Mike Ashley

300

nobody@vox.com(Mike) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:49:37 -0400

I watched 300 last night, and it made me think of dance. Odd, since the choreographed action scenes in 300 aren't really dance. I've been in small theaters for modern dance performances, and nothing on a screen can match being close to dancers where you hear grunts and feel mass hitting stage.

On the other hand, the choreography in 300 took advantage of computer-generated sets, temporal shifts, and fluid camera moves (no cuts) to add dimensions to the choreography you could never get with a live stage performance. We've come a long way from The Matrix and Gladiator.

300 is a ballet of death, but the techniques are so inspiring I wonder when we'll see movies that use this kind of choreography to tell different stories and convey different emotions?

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Whrrl

nobody@vox.com(Mike) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 13:01:00 -0400

I've been playing with platial and whrrl, and I've decided to stick with whrrl for now. If you haven't hard of it, it's a location-based social networking service. It lets you review places like restaurants, specialty stores, schools, etc. You have friends so that you can see how friends have rated places near your current location.

Whrrl isn't perfect, and I have a wishlist of changes. First, it appears to be targeted at high-density locations like city downtowns. I say that because the iPhone app is fixed to a two-mile radius. I wish this was more customizable; a 5-10 mile radius makes more sense for midwest city suburbs.

Another wish: Whrrl supports the idea of being a fan of somebody, but what I would like instead are special-interest groups (SIGs). I could then search for places using reviews from members in a particular SIG. There are a few ways I would use this.

Mexican restaurants. I'm traveling on business, and I'm in a new town. Where's the good Mexican near my hotel?
Ministry. I've got half a day or a few hours in the evening to kill while ttraveling. Is there a soup kitchen or shelter nearby where I could volunteer for a bit?
Team-building. I want to do a team-building activity with my peeps from work. What are some good things to do and where?
Guitar. I'm spending time looking around for the right used Les Paul. I've got an hour in a strange land. Where's a nearby guitar store where I can see what they have to play?

I hope Whrrl takes a cue from LinkedIn and looks at using groups. Over at LinkedIn, people would add connections not because they could refer the person professionally but because of a shared interest or history, e.g., school alumni.

Another direction to take the service is add more game elements. I want features that reward me and others for adding reviews and exploring new places. Badges are an obvious idea, and you could build subcommunities if you give ladders within SIGs and around geographies.

Consider jumping on and let me know if you do.

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West Virginia Mission Trip

nobody@vox.com(Mike) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:15:15 -0400

Megan and I participated in a group workcamp in Mannington, West Virginia as part of her church youth group. Us included, there were about 400 people in town for a week to paint, build ramps and decks, and do other small projects to help families who were unable to get the jobs done themselves. The operation was run by Group Workcamps Foundation.

The organizers split us into about sixty five of about six people each, and they also mixed people so that nobody else on your crew was from your home church. The result: I was on a crew with one other adult and four teens ranging from 8th to 11th grade. They put a lot of the younger kids like Megan on painting crews, but my crew got assigned to build a raised, free-standing porch and do a little trim painting.

Crew 29

The teamwork was great. None of the kids on my crew had much carpentry experience, so the other adult and I had to show them what to do. We were lucky that the job was well-estimated so that we had the time to slow down, teach, and still get the work done. It was also the first time I had to show and tell other people what to do on a carpentry project and keep in my head everything that needed to get done. That was a challenge, especially the first couple of days as we gelled as a team. By the end of the week we were doing just fine. If you look on this map of Mannington, the property where we worked is at the intersection of Brink and Joe's Run Road west of town.

There was a scheduled half-day off on Wednesday, so we went whitewater rafting on the New river south of Mannington. I had never been whitewater rafting, so that was awesome. Of course the class 3 and 4 rapids were fun, but there was an awe-inspiring thirty minutes when we first sat upstream from a class 3 rapid in a torrential downpour; a downpour so white I could barely see the other boat 100 feet in front of us. The rain broke after five minutes, and we went through the rapid. On the other side the rock walls towered over us, mist and steam rose from the trees, and sun beams streaked through illuminating the canyon. Most of my outdoor days were in the southwest, so seeing the beauty of this just took my breath away. We stroked slowly to the next rapid taking it in, and even our guides had not seen anything so beautiful. We all had so much fun the guides stretch our two-hour express ride to two and a half hours.

This the first time I had done a mission trip. We talk about it in my house church group sometimes, but we haven't done a big project yet. I think two factors were important on this trip: 1) getting out of my normal routine so that I could dedicate time without distractions, and 2) participating with others who had the same goal to get over the discomfort of serving others we didn't know. I had been suspicious of group mission trips before, but now I understand why they work.

This was also the first vacation that I can remember where I didn't think about work. Apparently the trick is to be so busy and so exhausted that there's no time to think about anything else. Lights out was at 11pm, and I was generally awake by 5am each morning. There were evening programs, devotionals, and other actvities that kept all of busy outside of our projects. I need to remember this for the future, because it was exhausting in a good way, and I was mentally recharged when I hit the office on Monday morning.

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Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Impressions

nobody@vox.com(Mike) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:48:42 -0400

I played Dungeons and Dragons from 1980 to 1986. I started with the basic rules and moved to the 1st edition (1E) rule set early. I was a player with a group of people older than me, and I was dungeon master for friends my age. We played Grayhawk and a couple of custom campaigns I invented. I stopped when I went to college and didn't pay much attention to D&D between then and now.

The 4th edition (4E) news online got me interested in the game again. How do other people play D&D? What's changed between 1st edition and 4th edition? Would my kids (girls, 9 and 12) be interested in playing? Suprisingly, it was hard to get good information on the Internet. Most information related 4th edition to 3rd edition, and playstyle articles were scattered and disconnected. There was also almost no information about how accessible 4th edition would be to casual players or young players new to the game. It was pretty frustrating.

Keep on the Shadowfell

Bruce Cordell

I had this week off from work, so I decided to answer these questions for myself. I borrowed a copy of the rulebooks from a friend, bought a copy of Keep on the Shadowfell, and found some dice. I talked about the game with the kids, they seemed interested, and we decided to play. The rest of this post is a few notes from our experience.

The Encounter System

The encounter system in 4E is great. There is a very deliberate separation between noninteractive storyline elements in the adventure and the encounters where the players get to take action. The encounters can be combat or noncombat oriented. Keep on the Shadowfell illustrates how encounters are set up and also gives story elements to transition players from encounter to encounter. Story elements include NPCs and information they might give to players in response to questions as the players accumulate clues as to what's happening at the Keep. It's a lot of detail, but the module is illustrating how to lay out a story and keep it moving.

I found myself wanting to use graphviz to make another kind of map: an encounter map. If I had it, I could see a high-level structure to the story arc, and I could see at a glance what critical encounters were important to play before others. In Keep on the Shadowfell, the early encounters are important to gather clues as to what's going on in the Keep. If I were designing an adventure from scratch, I'd start with the encounter map to back the story and only then work the details of each encounter. Sounds like a plot outline? It is!

Combat

The combat mechanics make 4E almost a new game for me. The mechanics are advertised as simple: you roll a 20-sided die and compare to a number. The catch is the modifiers to the roll, and those modifiers can change from round to round and even turn to turn. 4E is also designed to be played on a grid with miniatures or tokens, i.e., space, location, and movement are important. It makes the game far more tactical than 1E ever could be. I like it.

The system doesn't have to be complex. You can drop some rules, and all it affects are modifications to that d20 roll. As an example, the kids and I ignored terrain and cover modifiers. If you had line of sight, you were good. The problem I had was knowing what rules I should drop being new to the game.

This is an important point. I was overwhelmed when I first read the combat mechanics in the Players Handbook and Dungeon Master Guide. They've developed a deep, tactical combat system that can be a lot of fun to play, but it's not an approachable system. As it stands, I don't see how an unmentored 12-year-old could pick it up without tons of errors and an incredible will to wade through the rule books. This is a see-one, do-one, teach-one game.

As a suggestion, it would have been nice to have a template worksheet for managing the bookkeeping. There seems to be a list of stuff that can change dynamically: condition, combat advantage, continuing effects, etc. A good worksheet for tracking this would have helped with the numbers and also served as a cue for what to track.

As for our personal experience, the kids and I made steady progress learning the combat mecahnics through the first three encounters. In the first encounter I made us stick to basic melee and ranged attacks. We didn't appeal to anything but at-will powers. By the end of the third encounter, we were getting more teamwork, more variety in powers, and more interesting tactics. The kids put themselves in a bad tactical position, and the party's paladin got knocked unconcious before the end of combat. This made things exciting enough that they high-fived when the last enemy turned and fled. Meanwhile, I was wondering how many mistakes I made with modifiers but kept that to myself. If you can't bluff, you don't DM.

Roleplaying

The rule books and the Keep on the Shadowfell module make the roleplaying and storytelling explicit in their advice to players and especially the DM. The first 30 pages of the DM guide is all about how to run a game. Keep on the Shadowfell is almost a tutorial on how to run an adventure. They are very well-written, which means they got a lot of attention in development. WotC is taking this part of the game seriously, far more than TSR did with 1E.

I've got a theory about why this is so: Dungeons and Dragons has to differentiate itself from computer-based games. The combat mechanics are interesting, but in the last twenty years, computer-based games have developed enough where these systems can be automated and made more fun on the computer. The comparisons to World of Warcraft are apt: if you just care about stats and want a faster pace, then World of Warcraft is probably a more fun game.

Where World of Warcraft can't compete is in the social and story aspects of the game. Online chat doesn't replace getting together with people in real life. Telling your own stories and making your own adventures is a different reward from static, computer-based game content. Dungeons and Dragons provides this.

Only because of the storytelling is there an opportunity for roleplaying. How players want to express this is up to them. It's important to have a your character's personality, because the DM can start to incorporate personalities into how adventures unfold. There's a small taste of this in Keep on the Shadowfell when you encounter the undead remains of the Keep's last defender.

Here lies the rub. Roleplaying and incorporating characters into storylines is work for the players and work for the DM. Is there enough fun over computer-based games for people to pick up Dungeons and Dragons and stick with it? Good question, it's for the player to decide, and I'm happy WotC is being clear in the rulebooks and this first adventure module about where they add value.

Coming back to our experience, the kids hadn't played a tabletop roleplaying game before, so they didn't understand the concept. I had to prompt them to think in-character and in-story, but I could do this mostly in the way I asked questions and did setup. They started to get the hang of it, but it's harder to learn than the mechanics. Kids play tabletop games, they engage in pretend games, but they rarely do both together.

My Takeaways

I enjoyed playing 4E with my kids. I've learned they can pick up complex game mechanics when they are interested, and cooperative games fit their style a lot better that competitive games. Siblings have enough rivalries, after all...there's no need to add to it with a game. We had lots of laughs and a great time.

Will we keep playing 4E? Good question. The girls pinned me down for one last session before they went to see their grandpa, and they'll want to keep playing when they get back. They're enthusiastic. If we keep playing, we'll have to make a regular family game night, and we'll want to mix in some other games, e.g., Settlers of Catan. The prep time for 4E is scary, but using published adventures might make it manageable. It still looks daunting.

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Tweaks to How I'm Using Twitter

nobody@vox.com(Mike) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 06:52:54 -0400

twitter statistics

Twitter is what I hoped it would be: a way to stay in touch with friends. The way I use it has continued to evolve. Here are some notes.

I made my timeline public. It means I've moved away from the idea of Twitter as a backchannel for activities like work, but I was never able to get traction with that idea. In truth, I consider everything on the Internet public anyway, so simply marking a timeline private wasn't sufficient for me to tweet freely.

My public timeline complements my personal blog. If people want to know who I am, they can follow me or read my timeline to get a better picture. Maybe I'm setting the example: I wish I could learn more about the job candidates I'm phone screening and interviewing. I assume they want to know about me, too.

I'm using text messaging to receive tweets when I am out of the office in the evening and on weekends. I can't overstate how this changes the Twitter experience. With a 140-character tweet you get to know how that person's weekend is going, and you learn about it when you're out doing stuff too. It's a great way to stay connected to people when you're not camped in front of the computer. You should at least experiement with it and see what you think. It's also convinced me there is at least one more major breakthrough in social network applications coming once the right mobile platform arrives to enable it.

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Disease-Proof Your Child

nobody@vox.com(Mike) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:15:24 -0400

Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Kids Right

Joel Fuhrman

My brother the doctor insisted I read this book. It's out of print, but I found a copy at the Indianapolis Public Library.

Let's get the negatives out of the way. The book is poorly written and poorly organized. Most of the prose borders on ranting, and many of his assertions are unsupported. It's ironic that a doctor wrote it; the attitude of the writing oozes the know-it-all-doctor stereotype. To top it off, the included menus and recipes don't measure up to what you would find in any reputable cookbook. It's obvious why this book is out of print. I'm glad I didn't buy it.

Nonetheless, it was well worth spending an hour thumbing through it. He drives for a vegan diet that minimizes cholesterol and sodium, radically opposess processed food, and strongly discourages dairy. I agree with his targets, and it inspired me to think about what I can do to get there.

I have to be practical. The unspoken challenge in these diets is how to prepare food that is low-fat and low-sodium but still tastes good. My brother's wife is a professional cook and is willing to devote a lot of time to food preparation. For the rest of us, we have to find a compromise that works.

I feel like I have the family in a pretty good spot already. I prepare the meals, I push veggies, I don't fry, I avoid salt when I can, etc. I'm still going after some easy kills to do better.

Stop buying potato chips and cereal
Make more bread myself
Switch to unhomegenized peanut butter
Introduce nuts
Increase the fruit and veggies ratio at meals
Cut back on meat and cheese in routine dishes, e.g., the sausage in my red beans and rice or the cheese in my lentil cassserole

Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant: Ethnic and Regional Recipes from the Cooks at the Legendary Restaur

Moosewood Collective

The timing is good. I've been in a cooking rut for the last year and have needed something to shake me out of it. I pulled my Moosewood cookbook off the shelf with new eyes yesterday and spent an hour menu planning. Grocery shopping today should be fun; I'm sure I'll end up at Trader Joe's for some of this stuff.

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Johnny 99

nobody@vox.com(Mike) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:50:24 -0400

I had my weekly guitar lesson today, and for the first time my teacher and I sat down and figured out how to play a song I brought on CD. I chose Johnny 99 by Bruce Springsteen to keep it simple.

Ryan figured it out in about eight minutes. I checked the clock. It included the following.

Figuring out that Springsteen's guitar is sharp on the recording. Speculation is that the original 4-track was sped up when mastered.
Determining it was a straightforward 24-bar blues with a basic rhythm.
Deciding it sounded better with a capo on the first fret after trying it both with and without capo.
Throwing in some embellishments for the solo where Springsteen is blowing his harp.

After that it was just another five minutes to write out the basic chord structure and talk a little about the embellishments. We still have some followup on that next week.

He mentioned, by the way, that 24-bar blues shows up in the craziest places. Remember Prince's song, Kiss? Yep, 24-bar blues.

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My New Beetle tows my Beetle

nobody@vox.com(Mike) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:29:31 -0400

Towing

I got the tow kit installed this weekend. The car doesn't need to be towed right now. Why the kit?

In 2006 I broke down on I-465 during rush hour. You don't ever want to do that and have to think. The traffic is heavy and fast. It's extremely loud. It's hard to think straight, and you mostly just want to get the heck out of there.

I want to be prepared for the next time I break down. I want to be able to walk into my garage, grab the tow bar, drive the new Beetle back, and rescue my old Beetle. I want to know exactly what needs to happen and how to get by '73 Bug back to my garage in peace.

Related to that, I don't like having to bum rides out to Greenfield to drop off the Bug with Dick or pick it back up when he's done. If the car's not running, then I have to find somebody with a truck and hitch.

So that's all fair, but there's a third reason too: I wanted to see my New Beetle tow my Beetle. It's a statement. I tooled around the neighborhood to see how the New Beetle would handle with the load. I got a look from every single person I passed, because face it, when have you ever seen such a sight?

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My Bug is out of Storage

nobody@vox.com(Mike) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:16:04 -0400

I got my 1973 Beetle out of storage. It feels a little late to be pulling it out, but it's been a cold and wet Spring in Indiana.

All I had to do was change the oil. The oil in the lawn mower needed changed too, so I did both at the same time. The car's oil was pretty sludgy, but that's probably a consequence of sitting for the winter. A little gasoline and air is all the filter needed to get clean.

As usual, it was a messy job. My car doesn't have the separate drain plug you can remove before removing the filter. I have to loosen the six nuts holding the bottom plate enough to let the oil drain, and there's no way to do it without getting oil all over your hand. Chloe thought it was pretty cool to see the oil running out when I let it go, though. Me, I was tickled I got her interested enough to get under and look.

The car started on the fourth round of cranking, which is exactly how it's been every year I've had the car in Indiana. That's its personality. Once warm I cut the choke and drove around the neighborhood for a while. She ran a little bit rough the first half a mile, and I had to ride the brakes half a block to clear a little rust out of the drums. After that she was smooth as butter. No flat spots when accelerating, and the idle speed is fine. I checked the valves last fall, so I don't think I need to do any more work on the car.

Now I feel like Spring is here.

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C4[1]: Exploring Erlang

nobody@vox.com(Mike) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 18:32:26 -0400

I finally watched the C4[1] talk Exploring Erlang (video, slides) by Bob Ippolito. It's a basic introduction to Erlang and worth watching if you've never seen the language and have only heard a little about it. He goes through several examples. Alex Payne wrote a nice summary of the talk.

He did a performance comparison of an Erlang web server to Apache. I believe the performance claims, but his comparison unfortunately is apples to oranges and isn't fair. Come to think of it, few benchmark comparisons are.

The questions following the talk were a little bit interesting. Someone asked if Erlang was suitable for desktop applications, e.g., using it to back a Cocoa application. The answer, predictably, was no. Alex Payne asked about the adoption rate at Ippolito's company, Mochi Media, since he had trouble getting people to consider Erlang at Twitter. If I recall correctly, Ippolito said there are eight engineers at his company, four are using it currently, and all new projects are using Erlang (as opposed to Python).

Bob spent some time talking about process trees and structuring collections of processes to be fault tolerant, but he didn't get to specific patterns. What's the right way to break down problems? Nobody pushed him on that in the questions.

I don't know what to say about the performance. Folks say Erlang is fast. These are the same folks using Python, Ruby, and Perl. Coming from Chez Scheme, I suspect the performance is nothing special, because I know that Chris and Bob's Erlang embedding in Chez is blistering fast.

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