When No Idea Was Crazy

While I was cleaning out and throwing away some old junk, I came across some old promotional stuff for iSmell scent technology which I guess I picked up at the 2000 GDC. I saved it for humor value. The company (Digiscents) met its demise in June 2001, to no one’s surprise. I thought I picked up their SDK and documentation as well, but I must have thrown it out a long time ago.

There’s an article linked from that Wikipedia entry titled “How Internet Odors Will Work,” but I’m afraid that it’s too much of a low-hanging fruit for even me to make a joke.

Someone appears to have taken over the Digiscents domain, and is running a “digital scent technology blog.” (For a laugh, check out the Google AdWords at the top of the page.)

Roll the Dice, Move Your Mice

We recently bought Culdcept Saga for the Xbox 360, and have been having a lot of fun with it. It’s essentially a cross between Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering — you roll a die and move your piece around the board, claiming (or contesting) territory with monsters that you cast out of your hand of cards. Like Monopoly, you can improve your land (raising the tolls you gather), and there’s also a “color affinity” mechanic where creatures gain combat bonuses when they are on land of the same element as the creature. You can use different items and different spells to affect the “strategic board” as well as individual combats. At the end of each match, you earn new cards with which to build your deck. Both skill and luck come into play in the game.

I can easily recommend this to anyone with an interest in collectible card games. There’s actually a demo available on Xbox Live, although it doesn’t show any of the deck-building mechanics — you have to use one of four prebuilt decks in the demo. We played the demo quite a bit before the game’s release earlier this month — thankfully, the full game is just as engrossing.

A Sight to Behold

We were in Santa Barbara over the weekend, and while we were walking down State St. we saw a guy with three animals: a cat and a rat, who were riding on the back of a dog. Unfortunately I couldn’t snap a picture as my phone’s camera decided to quit working (until I rebooted it…really unforgivable). Thankfully, though, there are numerous YouTube movies of this guy.

No All-Stars

The 2008 D-League All-Stars have been announced, and there are no players from the Arsenal on the rosters. It’s disappointing — having an All-Star representative would at least give Arsenal fans something to cheer about, but that’s not going to happen.

The only other team without a representative is Albuquerque. (Rio Grande Valley’s representative, CJ Watson, won’t be playing because he’s currently on the Warriors’ roster, but he’s listed as part of the Blue Team.)

The Mobile Browsing Experience: Rage

I just experienced a stereotypical moment of “tech columnist rage.” I had downloaded a mobile version of the (highly recommended) Keepass password manager, to make sure that I could access my personal information when I’m taking a trip or am otherwise away from my computer. For example, if I uploaded a trip itinerary to TripIt, and wanted to check it on the road, I could use Keepass to remember my password. I used a randomly-generated password for TripIt, which is both lengthy and nonmnemonic, so normally I’d use the cut-and-paste or drag-and-drop functionality of the desktop version of Keepass to fill it in. The mobile version of Keepass also lets you copy a password to the clipboard.

However, in the mobile version of Internet Explorer, you cannot paste into a password field. This makes randomly-generated passwords much more cumbersome to use, and appears to be a somewhat arbitrary restriction. Oh, and while we’re at it, the Javascript support in Mobile IE isn’t sufficient enough to support some basic Javascript like that used by the Semisecure Login WordPress plugin.

Fortunately, there are a couple of competitors in the Windows Mobile browsing arena. Let’s see how they fare in comparison:

  • Opera Mobile will actually allow me to paste into the password field. In addition, it has better Javascript support, and the Semisecure Login plugin will actually work. Sounds pretty good, right? Except for the fact that, for some reason, Opera Mobile’s password fields use the text field auto-completion feature, including storing new values! What this means is that, essentially, if you enter your password in a web page’s password field, the password will show up in other text fields as part of the auto-completion hints in plain text. (I tested and reverified this with Gmail.)This is a product for which they expect you to pay money. Unbelievable. And this product has been in development for 8 years.
  • Minimo, the mobile version of Mozilla/Firefox, has had its development process “rebooted,” and as far as I know, is nowhere near completion. The last available binaries (for Windows Mobile 5) crash on startup on my phone.

I can scarcely believe that these kinds of problems still exist. Windows Mobile would be much more useful and effective if they got more of these kinds of little things right — as it is right now, it can frequently be an aggravating experience.

Another Crushing Defeat

The Arsenal were unable to snap the Stampede’s winning streak last night, losing 93-87 in a game that was close throughout. As a fan, it’s frustrating to endure three close losses in a row to quality teams — I can only imagine the frustration the team is feeling. Positive highlights include Marcus Campbell recording a double-double (albeit on horrendous 4-for-17 shooting — probably about 8 of those misses were off of tips on maybe 3 total offensive possessions), and Mo Charlo coming off the bench to score 21 points on 70% shooting from the floor. Concerns include Ivan Johnson’s continued woes at the free throw line — he went 2-for-6 in this game, and a combined 4-of-10 over the last two games.

The attendance was not listed on the box score, but I can assure you that, as a Monday night game, it was sparse. I would estimate 150 people, maybe. Of course, the lower noise level makes it easier to heckle and try and get inside the visiting team’s heads, which can be amusing. It’s easy to understand, though, why the league tries to schedule as many games as possible on the weekend — even if there are other entertainment options in town on those days, it’s still easier to get people out of the house and into seats on their days off.

On the league transactions page, I saw that the Arsenal have dealt Davin White to the Colorado 14ers in exchange for another forward, Terrence Crawford. It looks like Yuta Tabuse worked his way up the depth chart, and took the place of White, who was one of the opening-day starters. I would surmise that, with the trade for another forward in exchange for a guard, the coaching staff are anticipating that Guillermo Diaz won’t be called up again in the near future.

Dewey Defeats Truman

According to Macy’s, that is.

NEW!
Waterford Crystal XLll Super Bowl Champion Football

$185.00
Patriot perfection! Nineteen wins. Zero losses. Football history has been rewritten, and the New England Patriots have won it all! Commemorate every bone-crunching tackle and triumphant touchdown with this limited edition Waterford Crystal football.
Let me just state for the record that I am very happy that the Giants beat the Pats…

Two Tough Losses

The Arsenal suffered two tough losses in the last two days. The first, Friday night, was to the D-Fenders, 107-102, in a game where at two separate points the Arsenal held double-digit leads. The game tonight was the Idaho Stampede’s D-League record-setting 16th straight victory, a frustrating 95-91 loss in which the Arsenal held the lead for almost the entire game. What’s disappointing is that, in both cases, the Arsenal couldn’t finish strong — their shooting faded down the stretch, and while there were no real defensive blowups that I can recall, their opponents were still able to score enough to steal the win.

Bright spots for the Arsenal include the return of Guillermo Diaz (fresh from his 20-day cup of coffee with the Clippers), who, judging by the way he has played the last two games, really wants to go back up to the NBA. His stats against Idaho were less impressive due to the fact that almost every time he touched the ball in the second half, he was double-teamed — I think he scored all of his points in the first half. Ivan Johnson also had a pair of excellent games, filling up the stat sheet and making a lot of hustle plays. Unfortunately, center Marcus Campbell has had a couple of pretty dreadful games — little offense (particularly down low), foul trouble, and poor ball handling. I cringed every time a pass bounced off of his hands of stone, or an attempted feed to a slashing teammate got poked away by a defender. Hopefully this is a temporary phenomenon — when he originally came onto the roster, he had a couple of excellent games, making me think that he was going to be a key offensive and defensive presence (particularly for a size-deprived team).

The Arsenal will have a chance to avenge tonight’s loss on Monday, as they play the Stampede again.

Back home

Back homeMy flight back to LAX arrived about 15 minutes early last night, but we wound up waiting on the tarmac for 30 minutes for the gate to clear. Once we finally got there, my second mileage run was over. I felt less tired after this one than I did my first — I think that can be attributed to the fact that I slept more often on the flights this time, and that my total clock time was about three hours less on this run. My flight connections were tight in most cases, but I made them all, and had no significant issues.

I started thinking about why I find the idea of mileage running to be so amusing, and I think that there may be a link between it and other “pointless” exercises in computer and video games. To a lot of people, running around and constantly jumping to raise skill levels may seem dumb, but I find it hilarious for some reason. The act of flying around in circles, in order to make a future trip possible or cheaper, must touch the same nerve. My miles should post in a couple of days, and once that happens, I should be able to consider this trip completely done.