Fugu Talk

This Tuesday, for some reason, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer quote “Dawn’s in trouble. Must be Tuesday.” kept intruding into my head. It’s actually kind of a poignant line for me, dating back to a friend of mine who started watching BTVS while battling cancer. When he emailed me that the series was pretty interesting, I just startled rattling on about the show, who sired who, and all the other intricacies that are for more interesting than fixing lines of code at work. He got sufficiently absorbed in the show that he cried foul at the introduction of younger sister Dawn who was non-existent in previous seasons. But I assured him, it’s not stupid Hollywood screenwriting – Joss Whedon has a master plan. And indeed Dawn turned out to be created by ancient monks and spliced into this reality to avoid the nefarious clutches of…well, you should really watch the series. But my friend passed away around that time, so I don’t know if he saw all those pieces come together.

The point of that melancholy reminiscence is that there are a special group of people who appreciate Buffy. I keep discovering new clumps of them. For example, a Facebook friend might mention watching on old Buffy episode the other night. Then Buffy fans emerge from the woodwork and chime in on their favorite episodes, other Joss Whedon shows (Angel, Firefly). Or I remember visiting nVidia years ago back when they were just one of many players in the graphics card space, and finding out one of the OpenGL experts there was a Buffy fan. It’s like noticing someone is wearing the same secret decoder ring. (or part of the same shadowy underground cult, if you’re an observer)

In my experience, Buffy fans are pretty cool people. And of the people I know who make me want to run for the hills whenever I see them, none have any interest in the Whedonverse. So I’d like to try an application of this partitioning rule – start a company and only hire members of the Buffy appreciation society. It would simplify the hiring process immensely – in the interviews, ask if the applicant is a Buffy fan. Fakers can easily be spotted – a real fan will spout favorite lines, gush over favorite characters, reenact favorite scenes, or burst into song from the Buffy musical. Obviously, anyone making dismissive remarks about vampire-slaying cheerleaders will be shown the door. To be fair, some cool people might have somehow missed the series (a comic book store owner in Bend told me they didn’t get the series until season 3), so check for these “potentials” by seating them at a computer and bringing up Dr. Horrible. See if they dig it.

Now, there might be a problem pitching this to a VC (“I don’t know what the company will produce, but we’re only going to hire fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and we’ll call each team a scooby gang, team leads will be slayers, and the department head is called a watcher, but maybe the legal department doesn’t have to have fans, they just need to be legitimately evil, like on Wolfram and Hart, but that’s Angel, not Buffy….”). I guess we just need to find an angel investor who’s a Buffy fan…

I received a nice letter from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund thanking me for my membership and relating cases of interest to their mission. That’s a typical courtesy of charities but what struck me as unusual was what wasn’t in the letter – an appeal for more money. Every other thank-you letter I’ve received from a charity has been a thank-you-may-I-have-another letter, which reminds me of the heroin addicts who used to accost me in Baltimore (“Can you spare a dollar? Thanks. Can you spare five?”), or maybe of startup companies. In any case, contrary to the stereotype of comic book fans as socially inept, here’s a case where they seem further up on their Ms. Manners than “professionals”.

Another example is Comic Con. The show is run by a non-profit organization staffed by volunteers, and it is the best-run, best-value and most fun event I’ve attended (compared to E3, GDC, Siggraph, Tokyo Game Show…)

I’d feel a lot better if I knew there were some comic book fans in the Obama administration.

I feel like the last to know, but I just read the news that The Sarah Connor Chronicles won’t be picked up by Fox for next season. I’m shocked, shocked I say. The time slot did suck – even though it was my favorite show of last season and had an arc where you don’t want to miss an episode, I kept forgetting when it was on (Friday at 8pm – now I remember, but too late). But once I discovered the episodes available on the Playstation Store, I downloaded the episodes I missed onto my Playstation 3, and then ended up downloading all of Season 2 (leaving just enough room for a few episodes of Breaking Bad and Dollhouse)

Speaking of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, I wonder if Fox decided that one Friday sci-fi show was enough for them. That would be ironic, considering Fox also killed Whedon’s Firefly, one of my all-time favorite TV shows (at least Fox is consistent). By the way, Firefly introduced Summer Glau to sci-fi fans, and there’s speculation that Glau will end up on Dollhouse. Maybe this is a devious master plan by Whedon. Or maybe while there’s nothing good on TV, I’ll have to invent my own conspiracy theories.

We code monkeys like to have intellectual-sounding titles – like computer scientist or software architect (definitely not “code monkeys”). Why architect? It’s analogous to computer architect, but that’s also kind of weird (in college, I told an architecture major I wanted to be a computer architect, and she said that’d be great – she needed some software to help with her work). I blame Ayn Rand and Hollywood – the cool people in film and TV are always in advertising or architecture firms.

But I think plumber might fit our job description better. A while ago my bathroom shower and toilet started filling up with sewage, coming dangerously close to overflowing.

The plumber came, tut-tutted, walked around the complex and the parking garage trying to find out how everything was connected, pointed out that the system was an unholy mess and whoever put it together didn’t know what they were doing, said it would take a lot of time and money to rebuild the whole system correctly, in the meantime they’d look for a quick fix, couldn’t find a way to do it, had to arrange over a few days for a bunch of cars to be moved so they could flush and drain the pipes while I asked all my neighbors to please stop using their toilets, and then they fixed it in the nick of time.

During that whole process, I was thinking that this is in fact the story of my career – “hey, what’s this supposed to do” ,” who designed this system anyway?” (a software architect), “I inherited this problem” (a familiar refrain from the Obama administration), “I’ll look for a quick fix but can’t promise anything”, and everyone’s favorite, “this thing should really be redone from the ground up”. Actually, I never say that last one – that’s where the software architect comes back into the picture.

The good folks at the Westminster Veterinary Group have taken to my cat Jiggs, so much so that they tend to call me “Mister Jiggs” on the phone. I’ve considered changing my name to save trouble, but I settled instead for registering the domain name, http://www.misterjiggs.com/ Not much there except a few cat photos sure to bore anyone who’s not into cats, or my cat in particular.

I remember in one of my previous jobs another cat owner and I would start talking loudly about our cats whenever our coworkers started going on about their kids. I don’t know what you’d do in that situation if you aren’t a pet-owner or parent – find some World of Warcraft players I suppose and go on about that.

In any case, I’ll close by inflicting a cat video of Mister Jiggs (actually, she should be called Miss Jiggs):

WordsEye Feature has been on the App Store for a while, but I finally got around to knocking out a Mac widget. It’s also running as a web player on Fugu Games - here it is (click on it to proceed to the next image):

The one time I attended an MBA party, everyone was talking about the latest episode of Friends. This answered a lot of questions, and perhaps a new one – why Microsoft named their new search engine Bing.

It certainly is easy to remember (especially for Friends fans). But take a cue from Google – it doesn’t make for a great active verb. I’m googling. I’m binging? I googled it. I binged it? Perhaps it works better with some extreme sports verve. Bing for it, dude! I binged it, harsh! Hey, I’m trying.

The game industry has some Hollywood envy – witness game producers who’d rather be film producers, and game designers who’d rather be writing screenplays. As a result, we have game studio execs who have to be spoon-fed “high-concept” descriptions of games, the dominance of licenses and sequels, and Bruckheimer-Bay style cinematics.

But game development has one type of IP reuse that is quite worthy – the port. Film remakes have questionable value (“reimaginings” are a bit more interesting), but game ports keep games alive. A pixel-perfect reproduction of an old game on modern hardware is useful enough, but even better are new versions that take advantage of the latest technology and even add content. As an example, here are a couple of promo trailers for WiiWare ports from Nicalis:

Terminators make the best door-to-door salesmen. On the Sarah Connor Chronicles, Cromartie always impressed me with his polite “Thank you for your time”. (terminators are great at ironic delivery)

This occurred to me when a Time-Warner cable salesman showed up at my door in the evening and without the courtesy of stating his business proceeded to ask me who was providing my current television service and then threatened to raise my cable modem rate if I didn’t sign up for a new package. (Terminators are much more effective with threats, too) So I told the guy to go away and then sent some rambling email to Time-Warner about how a high-tech company should be embarrassed about employing such stone-age sales tactics.

That visit did complete a life-cycle presentation of door-to-door sales – usually I get college-age or teen salespeople who whine like they’re asking for a raise in allowance, and it’s just that appealing – “Oh, c’mon, why not?” And then they stomp away in a huff. But recently a couple of kids from Santa Ana came by to sell something (I forget what) so they could buy soccer uniforms. The pre-teen negotiation relies on cuteness – “C’mon, pleeeease?” But I always sympathize with the accomplice who looks like he doesn’t want to be there. Just once, I’d like to see the soccer coach, band teacher, church leader, school principal or parents doing the rounds instead of pimping out the kids.

But not really. The kids range from nice to obnoxious, but I wanted to punch that cable salesguy (and does no one understand the signage words “no trespassing – no soliciting”?) And I recall that whining shows up a lot among professionals, in my own experience:

• a game middleware sales rep calling me up at work and whining “why noooot?” when I said we weren’t going to use their product
• a game outsourcing VP of marketing whining “why noooot?” when I wouldn’t give him my boss’s phone number (followed by “I know we can do this project” as an argument why we should use their serivces – “I know I can” is nice for self-affirmation but not much of a business presentation)
• a potential client whining “why nooot?” when I declined to take a project (followed by “I know your point of view but you don’t know mine”, “I’m sorry you can’t understand my point of view”, and so on, which pretty much justified my initial decision)

Whining makes for a terrible sales pitch. Grow up.

I’m wondering if Facebook has hit the wall.

First, there was that redesign. I can’t say that the new look is worse, but then again, I can’t say it’s better. It’s like a corporate reorg – it gives you the sense that progress is being made, but perhaps my senses deceive me.

More disturbing, it’s been really slow, lately. My browser status icon is spinning…spinning, just to show a page. Have they run into scalability issues? Web 2.0 success can be an enemy when it comes to scalability. That’s what likely doomed Friendster and almost totalled eBay (remember that crash back around 1999 where they had so much traffic they couldn’t restart the server and keep it going?)

And then you have to wonder if they still have the crack staff that made them successful in the first place. Besides the performance, there’s some other glitchiness. For a while, icons didn’t show up  – when I checked Help it was listed as known issue for a few people but solved (sounds like a political coverup). When I saw that Safari didn’t have that problem I switched to that browser, but then I spent a lot of time in my product page hitting the Share status button before figuring out it was only stuck on Safari (is this the Microsoft investment at work?) Back to Firefox and now the icons work.

OK, those are all programming glitches, and at least Facebook has a nice clean look – a big attraction for me over the tackiness of MySpace. But maybe they’ve lost their best designers, too. I spent an inordinate amount of time choosing an icon for my product page not based on the appearance of the icon itself, but according to which one is cropped the least badly by Facebook. A wide image will have both sides cropped in the main display. Fair enough. But if I pick one that fits OK there, it is cropped vertically in the thumnail display – a problem partially addressed by allowing you to “edit” a thumbnail by dragging it around so it crops with the least amount of damage.

And after all that, in the Highlights display it is cropped even more.

You’ve got to be kidding me. Did they lose their best designers, too? Actually, who would think that displaying the same image with three different aspect ratios and randomly cropping to compensate would look good? Just pick a square!