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While searching for a good office chair so I can sit on my ass comfortably for 14+ hours in front of the computer when I need to (of course, I try to get up once an hour and stretch), I came across this funny little diatribe against the famous Aeron chairs. Watch the demo video clips, and if you have people in your office that use Aeron chairs, make sure you get them to watch the videos with you. There’s some cussing in good fun, but if your office culture sucks, then you might want to just watch them when you get home.
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As you can tell from the latest Kitty Cat Diary entries, I’ve been teaching Elena how to drive. I may suck at a lot of things, but teaching isn’t one of them. Teaching seems to come naturally to me–I somehow just instinctively know how to impart information in such a way that’s easy to understand even for total beginners. The upcoming workshop for CGOverdrive 2006 will be my first time teaching to a crowd of 1,500+ students–it should be a lot of fun.
There’s a huge parking lot in front of a Macy’s where we live, and it’s about 90% empty all of the time because of nearby renovation of another building. I would put shopping carts in some of the parking spaces and then have Elena practice parking. She’s particularly slow at eye-hand coordination feats, as she grew up very sheltered–no playing physical games with other kids, no sports, no dancing, and not even video games. Without those experiences in her early years, she is drastically slower in reflex and physically uncoordinated (this woman trips even when the ground is perfectly flat, wearing flat-heeled shoes). When I taught her how to jump rope, she twisted her ankle. When I taught her how to play badminton, she cracked her foot. I was relieved that when I taught her how to swim, nothing bad happened.
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I finally got my paws on Dreamfall. However, about ten minutes into playing it, I just had to stop–my GeForce FX5200 video card just couldn’t cut it anymore, and this is the kind of game I really want to play on the highest setting possible for full immersion. So, off to shopping for a new video card I went. Unfortunately, my motherboard is still an AGP one, so my choices were severely limited by the current PCI Express trend. I decided to spend no more than $200 (I ended up ordering a Diamond Viper X1600 Pro from newegg.com), as I only want a card that will tie me over until my next full upgrade to a PCI Express motherboard (probably in a couple of years). I just want to be able to play current-gen games on reasonable settings instead of watching what’s essentially a damn slide show like I was with the FX5200. The next upgrade will be the big one–probably a full-blown mega-highend DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), while my current machines will take on extra processing and sample hosting duties. My current main workstation isn’t all that shabby though–it’s a P4 2.8, 2 GB RAM, and almost a terabyte of internal and external hard drives.
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Recently while writing a custom module for Neverwinter Nights, I realized that although I love writing and being a storyteller, I really don’t enjoy writing for RPG’s. The amount of multi-dialogue path management one needs to do is just torturous. The more freedom you give the player, the less fun you have as a writer, because you are limited to providing a fulfilling experience for the player no matter what gender, race, class, alignment..etc the player chooses. When the main character can’t be locked down like that, writing becomes more of a chore than enjoyment. I would much prefer to write for adventure games, where the choices provided for the player are less limiting for the writer.
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Inspiration #2:
Love and Rockets (the underground comic book, not the band, which took its name from the comic book) – I discovered the Hernadez Brothers’ Love and Rockets from reading an interview in the early 90’s with Adam Hughes, a famous comic book artist. He cited Jaime Hernandez as an influence because Jaime is excellent at drawing natural looking figures, and is a master of spotting black (using lots of flat black shapes instead of lots of unnecessary detail). I gave Love and Rockets a shot because I thought Jaime’s artwork was great, but in the end, I got hooked because of the excellent writing (What’s not to love about mexican lebsian punk rockers?). I prefer Jaime’s writing more, because it’s not as dark and hopeless as Gibert’s writing, while still containing a lot of drama in that “slice of life” style (Gilbert’s art is also hard to look at for me–it’s very raw and to be honest, quite unattractive). The visual style of Jaime’s work definitely became a main influence in my own comic book work–anyone who’s seen my Enchanted series knows that. Of course there are other influences, but I’ll talk about them another time.
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Our little quest for the perfect automobile GPS has lead to a disappointing conclusion–none of the current models on the market fit all of our requirements. I returned that Magellan Roadmate 800 after owning it for two days, and I’ve been looking for another AIO (All-In-On) unit, but after much research and trying out the units at a few retail stores, I realized I might have to either wait for promising upcoming models to be released, or compromise and settle for something less than what we really want.
The current models that are strong contenders are the TomTom Go 910, and the Magellan Roadmate 860T (an updated version of the 800 we owned). The Garmin Nuvi 350 gets a lot of favorable reviews, but it falls flat on its face when it comes to sound quality.
The TomTom 910’s map doesn’t show all the names of streets around you, which is important to me because it gives me a good idea of my surroundings. I also wish it wasn’t so deep with the protruding back end (never thought I’d ever say that. Oh wait, we’re not talking about chicks. . ..)–you can’t put it in your pocket. Otherwise, I think its UI (User Interface), features, audio speakers, voices for text-to-speech, number of different voices..etc are all far superior to the Nuvi 350.
The Nuvi’s the most portable one without becoming too small to feel limiting, but I really didn’t like its UI, the way you input information, and the text-to-speech is just horrible–everytime it spoke, I felt like I was listening to Charlie Brown’s teacher. The audio speaker is just as bad–distortion at high volume and bad sound quality. I’ve heard cellphone speakers that sounded much better. The travel companion stuff is great, but I really have no need for it–at least not now.
The Roadmate 800 for the most part was quite nice–I almost didn’t want to return it. Although it’s bigger than the other two, it’s actually easier to slip into your coat pocket because it’s flatter than the TomTom 910. I think the features are great and has the best UI of the three, with nifty implementations of little things like smart spelling input, which makes it much faster to input information. The map also displays all the surrounding street names–great for those days when you just want to roam around. I liked it enough to almost want to just go ahead and get the 860T for the text-to-speech, but the two things holding me back are 1) I wish the battery could last longer (it only runs for roughly two hours), and 2) I wish the unit’s a bit smaller so it can go into a shirt pocket instead of a coat pocket. I also have no idea how the text-to-speech sounds on the Roadmates, since all the stores I went to didn’t have a single working model on display.
So at the moment we still haven’t found a perfect unit yet. I’m thinking maybe we should wait for the Magellan Roadmate 6000T to be released–but I have no idea if it’ll come with it’s own set of shortcomings.
Anyway, our current list of requirements to meet are:
01) Natural sounding Text-to-Speech that’s intelligible
02) Quality audio speaker(s) that won’t distort at high volume
03) Fast auto-rerouting if we take a wrong turn
04) Smart Detour with alternate routes to choose from (ideally more than one)
05) Easy to search POI (Points of Interest) that’s fairly updated and informative.
06) Portable size (fits in shirt pocket)
07) Long batter life
08) Detailed maps that show surrounding street names
09) Powerful receiver, or with option for external receiver on roof
10) Easy to read screen in all conditions
