Not the finest of vehicles...

As previously noted, the LA and I are expecting a child. One of the many consequences thereof is that the hitherto merely undersized bed we'd been sharing rapidly became far too small, and so we wanted a larger one. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately with respect to the forthcoming sprog and its inevitable deleterious effect on finances, we were both raised with deeply ingrained habits of frugality, and effectively throwing away a nearly-new bed sat ill with those habits.

Enter the LA's parents, who had a somewhat larger bed which they were not using. One size up, from a "Full" to a "Queen", would be a significant improvement, and would also result in a better-sized guest bed for the inlaws. And so it came to pass that I arranged with a couple of friends that I'd rent a U-haul van, they'd help me hump the heavy stuff, and we'd swap them.

I hadn't known when I arranged this that one of said friends is currently sans driver's license, for petty reasons, and so I had to detour to collect him as the first step in this. Once he was in the van with me, we repaired to my home, and got the mattress, box spring, and headboard into the van. Once we were done with that, the second assistant arrived, and we convoyed to the inlaws', since the van only had two seats. Whatever happened to bench seats? It's not as though there wasn't ample space, with the column shifter and foot parking brake; but no, silly captain's chairs it was. Once at the inlaws', we found our first real snag: the frame we'd all blithely assumed could be adjusted for a full... couldn't. Into the van it went, then, and with bed F at the inlaws, disassembled, and bed Q in the van, it was back home.

Reassembling the bed was easy enough, and with that I bid farewell to my assistants and returned the van to whence it came, with great relief. I'd appreciated the very high seating position (with my long torso, I was able to look straight over full-sized SUVs; quite the change from my usual position in a car!) and I'd enjoyed the oomph provided by the big, lazy V8 I was sat over, but everything else had been rather terrible. Once I had my car again, I took myself home and knocked down our adjustable frame; it came apart into three long pieces, two of which required the ski hole in my car's backseat, and then it was time to reassemble bed F. That done, having found out that my MIL had not been using a waterproof mattress cover, I took a trip to Target for a waterproof one (with a baby on the way, it's mildly to moderately essential) and finally came home, to finish dressing the bed and then take a shower.

After all those shenanigans, I was in no fit state to cook, and we headed off to one of our regular Italian eateries; having managed to miss lunch entirely, I was running on fumes and needed good solid peasant cooking. Plenty of pasta. Shortly after we were served, who should sit in the next booth but one of my erstwhile assistants and his wife! So there was an amusing end to a very strenuous and remarkably satisfying day.

Of course, I'll be unable to sensibly comment on the comfort of the "new" bed tonight. After a day like that, I could sleep on a freshly felled oak.

Don't release your coding exercises

Things have been distinctly complex for the LA and I of late. We're rearranging the house, because we have a child on the way (and a swap with the LA's parents arranged such that we end up with a larger bed; I shall document the inevitable tribulations thereof once it's happened), the LA's grandfather recently passed away, and to while away the inevitable downtime on that trip, we bought a nook e-reader for me. I still keep calling it an e-book, because it's an electronic thing that I use like a book, but that's beside the point. The point is that it has one of those fancy electronic ink displays, which means that keeping a static image on the screen uses the same power as blanking it: none whatsoever. This leads to it having screensavers; I'd rather not have the portraits of authors one on there, and the built-in "nature" one rather wore on me after a while, between limited images and some less than wonderful conversions from colour to B&W photos. It's not as simple as desaturating it until it's black and white!

And so I availed myself of Flickr's Commons feature, which is a huge collection of copyright-unencumbered images. They're too old for copyright, they're US Government produced, they've been released into the public domain... whatever the reason, they're suitable for use without infringement concerns. Many of them are low resolution, but the spec size for screensaver images is 600x800 pixels, which is definitely low resolution in this day and age. And so, I searched for "ship" and found a veritable cornucopia of monochrome images.

Unfortunately, Flickr has recently given itself a short-notice redesign, about which I'm distinctly unhappy. The old interface was clean, uncluttered, and fast. The new interface is busy, and relies so heavily on JavaScript that it requires a high-speed connection and a ridiculously powerful computer to run, and that very slowly. The heavy scripting also makes it fragile, and prone to crashing browsers. It also allows them to use one of the great annoyances of the scripting age of the Internet: so-called infinite scrolling.

Back in the days before scripting took over, content was divided into pages. Often, these pages would be larger than would fit on one screen, and so one would scroll. Vertically, for preference; horizontal scrolling is regarded as evil by most denizens of the net. When one reached the end of a page, on to the next page, and so on. It wasn't really possible to keep adding on a little bit more to the end of the page. Now, we see two extremes when it comes to content delivery. The first is prevalent among newspaper websites: divide the content into tiny chunks, and have each paragraph on its own page, to make the user ignore as many ads as possible. The second is common on social networking sites: just keep adding a little bit more to the bottom of the page, every time the user reaches it. This is "infinite scrolling", and it's a truly hideous misfeature.

Why is it a misfeature? Several reasons. Firstly, it demands heavy scripting, and places lots of demand on both the client and the server; the client for rendering, the server for fetching data. This makes it slow and clunky to use. Second, it breaks user expectations; by now, we're used to pages having a bottom. Third, it can render important aspects of the site unreachable; any website which uses a footer (such as Twitter) will be broken by infinite scroll, as the footer runs away from the user. Fourth, it's fragile and breaks the ability to share links; a browser crash in a paginated interface will, when recovered from, return the user to roughly where he was when the browser crashed. An infinite scroll interface doesn't have this ability. A paginated interface will allow the user to share a link to a given page of search results; an infinite scroll interface won't allow that. It's still possible to share a link to a single result, but there are times when context is necessary or just pleasant to have.

So, while I'm very happy that you've figured out how to make this thing happen, and you can reasonably be proud of yourself for doing so, please stop using it in the wild. It's the wrong tool for presenting search results.

More on EA, and free services.

I've said before, as have many other people, that if you're not paying for a service (such as Twitter or Facebook) and sometimes even if you are (such as cable television) then you are not the customer; you are the product. To cable TV providers, there are multiple products flowing in each direction; your eyeballs are the primary product, but they also see the scheduled programming to get you to watch the ads as a product. This attitude is actually somewhat characteristic of middlemen; there's some customer nature and some product nature on both sides of whatever deal they're in the middle of.

And that's where EA sits: as a middleman. The games they produce are a product; the sales we generate by buying those games are the product that EA sells to the developers, and that essentially means that we're product to EA as well. An intangible product, and that's where the trouble arises.

Normally, with a tangible product, it's both easy to determine damage and costly to incur damage in the delivery of the product. This means that the suppliers of that product will go to great lengths to avoid damaging the product; enormous amounts of expanded polystyrene stand testament to that. Intangible products seem to get no such care. Twitter will change its user experience radically, with no warning, resulting in disaffection among users; this is damage to the product, because a disgruntled person who's shown an ad will be FAR less inclined to click through than would a happy person. Facebook does similar things, to a greater extent due to its more pervasive nature, and yet advertisers will continue to buy its product. EA will make decisions which annoy buyers of games, making them reluctant to do business with EA, because EA haven't yet figured out that this is essentially damaging one of their products deliberately.

I've no great objection to being an intangible product, but I would like it if the various companies selling me as such would wise up and try to avoid damaging their product. My doctor would no doubt be much happier with my stress levels, and the LA would find me far less irritable!

Why EA is unpopular.

After the horrible mess that was the launch of Sim City, and all the fallout from that, combined with the stepping down of its CEO, EA seems to be in a pretty nasty fix. It's clearly hurting, and worse, gamers don't like it. EA can't quite figure out why, but I have my ideas.

My one-sentence summing-up of my problems with EA: business decisions which directly result in poor game design.
— Silas Humphreys (@McNutcase) April 5, 2013

Let's look at that in detail. To do that, we have to understand what EA is, and is not.

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.

Zero Sink Rate

With a title like that, you might expect this to be about glider technology - I mean, gliders are pretty awesome, right? I know I'd love to try it. But no, this is about kitchen management, and the fact that a kitchen is a system in which cooking is only one part.

In my last post, I mentioned a tendency to get behind on cleaning up after meals, and the knock-on effects that had on future meals. That got me thinking, and I came up with some rules for myself to keep my kitchen more usable.

Rule 1: Making a meal includes cleaning up. If I have enough spoons to cook, but know that I will run out before I've cleaned up after it, I don't have enough spoons to make a meal. The easiest time to get pans clean is right after use; if I let them sit, I'm making work. I'm stealing spoons from myself and throwing them away. So the only valid reason for the pans from a meal not being cleaned up is the meal still going on, whether in active eating or conversation.

Rule 2: Thou shalt not soak. This one isn't quite rigid; if I screw up, there might be carbon that doesn't want to come off. That's acceptable, but I have to have made a genuine effort to remove it before resorting to soaking, and I MUST make a genuine effort to remove it each time I enter the kitchen until it's gone. The same goes for peanut butter jars (the LA loves it), which do require soaking to soften the peanut butter; but each time I enter the kitchen while one is soaking, I have to get it half-full with water and shake the dickens out of it to knock the tenacious stuff off the sides.

Rule 3: Drip-dry is fine. Sit dry is not. What this means is that once pans are dry, they should be put away at the first opportunity. That way, when the time comes to cook again, I know where they are. I don't have to waste spoons on remembering which pans are next to the sink and which are in the cupboard.

Rule 4: Load the dishwasher. The LA and I both have the bad habit of setting plates, glasses and the like on the counter rather than in the dishwasher. In the LA's case, it's because she knows I'm particular about how the dishwasher is loaded (engineer brain working out the optimal stacking for cat dishes, how to keep can covers restrained, and so on) but in my case it's purely and simply a bad habit. I'm aiming to break it.

Rule 5: Unload the Dishwasher. This is the automated version of Rule 3. In the dishwasher's case, it's fine to wait for it to cool down (attempting to remove a plate right after the cycle finishes will erase fingerprints, and hurts even my notably heat-resistant hands) but then, put stuff away rather than letting it sit.

I'm not necessarily doing well at following these rules - but I do want to let them guide my actions and decisions, and I want to make them public for anyone else who's having trouble with keeping their kitchen usable.

The insidious cycle

As you probably know, I'm one of those people who suffers from chronic pain. I have arthritis, I'm currently dealing with a knee injury, and it all adds up. This limits what I can do, both from a physical capability perspective (sitting cross-legged on the floor is not within my capabilities, unless you're going to pay for the necessary painkillers and a hefty guy to haul my carcass back upright) and from an available resources perspective; I simply don't have enough spoons. Do read that piece, if you haven't already, and then come back.

It's the lack of spoons that leads to the insidious cycle in the title. It's common for me to have enough spoons to cook a good dinner, but run out of spoons (having been sure to reserve enough to go to bed) before I can finish dealing with the mess generated by it. So now I have dirty pots and pans sitting in the kitchen, waiting for me to deal with them. This is somewhat daunting mentally, and of course requires spoons. So now, the next dinner is a higher spoon project than the one I did last time, because I have to clean things up before I can start it. And then I run out of spoons before getting ANY of it cleared up. The vicious cycle means that even though I might have enough spoons to cook, I don't have enough spoons to make dinner, because of the prerequisite tasks. Life is unfair like that, and this disproportionately affects sufferers from chronic conditions.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that chronic pain and depression are linked. They have very similar effects on life activities, albeit by somewhat different mechanisms, and having dealt with them both at one time or another, I honestly don't know which sucks less. Both take (potentially) mind-altering drugs to treat, and that makes people wary of treating them. I worry about addiction and tolerance every single time I need to take a painkiller, and frequently argue myself out of taking painkillers even if the pain is too intense to stand.