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18 November 2008 
 Guy Blade---20:01 |
Comparison Chart
I have produced this easy to use chart to determine how much the EESA of 2008
$700,000,000,000. Economic Stabilization Act of 2008
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12,870,012,870.013 Barrels of Oil (as of 18 Nov 2008)
2,800,112,004.480 Nintendo Wiis
1,750,043,751.094 Xbox 360 Elites
1,750,043,751.094 Playstation 3s
65,783,291.044 Metric Tons of Nickel (as of 18 Nov 2008)
65,005,417.145 Pounds of Gold (as of 18 Nov 2008)
53,435,114.503 Minimum wage employees (per year)
45,439,792.275 Honda Civic Sedans (basic package)
31,818,181.818 Toyota Priuses (basic Package)
16,164,788.472 Hummer H3s (standard package)
10,000,000 GB Salaries (per year)
2,333,333.333 One Bedroom homes in LA (~$300k each)
1,093,750 Liebeck v. McDonald's Awards (post-reduction, pre-settltment)
9,070.882 Delta II Launches (FCA)
3,449.975 Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Endowments
2,535.654 Days in Iraq (~0.276 $B/d)
2,333.333 Boeing 747-8s
2,333.333 Space Shuttle Launches (in year 2000 dollars)
1,035.503 Hoover Dams (adjusted for inflation)
376.344 California Institute of Technology Endowments
243.309 NOAAs (per year)
40.462 NASAs (per year)
33.849 Sonys (by Mkt Cap)
18.970 Harvard University Endowments
9.044 Puerto Ricos (by GDP)
7.478 Googles (by Mkt Cap)
4.011 Microsofts (by Mkt Cap)
3.705 Israels (by GDP)
3.271 Indianas (by GSP in year 2000 dollars)
1.731 Egypts (by GDP)
1.275 US Defense Departments (per year)
0.386 Californias (by GSP)
0.339 Frances (by GDP)
0.314 United Kingdoms (by GDP)
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14 November 2008 
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Guy Blade---03:41 |
Watching
So, a few months ago I ordered copy of Watchmen. Unfortunately, when I did so, I ordered the hardcover edition which was a prerelease. I had forgotten about it quite completely until it arrived yesterday on my doorstep. It had been recomended to me by someone (I've forgotten who at this point) and I was suprised by its quality. It was good enough that I read through about 60% in one sitting (it was after midnight at that point and I had an 8am meeting) and finished the rest after work today.
What I don't understand is how anyone intends to make a movie of it. It seems as if having a big naked blue man wouldn't fit into the demographics that an X-men or Spiderman might target. Then again, maybe they're doing it as equal time for Mystique...
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11 November 2008 
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Guy Blade---03:11 |
[Recentism?]
So, all of the ads for Fallout 3 made me want to get some retro-futurism going. This led me to playing through Bioshock again. Since on my previous trip, I had been good, this time I decided to be evil. It turns out that the game isn't particularly different, though it is very easy to purchase whatever upgrades you want. Since the whole game can be beaten without ever really using much more than the lightning plasmid and firearms, I suspect that it would be possible to even try beating the game while being ambivalent to the little sisters. If I ever play again, I will save exactly one and kill exactly one little sister and see what ending it gives.
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Ninja Gaiden Sigma is excessively difficult. The game is hard on easy mode. The difficulty of the game is not the main problem, however, it is its completely unforgiving nature. Gameplay wise, it is quite similar to the Devil May Cry games. Unlike the DMC games, NGS makes gameplay decisions the explicitly frustrate. Example 1: In DMC, if you die you can (usually) start from the beginning of the room that you're currently in. In NGS, you can continue, but you reset to the last safe point you used. Compounded with the relatively rarity of save points, there is much backtracking. Example 2: In DMC, there are enemies that do a fair amount of damage. Single enemies may do up to 10% of your health per hit, but you're given temporary immunity after being hit so that you can recover and counter attack. In NGS, basic enemies that show up in chapter 3 (of 19) can take 1/3 of your health or more in a single attack. Enemies are also capable of juggling you successfully while you are generally incapable of juggling them. Example 3: DMC has almost universal access to the in-game store. In NGS, there is no access to the store for the last 6 or so areas unless you're willing to backtack through a huge distance. This is bad gameplay design.
I beat NGS so that I could say that it didn't beat me.
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Dead Rising is an amazing game. It turns out that running headlong into a swarm of zombies swinging a chainsaw does not get boring. Neither does picking up a bunch of orange safety cones and stuffing them on the head of zombies. Driving a car through an underground tunnel filled with zombies? Always awesome. Shooting a zombie with a nerf gun is also awesome unless you intended to stop it from biting your face off. And of course, the best thing is to pick up one zombie and then use it as a missile weapon to destory a small crowd of zombies. If you have a 360, you should have this game. It is essential. Also, the plot is rather interesting too.
Apparently there is also a Wii version. I can't vouch for it as I haven't played it.
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Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is the archetype of the average game. Its story is average. Its gameplay is average. Hell, even its acting is average. On the PC, the controls are lousy (due to it being built too cross-platformy and not really being optimized for keyboard and mouse). It has several of the major flaws that show up in the more "Japanese" action games. Most noticable of these is its tendency to explain things to you (with a narrator and everything) rather than allowing interesting things to be revealed in more natural ways. It also commits the sin of having a plot that is wholely divorced from the levels being played.
It is like PN03 only less fun and with no RPG elements. It is like Oni only without an interesting plot or fun shooting/fighting elements. It is just plain mediocre.
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Crysis: Warhead is more Crysis. The game doesn't particular add anything, but it is more fun in the Crysis universe running around and shooting people in the face with a shotgun while cloaked. I could spend a fair amount of time doing that without getting bored. It also ran somewhat better than its predecessor on the same hardware which I consider a nice added bonus. I could barely get 30fps during the outdoor winter scenes in Crysis, but was able to get somewhat near that in Warhead.
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I'm now playing Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. The most interesting thing about the game so far is the realism in characters' facial gestures. This game probably has the best facial movements that I've seen since Half-Life 2 and may well be significantly better.
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05 November 2008 
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Guy Blade---02:42 |
Time Travel
So, over the past year, I have slowly been getting to work later. When I first started working, I was starting at 7:30. By last week, I was getting into work at 8:30. This had been fine because it was still light outside at 5:30, so biking home wasn't an issue. Yesterday, however, was the first day that I worked after the revert from daylight savings time. Unfortunately, the shift caused it to be just shy of completely dark out at 5:30 when I left for home. This is problematic.
In summary, fuck daylight savings time.
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29 October 2008 
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Guy Blade---23:03 |
Social Graph Manipulation
Firstly, I should note that the lab coat situation was resolved without incident. My meeting took all of 10 minutes before it was clear that whoever reported me was somehow confused.
I was able to get the original email reporting me (or at least as original as the person from occupational safety still had) and I present it here in its entirety:
Some JPL employees told me about a person who likes to wear his lab-coat into the 303 cafeteria. It appears to be soiled. You might want to talk to the food-services supervisor and have him/her keep an eye out for this person. There's no telling what chemicals this person is dragging into the cafeteria.
I take issue with several things in this statement. I am greatly irritated by the word choice in "soiled". I take care to keep my labcoats clean and bleach them at least monthly if not more often. Also, there's not "no telling" what chemicals were on my jacket--a five second discussion with me could identify the only possibly dangerous chemical (detergent grade bleach) and recognize that the odds of it contaminating food were nil. Furthermore, who are these "some people"? If this email was on Wikipedia, I would put a [Who?] tag on that in a second.
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I've decided to attempt to use Facebook as a tool to build a map of my life as defined by the people that I knew. In that sense, I've decided to be very liberal in adding people as "friends". This doesn't mean that I'm going to add people who aren't people that I would consider friends, but it does mean that I will seek out people from my past to add. Eventually, I think it would be interesting to use mutual friend graphs along with some sort of autobalancing tool to draw an history of who I knew. Of course, the membership of facebook doesn't represent the entirety of people who I know and have known, but it does provide a large enough sample size to be interesting.
This idea was sparked by me doing a full export of my livejournal (the only was I could find to see posts more than 380 posts ago) and seeing some posts/comments from people who I had not talked to in years. I thus began hunting up people who I knew back in my highschool days on Facebook and found a few. My theory is that by bridging between my social graph and the graphs of people that I have been isolated from, I can build something interesting. We'll see how this goes.
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28 October 2008 
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Guy Blade---20:34 |
Occupational Hazard
So, today I went to lunch as I usually do. When I was checking out, the cashier (who is also the manager of the cafe) said that he needed to talk to me when I had a free minute. I found this odd for any number of reasons. After eating my lunch, I asked the staff to point me to said person. It turns out that the manager had been contacted by lab occupational safety to "find the person in the lab coat" and get that person (me) to talk to them (occupational safety). Trying to find someone using the cafe managers seems like an inefficient use of resources as we have such helpful things as public safety for quickly finding a person, but nevertheless, I took the contact information given to me by the cafe manager and, once I had returned to my office, went about getting into contact with said person.
This occupational safety person was, of course, out for the day. I chose to take the route of calling her on her cell phone as it seemed a fitting response to her conscripting the lunchroom staff to find me. Upon contacting her, she explained that someone had sent her an email about me. The sender of said email was concerned that I "wore the labcoat that I'd been using in a chemistry lab to lunch and that it was stained with chemicals that might be hazardous". Now, this characterization was so ill-informed that it made me laugh out loud while talking to her. I informed her that, no I didn't work in a lab (aside from JPL itself) and that my labcoat, if dirty, was only such due to the various vagueries of life. She was, unsuprisingly, confused as to why exactly I was wear a labcoat if I had no need to as part of my job and that there was "an appearance of an issue" which might, despite the lack of an actual issue, require some sort of mitigation. Despite my repeated reassurances that there was no issue, she insisted that we needed to meet, in my working area, before she could "make a decision". What that decision would be, I have no idea. Thus, I have a meeting scheduled with her tomorrow to discuss my lab coat.
I find this whole matter to be completely ridiculous. I've been wearing a labcoat to work for 16 months (more or less) without any issue. What really irritates me though, is that someone decided to report me to occupational safety rather than taking the two minutes to find out if there was really an issue. Because of that, I had to waste half an hour today and I'll have to waste at least as much time tomorrow resolving this idiotic situation.
It makes sense to investigate every report of safety issues--that's just called due diligence--but this seems to be going a bit far. To a certain extent, I almost hope that I'm ordered to stop wearing my labcoat. I think it would be highly entertaining to contest a ludicrous order up the chain of command. I don't know if I would necessarily quit over such a dispute, but I wouldn't rule it out. Hopefully, all this talk is premature and people will act rationally.
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