February 10, 2007: jRPG Day

Since we didn’t travel back home this weekend we have some time to relax this weekend. Our goal for today is totally, unadulterated relaxation. And, I think, we were wildly successful.

Last night, before going to bed, I put in some long hours and finally finished playing Lunar Legend for the GBA. That is a very good, traditionally styled jRPG. Quite enjoyable and not too difficult. Overall far too linear but still quite fun. I am looking forward to playing other Lunar games. I really wish that Lunar 2: Eternal Blue would get a GBA make over. That would be great. But alas, it is not likely to happen, and so the only way for me to play it is to find an old Playstation copy of the game used on eBay which is rather expensive as it is a rather classic title.

Dominica played a ton of Kingdom Hearts II today until she got to one part that was dramatically harder than everything else that she had done in the game up until this point and she got frustrated which worked out well for me because it allowed me to play Dragon Quest VIII for the rest of the evening. That game continues to be awesome.

We went out shopping this evening looking for a television stand. We have re-evaluated our living room arrangement and have decided that our setup is not very conducive to the way that we live. Our current furniture arrangement does not utilize the space well at all and is a horrible waste of space. So we looked hard into a number of options and decided that we needed to be setup better oriented towards playing video games and working on our computers which are the only two big activities that we do there. So we need a television stand as we have a spot to actually put the living room television. The long term plan is to get a new television for the living room and to move the current one into our bedroom. But for now it will be the living room television.

We were unable to find anything that we liked for the television that matches our apartment so we ended up returning home basically empty handed. The hope had been to run out quickly and to get a television stand and to spend the evening re-arranging the living room.

We got home and decided to do some re-arranging anyway. We took our larger printer stand that we have been using in our bedroom as a closet extension and put that in the “hidden” part of the living room to hold the router, cable modem, phone and printer. Then the shorter printer stand was moved in front of the book shelf along the north wall and the television was placed there. Now we have turned what was a single, large “L” shaped living room into two smaller rectangular rooms. The strange thing is that instead of losing a lot of space it really feels like we have quite a lot more space.

Dominica went to bed a little after normal but I stayed up for a while playing Dragon Quest VIII because I am totally addicted!

February 9, 2007

The original plan was for Dominica and I to drive back to Geneseo tonight since we didn’t manage to make it home last week but as this is February there is supposed to be quite a bit of snow back home and we decided that it would be silly to go home this weekend. So we have another unplanned weekend in Newark. We didn’t make the decision until this morning when we looked at the weather. It isn’t supposed to be so bad but considering that we don’t really need to travel and are just trying to get things done early at the house it doesn’t seem like a good idea to take the risk for no reason. Coupled with the fact that the PR5 has summer tires on it and not its winter tires, needs an oil change and needs to have its bearings replaced it seems like we will be better off just waiting. Next weekend I have a three day weekend and may just head back home by myself to take advantage of the extra day (although I think that Dominica just wants me to go back on my own so that she can take the entire weekend to play video games.)

Work was actually slow today! Yay! I have plenty of work to do over the weekend though that can’t be done during the week so it isn’t like a slow day today means that I have nothing to do this weekend. That is unfortunate. I have to stay a little late tonight as we have after hours diagnostics and maintenance that has to be done and then tomorrow I have a bit of updates to do to support compliance. Boring. But hey, at least I get overtime right? It could be a lot worse. No complaints here. And it works out that we could travel this weekend too. Although I am really looking forward to installing Vista and I have to hold off on that for yet another week now. I am not as excited as if Novell had released the latest version of openSUSE Linux but Microsoft only releases operating systems like every five years so I have to say that I am very curious to see what they have done and I have heard that there are some really nice changes. Although the install is supposed to just take forever.

For those who don’t know my personality, I am a very cyclical person when it comes to my interests. I have a set of primary interests – mostly in the areas of my personal entertainment – and I cycle through them over a period of several years. I imagine that this was very frustrating to my parents as during my childhood the cycles would have been so long as to make it seem like childhood stages and not as a natural cycle that didn’t noticeably emerge until I was in my mid-twenties. One of the areas in which this is very noticeable is video games. I can sometimes go for one to as much as three years without playing any significant amount of video games. This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy them from time to time but I have no major desire to play them for an extended period of time. I believe this to often be triggered by external factors like the existence of a video game that I just can’t put down or a new technology becoming available – but I am not sure that I could prove that.

That leads me to: I am addicted to video games again. 🙂 It happens every so often. The last time that I really got into a game was Age of Empires II several years ago (which I really wish I had some time to be able to play again) and before that it was Quake II back around 2001. Both of those times I got hooked when we found a game that really allowed me to play games against friends. Andy, Bob and I played a lot of Quake II and later Quake III (and to some degree Call of Duty) against each other and that was a blast. Now I am starting to play all of the great console games that I have missed over the last several years. I owned a PlayStation and a Nintendo 64 as my last real consoles (I did get a DreamCast recently but that was recently and long after it had left the market.) The Nintendo 64 had almost nothing worth playing available for it except for Perfect Dark which lead us to try Quake II. The PlayStation I never really used and I even forgot that I had. I think that I gave it away at some point but I am not sure. The only games that I really used on there were Ridge Racer IV, Final Fantasy VII and Suikoden. It is weird to think that for several years I owned this really cool (at the time) video game console and really didn’t use it at all. So much so that I totally forgot about even owning it. I have no idea how that happened. I guess I was just too busy doing other things during that time period and, I suppose, the PlayStation was pretty old by the time I bought it and I hadn’t intended to have bought it (someone borrowed money to buy it and never paid me for it.) So I guess I hadn’t been prepared to play it at the time and was never happy with it because of that.

Towards the end of the day things slowed down even more than usual and exceptionally early for a Friday night which may be, in part, to the fact that I have been phased off of supporting a small client who does a large amount of late Friday evening deployments. So tonight I was actually able to leave the office before six! On a Friday night! It doesn’t get much better than that.

Dominica was home ahead of me and was already deep into Kingdom Hearts II before I arrived. She will be playing this all weekend. I got home and once she was able to save her game in progress (which can often take half an hour or more to be able to find a save point in KH2) we headed over to Food for Life for dinner. We didn’t feel like being away from the house tonight and thought that a quick trip over there would work well. They have a new menu item called the Tahitian Event that Dominica is totally in love with.

We came home and I hooked up the new cable for the PS2 (we switched from the cheap, included A/V cable – aka composite video – so a cheap component video cable from GameStop) and the difference, even on a low quality game like Kingdom Hearts II which is just 480i, was very noticeable. The biggest differences were the sharpness and the colour saturation. If you have a PS2 and are still using the included cable definitely get out there and spend fifteen or twenty dollars on a halfway decent component cable. Every game will look better and the high definition games will take on a whole new life.

Ethics in Neuroscience

The Guardian reports today that scientists have created a device capable of foretelling a person’s actions. This device is very interesting and has huge implications. The scientists who have created it are not claiming to be able to read minds but say that they have roughly a seventy percent accuracy for predicting short term actions based on brain activity.

The question that society immediately asks, as does Steven Spielberg in the sci-fi dud Minority Report, is: Is it ethical and/or practicable to judge a person’s likelihood of committing a crime? This is an ethical issue that society is going to have to face very soon as this technology is going to mature at a formidable pace and, like all technology, rapidly out pace society’s ability to comprehend it within the standard framework of ethics and morals. (Similarly, much of society today has little or no ability to relate so-called “digital” crimes to more traditional forms of theft, misrepresentation, harassment, etc. In the future society will learn to see computers as a normal part of life and “digital” crime will just be another mode of traditional crime and not seen as a special case outside of the morals of normal life.)

Let me pose four questions regarding the ability to “read someone’s mind.”

Question Number One: Can a person who intends to commit a crime spend time practicing with a mind reading device to learn how to “intend” to do one thing until the last minute and change their mind at the very last second? This would be a form of “gaming” the system. It might be feasible for a person who intends to mislead a mind reading device by, perhaps, convincing themselves that they won’t do something wrong until the very last second. Or, for organized crime or terrorists, one person could intend to have other people commit crimes but not inform a number of people as to what crime would be committed when or by whom so that an entire cell of people might be willing to commit a crime or act or terrorism but have no foreknowledge of the event circumventing the entire system.

Question Number Two: Does a mind reader take into account the intents of people who have convinced themselves that something is not unethical? Take, for example, all of the people who believe that anything that is available online for download is legally theirs for the taking even if someone previously stole it from someone else. Some of those people (or so I am told) actually believe that what they are doing is legal. If this is true then they do not believe that they are committing a crime. Along the same lines, many people do not believe that it is illegal or immoral to be involved with a crime if the initial crime is committed by someone else. For example: you hire a hitman to kill someone for you. Many people believe that the hitman is a murderer but believe that they, as the actual person instigating the killing, are not committing a crime.

Question Number Three: Do hardened criminals see what they do as a crime? Perhaps the average seasoned bank robber continues to feel that his or her actions are illegal but needs the money or enjoys the high. But what about serial killers? How many serial killers feel that they are going to commit a crime before they actually do it?

Question Number Four: The locked cookie jar scenario. You want cookies. You know you have no willpower to avoid cookies. You lock a cookie jar to keep yourself from eating cookies. You “intend” to attempt to break into the cookie jar but have barred yourself from doing so. Do you have cookie criminal intents? Is it wrong? Is it wrong even if it is you who stopped yourself from stealing a cookie? What if it was someone else who stopped you from stealing a cookie? Are you worse than the person who doesn’t intend to steal a cookie but does absentmindedly at the last second just because they were “there”? Are you a speeder who owes a traffic fine even if you bought a car with a limiter so that you couldn’t physically drive too fast even if you tried to do so?
Question Number Five: What about people – and how many people are like this – who intend to do something wrong some of the time but stop themselves before actually doing it? Maybe this brain reading device does not fall prey to this type of inaccuracy but it seems unlikely that it wouldn’t at least a fair portion of the time.

It seems to me that the nuances of the human intention is far too complex for any machine or even people themselves to express. Won’t criminals just learn to carry a “random crime generator” to allow them to make criminal decisions at the last possible second to remove the ability for intent even though their intent would be significantly greater than it would have been otherwise? If we, as society, cannot truly define intent then how can we judge a machines ability to live up to that non-existent standard?

Perhaps, as Americans, we have another reason to not desire to have a mind reading device used to judge our legal, moral and ethical intentions: “…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…” – Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in the United States’ Declaration of Independence. Any device, instigated by the government, that is designed to eliminate the capacity for citizens to ban together in an attempt to overthrow a corrupt government is not only in and of itself unethical but is in direct opposition to the very letter of the intent of the formation of our nation. Judging the “intent” of others, by the government, is an act of desperation and signifies a government that is no longer representing those that are governed and is solidly within the realm of totalitarianism. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Wilson, etc. would have gladly welcomed such tools into their arsenal of anti-libertarianism.

February 8, 2007

Last night we picked up my friends at Newark’s Penn Station and we drove as close as we could park to Mompou and got some dinner. Dominica and I tried their crab and corn chowder (yes, my second soup for the day) which was really incredible. We all had a really good time and the food was awesome as always. It made for a late night but we had a really good time. Next time we got out with them the plan is to go to Chinatown in Manhattan to some places that they frequent.

Today I am working from home. It wasn’t too bad of a day from a work perspective. Enough to keep me busy but definitely not rushing me off of my feet. Oreo wasn’t feeling well today, though, and had an accident sometime early this morning and got sick a couple of times too! But he was glad to be able to spend the day at home when he wasn’t feeling well. But I ended up having to do a lot of laundry.

For lunch Susan walked over from her office and we went to FFL for lunch. This is Susan’s first trip to FFL! Unfortunately they ran out of their signature nautical bacon (a bacon like product made from salmon) and so she was not able to try that. But she enjoyed her meal and will probably be back to FFL soon. I will be back tonight, I am sure.

This afternoon I got a chance to play about an hour of Dragon Quest VIII which remains, after about two hours of play, a really cool game that I am really enjoying. I am taking my time and enjoying the scenery, music and story – the way that a good RPG should encourage you to do. So far this game has done a good job of “drawing me in” and making me interested in the outcome of the game and its characters. I am still on the first “mission” so we will see how it goes.

Dominica went out to GameStop during her lunch break and picked up a wireless controller for the PS2, a component video cable so that we can switch the PS2 into HD modes and found a used copy of True Crime: Streets of LA for me for less that five dollars. True Crime isn’t normally my type of game and I don’t usually get games available for Windows on a game console but for that price it seemed well worth it. The game is one of the few high-definition games available on the PS2 which is how I found it. The game looks roughly interesting in that Max Payne sorta way. I needed something to play when I wasn’t in an RPG mood and this seemed to fit the bill pretty well.

Dominica got home and we went over to Food for Life for dinner. They had more bacon but I tried the fish and chips 🙂

After dinner Dominica spent the evening playing Kingdom Hearts II and finally managed to get past the point that Josh got to while playing her game while he was at the house this week. I did a little light work and played Lunar Legend on my Nintendo DS. I am just about done with that game and want to get to the end of it.

Right now we only have a television in the “living room” but the one that we have there is the one that we bought with the intention of putting into our bedroom. But the Sony PlayStation 2 that we have and the Nintendo Wii that we are planning on getting (once Nintendo gets their manufacturing ramped back up) are both games that really require space to be able to use (the Wii is all motion based and the PS2 has the DDR games) which leaves us with nothing to play in the bedroom even though that is where we would like to play maybe even a majority of the games. We don’t have the living room’s television yet so it isn’t quite a problem but it will be sometime soon. We can’t decide what we want to do. For starters we will bring down the Sega DreamCast that is still in Geneseo but we only have about three games for that that I am really interested in played (Grandia, Skies of Arcadia and Shenmue.) So that won’t work for very long. We will eventually want a PS3, we think, and there is an XBOX 360 in the building. So we don’t know what we want to do. It is hard to decide.

February 7, 2007

I rushed home from work as early as I could manage last night and arrived in Newark before seven thirty. Dominica and Josh came down and we went out to IHOP for dinner. After dinner we came back to 1180 Raymond and Josh and I decided to check out the new Media Room that we have down in the basement. We took down Enchanted Arms for the XBOX 360 and put in a couple of hours playing that. We quickly noticed that the XBOX 360 was both set incorrectly and hooked up incorrectly so it looked awful. We fixed the settings that we could and that helped a little but it is still hooked up wrong so it doesn’t look so hot as we are playing it in standard definition instead of high definition.

We played through almost ten percent of Enchanted Arms and so far the verdict is that the game is exceptionally weird. The storyline is quite odd. The game hasn’t been rated very highly from reviewers but it is the only jRPG available on the XBOX 360 and is, in fact, the only game on that platform that I am really interested in playing at all. It definitely is not a good showcase for the 360. The game is moderately enjoyable but so weird and pointless that it looses most of the cinematic storyline quality that generally makes jRPGs so much fun. The characters in the game are intentionally shallow but it makes the game shallow as well. I still have a lot of game to play so we will see how it is but so far, I am not impressed. This is just a game to hold me until Blue Dragon and Assassin’s Creed release for the 360.

While we were playing Enchanted Arms in the Media Room, Dominica was playing Kingdom Hearts 2 on the PS2 up in the apartment keeping Oreo company. She really loved the KH series of games. Personally I think that they are just weird. It was almost midnight by the time that we all managed to get to bed. It is amazing how little Canadians seem to care about their own rights.

Russian schools are beginning to switch to Linux quickly after Russian authorities jail a school’s headmaster for purchasing pirated copies of Microsoft Windows. Microsoft was not involved in the action but the arrest as put a scare into the educational system there which, obviously, like here in the United States has a tendency towards ignoring the law and steals software on a large scale. Educators, of all people, often use a defense of ignorance saying that they don’t comprehend theft and don’t realize that taking things that belong to one person and giving to another is wrong.

The US Army prosecutors in the case of a soldier who refused to participate in war crimes stated that there is no excuse for defiance of direct orders. This means that the US Army is saying that US soldiers are required by law to commit war crimes. Since a soldier can be punished for war crimes and since a soldier can be punished for not committing war crimes requested by any commanding officer the US Army law office has effectively decided that it is a crime to be a US soldier. The most shocking thing, though, is that the US Army now believes that it was okay – and in fact BETTER – that all of Hitler’s soldiers slaughter the Jews during World War II. Or maybe the US Army is now defecting to the Iranians and claim that the holocaust didn’t happen. This clearly means that I no longer consider the US Army to be in defense of its citizens or its constitution, by its own admission, and is now a renegade, illegal entity acting as a terrorist organization.

Now here is an interesting news item today – one of those “obviously they didn’t think about what they were saying before they said it moment.” Walmart is being sued for supposed gender inequalities. I total believe that gender bias exists and I have seen it a lot over the years. Obviously, as a male, I am much more likely to notice jobs that tend to promote women over men and, in some cases, that outright refuse promotions for men altogether stating that certain jobs (including all above a certain level) were reserved for women. I have no idea whether or not Walmart has done any such thing in either direction and it is very hard to believe that such a thing would be happening on a large scale. However, in the article, they stated how women are now mostly getting pay parity with men but men are tending to get more promotions. However, they they then stated that they had found nothing to suggest that the men getting promotions were getting paid more than the women who were not getting promotions! This is clearly an example of pay disparity. They are clearly stating that the men are being given more responsibility and more work but the women are getting paid for doing easier job the same as the men willing to take on more work! What this study actually managed to show is that women are getting paid more than men for the same job! Now it is men who need to fight for pay parity.

Canada appears set to sell out its often poorly informed citizenry today by transferring their communication right to its major telecom carriers allowing a few large companies to determine what Internet (read: television, news, radio, music, blogs, email, instant messaging, etc.) the Canadian citizens will be allowed to receive and at what speeds regardless of the speeds that they pay for.

According to Slashdot today, Dell is threatening to sue an end user who has discovered that certain Dell laptops are outputting up to 139 volts AC from any chassis screw against earth ground. This is not just incredibly bad for your laptop but can be rather hazardous to your health. Dell’s eletrocution laptop is apparently the follow-up to their exploding laptop. Dell’s new strategy is, I suppose, to kill as many of their customers as possible before their can tell anyone else about how displeased they are with their Dells. Michael Dell has just recently taken the reigns again at Dell so that he can oversee things like this personally to make sure that others don’t screw it up.

In the category of “you can patent anything” in the US – today someone patented “holding your cell phone upside down”!

Skype applications have been caught by 64bit security systems and are now known to be reading detailed hardware information from your computer (including your serial number) and sending it to eBay! No one knows what this is being used for but it could be really bad.

We are most of the way through the week and the supposed “cashed check” that Central Parking claims to have sent to us was not produced on Monday like they claimed that it would be and no one answered the phones there today either. It seems like they panicked when I continued to follow up with them and made up a story that they had actually paid out to put me off the scent while they attempt to hide under a rock. Central Parking has been avoiding paying for the repairs to Dominica’s BMW since sometime around October!

I got stuck working from home longer enough this morning that Josh and I were able to go over to Food for Life and get something to eat. We ordered our vehicles from the valet and then walked over to eat. We called ahead so that everything would be fast. We both got the No. 15 “The Round” and then it was off to work.

My day at the office was much slower today than it has been for a while, which is probably noticeable from the amount of news that I was able to report on today. I managed to get a little bit of my miscellaneous stuff done today that has been backing up like talking to my CPAP supplier and some mail.

I got to have lunch with a friend at the office that left the company that I am at six months ago and has just now returned here. I have been busy this week and haven’t really gotten to see him so today we made a point of going out for lunch. I wasn’t very hungry from breakfast so I just got some lobster bisque which ended up being really awesome.

Today is really a friends and food day for me. Breakfast with Josh. Lunch with someone at the office. And tonight Dominica and I are going to Mompou in the Ironbound with a friend that recently left where I am working now. So all three meals today! And tomorrow I am doing lunch with Susan!

News from the University of Rochester today: playing video games is good for your eyes!  Contrary to the old wives tale that straining your eye muscles or exercising them in any way makes you blind (like lifting weights makes your arms fall off) playing video games can improve visual acuity.

Well, it is a “dinner out” night and I have to get to the apartment before I am late.  Have a good night everyone.