Geek Smithology

Wow, it’s the 10th anniversary of the Pragmatic programmers, and part of going forward, they have teamed up with the inimitable Michael Swaine (you likely enjoyed his Swaine’s Flames column in addition to all the fine articles he wrote for the late, great Dr. Dobb’s journal) to put together a free online magazine called PragPub.

In addition to a great looking PDF, you can get it in mobi (kindle) and epub (Stanza on the iPhone - I can attest it works and looks great) formats for those commutes. If you’re a fan of Dave, Andy, Michael, or even just programming in general, you owe it to yourself to go check out the first 37 page issue right now…

For those of you who don’t know, the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo was held this weekend, and the family decided to check it out. It was as expected - super crowded, super crazy, and a lot of fun. I got to meet and talk for a few minutes with Terry Moore who might be my absolute favorite comic writer/artist today (with the possible exception of Larry Marder, although his output is low these days. I also got him to sign my copy of the First SiP Book. Also got to see Darwyn Cooke and Sergio Arogones, and had Ron Marz and Mike Choi sign the first Witchblade graphic novel.

Also hung out with the soup nazi:

And Darth Maul:

(Pictures are a little iffy ’cause our camera died and my wife is not comfortable with my iPhone!) Whether I go again will depend entirely on the guest list, but all in all a neat few hours

Everybody blocks.  Writer’s block.  Programmer’s block.  Lego block.  As with so many things, one of the things that differentiates the great from the average is how we break through.  I’m always on the lookout for new ideas and came across the idea of oblique strategies, an idea from producer Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt.[1]  The basic idea is a deck of cards, each with a pithy (or cryptic) saying on it that helps you reframe your thoughts, like the the one in the title of this post:

Gardening; not architecture.

What does that mean?  We all have our own interpretation, and while our left brained developer minds might not like it, every one of those interpretations is correct.

It has been said that the best metaphors often come from bisociational discord.  In fact, assuming we can bring it together, the further apart the two sides of our conceptual model, the more epic our epiphany when it comes together.

And if it doesn’t?  Who cares!  Pick another card and go again…

Not building a wall, but making a brick.

[1] There are various web resources for using Oblique Strategies: I use the iPhone application myself.

I’ve been critical of what I like to call the “Julia Roberts and Richard Gere desperately trying to duplicate the success of Pretty Woman” genre of film (cf. Runaway Bride). For many years, I’ve considered Clive Owen to be quite the bad ass. Think about it: Sin City, Children of Men, Shoot ‘em Up. But now that Richard Gere has seemingly finally passed beyond “distinguished” into “just plain old” he’s been replaced, but Clive say it ain’t so:

You’ll never be James Bond at this rate, my friend.

Shortly after I left Service Intelligence all those years ago, a small panel convened at a Tim Horton’s to discuss the future. Well, actually, it was me, The Ront and Foo and since we seemed to like working together we figured we’d write a game of some kind. After not a whole lot of thought we figured we’d go ahead and write a chess game in Java. We didn’t really get anywhere with that, though. Then it happened.

I remember it like it was yesterday. But really, it was right after No Fluff Just Stuff 2005. My eyes were opened and it was decided right then and there that the chess game would written in Ruby. Sure it’s not the most “performant” language for chess calculations, but I wanted to learn Ruby and it’s always better to have a real project to work toward.

We decided to call it “pawnzilla”, for all the reasons you can imagine someone might want to call a chess engine pawnzilla. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster - we went through a horrible OO implementation, transition to 64-bit love and bitboards, and a fairly recent switch from sourceforge to GitHub, but after three and a half years (maybe a couple person months total effort - it’s tough to get time to work on this stuff!) I finally realized a dream, and played a game against my own chess engine.

It was pretty anticlimactic. All of the time so far has been spent working on a complete rules engine (this turns out to be quite a difficult proposition!), so the AI is pretty stupid. So stupid that the game lasted only 7 moves. But still, after all this time, it was great to watch pawnzilla make moves and actually “understand” that the game was over.

I think that we’ve implemented some pretty cool ideas in pawnzilla (including our domain specific approach to testing) and now that there is finally something to see, I hope to start blogging about some of those ideas. The next big goal is to develop the AI into something that doesn’t suck and hook it up to the free internet chess server so that it can get rated. So far it’s been a hell of a ride, and even though it took so long, it’s nice to get to such a significant milestone in my own labour of love.

If you’d like to see it, pawnzilla is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and you can check it out over on github. And if anyone out there wants to play with a pure-ruby chess engine (should be a lot of fun just to work on different AI strategies now that the rules engine is in place) drop me a line and I’ll be happy to talk about it.

So cheers to pawnzilla.

6:29 The show is about to begin. I fell down the stairs yesterday and my tailbone is in bad shape, so I’ve spent most of the day off of my feet, which means I caught most of the red carpet rigamarole. I can’t say I missed it. Ooh, ooh! Here comes Hugh!

6:38 Okay, so far Hugh rules. “Robert Downey Jr. is an American playing an Australian playing an African American. Nominated. I’m an Australian who played on Australian in a movie called Australia. Hosting.” This is the best introduction of all time. Standing O? Damn straight.

6:42 and so endeth the first montage. At least it’s relevant, but still too long. Do we really need five past winners? And I’m sorry, the speeches are too long. On one hand, I like that they’re recognizing the nominees, but this is too much.

6:47 And the winner is… Penelope Cruz. Yeah, I’m on record saying I thought Marisa Tomei should win, but I can’t begrudge Penelope this win, she was a good part in a good movie. But I really don’t like the twenty year introductions. Nathan goes 1 for 1.

6:57 I like they way they did the introduction of the Best Original Screenplay , if that is indicative of the new “style” this could work out really well. And the winner is..Milk. I probably should have guessed that, but I really think In Bruges was the better script. 1 for 2.

As for adapted screenplay, the winner is Slumdog Millionaire. This was a pretty easy pick and I’m sitting at 2 for 3.

7:07 Is there anybody anywhere surprised that Wall-E is the best animated feature? In a rare move, all three nominees were excellent, but the Pixar film was heads and tails above the rest. I easily go to 3 for 4.

7:17 The Art Direction oscar is presented to the folks behind The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Silly me for thinking that it would be the latest costume drama featuring a certain Keira Knightly and I drop to to 60 percent and 3 for 5. Will Ben Button sweep the design awards or will the costume drama win? And the oscar goes to The Duchess. Ah, there’s the Knightly movie award. I feel vindicated for no reason whatsoever, but take my place at 4 for 6. Another easy call as the Makeup Oscar goes to “the movie where Brad Pitt looks all old”. Smith is looking good at 5 for 7.

7:35 Damn, Ben Stiller is hilarious, and Natalie Portman looks better than she can act. My theory that just picking Slumdog Millionaire for every category in which it was nominated will probably bear a lot of fruit as the night goes on. 6 for 8 as I say hello to 75 percent, the best I’ve been since 100% after one award.

8:12 Heath Ledger wins best supporting actor. Once again I want to stress that he was the best actor in that group, and this is not a sympathy win by any means. Very emotional, but well done. 7 for 9.

8:15 I was starting to second guess myself and thinking that Trouble the Water would win the best documentary, but I am pleased to see Man on Wire win. Such acrobatics. And you gotta love Bill Maher. 8 for 10 - what’s up?

8:27 “The movie where Brad Pitt looks old” wins another Oscar, this time for the heavyweight category Visual Effects. Make a good looking dude look old and you too can win Oscars. 9 for 11. But I think I’m going to go downhill quickly with Sound Editing and Mixing. I went with Wall-E, which should win, but won’t.

Nope. Sound editing goes to Dark Knight. I guess they had to award it something. Bah, I fall to 9 for 12. As for sound mixing, Will Smith gives the award to…Slumdog Millionaire, of course, Whatever, no-one really cares about sound…9 for 13.

After my craziness for Wall-E subsided I went back to the “if it’s Slumdog pick it, and here they win for Editing. Not much of a surprise, 10 for 14.

8:54 Slumdog wins again, this time for score. I don’t think it was the best, but it’s a Slumdog night and it continues. I go 11 for 15 and I’ve already hit my total from last year. That’s just crazy talk.

9:00 Okay, while this medley of the nominated songs is pretty annoying, it’s far better than having separate performances throughout the night as we’ve seen in the past. Slumdog has two songs nominated so the trick is to pick which one. And the winner….Jai Ho. It was a bit of a slam dunk — when in doubt, go for the dance number. Hello 12 for 16. I don’t know how I can possibly beat such a performance.

9:20 Danny Boyle wins an unsurprising Best Directing statue for Slumdog Millionaire, and received it “in the manner of Tigger”, which certainly entertained my wife. 13 for 17.

9:32 Oooh, I’m on fire. Kate Winslet wins for The Reader - watching Marion Cotillard do her little speech was almost better than Kate’s. This is really good to see her win after six nominations. 14 for 18.

9:43 “You commie, homo loving sons of guns”. Sean Penn wins another Oscar for his brilliant performance as Harvey Milk. I’m disappointed for Mickey Rourke who likely won’t be here ever again, but the bottom line is Nat X goes 15 for 19.

9:52 And after three and a half (not as torturous as other years) long, long hours, Stephen Spielberg awards the best picture to Slumdog Millionaire. Is anyone surprised by this? If you are, you’re a fool. It’s hard to believe that this movie was almost a straight to DVD release, but thanks to the magic of Toronto and its film festival, it found a distributor and found love. Even if you don’t like the movie (and if you don’t, you’re a fool) you have to like the story. Nice to see so many people from the cast make it to Hollywood for the show.

I absolutely destroy last year’s result of 11/19 by going 16/20. I’m not making any kind of prediction for next year.

And there it is, another year, another Oscar telecast. I think Hugh Jackman should be given a lifetime contract to host the Oscars - he was truly excellent.

As with last year, I’ve decided to throw out who would win the oscars if the Academy decided that maybe they should ditch the whole voting process and get some guy from Calgary to pick the winners. I will list both who I think the academy will pick (Who Will Win), and who I would pick if I had an actual ballot (Who Should Win.) I’ll be keeping score during the oscars to see how well I did.

Supporting Actor
Who Will Win: Heath Ledger (Dark Knight)
Who Should Win: Heath Ledger (Dark Knight)

The Dark Knight wasn’t a very good movie, but Heath Ledger was great in it. He took the Joker out of the clownish imp of Caesar Romero and Jack Nicholson and turned him into the insane monster he really is. Some will say he wouldn’t have won if he was still alive, but that’s an unnecessary excuse - it’s the best performance of the nominees.

Supporting Actress
Who Will Win: Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona)
Who Should Win: Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler)

The academy loves supporting actresses who are different See Mira Sorvino for Might Aphrodite and the bizarre win by Tomei for My Cousin Vinny. And Penelope Cruz is quite the character. But I think that this year Marisa deserves the award, and not just because she was naked, but finally real.

Lead Actor
Who Will Win: Sean Penn (Milk)
Who Should Win: Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler)

I have a feeling I’m picking the wrong role for who should win, but the academy loves Sean Penn, and with the Democrats in charge, maybe they’ll put up with this politics. But thank goodness for Darren Aronofsky who wouldn’t make this movie without Rourke (hard to believe that Nicholas Cage was once attached to this role.) Forget all of the art imitates life drama, this is where MIckey proved once and for all that he is a true actor. Remember Diner?

Lead Actress
Who Will Win: Kate Winslet (The Reader)
Who Should Win: Kate Winslet (The Reader)

It’s finally Winslet’s year. So many nominations (5) and so few wins (0). This nomination makes her the youngest actor in history to have received six nominations, and she will ride the tidal wave of her dual Golden Globes to Oscar gold. She plays a character who is detestable in every way that matters, but you can’t look away.

Best Director
Who Will Win: Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)
Who Should Win: Gus Van Sant (Milk)

Make no mistake - Slumdog Millionaire is a great film with the unmistakable stamp of Danny Boyle all over it, but it’s riding a wave of over-hype that was only fed by the Golden Globes. The true directing achievement of the year is Van Sant, who evokes old timey San Francisco while creating a truly interesting film even though we come in knowing the result.

Best Picture
Who Will Win: Slumdog Millionaire
Who Should Win: Milk

Again, the nominations are wrong this year. For Benjamin Button and Frost/Nixon to be nominated in the year that Wall-E and The Wrestler were released just shows that the Academy is, in a lot of ways, out of touch.[1] There are no masterpieces on this list, unlike There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men last year. Once again, while I’m a big fan of Slumdog, it doesn’t have the direction or performances of Milk. While Sean Penn seems so over the top in the movie, you need to seek out video of the real-life Harvey Milk, and you’ll see how dead-on his portrayal is.

And there it is, folks. I’m hoping to live blog during the show again and seeing how I measure up. For everyone playing at home, here are my full picks. Once again, I’ve omitted best foreign film and the shorts, because I saw none of them.

Please feel free to comment or email me with your own choices (see here for a full list of nominees) and we’ll compare our prognostication abilities.

[1] To the fanboys complaining about The Dark Knight getting “snubbed” in the best picture category, not only is it not the best picture of the year, but in retrospect, it’s not even that good.

You know, we like to put Microsoft down all the time. We all remember the hilarious “If Microsoft designed the iPod box” video[1], and those excellent points about how the Zune marketing discusses how many gigabytes it can hold, while the iPod lets you know how many songs it will hold. Hell, even I occasionally wonder what they are smoking. But, let’s face it, Microsoft really makes it too damn easy.

There are seven (that’s right, 7) different versions of Windows 7. Insert your own joke.

[1] Yes, I am perfectly aware that the parody originated within Microsoft. I chalk it up to frustrated designers and the old maxim “It’s funny because it’s true.”

We’ve all felt like Randy from Scream: watching hapless horror movie victims take every wrong turn so they cross paths with the killer for the next death set-piece. But who ever thinks about that killer? What about all the planning and training that goes into the perfect spree? If post-modern horror movies took the step of becoming self-aware, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon goes even further and takes us into the life of an up-and-coming slasher as he prepares for his big night.

The story is told through the eyes of a documentary crew led by Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals[1]). Unlike the hardcore verite style of Man Bites Dog, another documentary that follows a killer, this movie follows a more comedic tack as Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesel) works through all of his moves, as if it were a chess match. He talks us through picking out his “survivor girl”, planting bizarre clues (when leaving a fake newspaper article behind tying himself to survivor girl, he marvels at his own wit in remembering to alter the microfiche), and working out the remote location to ensure maximum carnage, all in an attempt to follow in the footsteps of “Jay”[2], “Fred”[3], and “Mike”[4].

As the events unfold, we meet Leslie’s mentor, Eugene a retired slasher who talks about tricks of the trade as he and his girl Jamie help the killer with his plans. When Leslie’s old psychiatrist, Doc Haloran (Robert Englund), comes to town, Leslie now “has an Ahab!” However, the film takes a turn to the dark side as it slowly dawns on Taylor that Leslie isn’t fooling and that he fully intends to go through with his plan. How it all goes down and how he handles it is a twist I wouldn’t dream of revealing, but after a second viewing, the movie earns it.

The two main performances are really strong - Baesel plays the hopeful killer with an “aw shucks” quality that will make audiences start to like him despite his plans. Goethals does a great job playing a cynical documentarian playing for laughs who slowly realizes that this is no joke. Robert Englund, so famous for playing the child killer in the striped sweater, is put into the trench coat of Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) from Halloween in an inspired bit of casting. Finally, Scott Wilson as the retired killer-cum-mentor Eugene steals most of the scenes he’s in.

Just as the characters from Clerks mused about the thousands of innocent contractors who must’ve been blown up in Return of the Jedi when the second Death Star was destroyed, Behind the Mask takes a look at some familiar cliches from a different angle and manages to be pretty darn entertaining.

[1] Yes, that Angela Goethals, of famed 1993 sitcom Phenom and who uttered one of Home Alone’s most annoying lines of dialog…”Listen, Kevin, what are you so worried about? You know Mom’s gonna pack your stuff anyway. You’re what the French call “les incompetents.”
[2] for the horror impaired…Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th (Kane Hodder who portrayed Jason makes a cameo)
[3] Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street
[4] Michael Myers from the Halloween movies.

Like so many geeks who grew up with the original Star Wars trilogy (and I mean people who were actually born when Star Wars came out, not these punk kids who are five years younger than Return of the Jedi) I was, shall we say, disappointed with episodes one two and three.

It is my contention that Episode I was a complete waste of time, and that Episode II (a well-written and acted Episode II, of course) should have been the first, entitled The Clone Wars. And rather than just a few anticlimactic minutes of a single movie, Episode III would have focussed on the Vader’s destruction of the Jedi, call it Revenge of the Sith (because that’s actually a fine name). This means that the famous duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan (which was actually pretty good, all things considered) would’ve ended my Episode II, Rise of the Emperor. However, rather than a pathetic “NOOOOOOOOO!”, I would’ve ended it something like this…

There’s been a lot of noise ’bout distributed source control the last year or two, especially with regard to Linus’ other baby, Git. Even I’ve bit - moving pawnzilla from sourceforge to GitHub last year, with serious thought to going with gitsvn in my professional life.

Stuart over at Relevence even went so far as to say that If you run a significant open source project that is not on a distributed SCM, it is a clear warning sign that you are a dinosaur.

He points to a pretty brilliant data visualization of commits to the rails project over the years. Take a look around April 2008, when they moved to Git. Make sure to watch the HD version fullscreen, it’s truly something to behold.

As always, our friends the pragmatic programmers have a book about Git to get you started on the road to enlightenment. (Or distributed SCM, as if they aren’t the same thing…)

As a software developer, you occasionally hear a conversation like the following:

“You know, this resume looks good, but she doesn’t have a degree”
“Yeah…but seven years of experience”
“True, I suppose it’s a mute point”

Well, not really. First off, mute as an adjective means “characterized by the absence of sound; quiet.” So while you could say that with so much experience, the point that someone should have a degree becomes silent, or no longer necessary.

However, there is an even better word. The word that is supposed to be used, which is “moot”. The definition of “moot” as an adjective is “subject to debate, dispute, or uncertainty, and typically not admitting of a final decision”.

So replace mute with moot in the conversation above and you’ll see that someone is saying that while education always matters, when a person has a lot of experience, the relative merit of education in the interviewing decision is lessened.

But not silent.

I loved Fallout.
I loved Fallout 2 even more.
And so far I’ve really loved playing Fallout 3 (yay Steam!) but my love of the previous games has tripped me up. I was developing my favorite type of character, a man who can destroy anybody with a hail of small arms fire, generally going by the name Doc Holliday, I developed my character the wrong way.
Based on my previous experience, I was putting some stats towards Perception, only to find that I should have been putting those stats into Agility in the new game. Well, shit. I begged off the game for a bit, only to find out (thanks to some direction from Foo), that you can edit your stats through the console if you’re playing on the PC.
So for anyone else who needs to change their stats, I just did the following:

(Hey, I don’t wanna cheat, I just want to do things the way I thought I was doing them all along!)

This is a pretty comprehensive list of console commands for anyone else who may be looking.

I’m not going to comment on Rock Band 2 right now (Or it’s relationship to Guitar Hero: World Tour in the rock star simulation firmament) even though I have a lot to say, but I just want to say that as of right now (as opposed to not earlier today), the DLC is finally working on the Wii.

This is a huge deal that really makes the game. I was seriously considering getting another console just to have the ability to download songs, but thankfully the second generation of each game has given us downloadable content on the Wii. Not the best selection yet, but I downloaded a few songs and it’s only going to grow. Where the hell is China Cat Sunflower?

At least China Cat will be available one day. Why they don’t have Friend of the Devil or Dark Star is beyond me…

Heard a remark that this was the last year that people could wear stupid 200X glasses (you know, like this:

However, you can easily see that 2010 glasses would work out just fine. And if you’re willing to go all pirate and see out of one eye[1][2][3] you can comfortably wear hideous novelty specs at lowbrow New Year fiestas until 2111. Of course, that will be year that you can pretend it’s a visor and that you’re a bad ass knight. Or maybe your great-grandkids can pretend to be Sir Ass of Bad, ’cause even if I could live to 136, I’m reasonably certain I will not want to.

Unless either HG Wells or Ponce de Leon were correct, then it could be interesting. For different reasons, one more paradoxical than the other, yet each delicious in their own way. Like cupcakes. Chocolate cupcakes. With peanut butter icing. From Crave. With an Americano from Bumpys. Yeah, I gotta run…

[1] Thought the first: if those pirates could duel with only one eye (and the resulting depth perception issues), they must be excellent duellists.
[2] Thought the second: if those pirates are such excellent duellists, why did they lose the eye in the first place?
[3] Thought the third: it is said that footnotes 1 and 2 have the ability to keep me up at nights.

Let me congratulate Team Canada on a hard-fought tournament to claim a fifth World Junior championship in a row - this one on Canadian soil, led by a great performance by the best forward of the tournament, John Tavares.

I’m not sure if you are aware, gentle reader, but our opponents in the gold medal final (Sweden, again) did a little trash talking before the game, about Canada wasn’t to be feared and how we were totally beatable because are goalie wasn’t “that good”. They also said that we’d fall apart if they scored a couple of quick goals.

And well, that might be true, but we’ll never know, because Canada went up 3-0 and despite being outshot, ended up winning 5-1. I’ve got nothing against the Swedes in principal, but there’s a piece of me that loves seeing trash talking mooks lose almost as much as the piece that loves watching my country win. Add to that the gold and bronze Canada took in the Under-17 tournament and our future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades.[1]

This is Canada’s record-destroying 15th title - you need to add the next four teams together to get that total (okay, Russia has 11 if you add the 8 that the Soviet Union won to the that Russia has won, but I don’t). Can’t wait until 2012, when the world Juniors finally come to Calgary (and in Regina and Saskatoon next year for my prairie peeps.)

[1] It’s been 20 years, folks, it’s time to proudly (and without irony) reference Timbuk-3 again! Yeah right, who am I kidding…

A little way back I purchased a Time Capsule, Apple’s ingenious backup device. Not only is it beautiful (mmmm, white square with a silver apple on it…) but it manages to stay out of my way while I use my computer. Like many computer users out there, I have shoe boxes full of floppy disks, spools of CD’s and even weird proprietary pieces of plastic full of Zip disks from previous backups. These backups were ad hoc, unscheduled, unverified, and never used. Oh sure, I had a hard drive crash once, but none of my “backups” were useful at all, so I just laboriously attempted to recover everything off of that disk.

Now, you might say “sure, Mr. Fancy-Pants, you have this nice beautiful hermetically sealed and aesthetically pleasing device making little to no noise on that desk in your basement, but does it work?”

Yes.

I got a little overzealous with some photo editing/changing, etc the other day and, well, lost a bunch of pictures. This caused me great angst for about 79 seconds when I suddenly realized, “Hey, I have backups of this stuff” And I did!

What was almost as interesting as the backup story was the restore, uh, story. iPhoto itself has “Browse Backups” option that goes into an iPhoto specific version of Time Machine. You can browse through in the standard way, select the pictures you want to restore (yeah, that’s right, select the pictures you want to restore) and then click “restore all”. iPhoto does an import, you have your stuff back, “BOOM!”.

I know there are some people who aren’t fans of the Time Capsule, and I weep for them, because for me, it a joyous thing to behold.

[1] If you don’t see a heart in the title of this post, fix your character encoding settings!

Okay, I love my iPhone, but one thing it’s always done a really shitty job with is podcasts. Mostly it would refuse to honour the play count, so it wouldn’t always ditch the ones I had already listened to, and then they’d be on there after I synced, and in my OCD little world over over-organizing everything, this just didn’t do.

Then came the 2.2 software update, promising the ability to delete podcasts from the phone, and even download new episodes. This is genius!

Except that it’s not. And it kinda sucks. First off, deleting podcasts doesn’t really delete the podcasts. In fact, sometimes they just come back, much like the play count would suddenly be erased without warning. And more annoying, when you plug into iTunes, it makes sure that all of them are still there. Assuming I have “Allow Auto Delete” set for these podcasts (I do, but those setting aren’t always honoured either, but that’s a whole different rant), you’d expect them to be, uh deleted. But they aren’t, they just show as having been played. Lame.

Second, downloading new episodes just takes you to the iTunes music store. Sometimes it goes to the page of the podcast you are attempting to find new episodes of, sometimes it doesn’t. What I want to do is say “get new episodes” and have it check the feed, and ask me which (if any) of the new episodes I would like to list. I mean, what about podcasts that aren’t in the iTunes store (that I have to subscribe to using the “Advanced” menu option.)?

So, uh, how ’bout you take a Mulligan on this one Apple, and try to get it right for 2.3?

I’ve been a fan of the Tomb Raider franchise pretty much from the beginning - I played the first one, reviewed the second one (played on the late great Gravis gamepad - the one with the (completely useless) mini-joystick that you could screw into the d-pad), but then got less interested as the games decayed into dreck.

Then came Legend. A new creative team, a return to what made the game great in the first place. And for the vast majority of the time, it really delivers: more “tombs” to raid instead of stupid cities (although the big city level, set in Tokyo, is excellent), a ton of acrobatic action, interesting puzzles that don’t require a walk-through, and pretty stellar graphics (although the “next-gen” content was too freaky looking for my taste.

Because I’ve been accused of destroying the pending enjoyment of two-year-old games in the past, let me just say…SPOILERS AHEAD (kinda.)

Here’s the thing - after a really fun game, it all goes to hell right at the end. I mean, it completely destroys the experience. Like you’re eating a chocolate eclair and just as your about to finish it you realize that not only was there a hair on it, but that it was actually made of poop. After a silly “interactive” cut scene[1] you’re dropped into a fight against a ridiculously large number of enemies. This content seems to have been created for the sole purpose of sucking up all of your first aid kits and taking away as much health as possible. When you dispatch the hoi polloi, you are suddenly faced with a giant monster, and you realize a few things:

1) Every time this creature attacks you, not only does it take a bunch of your health away, but it throws you to the ground and it takes forever to recorder.
2) Actually targeting and hitting said creature is next to impossible.
3) The tomb raider camera is fucking useless when it comes to fights like this. Worse than useless - it actually makes the fight harder.

To make things worse, when you actually manage to whittle away enough health for the creature to enter it’s death throes, you find out that you need to run over and stab the girl who turned into the creature. But…wait! You’re not done yet, you have to do this two more fucking times. This is one of the most frustrating endings of any game ever. I downloaded a trainer to get through it because I just don’t have the time to get through it “properly”, and that’s assuming that given infinite time I actually could do it “properly.” I’m not sure that I could.

So, I hate you Tomb Raider Legend, and give you a metaphorical football to the junk. Here’s hoping that Anniversary sucks less. I’m not optimistic enough to hope that it’s good.

[1] You know, the ones where it shows your character doing some crazy cool stuff that the game engine can’t handle, so you just push directions and buttons at the right time? It’s like a modern version of Dragon’s Lair, except that the game developer forgot that Dragon’s Lair sucks and nobody wants to play that any more. Except for maybe Don Bluth, who would invite you to his house, hand you a Bud Lite while ordering a pizza and say “hey, wanna play Dragon’s Lair?”, which you politely sidestep by saying “hey Don, isn’t there a hockey game on or something?” You see by his pathetic look that he is saddened by your rejection, but he agrees to watch the game, knowing that if he gets you drunk maybe later you’ll try Space Ace.

…my 64-bit MacBook Pro laptop, that is. This time marks the one year anniversary of finally taking the leap into Mac-hood. I had already gone part way with my love of the iPod, but I hadn’t really consummated the relationship with the full leap into OS X. Now I have, and use it for everything (except for playing Fallout 3, which looks way better on the PC with the 9800GTX video card and 21″ widescreen monitor). It’s been absolutely brilliant for organizing my photos, playing with the digital features of my piano, doing some video work, and of course doing development in Java and ruby.

I’ve also become an Apple fanboy, with a Time Capsule and an iPhone (and probably an iMac in the not so distant future). So, happy one year anniversary lappy. I’d like to toast to a long and prosperous relationship, but let’s face it — in about 19 months I’ll grow bored and you will become my wife’s computer when I replace you with something shinier.

Oh, and yeah, I still adore my Commodore 64 as well. Not as much as my Vectrex, tho’