malvasia bianca

Just got back from vacation; I trust that my weeks of silence didn’t cause any distress to my legions of loyal fans. We spent a couple of weeks in Paris; our first vacation since our honeymoon that didn’t involve visiting relatives. (This is what happens when one has a child.)

Loads of fun; I will post more about it over the next week, I expect. Miranda continued to maintain her status as perfect in every way, and a thorough delight to travel with. I wasn’t surprised that she did great in restaurants; I honestly was a little surprised at her museum stamina. We got a good look at almost all of the ground floor of the Musee D’Orsay (I become more of a Manet fan every visit), and even a not-insignificant chunk of the Louvre. Weird traffic patterns there – in particular, why is the lovely covered statue courtyard that they created a decade or so ago on the north side so sparsely populated? Miranda liked it, too: because of the Disney Hercules movie, she wanted capsule explanations of all of the statues of Greek figures.

Miranda’s been taking dance lessons for the last year. Actually, for longer than that – they offered dance lessons at her preschool, so she took them there. She liked it enough to want to continue it this year, but it hasn’t been her favorite activity, so we’re not planning to continue it any more. But her school had a dance recital last weekend, which of course she wanted to participate in. So we went to that.

And it was a lot of fun! Her class is pleasant enough, but ultimately it’s a bunch of 5- and 6-year olds who aren’t the most focused people in the world. And the other classes at the same time are at not very advanced skill levels as well. So, while I was aware that there was a wide range of classes available at the school, I hadn’t really seen them.

But it was pretty cool seeing maybe 30 different classes show their stuff. There were several classes at or near Miranda’s level, but they were at all at least cute. And the kids definitely got better as they got older; the high-school-age kids seemed to me quite good. A whole range of dance styles, too. They mixed it up nicely (both in terms of ability and style), lots of different costumes, and they kept it moving quite briskly.

It didn’t change our mind on her continuing the lessons in the fall (nothing against the school, it just doesn’t seem to be her thing), but it was a nice final experience with the school.

The A’s are continuing to do pleasantly well: they haven’t gone on a huge win streak or anything, but they’re winning almost every series these days. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by Bobby Crosby’s return; call me a pessimist, but even though he was rookie of the year last year, he only batted .239 last year, and sophomore slumps are far from rare, so I wasn’t expecting much from him this year. But his line this season is .313/.370/.507, which is great.

I’m still not thrilled about the Tim Hudson trade, but the Mark Mulder trade is turning out nicely so far: Mulder has an ERA of 4.27 (in the NL), while Danny Haren has settled down after an iffy start with an ERA of 3.98. Keeping Barry Zito still doesn’t look too good, but the younger arms seem to be living up to their billing. I have a hard time imagining we’ll make the playoffs this year, but as rebuilding years go, not too bad.

And Julio Franco, not content to rest on his laurels, followed up his two-steal game with a two-homer game. Doubtless inspired by his example, the Indians are doing great; I doubt they’ll catch the White Sox, but a wildcard berth isn’t completely out of the question.

The computer’s memory problems seem to have settled down: I’m not convinced that everything is right, but it’s stopped crashing now that I’m only using one DIMM. (And 256 MB seems to be right on the borderline of where swapping starts happening, so I’ve ordered a 512 MB DIMM.) But now I’m having networking problems, which I’m not sure are my fault. Sometimes my internet connection temporarily disappears, which might be the fault of the computer, the ethernet cable, the cable modem, or something else, and I have no clue as to which of those it is. “Something else” isn’t completely crazy: I got assigned IP addresses a couple of times last week that makes me think that one of my neighbors is running a misconfigured DHCP server. If the problems continue, maybe I’ll bring in a laptop and ethernet cable from work to try to eliminate some of the variables.

Incidentally, one more thing about Nausicaa: in the comic books, the big bugs are called “Ohmu”, while in the movie their name is pronounced “Om”. Is “ohmu” how Om (as in Om mani padme hum) gets transliterated into Japanese? I would believe that. Also, is there any significant difference between the new edition of the comic books and the older, four-volume edition? Nothing leaps out to me (other than the color of the ink), but I haven’t compared them carefully.

Yesterday was a good day for Indians of my youth. Julio Franco, 46 years old, an age normally reserved for knuckleballers and the occasional freak lefty reliever, went two for five with two steals. And the comparatively spritely Omar Vizquel, a 38-year-old babe in arms, went five for six, with a double and a triple, and is batting .302 for the season.

We watched Nausicaa for the first time a week or two ago. At first, I wasn’t too impressed: even before watching it, I’d already half made up my mind that I wouldn’t like it as much as Miyazaki’s other movies, because of comparisons with other works of his: the manga version of Nausicaa is much more elaborate than the movie, and Miyazaki had revisited environmental themes in other, later movies (Castle in the Sky, I should watch that one again, and Princess Mononoke). So I figured it would be a sort of journeyman work with interesting ideas that ultimately didn’t get their due.

And when I started watching it, my opinions started to solidify: the animation is pretty basic compared to his later work, and the idea of forests and insects evolving in order to clean the world for humans makes me roll my eyes. But somehow, by the end of the movie, I found myself really enjoying it. And Miranda has watched it twice since then, and I’ve been perfectly happy to be in the room with it on.

I think what’s going on is that I’m a sucker for big picture mysticism, driven by charismatic leaders. (Not by any means all charismatic leaders, but Nausicaa certainly qualifies for me.) Castle in the Sky, if memory serves me well, had some neat ideas and pleasant characters, but was lacking on those fronts; Princess Mononoke did better, but wasn’t as simplistically optimistic as Nausicaa. (Optimistic probably isn’t the right word, but I’m not thinking of a better substitute right now.) Don’t get me wrong, I don’t advocate simplistic works in general, but sometimes they have a certain purity which can tweak me in happy spots.

All things considered, I’d probably rather be watching Princess Mononoke, but it was a pleasant surprise given the way my opinions towards Nausicaa had begun. Good thing, too, given that Miranda is way too young for Mononoke, and right now wants to watch Nausicaa every few days.

Yesterday was the last day of Kindergarten. Very sad (well, not very sad, but certainly poignant): no more Wednesday mornings in classrooms, I won’t see the other kids and parents for a few months, and even once next year starts, I won’t see the current first-graders much at all. And Sue Lampkin, Miranda’s fabulous teacher, is retiring. Sigh. I can’t say I’m thrilled about having to make Miranda’s lunch every morning over the summer, either, though not having to get out of the door early on Thursdays will be nice.

At least PACT manages to ease the blow: Miranda’s brought home a lot of stuff this week that she did over the year, and we had a very nice class potluck on Monday evening, where we all got to see each other one last time, do some celebrating, and look at stuff. The first graders had been doing autobiographies; I got to look at a couple of them, and they were great! Also, they handed out CD’s with a few hundred pictures (and some movies, I think) on them. So lots of stuff to remember people by; who knows, maybe I’ll even put some of the pictures on my home page, so people will be able to see pictures of Miranda without, say, a pacifier in her mouth…

As threatened earlier, I’ve started to work Dance Dance Revolution (the specific version I have is DDRMAX, just for the record) into my exercise routine. I do it on days when either the weather is such that I’d rather not jog, or when I’m recovering from a cold and don’t feel like jogging but don’t mind exercising without leaving the house.

Interesting results. I sweat at least as much while playing DDR as I do when jogging. I almost never breathe as heavily, though. It does seem to get the heart rate up pretty well. My legs don’t feel as tired as they do when I’m jogging. All in all, I’m pretty sure that jogging does me more good than DDR does (especially since I suspect that I need aerobic exercise more than other forms of exercise), but DDR is probably better than nothing, and it’s possible that they’re helpful in complementary ways.

Certainly playing DDR is a lot more fun than jogging, even with iPod. The music is great, and there are enough songs there that it will take a while for me to get bored from the repetition. DDR and Katamari Damacy are convincing me that Namco has the best music of any video game company. (Though Space Channel 5 was pretty awesome, too…) Pleasantly challenging, with a nice learning curve.

The room layout isn’t that great: the couch is kind of close to the TV, which is fine for watching TV and playing video games normally, but not so great if you’re standing in front of the couch. For whatever reason, the pad shifts a little bit while I’m playing; that’s not too surprising, but what is interesting (to me, at least) is that it rotates clockwise. What asymmetry in my play style causes that? (It could be an asymmetry in the pad itself, but I can’t think of one.) I haven’t counted, but I think I use both feet about the same amount. (A little strange, actually: I would have expected I’d favor my right foot.) It may be the case that I hit the front arrow more with my right foot and the back arrow more with my left foot, but why would that cause rotation? Maybe I move more emphatically when going from front/back to side than in the other direction? Hard to say.

It was pretty weird to read in the paper that the Supreme Count had a 6-3 opinion where the three were Rehnquist, Thomas, and O’Connor (with Scalia in the majority). And even weirder that I agreed with Rehnquist and Thomas. Such are the bedfellows that medicinal pot makes; I guess it’s not all that surprising that it’s the sort of issue that could bring together a strange coalition.

I’m honestly not sure what I think about the whole interstate commerce thing, and skimming the opinion hasn’t helped much. In general, I think the left is a bit confused on this issue: we end up supporting decisions that rest on the interstate commerce clause not because we agree with the logic but because we have more faith in the federal government than in state governments, at least in issues where the clause could be applicable. Which is problematic for two reasons:

• The constitution is important, so we should try to support Supreme Court decisions with reasoning based on the constitution itself.
• I’m not at all convinced that, in general, pragmatic reasons should cause us to support the federal government over state governments.

I tend to agree with some people on the right that the interstate commerce clause is way over-applied. And certainly the pot laws are screwed up: it shouldn’t be illegal in the first place, never mind medicinal pot, and my understanding is that medicinal pot has the support of a significant majority of americans. So I would like to put those two together and say that the court made the wrong decision, but the truth is that I don’t really know where to draw the constitutional dividing line, and I will admit that the federal government should be allowed to pass misguided but constitutional laws.

Chalk up another one for the prison/military/industrial complex.

As I lamented about a month ago, the A’s offense has been subpar this year. What I didn’t expect was that it was actually going to get worse after that post: I had largely chalked it down to small sample size, and how long can that continue? But from May 1 to May 29, they won 5 games and lost 20. It’s not easy to have two 8-game losing streaks in a single month, but they managed it.

Fortunately, this week has been a complete change of pace: a four-game winning streak, followed by a loss, followed by two more wins. With quite nice hitting, both volume-wise and clitch-wise. Yesterday, after they gave up two runs in the first two innings, I was nervous, but they stopped the bleeding there, and in the sixth inning Eric Byrnes made a great defensive play and then hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the inning, and the A’s tacked on a few more later to win. Yay. Hopefully this is a little closer to their true offensive performance, and once Rich Harden gets back, maybe they’ll go on a bit of a tear.

Mind you, I’m still not optimistic about their making the playoffs this year. But a rebuilding year wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Nice to see that the O’s are still playing reasonably well, if not quite as well as they were in April.

The upcoming game that I’m most excited about is Spore. It’s by Will Wright, the guy who did Sim City and The Sims, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Or rather, I’ve seen tons of things like parts of it, but nothing that puts its all together the way that this game is trying to do.

He apparently got his inspiration from the old Powers of Ten movie, that starts at a microscopic scale, and pulls the camera back ten fold over and over again until it gets to a human scale, a planetary scale, a galactic scale. Spore is trying to use the same idea in its gameplay: you start off by playing a microscopic organism, that goes around eating stuff and laying eggs. Each time it lays an egg, it changes a bit, gradually evolving into a larger organism. Eventually it gets to the level of a fish swimming around in the ocean, or an animal walking on land, trying to eat, survive, kill other animals and reproduce.

Once your creature gets a big enough brain, it becomes sentient, so the gameplay switches into a of tribal level, where you’re discovering tools and beginning to accrue elemnts of civilization. Then, when your tribe gets big enough, it turns into a Sim City-style game, with Civilization-style conflicts with other cities on the planet. Once you develop further, you begin to terraform and colonize other worlds in your solar system; then you become able to interact with other nearby civilizations, and eventually expand out further through the galaxy.

Which is pretty amazing: lots of my favorite games, all tied together in a wonderful-sounding way.

Wright gave a presentation on it at the 2005 Game Developer’s conference; I recently learned (from Sun’s president’s blog, amusingly enough) that there’s a video of his presentation. (It’s free, but you have to register; I hope I don’t get too much e-mail from them, but it’s worth it, and lots of the other presentations look interesting, too.) It shows lots of gameplay snippets, and also provides some interesting game design insights.

One of the big issues in game design these days is that, as computers get more powerful and storage media gets bigger, games get bigger in scope, requiring huge amount of resources to flesh out. This is a problem: games are now, for example, trying to simulate entire cities fairly seriously, and it takes a huge number of person-hours to, for example, design all those buildings. So content creation eats up huge chunks of games’ budgets.

One thing that Wright noticed about The Sims was that people often really enjoy doing content creation themselves: it’s a lot of fun, it’s a way for people to put their own personal stamp on the game. Apparently people can create stuff in The Sims and upload it to a web site where other people have access to it, and there’s a vast amount of content available this way, of increasingly high quality.

Spore is taking this lesson to heart. In the first place, the evolution of your creatures isn’t random: you control it, with different (but related) editors for the different stages of the game. So the creatures that you end up taking over the galaxy with are unmistakably yours: you decided on every aspect of their development, and another player would have come up with a completely different design.

That’s great, as far as it goes: the game’s creators don’t have to worry about designing the perfect protagonist for the game, they leave that up to you. But what about the creatures you’re going to interact with? How are they going to be designed?

One conventional answer these days would be to simply make the game networked, so the other creatures were played by different people. And I can imagine that an online version of this could be a lot of fun; I wouldn’t be the one having the fun, however, because I don’t have time to regularly devote to online game playing.

But that’s not necessary to solve the problem at hand. Making this an online game would mean that other people both design and control the other creatures; what if we divorce these aspects? Controlling other creatures is tricky, but it’s a problem that we’re getting better at solving without require massive amounts of human resources. Doing large-scale interesting designs, however, is labor-intensive.

So the solution is that, whenever you design something (a creature, a building, whatever), it can get downloaded to the game’s servers. Then, whenever the game needs to populate the surrounding area, or give you choices for buildings to build, or whatever, it downloads new content from those servers. This is done asynchronously behind your back: you don’t have to worry about being logged on at specific times, you don’t play directly against other people, you just all work together to get a big content library.

And it tries to do this in a clever way. It choses creatures to fill up an ecosystem sensible; it makes building designs available that are somewhat similar to the buildings you’ve already got. It notices which designs are more popular and less popular, and adjusts their availability accordingly.

The game is still a work in progress: its current planned release date is the end of 2006, and release dates slip a lot more often than they get pushed up. If they can pull it off, though, it will be amazing.

A little while back, I read Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel trilogy. A trilogy of thick fantasy novels, the sort of thing that I normally avoid, but I’d been getting the feeling over the last few years that I’d been avoiding fantasy novels more than I should. So when I ran into an interesting review of the trilogy in The New York Review of Science Fiction, I thought I’d give it a try. Plus, the protagonist’s name ends in Delaunay, which is kind of like Delany, which probably isn’t an accident.

I’m glad I read them. I’m not sure fantasy is quite the right genre characterization: maybe it’s more alternate history. (A genre that I read almost never.) Hard to say; not a lot of magic, and such magic as there is is more the effects of gods than people casting spells, but on the other hand the history becomes alternate two millenia ago, and the trilogy takes place seven centuries (if I recall correctly) after the point of divergence. So it doesn’t fit too neatly into either genre’s mainstream, for what that’s worth. (Not much, I know.)

The divergence comes (if I’m remembering correctly – I checked the first two books out of the library, so I don’t have them at hand) in the form of somebody who was created from Christ’s blood during the crucifiction, and an angel who follows that person all over Europe, having sex with strangers whenever necessary to ease their passage. Eventually, they settle in what is now France, and a nation arises that follows their teachings.

And this divergence is handled in interesting ways; I like the way the book questions Christianity, and gives glimpses of what could have been. For one thing, some people will claim that Christianity is all about love, and certainly those aspects of Christianity are what I find most attractive about it. But there seem to be a whole lot of Christians in the world for whom love is the farthest thing from their mind, and Christianity in general seems quite sex-negative. So it’s nice to see a take-off from Christianity that starts by focusing on love, but starting from the more physical side of things. And other aspects of love are never absent from the book, and come to the fore more and more as the trilogy progresses, in ways that I found quite powerful.

Also, it’s nice to see a world where monotheism never took over; caught as we are now in a war between monotheists, I am, quite frankly, sick of the whole idea.

I’m not in the mood for plot summarization, but I will say that each book in the trilogy kept me reading much later than was wise as I was finishing it.

So: score one for following random fantasy recommendations. I wonder what I should read next in that genre?

(Unrelated note: a Penguin Classics complete collection is about to be released. Pretty cool; I spent a lot of time reading Penguin Classics when I was younger…)

My overheating theory sounded plausible, but it isn’t holding up too well: I’ve seen more memory complaints at boot, including complaints when the computer was turned on for the first time in the day.

For a while, I hoped that only one of the DIMMs was problematic, but that theory isn’t holding up too well, either: one might be worse, but I did get a memtest error on the other DIMM. It did take 35 minutes of running memtest to get an error to manifest itself with that DIMM, but one error is one error too many.

I’m not sure what the next step is. The computer works well enough that I would like to fix it, but the problems are intermittent enough that I’m not sure I trust anybody to fix it: it seems a lot more likely to me that I’ll ship it off, spend a hundred bucks, get it back a week or two later, and it will still have problems. (Or that they’ll want to replace the entire motherboard, at which point it will be expensive enough that maybe I’ll want to replace the whole thing instead.) I might just buy a new computer; I’m not sure exactly what I want out of a computer right now, though…

I was happily using my computer yesterday when it froze. I waited for a few minutes (thinking “Linux isn’t supposed to do this – at the worst, X could crash, but why would everything freeze?”), and then rebooted it.

At this point, things got a little scary: it complained right at the start about a bad read from memory, and when I (probably misguidedly) told it to soldier on, had a kernel panic quite quickly.

So I turned it off again and got out my screwdrivers. It took me quite a while to get at the memory: I’d installed memory on this machine, and recalled it being quite easy, but with the computer not working I couldn’t go to Dell’s web site to download instructions! And the panel that was my first guess was quite hard to get open; I was a little nervous about prying it open, because I didn’t want to break anything.

Eventually (after looking everywhere else that was at all likely), I pried open the panel in question, and the memory was indeed right behind it. I reseated the memory, but it still wouldn’t boot properly. (By this time, I was getting quite nervous: it had been a while since I’d last backed up the machine, and I’d rather not lose even a day of saved mail, let alone a month or two.) I took out one of the DIMMs; still wouldn’t boot. I took the other one out and put the first one back in.

That time, it booted. Yay. So I backed up the hard drive, and then thought about things. I figured that probably one of my DIMMs had gone bad, but I wanted to double check.

So I swapped DIMMs again (back to the previous configuration, which had failed); this time it booted fine. Very odd! But it was late, and I needed to go back to bed, so I swapped DIMMs again (so I had 256 MB of memory instead of 128 MB).

Another datum: the only direct evidence that memory was bad was a complaint from the computer the first few times I rebooted. On later failures, I didn’t see any complaints about memory. So maybe it’s not the memory at all? The next thing I thought of was overheating, and I’m still sticking with that theory. I did leave the computer turned on while sitting on the carpet for an hour or two yesterday; that may have interfered with the fans a bit, and I think the computer might also dissipate heat through the bottom, which wouldn’t work too well if sitting on carpet.

So it’s probably under control now, though I still have to verify my theory (or at least verify that it isn’t the memory) by putting the memory back in. Still, it gave me a bit of a shock. And I really should get my backup story better under control. At some point, we might get a desktop machine in addition to the laptop; that will help, at least… Maybe I should look into web backup solutions; there has to be somebody out there who will do this for cheap, I’d think.

I’ve finally finished Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, only five months after starting it. It would have gone a lot faster if I could have played it while Miranda was watching, obviously, but it is a pretty long game.

I don’t have a lot to add to my earlier comments. I said back then that I wasn’t sure I was going to finish it; its gameplay and plot very much kept me going, though, and actually I’m now seriously considering playing the earlier games in the series. (Though not for a while: I do have a backlog of games to get through first, and by the time I’m done with them, other games I have to play will have been published.)

The mission design is, by and large, excellent. In particular, I was very impressed with the series of Las Venturas missions that leads to the casino robbery. You start off by scaring a mafia member into spilling his identity by driving around at high speeds with him strapped to the roof of your car. Next, you start a fire in the planning department in order to illegally photograph a casino’s building plans, and shoot your way out. You then seduce a casino worker to get a key card. Then you parachute into a dam and sneak around it, planting charges to enable you to later to cut power to a portion of the city. Then you drive around town stealing four cop bikes (some with cops on them, some not) and rendezvousing with a truck that’s driving around the highway. Then you shoot your way through an army base in order to get your hands on a helicopter with a magnetic crane attachment on the bottom, which you then use to steal an armored truck. And finally this all get used in the casino theft itself, which is a well-done combination of sneaking and shooting through a building, with some nice parachute use at the end.

Not all the missions are quite that good. Flight school is a pain in the ass, for example, and you don’t really use the resulting skills enough to justify it. And the return to Los Santos was a bit boring at times: way too much gang warfare. (Fortunately, the gang warfare was a lot easier than the first time you were in Los Santos; arguably, the most annoying thing was driving around what was ostensibly a rival gang’s turf and waiting fruitlessly for them to show up so you could actually take the turf over from them…)

The difficulty level was nice, too; aside from a few flukes, the missions were at worst pleasantly challenging. I admit to using a guide for a lot of the game; I might have resorted to one less if the times when I could play the game weren’t so restricted, but at any rate the game is strong enough that having a guide didn’t ruin it at all, and well-enough designed that I could have done fine without one, though it would have taken longer.

So: recommended. Next up in the slot of “games I’ll play without Miranda around” is Resident Evil 4; I’m also working through the excellent Gran Turismo 4, and just bought the latest Fire Emblem to play when we’re on vacation.

Reading Christopher Alexander reminded me of Jane Jacobs, so, since I had a copy of her latest, Dark Age Ahead, on the to-read shelf, I decided to read it next.

She’s quite an author. She’s most famous for her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but she’s hardly a one-trick pony. After that, she moved on to economics, preaching the powers of import replacement as the key mechanism to economic growth. This is when a region becomes able to manufacture items that it had been previously forced to import; this is, obviously, good for that region, since it can get the same level of goods while sending less money (or goods) out of the region in return. (And it may well be able to export the item in question, too.) The interesting thing is that it’s not necessarily bad for the rest of the world, either: while the external region that had previously been supplying that item isn’t likely to be thrilled, the import replacing region will still have money to spend, so it may start importing something else instead, bolstering the growth of some other region.

But she’s not even a two-trick pony: she also wrote Systems of Survival, which is a dialogue on morality, a form and topic that are both decidedly out of fashion. Gave me things to think about; I should reread it at some point.

Her latest book is, as you might suspect, a bit on the dire side. She thinks that there’s a serious possibility that the US and Canada (and possibly more of the world) are about to enter a phase of serious cultural decline. The five problems that most concern her are: “Families Rigged to Fail”, “Credentialing Versus Educating”, “Science Abandoned”, “Dumbed-Down Taxes”, and “Self-Policing Subverted”. Some familiar themes: the first talks about how communities have been destroyed over the course of the century, which we’ve seen both in her first book and in the aforementioned Alexander book. Education’s increasing focus on credentialing is one of my pet peeves, too; it was one of the things I most disliked about teaching, and I wish I knew how to best mute its deleterious effects on Miranda.

The taxes section is interesting. In her books on economics, she says that it’s harmful for regions’ economies to be too closely linked: what is good for one region may not be good for another. (And, as evidence, she claims that nations tend to have one dominant economic region: Paris for France, London for England, etc.) One reason for this is that the natural effects of inflation and deflation are a good form of feedback: for example, economically weakening regions will tend to have their currency drop in value compared to their neighbors, which means that they can export goods at lower prices, which helps them. (And it means that it’s more expensive for them to import goods, which encourages import replacement.) So she doesn’t like shared currencies. (Just what are the arguments in favor of shared currencies, anyways?)

She generalizes this to a feeling that, whenever possible, regions should have control over their own destinies: the closer a government is, the more likely it is to be able to spend money effectively. She also feels that, in general, local governments should be able to keep their own taxes: she’s not a big fan of regions artificially propping up other regions.

Here, my feelings are more mixed. In general, I support the haves sharing with the have nots, so I wouldn’t want to go too far with local control. (For example, I think it’s an awful idea to use property taxes as the primary funding mechanisms for schools.) But I don’t think Jacobs is that heartless, either: I’m fairly sure that she supports, for example, subsidizing cultural programs that can’t always pay for themselves. And, to be sure, I would also tend to support assistance that leads to self-sustaining groups wherever possible. (Though I emphatically do not support assistance programs that declaring by fiat that their recipients’ becoming self-sustaining without supporting evidence, or programs that are actively harmful to their recipients.) I suspect that she has well-thought out positions on these matters that I would end up agreeing with; I just don’t quite understand what it is yet.

Worth reading, as are all of her books. I also recently ran across a good interview with her. She must be a lot of fun to talk to.

We recently watched The Cat Returns. One of only two non-Miyazaki Studio Ghibli movies that I’ve watched, the other being Grave of the Fireflies. And the two couldn’t be more different: the latter is very good, but very, very depressing; I honestly have no idea when I’ll be up for watching it again.

Anyways, The Cat Returns was fun, but hardly a masterpiece. Rather slight, which can be fine, but the word “cool” is way overused in the movie. I quite liked the designs of the city and castle; Miyazaki’s locations are wonderful, and you can see some of that in this movie, too.

Miranda’s watched it several times; it’s pleasant enough to have on in the house, so I’m not complaining.

E3 is over now. The PS3 looks good; presumably somewhat more powerful than the Xbox 360, but it’s hard to say for sure, and some of the ways in which Sony is promoting its graphical superiority seem, honestly, kind of silly. It can connect to two TV’s? It can do 1080p, not just 1080i and 720p? Big whoop; when I have two 1080p TV’s around, then I’ll care about that, but not before.

Nintendo is disappointing, though. They always downplay the power of their technology (and I don’t understand why: Gamecube games really do look better than PS2 games, but you’d never know it listening to them), but now they seem to be giving up completely on that front. Innovation is all well and good, but I just don’t see them as coming up with any great ideas that are so strong as to offset plain old processing and graphics power. Maybe their new console will end up more powerful than they’re currently claiming, but I’m not optimistic.

It is cool that they’ll enable you to play games from all their previous consoles on it. (And it’s great that the PS3 will be backward compatible all the way back to the PS1.) But games these days are a lot better than games from a couple of generations ago, and I’ve already played most of the famous NES and SNES games in remakes, so I don’t see that making a big practical difference.

Not too much in the way of interesting game announcements. The new Zelda looks great, but we already knew that. I continue to look forward to Okami. Really, it was all about technology this time; and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m looking forward to the next generation of consoles, even if I don’t quite know what I’ll be playing while waiting for them to come out…

Last night I was planning to go to a talk, but I decided at the last minute to stay at home instead. Which meant that we didn’t have any dinner planned, and neither Liesl or I was up for anything elaborate anyways.

The solution was the excellent Pasta Rouille avec Thon. It has the virtues that:

• It’s quite yummy.
• It’s quite easy: the sauce doesn’t require any cooking, and there’s next to no chopping.
• All of the ingredients are non-perishable (except for garlic, but who doesn’t have garlic lying around?), so you can pull them out of the pantry whenever the urge strikes.

I got the recipe from Jordan (who will be happy to extol its virtues as well), who clipped it from the Washington Post; I don’t know what the original source was. Here it is, for the sake of harried cooks everywhere.

Pasta Rouille avec Thon

7 oz. roasted peppers
2 flat anchovies
2 large cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
2 tsp oregano
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1 tsp sugar
1/4 cup olive oil
7 oz can tuna, drained and flaked
1 Tbsp drained capers
red pepper flakes, to taste
1 lb short pasta

In blender, blend peppers, anchovies, garlic, oregano, salt, pepper, sugar until smooth. Add olive oil, blend some more. Put in bowl, mix with tuna, capers, red pepper flakes. Cook pasta, drain, toss with sauce.

E3 has crept up on me, but press conferences would seem to be going on as I type this. I followed the Xbox 360 unveiling last week; looks pretty cool. There were rumors that the console was going to be a bit underpowered, but Microsoft has apparently changed its mind: three cores each of which can run two threads (multithreaded world, here we come), plus a GPU that can do a trillion floating point operations a second, sounds pretty good to me. Maybe Sony’s super-spiffy-magic cell processor will beat that, but I have a hard time imagining that there will be a big performance gap between the two.

It’s interesting to see console designers finally converge on what functionality a controller should have; I agree with their answers. Two joysticks, one D-pad, four face buttons (plus a glorified pause button), four triggers. And an agreement that rumble is nice, but not at the expense of wireless. I like the designs where one trigger on each side is deeper and has analog functionality (much better for driving games than overloading the second joystick for accelerate/brake), and I don’t want analog functionality anywhere else other than, of course the joysticks. And I like the somewhat asymmetrical and colorful layouts that make the key controls easiest to reach, and that make it clear which face buttons are the most important ones (for games that don’t use them all equally); hopefully Sony will learn from Nintendo and Microsoft in this regard.

Of course, for all I know, Nintendo will introduce some completely bizarre controller tomorrow; they seem to like doing stuff like that. Still, I doubt it can be too weird, because their new console will be backwards compatible. I suppose they could just require you to buy Gamecube controllers to play Gamecube games, though.

One thing that I’d been wondering about: will the new Xbox be backwards-compatible with the old one? Last week’s press announcements didn’t say anything one way or another, which makes me think it’s still up in the air. Which is a little frustrating, because the recent release of Jade Empire, combined with the dearth of games for other consoles, makes me want to buy an Xbox now, so I’m trying to figure out whether or not I should give in or hold off half a year and just pick up an Xbox 360. That’s kind of silly, though – the current console is cheap enough now (and you have to think they’ll drop the price again any day now), and the new one will probably be hard enough to get right after launch, and packaged with tons of crap that I have no desire to get, that there isn’t much financial reason to hold off. So probably the best thing to do is, once I get tired of Gran Turismo 4, to just go out and buy an Xbox, spend the rest of the summer and fall playing Shenmue II and Jade Empire, and buy the next generation of consoles whenever the games force me to do so.

I never would have guessed when Microsoft bought Rare that they would have exactly one game to show for it at this point. (Plus another game to be released in a month that’s a remake of an N64 game.) I mean, Kameo showed for a couple of E3’s as an N64 game, but it not only didn’t release for the N64, it missed the entire next generation of consoles! Despite that, Perfect Dark Zero may be enough by itself to convince me to get an Xbox 360. I’m not a big FPS fan, but I really liked Perfect Dark: in particular, the cooperative scripted deathmatch missions are by far my favorite way of enjoying an FPS.

Even there, though, I’m probably in a minority: everybody else is waiting for Halo 3 for their FPS fix. I don’t know if I’ll buy the first two games in that series: on the one hand, I feel pretty uncultured because I haven’t played them, and I’m sure their multiplayer play is excellent. On the other hand, I’ve heard some bad things about their single-player modes, and I don’t have enough friends around to play it with. So I’m torn; it will probably depend on the lulls between new game releases. The best solution would be for me to have more friends around to play video games with, of course…

I just finished A Pattern Language, by that favorite architect and urban planner of programmers everywhere, Christopher Alexander. (Actually, while Alexander gets the lion’s share of the credit in subsequent references, the front cover lists “Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel” as authors.) My main reaction was “this book was published almost thirty years ago; why haven’t we learned anything from it since then?” Not that I’m really surprised by that: lots of the same lessons were in The Death and Life of Great American Cities almost two decades earlier, in particular the importance of vibrant sidewalks, and how mixing stores with housing is key to that.

Alexander’s book, however, differs from Jacobs’ in being 1100 pages of concrete recommendations. (Only a third of it is urban planning: the rest is on smaller-scale matters.) Some of it I’m dubious about (e.g. City Country Fingers – in general, I’m not as convinced of the wonders of countryside as he is), some seems nice but idealistic (Self-Governing Workshops and Offices), but some of it is wonderful, often in surprising ways. Green Streets is an example: one of the book’s strengths is that it acknowledges the current importance of automobiles, while presenting methods for minimizing their impacts, and this pattern suggests that, if you have a pathway that cars have to occasionally pass through, you should create it by inserting paving stones into grass (with gaps between, so grass grows everywhere), instead of by paving the pathway completely. That way, it makes it clear that the cars are only there by sufferance: the conceptual change is huge, and as a practical effect cars also drive a lot slower and more carfully in such areas. I don’t know for sure if it would work or not, but it sure sounds like it’s worth trying.

When the patterns get smaller in scale, I start looking around our house (and the townhouse complex), seeing which patterns we follow, which we don’t, and how well they work. I love the house outlines that he creates motivated by Light on Two Sides of Every Room (with the help of other patterns, such as Wings of Light and Cascade of Roofs); a pity we’re missing that so completely. (But then where would our bookshelves go?) At first, I thought that the balconies in our complex are completely unused (except by one cat) because of Six-Foot Balcony, but now that I’ve actually measured our balcony’s depth, that’s not the answer: it’s not quite six feet deep, but it’s very close. Probably a better answer is that the balconies aren’t taking into effect the public-private dynamic: they’re off of the master bedrooms, and I suspect that balconies are more effective when they’re off of public areas. Also, most of the balconies don’t get much light. (In general, we do a lousy job of South Facing Outdoors.)

Given that we can’t change many things about our house, how can we bring out more of these patterns? Our piano is placed where it is as an attempt to hint at an Entrance Room, and to improve the Intimacy Gradient (which I read about in The Timeless Way of Building); I think it’s been reasonably successful at that. We don’t have a lot of windows, but perhaps we could make a better use of the ones we have: could we create a Window Place or two? Is there anywhere we could hint at Alcoves? Could we reclaim the master bedroom as semi-public space somehow (leaving the Marriage Bed at one end, of course), and as a result use the balcony better? Something to think about…