A guide for the confused

Let's talk about intellectual property for a while. Now, before we go any further, I must note that I am NOT a lawyer (I merely sleep with one) and CANNOT and WILL NOT offer any kind of legal advice. Everything I say here is liable to be incorrect. Do not rely on it. If something I discuss is relevant to you, do your own research and talk to a lawyer.

I'm also going to skate over the discussion of whether intellectual property is a valid concept.

Things never go smooth. Why can't things ever go smooth?

I've been becoming more and more frustrated with the distinctly low-end aftermarket stereo in my car, and decided finally to replace it. Picked out a nice Kenwood, ordered it and what they were certain was the right harness adaptor from Crutchfield. It took a week to get the package, and when I had it I went out, looked, and from the view I had through the slot in the dashboard, it all looked good to go. So I pulled out the wire strippers, and the crimper, and with a merry chorus of clicking noises I connected up the wiring harness adaptor. That done, I decided to just install the new stereo and be done with it.

So I pulled out the old one, pulled on the wires, and... wait a moment. That's the wrong plug. There's no second plug. This is the wrong harness adaptor. So, now I'm out $15 because their website was wrong. There'd been a review mentioning that this might not be the right adaptor for a 1994, but I'd trusted them.

Turns out, the reviewer was right. I needed the other adaptor, which the website didn't even show me until I searched by the part number he'd given, and which the website insists won't fit my car. Sorry, website, but I'm rather more inclined to trust the actual wires and plugs under my dashboard.

So now, I have two options. I can either whomp up another set of splices in the wiring I have, or I can telephone the people who sold me the stereo, and explain to them that their website steered me wrong, and I need the other harness adaptor. It turns out, you see, that which harness adaptor is needed depends on which of the two options for a factory stereo Volvo installed, and I didn't know which stereo my car had had since it was long gone when I bought it. I'm definitely inclined to telephone them and say that they really ought to have both options shown, since their unwarranted certainty caused me issues.

In the meantime, I shall continue with the declining stereo that's fitted. It mostly works.

I don't know how to answer...

So, the usual thing happened: the long weekend was DunDraCon, and I attended. Thing is, like last year, I only attended for one day; there just wasn't enough of a value proposition for me to attend more than that. The trouble is that I won't even bother trying to get into any games there.

Let me explain. My first DunDraCon was four years ago, and I went for a weekend pass. I did online games registration, and I lucked out; I got into my first choice of game for the first slot. That was a blast, thanks to Sean Nittner's excellent work in getting the situation complicated. If you ever get the chance to play the Burning Wheel scenario The Gift, do so, and if it's Sean running it, be VERY glad!

What I didn't realise at the time was I was lucky as hell. See, DunDraCon has a game assignment system which uses a random number generator to  decide who gets to be in which game. This means you've got no guarantee of getting into any game at ALL, never mind the one you want to play in.

Ryan Macklin has outlined his problems with the shuffler system more eloquently than I can. Suffice it to say: I don't even try to get into games at DunDraCon any more. I don't even attend KublaCon, because it also uses a shuffler, and doesn't have as attractive a seminar track. I attend DunDraCon mainly for the City Building seminar that tends to happen on the Saturday, and whatever other panels Kenneth Hite happens to be on, since he's always worth listening to and potentially debating with.

But the survey asks how satisfied I am with how the system works. There isn't a box for "not applicable" or "broken as designed". My only real option is to keep on complaining on the publicly accessible internet and not paying for a full weekend pass. They could make almost twice as much money from me; but until the shuffler is removed, I simply don't see enough value in paying for the whole weekend; it's better for me to wait until the seminar track is visible and then plan to pay at the door on that day. I wouldn't save any money by pre-registering (and that means the con misses out on getting my money early, with attendant problems) and so it's just not worth it.

A Tale of Two Videos

CD Projekt RED recently released their teaser trailer for the upcoming computer game Cyberpunk 2077, and unfortunately ignited a firestorm with it. The video, and my thoughts regarding it (along with the reason for the cryptic post title) are below the jump.

Doing it again isn't fun.

One of 2012's most critically-acclaimed games is The Walking Dead, an adventure game (which is to say, a game about clicking on everything) with some action elements. The major point leading to its acclaim is the strength of its character interactions. I bought it on sale, and unfortunately I'm now regretting that; not because of the story, but because of the saved game system.

Naturally, a game which forces you to make decisions needs to make those decisions count; so the game only has one save file for a playthrough. That, unfortunately, is where the problem lies; there's no explicit saving allowed, in a bid to avoid save-scumming. That puts the player at the mercy of the developer's autosaves, and they have scant mercy. They're infrequent; it's perfectly possible to go half an hour of solving puzzles, talking to people, and generally moving things on with no autosave happening. They're hidden; I don't actually know if there's any way to tell when they happen. I certainly haven't seen a way, and I haven't seen any kind of tooltip suggesting it. I found out the hard way about the half-hour; I started playing again, and found myself not having solved a puzzle I know for a fact I'd solved half an hour before I quit the game. At which point I promptly quit again, and am now considering getting rid of the game; because the developers do not have the decency to respect my investment of time.

Shamus Young has decried the idiocy of "Do It Again, Stupid" gameplay, but I feel that this is worse. DIAS merely wipes some of your progress in a predictable manner; this frankly broken save system wipes progress in an UNpredictable manner that doesn't even show up until one re-starts the game; at which point, with the vagaries of human memory being what they are, it is nigh-impossible to recall what is or isn't actually done, particularly given the lack of indication attached to saving. The entire point of saving the game is to ensure that what the player has done in the game remains done; that's why the save system of The Walking Dead cannot be described as other than broken. It doesn't perform its most basic function reliably.

Your car is probably lying to you.

Most cars have an array of gauges in front of the driver. There's always a means of indicating road speed, and usually a gauge for fuel level. What else there is varies depending on the target market, but nowadays a tachometer to show engine speed and a temperature gauge to show if the engine's overheating are normal.

Most of these gauges are fully functional, but one, the temperature gauge, tends nowadays to be a skeuomorph. It's not technically a temperature gauge (which in automotive terms is actually a suitably calibrated ohmmeter, reporting the varying resistance of a bit of wire that is the temperature sensor), but a multi-state indicator. This is called compensation, and it's annoying to me.

The major reason for compensation is to avoid worrying inexperienced drivers. When first sitting at the controls of a car, one sees this apparently huge panel of dials, very few of which are all that obvious in function. To avoid overwhelming the novice, much of what used to be handled by dials (oil pressure, electrical system health, and so on) has been relegated to a row of go/nogo "idiot lights". The temperature gauge was a candidate for this, but it turned out not to be a good idea; there is still a need for more granularity than a simple light can provide. However, by filtering the signal fed to the gauge itself, the needle can be held rock-steady.

Why is the filtering needed for a steady needle? Because engine temperature is affected by multiple factors working to both increase and decrease it. Demand more power, and the extra fuel will result in more heat energy going into the engine; it heats up. The thermostat opens, and it cools down; the electrically driven fan comes on, and it cools down further, closing the thermostat. Heat begins to build again. And so it goes, with the temperature confined to a surprisingly narrow range so long as everything's working as it should. If the filtering weren't there, the needle would move around, and an experienced driver would be able to see when the thermostat's opened, and so on. This would be useful should something in the complex chain of equipment stop working, since it would be reflected in the gauge's reading, making figuring out what's broken easier.

However, a nervous driver will be distracted by this wavering needle, wondering, not unnaturally, what they're doing wrong; and making the needle stay still is easier than explaining that "it's meant to do that". So in goes the filtering circuit, and the needle now has five positions. When the engine's cold, it's just off the stop, since it has to indicate that the engine is running (despite the tachometer; it's expected that a gauge will be "live" when the engine is running, so even if a cold engine should have the needle sitting on the stop, it's moved up); when the engine's warm, but not to full operating temperature, it'll be between there and the middle. When the engine's in normal operating range, the temperature needle will be rock-steady at the middle of its travel, since there's a strong mental association between "the middle" and "where it should be". Then there are "moderate overheat" and "severe overheat" positions, although the severe overheat will usually be heralded by a cloud of evaporating coolant and a cessation of drive.

But you're not seeing what the engine temperature actually is. Instead, you're seeing that it's within what the designers of the circuit deemed acceptable. This doesn't just make troubleshooting harder; it introduces another thing which can fail. The small circuit board that handles this for Volvo 240s is notorious for failing, and it's normal for enthusiastic owners to simply remove the board and substitute a short wire which restores the temperature gauge to being an actual gauge, rather than an indicator. Most vehicles built after the later 1980s will tend to have some degree of compensation in their temperature gauge; so unless you're driving a classic, it's probably lying to you about the engine temperature.

I'm not a fan of skeuomorphs in general. I much prefer that an interface be designed from the ground up for the device it's to be used on; skeuomorphs hinder accessibility and force compromises which lead to less powerful interfaces. It could be argued that skeumorphic design leads to less usable interfaces as clutter and non-functional elements accumulate.

Allow me to gush for a moment.

I've only ever bought one computer game on release day. That was Half-Life 2; I was working at the Social Security office at the time, and on that cold November day I used my lunch break to go to a game store and buy a copy. Full price. It sat in my bag all afternoon, and when I got home I couldn't play it because the then-new Steam service used to authenticate it had fallen over under the astoundingly huge demand. That game was POPULAR, in a big way. The next day, the load was less, and I was able to play, and the sheer beauty of the game, even on a video card which fell between "minimum" and "recommended" specs (and which, unlike the rest of its line, was unable to cope with the most advanced bling-mapping used then) blew me away. Combined with the most believable NPCs I'd ever seen in a computer game, the effect was almost complete immersion. I was reacting as Gordon Freeman, and the fact that I physically resembled his canonical appearance (goatee, glasses, and according to the first Half-Life a ponytail) was icing on the cake. In time, that particular install of Windows went irretrievably south, and I still hadn't finished the game. It had, however, been a wonderful experience up until then.

Roughly seven years later, I wondered why I'd picked up a dislike of Steam's conditions in the years between my losing my ability to use it and then. I checked, but found nothing more objectionable than most EULAs, and many terms more generous than that. So, I logged in once more (having astoundingly remembered the password to a service I wasn't using for a good long while!) and found that I'd lost my progress. The current version of Steam is exceedingly friendly; I not only have access to my games from any computer capable of running them, I have my preferred control setup, my saved games, and so on, backed up transparently to "the cloud", which is to say a space on Steam's servers. I could, if I so desired, go to any computer running Steam, log in, and play any of the games I own starting from any saved point within them. This wasn't available in roughly 2005 when I stopped using Steam.

Thanks to the generosity of friends, I was given gift copies (another new feature since I stopped using Steam) of Portal, an excellent puzzle game, and Half-Life 2 Episode 1, the abbreviated follow-up to Half-Life 2. I actually finished Half-Life 2 (for the first time!) prior to starting Episode 1; I wanted to follow the story. Around October, Portal 2 became available at half-price for a short while, and the LA and I (having both gotten Portal for free, by various legitimate means) decided to purchase a copy each. That put me back in the ranks of "people who own a game released in the current calendar year", a situation I last experienced in 2004.

And, recently, as part of a sale, Half-Life 2 Episode 2 went half-price. This is the second short sequel to Half-Life 2, and is distinctly improved over Episode 1 insofar as the difficulty curve is better judged, and the environments are less recycled-feeling. It's also introduced a new enemy type, and this enemy type does horrible things to the player's view of the screen. When its characteristic "warning" hits, the screen area narrows down into tunnel vision, colours are somewhat distorted, and there's a distinct faint noise. Somebody at the development studio has low blood pressure; the effects of the Advisor's psychic warning are almost exactly those of a blood pressure crash. I'm very impressed by the realism shown here, and at the point in the game I've reached I can't help but feel that Gordon Freeman must be nursing a very severe headache; it's hit him quite a lot.

In other recent news, I've been given a date for my oath ceremony; on December 14th, four years and one day after I landed in Los Angeles, I shall become a US citizen. I really did hit the fast track. Also, yesterday saw a follow-up appointment with my doctor regarding the x-rays of my lower limbs he recently ordered; it turns out, despite my having had painful ankles since I was about 10, they're fine; despite my knees being painful since my late teens, they're fine; it's my hips, which only really started hurting in my mid-20s, which are arthritic. I wasn't really surprised by the diagnosis; although the blood factors are only elevated normal, the extent and persistence of the pain indicated pretty clearly that there was damage, and it's something of a relief to have that confirmed. There are many good options for managing arthritis, and we're starting with the ones that have fewest long-term ill effects on the rest of my body, since I'm only in my early 30s. There's no cure for arthritis, and little prospect of such a thing ever being discovered, so I shall be living with it for a long time. I just hope the next set of hip x-rays is a long while away; I shall be learning from last time next time I need them done, and taking with me a designated driver and some powerful painkillers. It turns out that arthritic hips really don't like being placed in the positions needed for a good hip x-ray; for a couple of days afterwards, I was barely able to walk, and that only with the assistance of a cane and synthetic opiates.

It's been quite busy of late, all in all. I'm hoping for a slowdown, but doubting its likelihood.

Troubleshooting

As you probably know, I drive an older car. Old enough, in fact, that it has a few mildly intractable problems, such as the fuel gauge, which only works intermittently. It's seemingly random, but today I finally figured out the pattern. It had seemed to correlate with cabin temperature, but not during summer; when it was warm in spring, the gauge would work, but for summer it wouldn't. This puzzled me until I finally figured out the human factor.

You see, my car has working air conditioning. This pushes cold air through the ventilation ducts. The fuel gauge is on the extreme left of the instrument cluster, right next to the vent duct leading to the outermost vent on that side.

So, I have a dodgy connection somewhere in there, which sometimes expands enough from heat to make a good connection, and can be cooled to the point of not making the connection by the air conditioning cooling the ventilation ductwork. I'm inordinately satisfied with myself for figuring that one out.

Making me want marketing

I tend to dislike advertising. No, scratch that, I tend to despise it with the flames of a million suns. On occasion, however, it can happen that I desire it. For instance, one publisher I rather like the stable of is Orbit. They publish, among others, Iain M. Banks, K. J. Parker, and Joe Abercrombie. The last two are the two authors who have earned automatic buys from me; I will buy anything they've written, based on the sheer quality of their previous work. Only one other author has ever enjoyed that status with me, although I've since demoted him: Terry Pratchett. Orbit have recently started doing a podcast; their format is roughly half an hour to an hour of conversation between a regular host and an author, so far (in the two episodes released to date) one with a new title either just out or coming soon. I only caught the first episode because Joe Abercrombie mentioned it (he being one of those authors who keeps a blog, interacts with readers, and generally keeps his fans informed of what's going on and what they can expect soon, in contrast to the rather secretive authors who toil in obscurity and on occasion release a book) and the fact that he was going to be on it. There was an iTunes link, so I pointed iTunes thereat (since I own an iPod, I do have a use for iTunes now) and it cheerfully slurped down a rather interesting interview with the chap, who sounded roughly as I'd imagined, and as though I'd greatly enjoy a beer with him. Since the first episode had proven interesting, I didn't bother to delete the feed from my trawl (the joys of a thousand gigabyte hard disk; I currently am not remembering to delete anything, because it's not as though I'm short on space), and today a second episode arrived featuring an author, Jesse Bullington, who I hadn't heard of, but for whatever reason discussing similar themes such as swearing in fantasy fiction, whether gruesome descriptions of injury are justified, and so on. I shall very probably be looking for this chap's work next time I'm in a bookstore; the descriptions which came up in the discussion made them sound very much like something I'd enjoy.

And so, I have been successfully advertised to. I've been given more information on a thing I already liked, which enticed me to stick around and obtain information on something I didn't yet know that I liked. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what you need to do to market things successfully. Let people know about what they don't yet know that they like. You don't achieve that by giving them earworms, attempting to cave their skulls in with excessive volume, or causing seizures with flashing lights; you do it by treating them as intelligent beings who enjoy interesting information.

Has it really been 25 years?

Twenty-five years. I suppose it must be, but January 28th 1986 is one of very few days I know exactly what television I watched. Well, not exactly; I don't remember whether Newsround was still John Craven's Newsround or not, but I do remember the lead story.

NASA had lost a Space Shuttle. The first Shuttle loss, and perhaps the one which cut the deepest. I can still clearly see the graceful, curving exhaust plume, the ragged ball of smoke, and the two trails of smoke climbing from it, and I remember knowing that this was Bad. It was a significant event; it could be credited with having made me a geek. It certainly made me interested in spaceflight.

Seven men and women died aboard Challenger. We should not forget Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Christa McAuliffe, and Gregory Jarvis.

Of mushrooms, mail, and memory foam

For most of my life, I've disliked mushrooms. Recently, I've learned to tolerate them, and then a couple of weeks ago, I began actually wanting them. The LA has been a somewhat enthusiastic fungivore for many years, so really, this brings my tastes into closer alignment with hers more than anything else. I've begun adding mushrooms to my pasta sauce, and may well continue to use them in cooking. It just goes to show, one should always be willing to give a food another chance. That said, neither of us feels that enthused about curry. The LA dislikes spicy food, and I still can't get past the years of school curries which smelled of vomit.

As for memory foam, I've finally realised that I need a good pillow to keep my neck from becoming completely ruined by my sleeping habits, and succumbed to the lure of the high-density polyurethane foam. It's too early to tell if it's a massive improvement, but this morning my neck felt better than it has for some time. All this bought me was more of a chance to feel the effects of my recently discovered allergies; I'd forgotten, but it seems that I suffer an overreaction to some varieties of tree pollen, and there are such trees around here.

And so we come to mail handling. E-mail is a useful tool, but poorly defined and generally poorly implemented. The standards are contradictory, and frankly it's a nightmare. Even determining the syntactic validity of an e-mail address is nigh-impossible. That said, some aspects can be managed; one such aspect is message threading, which is to say keeping a message grouped together with its replies. Some clients don't do this; it's a tricky thing to handle. The most computationally cheap method is to compare subject lines; this works reasonably well. Google's mail service uses this, and adds a few wrinkles such as parsing the message and hiding the quoted text under the assumption that you've already read it. However, this approach breaks down if someone changes the subject line; I've seen Gmail fragment a useful conversation into unreadability because of this. My in-laws gave me a used iPod Touch last week, as a very early birthday gift; among its features is an e-mail client. This client handles message threading very well. I believe that how it does this is by means of the message-id (a header not usually exposed to the user, automatically generated to have a reasonable likelihood of being unique) and the in-reply-to (another header, rather obvious in what it refers to). The upshot is that messages remain threaded even with multiple subject line changes. I rather like this. The iPod has many other useful features, but this was the one which leapt out at me.

Reading the instructions

I'm rather atypical for a male. Reading the instructions is something I do as a first resort, not the last resort. I'll cheerfully leap into a job and work out how to do it as I go, but if there are instructions, I'll read them, and despite my ancestry, I'll generally make the effort to use the correct tools.

In the case of Silas vs. the Alloy Wheels, that meant a torque wrench for setting the wheel nuts correctly. The spider I keep with the spare is excellent for taking off the nuts, since it's got rather more leverage than the included two-part wrench, but since today I was performing a long-term swap from the steel wheels the previous owners had on the car to alloys, I wanted a better metric for how to set the torque than simply noting how much I had to grunt to break the nuts free.

This is rendered important by the spec for this car. Most cars specify wheel nut torque in the region of 85-100 foot pounds, while applying that much torque to the nuts on this car would be Bad. It's specced at 85Nm, which translates to roughly 65 foot pounds. This little detail is stamped into the front hubs, visible while torquing the nuts, and so one would hope that even places which don't know this already would notice. Sadly, when I removed the front wheels, I found that they'd been set to typical torque specs - the 85-100 foot pounds that flirts with stripping the studs on this car.

Still, I now have Volvo alloy wheels fitted, and they do look nice. Quite an improvement in looks over the steel wheels it did have, especially considering it was using the original, much-abused hubcaps. The alloys are also lighter, which will translate to improved ride and handling due to the lower unsprung weight. This may also improve fuel economy, although this will probably not be significant. And finally, I'm feeling a nice sense of satisfaction in having achieved the swap without help (and, usefully, without a peanut gallery) and not broken a single thing, or found anything bojangled. The latter part is somewhat rare; it can be unwelcome to begin a repair, as one will almost always uncover another problem in the course of reaching the first...

Home is the gamer, and he's pitching...

So, this weekend was DunDraCon, an annual event. Last year was my first year, and thanks to some annoying factors (not having a driver's license, my own car, or a hotel room), I didn't get a really wonderful experience. I also didn't really meet people much. This year, things were different; I'd persuaded friends to attend (by taking care of the upfront cost of the hotel room, and having them pay me back at the con), and I managed to actually talk to people and get into pickup games. The net result is a new enthusiasm for con attendance, and a determination that this year is the last year of not running a game. Next year, look out for a game entitled Strike the Earth.

I'll be using my favourite fantasy system, Burning Wheel, and the setting will be lifted wholesale from the excellent (in many ways...) Dwarf Fortress. That should make for a very comic game, and the frankly obscene starting power level (it's a con game; there won't be any character advancement, so I can safely do crazy things in creation) will help that along. It may help to read the Let's Plays to gain a feeling for the setting.

Towards the summer, I'm going to need playtesters. It'll be a six-person game, and I'm shooting for hopefully around six hours of content.

The trouble with gamers

My local game store is a great place. The owner's cool, and the staff have been uniformly excellent. Despite that, he's struggling. Struggling to the point of putting coupons in Valpak, which is a blue envelope full of mostly useless coupons that drops into the mailbox about once a month.

I applaud his effort, but I think he's made a slight mistake: giving gamers access to money-off coupons. We may not all do it in play, but there isn't a gamer alive who doesn't know how to minmax.

In my case, well... after Sunday's auction, I have store credit I can use. The items I brought in sold, for a total of $34; I believe that, combined with the coupon and a loyalty card reward that I'm close to, I have a sticker budget for that $34 of $90...

It's happened.

Yes, I did have my camera with me, and I'd pulled in to the side of the road for this, on a residential street. Nobody passed me while I was taking photos of my odometer.

Really, that reading is no more significant than any other, but on the other hand, it's aesthetically pleasing to see a row of twos.

Doing it the easy way

So, I have quite the collection of recorded music. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of my actual CDs are still at my parents' home, and so I only have intangible versions. All well and good until I want to listen to an album in the car, at which point (thanks to the demise of the remote control for my mp3 player) I'm rather less than well-off. However, this Windows box does have a CD burner, although the various programs I had installed either refused to actually burn, or refused to recognise my preferred compressed audio format (OGG Vorbis; analogous to mp3, but less painful for my ears), and so I was unable to recreate my collection.

Until, that is, I found InfraRecorder, which is free (in both senses, for those keeping score) and actually does both.

And now I have my music in car-compatible format. Well, that's if my stereo plays burned CDs. We shall find out tomorrow, when the LA and I head to Berkeley for a barbecue with a theatre company for whom I'm intending to volunteer as a backstage hand. I won't act, but any kind of crew that won't tweak my acrophobia is fine by me.

In the dark

In the dark, you can't see. This is a problem when driving, which is why we have headlights, illuminated instrument panels, and illuminated shift gates.

Except that the shift gate light in my Volvo has burned itself out.

Now, I'm rather a fan of the Swedish Bricks mailing list's 700/900 maintenance FAQ, and it does cover this situation. The procedure listed is quite simple:

Shift Indicator Bulb Replacement. Shift Indicator Lamp. [Query:] How does one replace the bulb that illuminates the gear selector letters? [Response:] Here’s how it can be replaced:
1. remove ashtray
2. remove plastic cover under hand brake
3. remove two screws that 2. revealed
4. remove plastic cover that covers shift gate
5. Look under shift gate on left side for two wires connected to light
6. pull down gently on wires and the light appears
7. replace bulb and reinstall in reverse order

Now, after one trip to the parts store (and a certain amount of swearing) I have managed to ascertain that I can reach step 2 of this process. Now, step 1 is deceptive; it should read "remove ashtray assembly", as the ashtray itself is in a plastic box which covers the main fusebox. The fusebox needs to be exposed. Step 2 is a doozy; I have to disconnect the switches for the heated seats in the process of doing it, along with undoing a rather tricky spring clip. #3 looks OK (although I think they mean bolts), and the actual electricals should be OK.

Now I just have to hope that I really do need a 2721 bulb for this, not some obscure Swedish thing that Jan only blows once a year and only ships by trans-Polar reindeer, and that no more surprises spring up.

Gamescience!

So, my local gaming store has Gamescience dice in stock. Their pitch is precision.

Which is why, when you buy a set, you get free use of a marker to fill in the numbers, and free use of a file to remove the burr from the injection moulding.

Also, their d6s are interesting. Not only are they left-handed, they're spindown. The 3 and 4 are adjacent. This really upset Michael - he has a serious thing about a dn's opposing faces summing to n+1.

However, the d4s are numbered correctly (base numbering) and clipped to avoid horribly sharp corners, the d10s have had to be clipped so they can't be used as shuriken, and they are very nice looking dice.

But they're not precise.

People are STILL arguing about the plane and the treadmill?

ARGH.

Here is what happens, folks. Assumptions made in the following:
- The treadmill is automatically controlled to operate against the plane's speed, and is perfect in said control.
- Friction can be ignored.

Case #1: plane's speed defined by body and wings of plane with respect to undisturbed surrounding air.

The plane is started up, and as it increases power, it moves forward as the treadmill rolls backward. The plane takes off when it reaches flying speed; as it takes off, the wheels are spinning at the equivalent of double takeoff speed.

Case #2: plane's speed defined by body and wings of plane with respect to ground.

The plane is started up, and as it increases power, it moves forward as the treadmill rolls backward. The plane takes off when it reaches flying speed; as it takes off, the wheels are spinning at the equivalent of double takeoff speed.

Case #3: plane's speed defined by rotational speed of wheels.

The plane is started up, and as it begins rolling, positive feedback causes the treadmill to immediately begin to approach infinite velocity. Meanwhile, the body and wings of the plane are moving through the air, and pretty soon, it's passing through the air fast enough to take off. The wheels are at this point spinning an infinite number of times per second, but the plane still takes off.

In the real world, if you can make a Case #3 treadmill, the plane may not take off, because you have a chance to burn out the wheel bearings before it reaches flying speed. However, while wheel rotation is a suitable measure of speed for a car, it makes no sense whatsoever for an aeroplane, because what matters for an aeroplane is not how fast the wheels turn (unless they're going fast enough to cook the bearings) but how fast it's travelling with respect to the air around it (for lift) and how fast it's travelling with respect to the ground (for navigation).

The bottom line: THE PLANE TAKES OFF.

Now can we PLEASE go back to finding a '67 Chevy that we can put huge amounts of rocket power in and hope it doesn't blow up this time?

*tap tap tap* Is this on?

It appears that internet is on. I've been rather busy; the LA and I were moving, we had issues with cable companies (we're now with the competition, rather than the almost-monopoly; it's cheaper and faster) and I also took off to go to Burlingame for KublaCon. I had a wonderful time there, learning to play a rather fun (and impressively nasty) board game called Zombiegeddon (if Gary or Joe happens to be reading this, I highly recommend it; great fun to Do Unto your opponents, and enjoyable even when you're being Done Unto, since unless you've an eidetic memory you'll lose track of the score before the changeover point), being introduced to the Hero system (impressively crunchy, and I only caught glimpses of it, but I can certainly see why Keith Curtis (check your sourcebooks; you may well see his name under cartography in the credits, and I know he's done at least two maps for different A Song of Ice and Fire games. He's also an extra in Army of Darkness, giving him a Bacon number of 3 - this is the sole area in which I am as awesome as he is) likes it so much) and getting very much sleep-deprived and hypercaffeinated. I also rather enjoyed the drive there and back, although 1) the signage around the interchange of 101 North and 80 East in the City could stand some improvement and 2) I want a retrofit autopilot so I can actually enjoy the views. Incidentally, when coming off the Bay Bridge on my side, for a short stretch one drives along a section of freeway which is simultaneously 80 East and 580 West. Work THAT one out! This was also my first time crossing a toll bridge (I'm certain the toll collector appreciated my pre-counting the $4; nice and cheap for a bridge as nice as the Bay Bridge) and the longest and most complex freeway trip I've made.

The con was remarkably cheap, thanks to early registration and not having to pay for a hotel room. I was staying with a fellow who I know from the forums attached to Fear the Boot, and we had a grand time. He managed to win a Kubla pin, too; more than I did, but I got a Vote Cthulhu pin from the Chaosium booth which is #485/500. Overall, I account this con a success, and have offered to go halves on a hotel room for next year's DunDraCon with him. That's it for my cons this year, though; we're all about saving, and I'm intending to save up enough of a discretionary budget to make it to Fear the Con 3. I shall definitely have to whomp up Savage Worlds, Burning Wheel and possibly Mouse Guard one-shots for that, and I'm looking forward to meeting more Booters!