadcast TV, except over the net, which is, like, kind of pointless. Uh, guys, it turns out we consumers don't actually have a preference which WIRE our shows come from. Seriously, why wouldn't we just TiVo the show if that's what we wanted?

I mean, you've got to think, "Wow, those NBC execs really are independent thinkers! Stupid, sure, but independent! They aren't Steve Jobs' toadies! No sir! Look at the way they saw away at their noses! Their faces sure won't ever mess with them again!"

It's amazing how 100% of the companies that make their living distributing other people's content are run by absolute morons. Like, they fulfill no meaningful purpose in society -- these are the guys from the Hitchhiker's Guide that got sent in the first ship. I mean, you literally could put an African Grey parrot in charge of NBC and it'd make better decisions. (For one, there'd be a lot more shows about pirates, which would be awesome.) I defy anyone to think of a good decision that a record or TV or movie company has made recently. Let's sue teenagers! Let's make it impossible to enjoy our content over the web! Let's fund the seventeenth sequel to a crappy movie that barely made money! Let's have a fall season full of the same shit we've made a hundred times! Let's fire our writers and go entirely with reality shows that aren't real! Let's give outrageous amounts of money to washed-up artists and ignore the new talent that's actually selling records now! Let's cancel shows that are at all interesting and have a smart audience, because only stupid people watch TV now! Let's sue sue sue instead of create create create!

Maybe Amazon will start selling Heroes for $1 an episode, and non-copy-protected? Apparently Universal WUBS Amazon, so who knows?

Bush & Sons, General Contractors.

2007-09-21T03:28:00.001-07:00

Well, now, Mrs. Ross, I understand you have some concerns about our latest bill, so daddy's sent me over to talk about it with you. I'll be straight with you from the start: I don't know what half of this stuff is, either, but, heck, we'll muddle through it together, OK?

Yes, ok, I can see how you'd be upset that we said it'd cost $5,000 to fix your shower and now we've billed you for $5,000,000. No, I don't know where you're going to get that kind of money... uh, can you, like, mortgage your house, or something? That's a thing, isn't it? Mortgage? Funny sounding word. Mort-gage. Mortgage.

What? Oh, sorry. No, you really do have to pay it, I'm sorry, Mrs. Ross. Well, no, that's fair, we didn't actually fix your shower at all. Actually, we decided to start with the toilet, which is where we've concentrated most of our efforts for the last few years or so. No, no, I understand you thinking that was a mistake, especially in light of the fact that it turns out there was nothing wrong with the toilet, and you really wanted that shower fixed. But we didn't know that, going in! We had a gut feeling the shower and toilet shared the same bad plumbing! Yes, I know they are in different bathrooms, but the bathrooms sure look a lot the same, don't they? Didn't you find that a LITTLE suspicious? It's a logical conclusion. Sometimes you just know things, despite what people tell you, and you just have to take a leap. Ok, sure, yes, a $5,000,000 leap.

Yes, I suppose your grandkids will be paying for this shower until they're your age. Sometimes life works that way. Actually, it's not really the shower they'll be paying for, remember -- we decided not to work on the shower. It's the toilet that we're billing you for. Ok, fair, that's not fixed, either -- we kind of took it apart and, I'll be honest, we realized we're not plumbers. We have no idea how to put it back together. Man we feel really bad about that. That there is really where a lot of your expense comes from -- I mean, if we'd just taken it apart and put it together in a month, you can see how our bill would have been a lot smaller, huh? But it's been, what, years now? I gotta tell you, we feel as terrible about this as you do. It's been really hard on the boys. Well, not the boys in accounting, but the boys actually doing the work. Well, also not our suppliers. They're pretty happy, I gotta admit.

I know I threw that party for my boys and said we were "done" years ago... but that really needs to be put into context, you see. When I said "done" I meant "done with the hard part," which was convincing you to let us tear up your bathroom. I mean, we knew once we got in there wasn't going to be any finishing for years. No, in retrospect, I guess I could have been clearer about that. But that's ancient history, now. I mean, you've got a new toilet to look forward to, someday! Right, and a shower, if we get to it.

And of course, there was the damage to the area around the toilet caused by old Jim Blackwater. Oh, yah, I totally agree, I'm not even gonna argue -- he is one creepy dude. I'll give you that. I'm not gonna pull yer leg, Mrs. Ross -- he's not really a contractor. No license, no nothing. He's just a drifter who really likes tools, but he was too kooky to ever get a license. But, you know, recently we've been a bit short on men, so we thought, hey, he has his own hammer, and chances are good that at least SOME of the things he'll hit with it will be nails, so, why the heck not? I mean, it's not our money we're spending, so you can see our thought process, right? Look, I'm real sorry if he's been givin' your daughter the creepy eye, but to be fair you gotta admit she shows a lot of leg for a 15-year-old.

You gotta unnerstand, we could have read some book on fixing toilets and just gotten the tools and put in the time and acted like them pointy-headed city wonk plumbers do. But we're from Texas, and we do things a little differently there; we shoot from the hip. We don't like them fancy college boys tellin' us they know what to do just because they got book learnin' and experience and all that. Well, ok, fair, I did go to college too, but I didn't go to class, so I don't think it counts against me.

But, look, Mrs. Ross, try to see the bright side: I think we're making real progress, finally. No, I mean, with the toilet situation. We haven't had any progress on the shower, no; I keep explaining that we decided to do the toilet first. Yes, ok, fine, it wasn't broken, but it could have been, and it is now, so I think we should just keep doing the exact same thing we've been doing until it suddenly starts working.

Also, while I have you here, we've identified some problems with your sink now that the plumbing around the toilet is all dug up, and the boys are real eager to have a crack at that. Heck, we're probably gonna have to hire some more apprentices! Look, don't worry about the cost, yet -- those aren't final totals.