There are too many clicks required to play this Xbox game.

I've been sick lately, and so I've allowed myself to play some computer games. This is something I try not to do too much, but because I've been sick, and because I've recently read about the cognitive benefits of playing first-person shooter games, I've been playing Half Life 2. I know, I'm several years late. I'm having a lot of fun.

However, this is my rant blog, and I have to rant about how long it takes me to actually get playing the game. I think I'm spoiled on my iPad, with which I can start playing a game in about two or three clicks. In contrast, here is what I have to do on my Xbox to play Half Life 2:

1. Turn the Xbox 360 on.
2. Turn the television on.
3. Sign in to Xbox live.
4. Select that I want to play the game (as opposed to watch movies or whatever.)
5. Select from the Orange Box menu that I want to play Half Life 2 and not Portal or whatever.
6. Click down to "load game." (The default is "new game." Why? How often do people want to start a new game compared to loading one they're working on?)
7. Select "load game."
8. I get prompted "Would you like to select a storage device?" This is for where my saved game is located. Note that I'm not actually selecting the storage device, just affirming that I want to.
9. Click "hard drive" as my storage device.
10. Select the save game.

Then I'm finally playing. It takes over a minute. I know, there are greater problems in this world, but geez, it really seems like this takes too long.

Shitdog!

Pictured: Killing Antlions in Half Life 2. From Wikipedia.

The Problem With Conferences

A scholarly conference typically consists of a bunch of talks, punctuated by coffee breaks. In these talks, people sit and listen to someone give a presentation, and then ask a few questions. Then we go on to the next talk. I love conferences for networking reasons, but I really don't like the talks, and I try not to go to them. I think Glouberman puts it well in his interesting book The Chairs Are Where the People Go (2011, kindle location 2013).

"If you want to read this person’s paper, you can read it on the Internet. This structure doesn’t just ignore the existence of the Internet, it ignores the existence of the printing press. It’s a medieval idea about how information should be disseminated—to imagine that if you want to know what someone thinks, you have to go sit in a room with them while they read out loud to you their thoughts...Finding out what someone has to say in their paper isn’t a reason to travel across the country and stay in a hotel room. A reason to travel across the country is to have conversations with people and actually form human relationships."

I endorse this point of view.

Now there are two kinds of conferences: small ones, which only have a "single track," and conferences in which multiple talks are happening once: multi-track conferences. Multi-track conferences are not so bad, because you don't have to go to a talk all the time. You can hang out by the coffee and meet people.

But I really don't like single track conferences. Here's what usually happens. A talk goes long, and the person in charge of keeping the talk on track is just another researcher. In other words, someone with feelings. If a talk goes long, or the questions go long, then they often let it slide.

Then the next talk is late. Then when the coffee break comes, the only reason to have the conference at all, somebody says they're cutting it short because the talks ran long.

So you're out there with your coffee getting into a great discussion with someone. Then somebody comes out and tries to hustle everyone back inside because the next talk is starting. I usually try to hang back, but end up being all alone. I sigh and go into the talk.

Shitdog!

Two-Second Clips on DVDs

I imagine that people who create the DVD interfaces for movies are frustrated artists who just want to do a good job. One of the things they do is they set little 2 second or so clips from the movie to play after you select something from the main menu. So if you go special features, or something, it will play you a little exciting clip from the movie, then get to business.

It's especially stupid when you just want to play the movie. You click play, and you want to see the movie from the beginning. But what it does is it shows you a two second clip from the movie you're just about to watch. Who on earth would appreciate this?

It's especially annoying because it assumes that you've already seen the movie and would appreciate the clip for nostalgic reasons. I hope that's what they intend, because if they don't intend that, then I assume they want to spoil that exciting part of the movie for us. Annoying!

Shitdog!
  

Improperly Worn Bike Helmet On Bike Share Ad

Mandatory helmet laws are terrible for bike share programs*, and it's easy to see why. What are you going to do, buy a $40 helmet and carry it around in case you want to rent a bike?

Thankfully Ottawa has a great bike share program and no helmet laws (for adults). However the city wants to give the impression that they think you should wear a helmet, so how do they advertise bike shares with photographs? Most I've seen find the clever but still kind of silly solution of showing the person standing next to the bicycle without a helmet-- shopping at an outdoor market, for instance.

I guess they finally decided they needed an ad with someone actually riding the bike. Here is what we get.

Yup. A helmet. So silly. I love the bike share, partially because it gets people on bikes again, and when they see how fun it is they end up buying one. But with all the bike share riders I've seen over the past few years, only one was wearing a helmet. This is great-- helmets increase head injury because of risk compensation.

But here's the kicker-- she's not even wearing her helmet correctly. Look closely...

The helmet should be tightly buckled around your chin. Why? To keep it from coming off of your head when you go flying through the air. Did I need to say that? Apparently I did, because I see people riding around all the time with their helmets either loosely buckled or not buckled at all.

Shitdog!

* I can't find any empirical evidence for or against this. There is only reason and anecdotes, unfortunately.

Reselling Bad Product After Returns: Chumleigh's

I love the store Chumleighs, which sells used games and movies for great prices. A few months ago I was thrilled to find a Playstation 2 game I'd been looking for for a long time: Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, which had been very well reviewed.

Unfortunately, the game did not work. I cleaned it and tried several times, to no avail. I planned to bring it back. And even though I had no reason to suspect Chumleighs of any foul play, just to make sure I never bought that particular disc again I put a tiny dot of ink on the case insert in a place I would remember later.  They gave me my money back.

Just today I was browsing, and there was the Hulk game. With the same dot. I told the clerk that I'd returned this game and was disappointed that it was back on the shelf. She said that it might be a different copy, and I told her about the dot. She took the game to the back, and discussed something with somebody, and then put it back on the shelf, right in front of me.

For shame!

Pictured: Graffiti. From Wikimedia Commons

iPhone contacts

I recently got an iPhone 4 and sometimes I miss my Android dream.

I moved to the android from a Palm Treo. I found a program that would put my hundreds of contacts into google contacts. The only problem was that it gave "Buro" for the type of phone number (rather than, say, "home.") Whatever.

But now when I synch my iPhone with google contacts, it decides to not synch any numbers that are buro. Rather than placing it in some "unknown" or "other" category, I just can't see the number. This renders most of my contacts on the iphone useless.

So now I'm faced with going through my contacts on google contacts and changing buro to office.

If you bore me on the phone, that's what I'll be doing.

Getting quieter when I get closer

I hate it when I can't hear someone, and I get closer to hear them better, and they quiet their voice in response.

Shitdog!

Why is it so hard to see my keyboards?

I use three computers at home. And it's hard to see the keyboard of any of them in certain lighting conditions.

My primary home machine is a Dell laptop. The thing is silver, but the keyboard is black. So if I'm in the dark, like in bed with my wife sleeping, or I just don't have the lights on, I can barely see the keys.

My Gigabyte netbook is the same way, except it's even harder to see, and because the keyboard is so small I have much more trouble touch typing.

Finally, I have my HTC dream android phone. I picked the white phone for aesthetic reasons, but I am starting to regret it. The keyboard is white, and the letters light up when you start typing. Good idea, right? Unfortunately when in a bright environment it makes the letters the same color and brightness as the surrounding keys, so you can't see what's what.

Very annoying.

shitdog!

Chrome Rant

Love Google's Chrome browser.

Hate the "feature" of being able to drag a tab away into its own, new window.

I have never intentionally used this feature, but unintentionally use it about once every two or three days when I try to click on a tab and accidentally drag it a nanometer. Once made into a new window, there appears no way to turn it back into a tab. Drives me insane.

Shitdog!

Lame Claws

How could it be that the claws in X-Men Origins: Wolverine look less realistic than they did in the original X-Men movie that came out years ago? In that scene in the bathroom, they reminded me of the toon gun from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.



Shitdog!

Xavier

I hate it when people pronounce the name "Xavier" as "Eks-ay-vee-er" rather than "Zay-vee-er" like it's supposed to.

Shitdog!

What :P Means

I hate it when IM programs interpret the :P emoticon as a SMILING face with a tongue out, as though it's a good natured, goofy expression. The letter P has a straight post, my friends, and that means the smiley should be a straight face with a tongue sticking out, which indicates a negative feeling like regret or disappointment. I hate it when I want to express this and this stupid smiling face with it's tongue out appears.

Shitdog!

People who pronounce "why" as "hwai"

And let us not forget people who pronounce "at all" as "uh-tall"

shitdog!

Club DJs with censored versions of songs

I really really hate it when I'm at a club and the jackass DJ is actually playing a CLEAN version of a song. I mean, come on. 

"You can do it put your back in to it / I can do it put your BLEEEEP in to it"

Unnecessarily Locked Doors

I really hate it when I approach a set of doors and the one I happen to try to use is locked, where some arbitrary other ones are unlocked. I hate it for a few reasons:

1) I feel like an idiot and look like an idiot, pushing into a door, expecting it to move and it not moving. This is exacerbated by others with me going through nearby doors with no problem.

2) I think of all the time wasted by all the people all day trying to get through the door and failing, just because some jackass custodian was lazy and didn't want to take the extra twenty seconds in the morning to unlock all the doors.

At Georgia Tech I actually used to call in complaints about this when I discovered it in my building. It never got better. So much for local activism.

Once I was in a foul mood and I encountered this. I bitched about it to someone and he said "You shouldn't let the little things get to you, man." He was right, of course.

Shitdog!

A Book Ahead of its Time

As a professor I get sent free books sometimes, which is great. I just got one about AI that is really ahead of its time. How do I know?

It's March 6, 2008, and the copyright on the book is 2009. How is this possible?

Shitdog!

Please Expand Your Abbreviations

I just got an email that starts like this:

"Announcement
-------------------------------------------------------
Last Call for Papers/Abstracts and Invited Sessions Proposals for EISTA 2008, (Orlando, Florida, USA. June 29th- July 2nd, 2008) http://www.socioinfocyber.org/eista2008

Deadlines:
Papers/Abstracts Submissions and Invited Sessions Proposal: April 3rd, 2008
Authors Notification: April 25th, 2008
Camera-ready, full papers: May 22nd, 2008
-------------------------------------------------------

All Submitted papers will be reviewed by a double-blind (at least three reviewers), 
non-blind, and participative peer review. These three kinds of review will support 
the selection process of those that will be accepted for their presentation at the conference, as well as those to be selected for their publication in JSCI Journal."

It goes on, never saying what EISTA stands for. So annoying.

Shitdog!

Tom Jones's cover of Prince and the Revolution's "Kiss"

I like what my aunt said about it: "That man should be shot."

Shitdog!

More with the change!

I've blogged before about how much I can't stand getting the coins on top of the bills when I get change. Today some jackass took the offense to new heights!

I just bought my drugs at the supermarket. The change was $40. The jackass hands me one big package, with the bag (with the medicine in it) on the bottom, the receipt over that, and then the money on top. Like I'm going to carry the whole thing out into the freezing cold like that. As though I wasn't going to put forty dollars in the wallet I still had out.

I took the money. As I put it in my wallet, Jackass was standing there holding my receipt and bag. I told him to put it down. When I was done putting my money away, I took the bag and left.

Shitdog!

Why Do People Drink So Much Coffee?

I was just reading in Ottawa's "Centretown News" about these people did a budget and found out they were spending $100 per week at Starbucks.

As someone who doesn't really like coffee, I have to ask: what is wrong with you people?

Yeah, I think I'll go out to a bar so I can order a $4 GLASS OF MILK.

Shitdog!