for being about faith without being preachy

Technically, this movie opened yesterday, and I should have put up the review then.  But I already had two reviews set to go up, and three posts in one day seemed a tad crowded to me.  Besides, I don’t think many people are going to rush off and see Henry Poole is Here on a Friday night.  It is more of a lazy Sunday morning movie.

Henry Poole is dying.  Although, we never learn from what, he does say he won’t be around long.  But he’s gone back to his childhood home… or at least he tried.  Instead, he bought the house down the street.  He has a Hispanic neighbor who used to date the man who previously owned the house (who died of a heart attack in the kitchen).  He also has a neighbor whose husband ran out on her and their child, a daughter who hasn’t spoken in a year.  And he’s got a water stain in the shape of Jesus in his stucco.

Its that last thing that causes the most problems.

Henry Poole is Here is a movie about faith, about belief in something greater, but at no point does it come out and shove any particular religion down your throat.  It also never says anything remotely close to people who don’t believe going to Hell or anything.  It is more a message of, “Having hope is better than having no hope.”

I enjoyed it.  Not the greatest film ever made, but far from the worst.  I can think of plenty of worse ways to spend an hour and a half.

I’ve been a user of Last.fm for quite a while now.  Originally I would just hit it up occasionally to find a band or song and listen to it and maybe find some new music I’d never heard before.  Then, when the wife and I started having guests over to the house, either for parties or dinners, I put a PC up in the kitchen and dining room area where we could pick an artist and have random selections play in the back ground while we cooked, ate and hung out.

Then something happened.  With the idea that a television show could showcase and promote music through the site (something I still think every TV show should consider), I found myself spending entire work days on Last.fm, winding my way through genres of music.

So, I finally took the plunge and actually signed up for a free account there so I can actually store favorites and all that stuff.  This means, of course, I now have a profile there.  If you happen to also use the site, feel free to add me as a friend, and if you want to, let me know your profile so I can see what you are listening to.

Oddly enough, on the same day that a Democrat member of the House of Representatives announces that he’d like to legalize casual personal use of marijuana, Cheech & Chong announce they are planning to go back on the road.

Life is funny like that some times.

Yesterday, Harmonix officially released the Features List and Set List for the upcoming Rock Band 2.

Hell fucking yeah!

Over the last few years, I have noticed that I am less and less excited for new games coming out.  But back in November of last year, Rock Band really knocked my socks off.  I had played some Guitar Hero before, but the style of the game (being stuck with their personas and all that) just left me less than thrilled.  Sure, it was fun to play sometimes, but only really fun when you had someone else in the room to play with.  When I got Rock Band, however, that changed.  With the fully customizable avatars and being able to play four people at a time AND do more than just play guitar, I finally got excited about a game.

We’ve had a few parties at the house, and I have gone to a few other parties, and Rock Band plays so well as a party game.  With four people able to play at once and easily being able to rotate people in and out, and especially with the big 102″ screen and the large room to play in, everyone really gets into it.  Its not the stand still staccato snoozefest that Guitar Hero always ended up being, with one or two people staring intently at the screen clacking away on the strum bar and tapping out colored notes.  This was a band, and bands rock!

Now I need to officially begin saving up my money so that Rock Band 2 can find its way into our home…

Harmonix… From Those About To Rock, We Salute You.

Yesterday I decided to go through and make sure my RSS feeds in my reader were up to date.  I ended up dropping a couple where they haven’t posted anything in a while (a year), and decided that while I was doing it I’d try to see if feeds were available for some websites that I visit frequently.

Out of all the web comics that I added to the feed reader, only one (xkcd) actually had the comic in the feed.  The rest, at best, gave you a feed item letting you know that a new comic had been posted and you needed to visit the site to see it.

Now, I am not stupid.  I know exactly why they do this… advertising.  See, most of these sites, in order to offset the cost of hosting the comic (bandwidth and all that), have advertisements.  And as is the trend of ads on the web these days, most sites don’t manage their own advertising directly, they sign up with a banner providing site and then throw snippets of code on their site that will request an ad from the ad provider.  They do have some control over the ads, usually the ability to block ads they don’t wish to support, and overall I suppose they do a good job of keeping the ads “on message” with the rest of the site.

My problem is… well, why can’t the code snippets live in the RSS parser as well and tack on an ad at the bottom of a feed item.  Same banner image (though not the Flash “punch a monkey”/”you’ve just won two free ipod nano” ads), a line of text and a link/url to follow.  The capability exists.  WordPress has a plugin that does exactly that by putting a footer on RSS items.  Of course, not all web comics are using WordPress, but if it exists for one system it has to be possible for other systems.

Anyway, the result is, after adding a bunch of comics to my feed reader, I then removed all of them except xkcd.  For all the ones I removed, I’ll go back to visiting them when I remember to, which is usually once a month.  Just think, if they put the comic and an ad in their feed, they’d make me a daily reader of both their comics and their ads…

If you are anything like me and grew up in the 80’s, you probably went to Chuck E. Cheese or Showbiz Pizza for someone’s birthday or some other special occasion, or maybe you just went for the fun on it.  Both places had, in their dining hall, animatronic bands that would play songs while you ate.  I haven’t been to one lately, so I can’t say if they still have them, or if the shows are any good, but I do recall the last time I went (on a first date when I was 17 back in 1992… I wonder if she remembers that date, heh) the dining hall remained well lit while the band performed, which was kind of a let down.

Anyway, it seems that the band from Showbiz, The Rock-afire Explosion, is experiencing a resurgence.  A guy, a car salesman, bought himself one of the animatronic bands and with the help of the original designers is making music videos for more current songs.  They made a documentary about it.  You can see videos of several performances by searching for “Rock-afire Explosion” on YouTube.

I just wasted an hour watching this stuff, and I am bound to do it again.  I want to go to a Showbiz now, although I figure it won’t be as cool as these videos, and I would love to see those old pizza party places make a comeback, old-school, with the darkened dining hall, music and light show.  If I have kids one day, I want to take them there, or some place like it.

Thanks to Cyanbane for the heads up…

Not too long ago, on the Conquer Club website, they implemented a new system for player ratings.  Previously it had been based on an eBay style positive/neutral/negative scale with a comment.  You simply voted weather your experience playing them was positive, negative, or neither and then said something like “played all his turns in a timely manner” or “excellent team mate, worked well together” or “stupid dumbass only attacked his own team”.  Anyway, they switch over to a 4 stat 5 star rating system.  If you don’t care to follow the link, the short version is that after you play someone you can leave them a rating which is a rating from 0 (no rating given) to 5 (excellent) stars in 4 categories: Fair Play, Attendance, Attitude, Teamwork.  And the rating isn’t revealed until the game goes into the archive (no more ratings can be made on that game).

Going back to the eBay style ratings system, I hated it on eBay, largely because it was heavily retaliatory.  I once bought my wife a cello on eBay.  I didn’t buy the best model out there, I just wanted to get her a practice cello so she could start playing again (seriously, I’m not going to spend five grand on anything for anyone if there is a chance its just going to sit in the corner collecting dust).  The one I bought arrived and the bridge was not set up, which I expected.  What I did not expect was to wind up driving around to about two dozen music stores in an attempt to get someone to set up the bridge and have none of them willing to work on it because it was an “off brand” they didn’t sell or support.  I ended up setting it up myself, and did a very poor job of it, and after I gave it to my wife we finally found a music shop where someone relented and set up the bridge and tuned it.  So, I went to eBay and left a review of my purchase experience.  I was limited by the number of characters, but I said, “sale and shipment fine, but cello was ‘off brand’ and most music stores would not set up bridge or tune it.” and I gave him a neutral review.  To which, he replied by giving me a negative review that said “clueless user, DO NOT SELL TO HIM AND DO NOT BUY FROM HIM, liar and cheat!”  Now, because this was the only review I had, I ended up over the next 6 months unable to buy anything.  All my bids were refused.  The entire time, I was talking to the cello guy trying to get him to change his review.  I had been totally honest and had not given him a negative review, I just felt that anyone who purchased his items might want to know about difficulty getting service on those items.  Finally he relented and changed the review to neutral saying, “inexperienced eBay user, expects to get more than he pays for”.  After having a few more bids of my dropped, I just stopped using eBay.

As this relates to Conquer Club… well, I played a game with some people and I rated most of them 3 out 5 in most categories, except attendance in which case missing zero turns got people a 5, the occasional missed turn got a 4 or 3, and every player who dead beat (missed three turns in a row and was kicked from the game) got a 1.  Once the games got locked down and ratings were revealed, I got a flood of private messages from people complaining about getting a 3.  But looking at the rating scale:

0 means No Rating.  Or in other words, I don’t feel like I can judge you on this.

1 means Bad.  A rating of 1 means you sucked at whatever it was.

2 means Below Average.  This means you performed worse than I would expect.

3 means Average.  Meaning you performed as expected.

4 means Above Average.  You exceeded my expectations.

5 means Excellent.  You are awesome.

In most cases, people are Average.  To get Above Average in Attitude, for example, you just need to be gracious when you lose… or win.  To get Excellent, you need to also chat and be a good natured guy.  If you are silent the entire game, I cannot give you anything other than Average because there is nothing to base it on.  The ratings are from Bad to Excellent, not from I Want To Kill Them to Didn’t Piss Me Off.  There is a phrase where they call something “going above and beyond” and this is what they mean, you have to go Above and Beyond the Average to get better than an Average rating.

The problem is, people don’t see it that way.  3 out of 5 is a 50%, its halfway, and 50% is failing.  Most user based rating systems end up being all but useless for the same reason.  People being rated expect to be given the highest score possible unless there is a problem, and even then most of them want to still get the highest score possible after explaining or fixing the problem through other channels.  People rating others get pulled into the retaliation loop where they are giving higher ratings than they should because they don’t want to be rated poorly themselves.  And then most importantly, the site/game/whatever that is using the rating system, if they allow comments, usually have the length limited to the point where meaningful comments are not allowed.

I don’t know if there is any solution… you want to have the ratings to assist you in avoiding problem users, but the ratings can be, and are being, gamed so you don’t even know if a problem user is really a problem user.

Admit it… I mean, I know I do… most blogs are there for people to hear themselves talk.  But a co-worker of mine had a medical emergency a couple of weeks ago.  He complained of a headache before bed, and later his wife couldn’t wake him up.  After getting rushed to the hospital, the doctors determined he had a bleed in his brain.  They went in, relieved the pressure, found it was not bleeding anymore (it had clotted and stopped on its own), and now he’s doing much better.

During all this, his family was given a profile at CarePages.  This allowed them to notify friends and family and send out an email with a link to the page.  People can log in and see updates (done by the family) on how he is doing.  They can leave messages.  See photos uploaded by the family or patient.  Give virtual gifts and get contact information.  You can even sign up for notifications so that you get contacted every time the family or patient updates the page.

It has actually been quite nice for us, the people on the outside, to be able to get news when its available and not have to wait until the phone chain trickles down to us.  And it has to be pretty nice for the family, knowing they can go to one place, make an update and have it automatically sent out to everyone.  Nice for the patient too, when he or she can read all the well wishes from all the people in their life.

Anyway, its just something that I thought from a pretty good idea and decided to share it.

I have stumbled across this on the Internet a few times now, and I decided that I would post it to share with my readers, whoever you may be, and perhaps someone out there can point me toward the origin of this brilliant piece of work, because I can not find it.

Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the other monkeys with cold water.

After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm! Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked.

Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana. Why not? Because as far as they know that’s the way it’s always been done around here.

And that, my friends, is how a company policy begins.

I have found this to be true.

Have you ever had five or six things that you needed to do in your life?  Like perhaps you are in need of (1) Getting a Job, (2) Cleaning Your Garage, (3) Alphabetizing your CD collection, (4) Doing the Laundry, and (5) Calling your parents.  Arguably, of that list, getting a job is probably the most important (although, calling your parents might be at the top of that list depending on how long it has been… so, have you called your parents lately?  No?  I’ll wait…  okay, let’s continue), however, getting a job can be a big process which can be broken down into smaller tasks, and is least likely to be over with quickly.  You might, if this were your list, spend an hour circling ads in the paper, making a few calls and maybe emailing off a couple of resumes, and while the task of getting a job is not complete, you’d likely move on to something else.  Especially if this is not the first day you’ve spent looking for a job.  You might, given these tasks, go sort the CDs for a while, then throw a load of clothes in the wash, piddle around in the garage and come back to the job search later.  Sound about right?

As long as all the tasks were getting worked on at some level, you wouldn’t fault yourself for not spending all your time on the number one top task, nor would you fault anyone else for doing it either… unless it was their job.

It is very common in my daily work that I have a half dozen tasks on my plate.  The most important one might be to build an entire new application, followed by some bug fixes, maybe a new report over there, another field added to this screen, etc.  Just like any other person in their normal lives, when I work, sometimes, if the task is very large, banging my head against it, even if I am making good progress, gets depressing because it is not getting finished.  So, throughout any given work day, I am liable to stop working on the big task and go polish off a smaller one.  It makes me feel good, and makes working on the large lumbering task more bearable.  However, none of the people I’m doing this work for like it.  The people who want the entire new application are upset that I’ve released code with bug fixes, a new report and some screen changes, but no new application.

Being as this is in the Gaming category, how does it relate?  Ever read a patch message to your favorite MMO and found yourself thinking (or saying, because every now and then we all talk to ourselves out loud, and its okay), “Why did they fix all this piddly crap when X feature/class/mechanic is so utterly broken?!?”  The answer is in the preceding paragraph.  No matter how broken something is and how important that feature may be, sometimes a programmer just needs to take a few minutes to fix something easy just to get a victory under his belt for the day.

And believe me, you WANT him to have that victory, because a programmer who gets buried under huge high priority tasks with no end in sight is an unhappy programmer who is looking for another job… and when he finds one, he’ll be replaced with a temporarily happy programmer who doesn’t know the code as well as his predecessor (and he’ll be unhappy and looking for a job soon enough).  Those little victories are what keep the programmers believing that they can and will tackle the larger problems that exist.