I just upgraded to the Zune 3.0 software which includes games and purchasing music on the Zune via WiFi and once again I'm thrilled that the new firmware is available for old Zunes like mine. Rooting around looking at the new features I noticed Zune Badges for the first time. They're like Xbox Achievements, for example I have a Pixies Silver Artist Power Listener award for listening to the Pixies over 1000 times. I know its ridiculous but I like it, and now I want achievements for everything.
Achievements everywhere would require more developments in self-tracking. Self-trackers, folks who keep statistics on exactly when and what they eat, when and how much they exercise, anything one may track about one's self, were the topic of a Kevin Kelly Quantified Self blog post (also check out Cory Doctorow's SF short story The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away featuring a colony of self-trackers). For someone like me with a medium length attention span the data collection needs to be completely automatic or I will lose interest and stop collecting within a week. For instance, Nike iPod shoes that keep track of how many steps the wearer takes. I'll also need software to analyze, display, and share this data on a website like Mycrocosm. I don't want to have to spend extreme amounts of time to create something as wonderful as the Feltron Report (check out his statistic on how many daily measurements he takes for the report). Once we have the data we can give out achievements for everything!
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Carnivore Eat at least ten different kinds of animals. |
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Make Friends Meet at least 10% of the residents in your home town. |
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Globetrotter Visit a city in every country. |
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You're Old Survive at least 80 years of life. |
Of course none of the above is practical yet, but how about Delicious achievements based on the public Delicious feeds? That should be doable...
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is now available! Some of the new features from this release that I really enjoy are Tab Grouping, the new address-bar, and InPrivate Subscriptions.
Tab Grouping groups tabs that are opened from the same page. For example, on a Google search results page if you open the first two links the two new tabs will be grouped with the Google search results page. If you close one of the tabs in that group focus goes to another tab in that group. Its small, but I really enjoy this feature and without knowing exactly what I wanted while using IE7 and FF2 I knew I wanted something like this. Plus the colors for the tab groups are pretty!
The new address bar and search box makes life much easier by searching through my browsing history for whatever I'm typing in. Other things are searched besides history but since I ignore favorites and use Delicious I mostly care about history. At any rate its one of the things that makes it impossible for me to go machines running IE7.
InPrivate Subscriptions allows you to subscribe to a feed of URLs from which IE should not download content. This is intended for avoiding sites that track you across websites and could sell or share your personal information, but this feature could be used for anything where the goal is to avoid a set of URLs. For example, phishing, malware sites, ad blocking, etc. etc. I think there's some interesting uses for this feature that we have yet to see.
Anyway, we're another release closer to the final IE8 and I can relax a little more.
I recently finished Braid, the Xbox Live game, and a comparison with Portal is helpful. From a screen shot Braid
looks like a normal 2D platformer, but that's like looking at a screen shot of Portal and saying its a first person shooter. While the scaffolding of the game-play may sort of fall into that
category, the games are actually about exploring the character's ability and solving puzzles. In Portal the ability is bending space and in Braid its bending time. However, whereas in Portal there
is one space bending mechanism, the portal gun, Braid's protagonist explores several different time bending techniques including, most prominently, reversing time, but also time dilation, multiple
time-lines, and other odd things.
Similar to the difference in game-play, while Portal has a strict simplicity to its visual style, Braid is much more ornate, like you're playing in an oil painting. Without seeing video of the game, or playing the demo (which is available for free on Xbox Live) its difficult to convey, but it is quite lovely and the animation adds quite a bit. Both games too are rather short leaving you just a bit hungry for more and have an interesting plot and an ending that I'd hate to spoil although Braid replaces Portal's humor with melancholy. If you enjoyed Portal and Twelve Monkeys then I'd recommend Braid.
Saturday we went to Kirkland Uncorked,
a wine tasting festival near our home. We took the bus and after finding the correct one (they really should have different numbers for buses that are on the same route but traveling in different
directions) made it to the festival. Unfortunately I don't remember any of the names of the wines just which ones I enjoyed by order. Recalling that I enjoyed the first one I had and the second to
last one, doesn't really help me find them again. There were local artists who had setup booths and Sarah got
a lovely necklace. After that we ate at Cactus which, because it was such a lovely day, had all its windows and doors open.
Sunday was quieter. A few household chores and plenty of GTA4. I almost got the One Man Army achievement but I found that after four minutes with six stars I eventually dropped back down to three stars without realizing it.
The weekend before last was Sarah's birthday and as part of
that, last weekend we took a trip to Victoria, BC. I've got a map of our trip locations and photos. Not all the
photos are on the map but they're all in the trip photo set on Flickr. It turns out there's a lot of tourist intended
activities right around our hotel which was in the inner harbor and downtown Victoria area. As such we didn't get a rental car and did a lot of walking.
On the first day we checked out the Royal British Columbia Museum which had
some interesting exhibits in it and the Undersea Garden which was interesting in that its like a floating aquarium but was a bit grimy. There was a group of Japanese tourists next to us during the
undersea show in which a diver behind the glass in the ocean would pick up and parade various animal life. The group all repeated the word starfish in unison after the show's narrator and one of
the tourists was very excited to see the diver bring over the octopus. The diver made the octopus wave to us while it desperately tried to get away.
We flew in and out of the Victoria International Airport
which is a smaller sized airport. Although we needed our passports we didn't need to take off our shoes -- what convenience! The US dollar was just a bit worse than the Canadian dollar which was
also convenient. The weather was lovely while we were there and I only got slightly sun burned.
sequelguy posted a photo:
We ate at Camille's on our trip. It was a bit dressier than we had anticipated but the food was very good.
Camille's
45 Bastion Sq.
Victoria, BC V8W 1J1
Phone Number: (250) 381-3433
Sarah received her Wii Fit a few weeks ago. The Wii Fit is a game for the Wii and a
balance board accessory that can tell how you're standing on it: leaning forward, standing on one foot, leaning backward and mostly on your left foot, etc. The game puts you through various
exercises grouped into the categories of aerobic, balance, strength, and yoga. It also lets you set goals and keeps track of how well you do, how long you play, and a graph of your weight.
The portion I didn't expect were the mind games. Sarah turned it on after not using it for a day and it said something to the effect of 'Oh, didn't have time to exercise yesterday? Huh. Interesting....' I'm paraphrasing of course but the Wii Fit was definitely trying to lay down some guilt. In another instance when starting up the Wii Fit Sarah was asked 'Did you know that Dave has been using Wii Fit?' She selected yes and it then asked her how she thought I was progressing giving her four options. She selected the worst one, that I was getting worse (jokingly I hope) and it told her to tell me that, but not to use those words. In conversation Sarah should mention to me that I've been "living large". Now I'm not paraphrasing. It reminded me a bit of this xkcd comic 'Zealous Autoconfig'. Hopefully this is the extent of the manipulation and mind games that the Wii Fit will perform.
My GPS was stolen last night or this morning and I'm missing it already. For instance when I drove to Novus glass repair to get my front passenger window replaced I drove down the wrong road for a while.
When I got out of my apartment this morning there was a police car sitting in my parking lot and the officer asked me: "David? ... What'd you leave in your car?". My face must have changed a lot when I had the following sequence of realizations: (a) a police officer is asking for me by name, (b) I'm not in trouble, (c) my car must have been burgled, and (d) my GPS must be stolen.
The officer was waiting outside my complex because someone had reported my car's broken window to the police in the morning. The officer was very courteous and upon taking my date of birth noted that we were born on exactly the same day. The window's safety glass was shattered and lying in tons of tiny pieces all over the passenger seat, my glove box was open and the middle armrest where I keep my CDs was open. Nothing appears to be missing other than the GPS, the GPS power cable, and the GPS dash mount. Adding insult to theft, the their scattered my CDs throughout my car and didn't take any of them, insulting my taste in music.
My car's window should be repaired now and hopefully the rain that came in through the broken window until I covered it with plastic bags (classy!) didn't do any permanent damage.
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