Put this up last night, while unable to sleep.

Finally managed sleep at about 2am, but then woke up at 5:30, and didn’t really get back to sleep again ’till about 7:30.

“Fun.”

This happened to me earlier this week, when I went to get a new router from Best Buy. After looking around for a while, we decided on getting an Apple AirPort Extreme. Best Buy had them for $161, when they were $179 everywhere else. I went to the Emeryville Best Buy (yes, I know, I’ve sworn them off before. Shoot me.), and got in line. At the register, it rang up at $179. I said, “No, your website has it at $161.” The woman at the cash register said, “Okay, you have to go to customer service to get a price match.” So, I went and stood in line. 20 minutes later, I get to the front of the line, and say, “This was $161. Please check, and match the price. Thx.” She looks it up, and sure enough, $179. I realize at this moment that telling her that the intranet posts incorrect prices, and that she’d have to look it up on a different computer sounds absolutely *ludicrous*, unless you actually know what’s happening.

After a few minutes of trying to explain to her that the price on her system is wrong, I throw my hands up and give up. As I’m leaving, I realize I have my laptop in the car, and Best Buy probably has some sort of WiFi. Sure enough, they do. I go back to the customer service line, wait *another* 20 minutes, and then get to the front. I show the woman the price on my laptop, and how it’s different than the price in her computer. She looks sort of befuddled, but eventually gives in, and gives me the price. So, 40 minutes later, I’ve saved $20. Whoop-de-do. But at least those fuckers didn’t get away with their bullshit.

I certainly couldn’t have said it better.

At what point can you fire the entire government?

Call your congressperson and demand they vote NO on the current bill, and its betrayal of the American people. This should not stand. I, for one, will not vote for anyone who supports this travesty.

Reid, Pelosi – you should be ashamed.

I know I certainly am.

This is one of the more interesting articles I’ve read recently. It’s pretty much a takedown of a specialty chocolatier that trades, essentially, in fraud.

It’s an interesting read if you’re interested in chocolate, or basically how someone can pull the wool over someone’s eyes to the tune of almost a 7,000% markup over the retail price of their source materials, with essentially no added “craft.” Hell, you could probably make a good argument that what NoKA provides is actually that they actively make the product *worse*.

This fascinates me, in large part because one of the companies I’ve worked with in the recent past was essentially also in the business of pulling the wool over people’s eyes. It interested me how this guy – a real salesman’s salesman – could dupe relatively intelligent people by exploiting their insecurities, and their perception of value or quality.

It all basically comes down to exploiting perception. In the case of my personal experience with fraud, it had to do with the notion of experience, and knowledge. In NoKA’s case, it has to do with source ingredients and process.

This probably has some tie-in to a discussion last night about renovating the house, and the concept of paying $300/sqft for renovations, when that’s more than normal estimated *initial construction* costs, though while those numbers make my jaw hang open, I didn’t get the impression that the person we talked to was a fraud – this is more just a statement on what people are willing to pay in the Bay Area for something of perceived value.

I dunno.

Not long after we got the house, I bought a hammock and stand. I loved lying out in that thing on cool summer evenings, or reading a book in the middle of the day… man. Good stuff. We were lying out on the hammock the night I proposed to Ei-Nyung. There’s just something calming about sitting there, hanging just above the ground, gently swaying in the breeze.

About a week after we got engaged, that hammock broke. I hadn’t taken it in in bad weather, and the rope can only take so much before it snaps. I replaced in a little bit later with a cheapo hammock from IKEA, but it broke quite quickly (someone else broke it – sort of irritated me that they never even offered to replace it).

Anyway, the hammock stand stood there, hammock-less for the better part of two years. The blackberry vines had grown over part of it, and I’d just never had the time to deal with it. Today, we went to Target to get a bathroom organizer for the downstairs (damned tension rod thing had rusted, and fell over on me the other day, so I threw it out). While we were there, they had a cheapo hammock for $20. For $20, I couldn’t pass it up. Brought it home, got some chain to run to the stand (the hammock was too short), and spent the afternoon lounging.

There are really few things that are better than lying on a hammock, your dog lying at your side on the ground, on a beautiful warm summer evening.

You know, I wish I had something more interesting to say, but I really don’t. Took Mobius with me to work today. It was sorta tricky, ’cause it was his first day in a new environment, so he was really skittish. But everyone at work seemed to like him, which was cool, and frankly, it’s pretty awesome that dogs are welcome at work. I just wish I had more to actually *do*. It’s just one of those weird things – you come on at the end of a project, and everyone’s so focused on wrapping that up, but there’s really not much I can do, so I spend a lot of time writing, or doing busywork. I just wish there was something more substantial to do.

Playing the Halo 3 Beta – it’s good, but already some people are *so* good that the game’s getting a little frustrating. I guess maybe people aren’t working, or have taken time off work or something, because there are people who are insane already, and the thing’s only been out for a day. I suppose if you were good at Halo 2, your skills transfer pretty well intact. Alas.

Other than that, basically swimming in games right now – stuff for the Wii, stuff for the 360, and even a couple games I really want to spend more time with on the PS2, like The Red Star and God of War 2. Battlestations Midway is one of those games on the 360 that I’m really itching to try – it’s a combination action/strategy game. A friend of mine was picking up some copies of C&C3 – I’m looking forward to that as well. I liked BFME2, but not many people I knew got it. I doubt more of my friends will pick up C&C, but I know Klay will, so at least we’ll be able to hit up some multiplayer…

The house is in a bit of a state of flux – Joe’s moving downstairs, Colin & Jess are officially out, and we’re interviewing architects for the upstairs renovations. It’s pretty zany. No real “progress” progress yet, but yeah. It’s a start.

Also kinda weird – there have been seven muggings in something like four weeks in the neighborhood, one of which was only a couple houses down from us. Pretty scary. There was a neighborhood-wide meeting on it tonight, and so it was sort of interesting, meeting some of my neighbors, and actually interacting with them. Good to know there are a lot of people in the area who care enough to meet and take some sort of action.

Yeah. Wacky stuff.

So, a game I recently worked on’s first review just came out, and it’s less than stellar – averaged about a 50%. Seems fair, to be honest. Yeah, it’s the worst review score I’ve seen on a game I worked on, but while on other games, I thought those review scores were low, and they tended to be outliers, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is about what the game ends up getting.

So, it’s not really that the review score is a letdown – it’s about what I expected. It’s that the game is a letdown. I put a lot of effort into it, but knew that ~50-60% was the best we could hope for. Games are about both structure and content. You could have great level design in a FPS, for instance, but if the mechanic of shooting didn’t work, no one will care how good the level design was. Similarly, a great mechanic can’t make up for bland or boring content.

The game simply has weak mechanics in every respect, and the original content was also incredibly poor. While I had time to bring the content up to what I think was a decent level, for the characters I worked on, that was only maybe 1/4 of the content of one part of the game, and it still rested on weak mechanics.

*sigh*

Oh, well. It’s not like I didn’t know it was coming.

So… for the last few years, the only efforts we’ve really made in terms of home improvement have been the front yard, and getting the #($@(T*&#$&*@*!!!!ing leak fixed. Now that that’s done, and we’ve had some time to recover from the hell on Earth that was the last batch of major renovations, and now that Colin’s moved out, freeing up actual space (for the first time ever) to do the renovations in, it’s time to start looking at how to approach it.

We talked to an architect last week, and it was really educational – we realized that the *bulk* of what we want to do isn’t necessarily the domain of an architect – *most* of what we’re looking to do is to make our living space aesthetically coherent, which is something that just requires money on our part, and some research, in terms of window trim and the like, which was done with no consideration for aesthetics the first time we did it.

There is one major part we do need an architect for, however, and that’s the “doorway to nowhere” that leads from the kitchen into what was once the hall, and is now a gaping void above the stairs, as well as the inaccessible closet that’s next to that door. Thing is, we know what we want to do with that space, we just don’t know *how* to do it – that’s where the architect would come in.

The last two things we’d really like to do would involve the kitchen, and the upstairs bathroom. The bathroom can wait, frankly, and the kitchen is secondary to the living/dining rooms, but it’d be good to have a plan as to how to approach it.

But basically, I think the goal is to fix the things that aren’t done (door hole, closet, and the bannister that separates the living room from the stairwell – turning that into a half-wall) with an architect, and then talking to either an architect or the kitchen planners at Home Depot, or IKEA or something to try to get that space laid out in a pleasing manner.

Fun.

1.) I was going to be post this exact thing.
2.) Why would you take the Transformers, whose defining characteristic was that they were actually physically plausible, and make them *not* physically plausible?
3.) They’re FUGLY. More than that, they’re not distinct – it’s incredibly difficult to tell “Megatron” from “Jazz” or “Whateverthefuck” at a glance. The old Transformers were incredibly iconic, unique, and distinct. Gah! Stupid.

So, it’s relatively simple and straightforward, but I did this on Sunday, and posted my first Instructable about it.

Wacky fun. The end result’s been really useful.