Exercise app review: Zombies, Run!

I took the exercise app Zombies, Run! for a spin on the weekend, just through "episode 1". For the full experience, I used no music and had zombie pursuits switched on. On the whole, I like the app - I get the feeling that the story will unfold in an interesting way, and that's probably what I'm in for. Base building is not much of a draw to me, but I see the appeal for other people. As I said, I'm mostly in to see how the story plays out, and I'm keen to do more running to discover more of it. Which would be the whole point.

The feature that didn't get me were the zombie pursuits. The voice announced "Warning: zombies nearby" or something to that effect. Okay, I thought, better put on a bit more speed. They're zombies, though. No need to overdo it. Pretty soon, the voice announced "Warning: zombies 50 metres". Oh, okay, they must have started closer than I thought. Better speed up some more, to a fast run. I swear, before I'd gone another 10 metres, "Warning: zombies 17 metres". What? Alright, done with this. I break into a full sprint. "2 items dropped, zombies distracted". I slowed to a walk, exhausted.

This pattern continued a few times over my run, and it got tiresome (which I suppose is better than winding up dead in a real zombie pursuit). This did not seem to be helpful to me. How fast am I supposed to be going? My usual speed is 9.5 to 10kph. Granted, this weekend I was not at my best. I'm recovering from a cold and I haven't been for a proper run in a few weeks. Still, when the voice tells you "If you've got two legs and can go faster than a slow shamble, you should be fine, right?" it's demoralising to have three or four successful zombie attacks per run. I went looking for how to switch off that feature later and couldn't find it. I hope that doesn't mean I'm stuck with it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If I can turn zombie pursuits off again, I'll keep using the app for now.
PPS - If not, I'll start using my running time to catch up on podcasts.

Modem not included

I am currently in the market for some new networking hardware, and I like the simplicity of a single device to cover the modem and router parts of that equation. Unfortunately for me, it's rather difficult to be specific about this when searching for reviews and suggestions online. It feels like I'm having this kind of conversation with Google:

"Hey, Google, what are some good routers I could buy?"
"Here's a list of popular and well-regarded routers (modems not included)."
"Okay, I guess. How about modem-routers? You know, all-in-one devices?"
"Here's a list of popular and well-regarded routers (modems not included)."
"Ugh. Say, Google, what are the best modems on the market?"
"Here's a list of popular and well-regarded routers (modems not included)."
*deep sigh* "Google, what are the best modems on the market, excluding routers?"
"Welcome to Momento Demento, a festival of uncertain purpose! (website not available)"

The comments at the bottom of these router articles are along the lines of "Where are all the modems?" or "I bought one of these based on this article but now I need a separate modem too, what the hell?" which are usually followed by extreme networking nerds saying things like "Of course you need a separate modem, because the all-in-one things suck. Just get a cheapo modem and hook it to one of these awesome routers. Works for me!"

So my question is this: why can't anyone (apparently) build an all-in-one modem-router if all you need to do is add the cheapest, nastiest little modem to your kick-ass, blazing-fast router to get it online? That seems like the entire industry suffering from some kind of spot-blindness to me. All the network nerds nod to each other knowingly, saying that of course this is the way things are. How else could they be?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm a bit frustrated.
PPS - Especially with our ongoing Netflix performance.

Unreliable autopilot brain

When I'm on "autopilot", I have terrible spatial awareness. This is bad, because I tend to stumble through my physical environment on autopilot when I'm exhausted, such as when I've just woken up in the dark hours of the early morning, or when I've just come home from the gym. Last night, just home from the gym, I felt like I was crashing into the walls, barely balancing as I rounded the laundry basket and coffee table and basically hit Deb in the face as she was looking in the fridge. What I need, when I'm in that tired mode, is an autopilot that reliably steers me around obstacles and keeps me from flinging a rogue hand into walls, furniture and people. Instead, it seems, as with most things in life, that you can only have it if you don't need it. When I'm most exhausted, what I need is to engage more fully with my environment, expanding my awareness and amping up my alertness to its fullest extent. When I have energy to spare and plenty of light, then I can switch off and coast. That's like only driving to conserve fuel when you have plenty, and then flooring it when the fuel light comes on.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Sometimes my mind frustrates me.
PPS - And that's getting kind of meta.

Predicting stories

I think, when I spent a year writing one flash fiction piece per week, I did get a little bit better at it, but one of the biggest effects was that I became a better reader/viewer/audience member. I paid more attention to what stories were doing and why. While it's certainly possible to just sit back, brain off, and let stories pass through you, I enjoy recognising these little pieces that the author is going to bring together ahead of time. If it is in the story, it matters, so how is it going to matter?

One other thing I've encountered is the fact that nothing ever goes smoothly for characters. The straight line plot leads straight from boredom to boredom through unbelievable dullness. If something is going right, it won't go right for long. If there's a plan, there will be a hitch. Things go wrong for characters that have to keep going forwards. That's what stories are. You can end with all of the wrongness turning on the villain in one glorious moment - where the wild babboon picks up the gun that the mental patient loaded with the silver bullet just as the werewolf comes through the door - or you can have it all go horribly wrong for your heroes so that nobody really wins, but unless something is going wrong, your story is not going right.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wish I could bring more of that to my stories.
PPS - I have plenty of ideas for settings and characters. What I need are plots.

Security is a social decision, too

How empowered are ordinary web users to start encrypting all their web traffic, to protect it from the NSA, GCHQ, other over-reaching government agencies and the many criminal organisations that are, no doubt, doing exactly the same internet spying but aren't trying to tell us it's for our own good? If I wanted, for instance, to start using a social networking tool that couldn't be (easily) spied on, what are my options? Keep in mind that "social" part of "social media", too, which either means I need to convince all my friends to come with me and install pain-in-the-arse encryption software or it needs to be seamlessly compatible with their existing social media tools.

See, I could jump ship off Facebook and start using some hypothetical third-party encrypted social networking website, but unless the rest of my social network comes with me, it's just me. Yes, it's better for their privacy if they come too, but how do you convince every single one of your friends to take their medicine and eat their peas like good boys and girls when they're already set up on Facebook and it seems to be going fine?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - So I think we are kind of locked into insecure services if they're insecure by default.
PPS - Which just means everything should be made secure by default.

Planning for kids that never leave home

Because young adults are going to have an increasingly-difficult time gaining and keeping work, and paying rent or for a mortgage, it is becoming more common for them to stay living at home for longer. I think, because this pattern is becoming more common, families will start planning for it as an expected stage of life. We'll build our houses to handle a few adults in transition to independence, rather than planning houses for young families that assume you'll be out the door when you hit 18.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's going to be a subtle difference.
PPS - Or no difference at all, depending on who you ask.

What's in a name, and Who's on first

I would love to hear of someone naming their dog "police" or "fire". Calling him in for dinner would be weird but totally worth it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I also think any police officer with the last name "Down" is in for some confusion.
PPS - I once had an acquaintance who named his dog "Oi".

Data safety

If you've spent your life naively polluting the dataverse with your detailed life story and now decide to take your personal data security more seriously, how do you find out what data is out there and get people to delete or amend it?

Getting a company to update your details with something fake is probably the best you're going to do, assuming you can find the particular company with your data in the first place. In many cases, this won't be an option, because current, correct data is required. For instance, if you try to list a bogus name and address for your credit card, that's not "protecting yourself". I'm pretty sure it's credit fraud, in fact. As long as you have that card, you're going to be giving away purchase data to your bank, and there's really nothing you can do to protect yourself from that, except to cancel the card.

The point is, data safety is much more than not sharing certain details on Facebook, although that matters, too. Real data safety looks a lot like being a spy on the run - using disposable and fake details for everything, and refusing most of the modern conveniences like paying bills online, being on Facebook, reading your email in any kind of normal way or having a mobile phone.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You are, in general, much less private and secure than you think.
PPS - This is why so many people feel powerless to stop Big Data.

Fake video glitches as artistic features

Recently (well, for a while now, I guess) it's been somewhat fashionable to introduce video artifacts like stutter, visual pause and digital glitch artifacts into video art. Take a look at the opening credits of Revolution and Falling Skies, or see if you notice it on a video billboard ad. It's like we're living in a Max Headroom revival.

My point is this: streaming video or even DVD and Blu-Ray playback is so often glitchy or a bit unreliable these days that I can't always tell whether the glitches and artistic choices made with the video are intentional or not. When a TV show opts for a momentary freeze frame and I'm watching on Netflix, I am never sure if that's deliberate or if it's Netflix screwing up and recovering quickly. Do it several times in a montage and I will probably pause the video to make sure it's buffering properly. There's a video billboard at the train station now that is so glitchy in general that I still don't know if the title screen is supposed to do what it does.

So is it going to stop? I doubt it. Maybe we'll see less of it over time. Maybe directors will start experimenting with something else, and that will be next year's fashion. I don't know.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or maybe streaming video will get so good that I never expect it to stutter or glitch.
PPS - Well, no, probably not that.

Writing the right software

Writing software is easy. Writing the right software is hard. A lot of the time, that's the problem: teasing out the requirements from the client, and then separating the blue-sky dreams from what should actually be done. A lot of software projects, even if they're on track for budget and time get into trouble when the clients ask for more. Cowboy developers who grew up writing their own software on their own time for their own amusement can take a while to learn that "could" and "should" are different. That is, in a way, even more important than the correct architecture. Badly written software that still functions is a pain, but software written to the wrong requirements doesn't do anyone any good.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You have probably encountered both kinds.
PPS - Older software can drift either way, depending on whether the requirements change over time.

The Martian

This week I finished reading The Martian by Andy Weir, and I loved it. Ask anyone around me: I couldn't shut up about it. I wanted to keep reading, and I stayed up late to do it, which is a big compliment for me.

The story is about an astronaut who gets accidentally stranded on Mars when his team has to evacuate. That sounds more careless than it was, though - they had good reason to think he was dead and good reason to leave early when they did. A lot of the book is Mark's personal log as he struggles to survive in a harsh environment with equipment that was never meant to last that long. The sense of humour and resilience he displays through the ordeal is endearing, and the way he solves his technical problems (and causes some others) is fascinating to me, too. The writing flows surprisingly well for a book that is (almost) all mission logs, and I was with the story right through the end. It wouldn't get out of my head.

So, basically, I loved it. If you love stories of survival, the idea of manned space exploration and good-natured characters with indomitable humour, this is one for you.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I think the movie has great potential.
PPS - There are no aliens in this sci-fi. Mark is "the Martian" because he lives on Mars.

True forms are worn in

The true form of anything is worn, bruised, broken and used, not pristine, because that's what occupies the bulk of life. Things are meant to get used up. Yes, it means they'll go away, that they can't be "enjoyed" by future generations, but if you lock up your possessions in glass boxes, you're not enjoying them and neither is anyone else. Things get dirty, scratched, faded, worn down, and that's okay. That's life. It doesn't mean you don't have to treat your stuff well, because if you take some care, it will last longer, but if you don't use it at all in order to make it last forever, then it's wasted as much as if it were tossed away immediately.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I hate waste.
PPS - It extends to a problem with destruction and loss, in general.

Safe employment or following your passion

If I had the option, I think I'd rather be writing and acting for my career, rather than working on software. It's not that I don't like software, it's just that the other things appeal to me more and, in the end, I know it is possible for people to make a living doing them. The real question is whether I, personally, could make a living writing and acting. And of course, the longer I wait, and the more time I spend writing software instead of fiction, the more time I'm not spending getting better at my craft. If it takes ten years of dedicated effort to become a sellable writer, and I'm only half-committed to it, then it's going to take me twenty years to get good enough for publishers to notice. The same kind of argument goes for acting.

I could just quit and focus on writing and acting. That's a scary thought, though, because the amount of money I've made from them, in total, so far in my life, is not enough to buy dinner for two. If our mortgage payments rely on me making money at writing and acting, I predict a rapid descent into despair and homelessness. That might be an irrational fear, but I know the money is a real risk.

I saw Jim Carrey encourage a graduating class to follow their dreams by saying that you can still fail at what you hate, so you might as well do what you love. The trick is, sometimes what you love is a much bigger risk than the other option. That's why they call it the safe choice, the stable career. Sometimes you will lose your job as an accountant or as a software developer, but as a writer and actor, you are defined by unemployment, with brief periods of work. That is a life of never-ending risk and work-seeking, and I get exhausted enough looking for one job every couple of years after my various contracts run out or my employers go through rounds of redundancy.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Unemployment is fun only for about three days.
PPS - Or maybe up to two weeks.

This post revised for positivity

I wrote this whole post before, from a very negative standpoint, and I've had a change of heart. I had just ranted about all the "clickbait" headlines being thrown around the web these days, urging you to find out new facts or see photos and videos that will "blow your mind". To see things that will "change the way you think forever" or that you just "won't believe". It's a tease, like a six-year-old jumping around saying "I know a secret! Not telling you!" It's deliberately uninformative, which is the opposite of a good headline (unless you define "good" as "lots of clicks", which is clearly what has happened). It's designed only to pique your interest enough to click the link, after which they get their ad revenue and they're done. It offends me as a writer, in part because they're all exactly alike. Throw in one or two different keywords and the whole headline changes. Pair it with a picture of boobs and you're guaranteed legitimate clicks from soon-to-be-disappointed readers. It's hard to be positive in the face of this, so the only positive thing I can say is that I'm going to focus on other things that deserve more of my attention. Jump up and down in your clown suit all you like. I'm going elsewhere. If something you say is that important, it will come up in another, more respectable form some other time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Defining "clickbait" is really tricky.
PPS - If you're looking for examples, though, try Buzzfeed.

Reboot your car

We used to tell jokes about what cars would be like if they worked as badly as computers. That's starting to be the reality now. I've heard stories of entire cars refusing to run because the computer that controlled the headlight washer fluid broke down. One company recently decided to install DRM on their batteries on a permanent rental scheme. Pretty soon, yes, you might have to stop on the highway to reboot your car to get it working again, and it's not a joke. Welcome to the future, where nothing works quite properly, but it's all supposed to be awesome.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's kind of the bleak side of robot cars, I guess.
PPS - Google tends to do good work, though, so theirs might not suck.

Declarative programming for tomorrow

I strongly suspect that, in the future, there will be much less imperative programming and more declarative. That is, we will spend less time, as programmers, telling our computers "this is how to do this task" and spend more time telling our computers "this is what the task is". Defining the conditions around the task at hand is a powerful mechanism, and is very well suited to, say, manipulating large sets of data in one go, or running in massively parallel circumstances.

My honours thesis at university was written in a declarative language called Prolog. It was designed to do calculations on certain types of code conditions which, in time, could have become part of a compiler that would tell you if your real-time conditions were likely to be met by your code. Complicated stuff, and we expected it to function only if it had certain solid numbers to work with. However, because of the way Prolog works, when we fed it symbolic data instead of concrete data, it managed to swallow the whole thing and still produce results. In computing terms, this is like teaching a child basic arithmetic and finding out later that they've conquered algebra all on their own, based only on your arithmetic lessons.

That's another kind of power declarative programming has. It can sometimes go beyond your expectations in perfectly valid and logical ways. It didn't make any difference to my program if it was manipulating "x" or manipulating "2". They're all symbols at some level. We need that kind of power, natural parallelism and simplicity of expression to conquer tomorrow's programming problems. We might not be able to expand today's most popular languages to handle these problems, though.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's likely there will still be declarative parts of these new languages.
PPS - It's difficult to avoid them.

Games on smart watches

I'm starting to wonder what games will look like on smart watches. On phones, we got things like Angry Birds, although now there are a lot more desktop-like games for phones just because the power has increased so much. Smart watches will increase in power, but the size of the watch is likely to remain a very tiny touch target. "Idle games" might be a viable option, since they require little to no interaction, and it's possible that the ready accessibility of the watch screen could result in more "running around" games that only require occasional screen interaction. If your game is heavy on touch interaction, on the small screen, that is going to prove both difficult to use (because precise touch is difficult on such a small target) and no fun (because half the time your finger would get in the way).

You know what might work? Sliding puzzles where an edge-to-edge swipe now and then works well, or possibly slow card games, whether played online or against the watch.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Something you can look at for a few seconds, then put down for an hour.
PPS - Someone will do it right, I'm sure.

Enjoying board games

I don't seem to enjoy board or tabletop games much, or at least not all the time. I'm not sure why this is. Part of it might be that I kind of suck at them, and losing all the time has a way of draining the fun out of games. For me, the process of playing has to be fun, regardless of whether I win or lose, and I don't see that many games with fun-to-play mechanics. The fun is meant to come from winning, but that can only happen for one person, usually. If your board game is only fun when you're winning, then, for a four-player game, that means your audience is 75% not having fun.

Now, for some people, trailing behind has this kind of invigorating effect. Their response to losing is "Must Try Harder, Must Play Better", and that push - the pressure to do better somehow - is a thrilling kind of fun for them. For me ... I don't know. Maybe I'm over-competitive in my own way, but losing at a board game and knowing that I'm losing is pretty disheartening. It doesn't spur me on to greatness, it puts me down in my place. "Look, you're losing! See how much you suck? This is how much you suck." It might be and expression of depression, too. Even knowing that depression lies, though, is not enough to pull me out of the losing-and-sucking funk.

So what do I do? We only have about 4 games that even work with two players, which is how we find ourselves most of the time, and most of those fall into the "win or no fun" camp. Many of the games we play also seem to derive their fun from composing and enacting a complex and cunning strategy for winning, and I guess I'm not quite there yet, either. I need more games that are just fun to play, win or lose, or at least games that could be won or lost right up to the very end, and it's anyone's guess who the winner might be until then.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I also don't seem to play many video games.
PPS - That's probably more because I have so little time at home on the computer.

All for 'naut

Although the terms "astronaut" and "cosmonaut" were coined independently during the Cold War space race and don't really mean anything different, we seem to have adopted both of them in English, plus some others like "taikonaut" so that we can't talk about a space traveller without also designating their nationality. That seems counter-productive if we're forming a worldwide society, to me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Although, of course, we don't yet have a worldwide space program, either.
PPS - Unless you count private enterprises, but those seem less global, to me.

Why phone companies won't take excess data charges from unused call credit

You know what would be awesome? If my additional data charges could be taken from my unused call credit on my mobile phone plan. See, I get about $300 of call credits on my phone every month, and I use maybe $20 of it on average. I also get 300MB of data and use about 700MB which, on my provider (Vodafone) means I get a $10 charge for an additional 1GB of data credit. So, I'm just thinking, why can't that $10 charge come from my unused call credit? I'll even let you triple the charge if it makes you feel better.

Of course I know why this doesn't happen: revenue. If you start letting customers flex their charges between call credit and data, well, phone company revenues would take a hit. The only way to make it up would be if that type of plan attracted all the customers of other companies, too. Then, of course, they'd start doing the same thing and the only winners would be the customers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And that sentence is board-room poison.
PPS - Still, it's nice to dream.

The Smart Whatever of the Future

I don't know if we need to build "The Smart Home of the Future ... Today!", or any kind of item you can name in place of "Home" there - car, bike, kitchen, fridge, whatever. I think we're just going to keep making things a little bit smarter as time goes on. Cars are getting self-parking routines built in now, and it doesn't seem like it will be long before they're driving themselves in some places. Houses are getting smart appliances like self-learning thermostats, programmable light switches and power points. We will keep building these devices and attaching them to existing infrastructure, and the best ideas will be built in to the next generation. Going whole-hog from the beginning seems like a recipe for over-complication.

What we should do, as much as possible, is to build our homes, cars and other devices or structures with the capacity to be improved, to add on, to upgrade. Ease the transition into the future by allowing today's devices to be tinkered with.

Of course the flip side is maintaining security, which is another problem, often with conflicting demands.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And history has shown that erring on the side of convenience over security will bite you in the end.
PPS - We need adequate security when our very homes and cars are online.

Being the infrequent grown-up

Remember how your parents used to hang around with weird people their own age who were always trying to talk to you or tell you how big you've grown, and then you don't see them again for about six months? Well, you know how your friends now have kids of their own and you only see them once in a while?

Congratulations. You're now the weird older people your friends' kids only sort of recognise.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The other thing I remember is being told often how much I'd grown.
PPS - Which might be interesting to the adult, but kind of pointless to the child.

Mature software project management

I have a feeling and a hope that, as the software development industry gains maturity, it will also gain some better, more solid theories and practices of project management. We have had some false starts in this area, I think, and also some very good developments, too. New languages and new tools are always being advanced, enabling new features that let us set up some really solid patterns of architecture. However, I still run into as many bad managers as good ones - those who don't understand software projects in general, or those who don't understand programmers. The clients, also, underestimate how long it takes to get something done, so unrealistic expectations are set. There is as much bad software as good in the world, or probably even more.

Would it help to teach everyone to program as part of the school curriculum? Yes, of course. It doesn't mean it's something we really need to do, though. I'm sure there are plenty of accountants, pastry chefs, firefighters and jet pilots who wish everyone knew more about their jobs to better appreciate how hard they are and how to set realistic expectations. It's probably better to develop a specialised course - "Programming For Non-Programmers" - to instill some of the necessary skills and knowledge for people when they need it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've made it as far as that title before.
PPS - Maybe someday I'll put together at least a hypothetical course outline.

Smart watches need a new mode of UI design

The smart watch proliferation is interesting. It's a new kind of device, for which a new theory of UI design will be needed. Where a phone can be used with two thumbs at once and can show a fair number of items on screen at a time, a smart watch, because it's worn on one wrist, can only be used one-handed, and can probably, in a pinch, show up to four touch targets at once. It's hard to write software in those constraints, but it's possible.

Is it good enough for most interactions for most people most of the time? Probably not. I think smart watch owners won't ever be able to use it as their primary computing device, unless their needs are very limited. If you just make calls and get reminders, maybe that would work. If you send lots of texts, though, I don't think it's going to work very well without an alternative keyboard. This might finally be the format where we have to do away with QWERTY and go to dictation for most tasks. So maybe you could get away with a watch and headphones. Maybe. I think you'll still have a computer, the way most people don't just own a phone or a tablet. A watch is a terrible primary screen.

I'm prepared to see that change in time, though. Maybe, as smart watches get people used to the idea of wearing their computers on their wrists, we'll start seeing sci-fi-like forearm computers with bigger screens, or maybe some other form of interaction will take over.

Smart watches can do a lot, and I'm glad they exist, but we can't think of them as little phones. I think they need a different mode of thought for them to work properly.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - By my count, this makes at least five basic form factors to design UIs for.
PPS - That's watch, phone, tablet (touch), desktop/laptop (mouse & keyboard), television (remote).

Will Netflix force Foxtel to unbundle channels?

I think the most interesting effects of disruptive services like Netflix will be the responses of traditional pay TV companies like Foxtel. When on-demand streaming TV is so popular that it's basically the Millennial version of pay TV, how does Foxtel respond? They've started offering on-demand services via their "Box Sets" service, but to compete on price and choice, I wonder if they will finally have to start offering a-la-carte channel choices.

Since the beginning of their existence, Foxtel (and basically every pay TV provider in the known universe) have gouged their customers by separating high-demand channels into different "bundle" packages. This means subscribers, who might just want Fox8, the Comedy Channel, Discovery and movies, need to pay for the "Basic" package, plus "Comedy", plus "Documentary", plus "Movies", all for significant additional monthly costs. But now that so much content is available on demand, and even individual channels like HBO are being sold as a stand-alone streaming service, the only way to compete with that is to offer individual channels for reduced prices or else die as a company.

They've already cut their subscription fees in half. I wonder how long it will take until The Great Unbundling.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or whether they will choose to die instead.
PPS - Or focus all their energy on building up Presto, their own streaming service.

Home power management

I've seen videos of new home power systems including power usage monitoring and reporting, which is said to allow people to check their power usage and change their behaviour in response. With these newest systems, including solar power and backup batteries, people are able to switch to batteries and solar when it suits them, to minimise their bills.

This is all good stuff, but it assumes that people will be willing to keep checking on their power and make decisions about whether they should be on battery power, solar or grid supply at any given time. The assumption behind such a system is that people are merely unable to do this, not unwilling. I think you'll find, though, that most people would rather have a system that attempts to minimise their power bill automatically, as long as it delivers reliable power.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Well, that's what I would want.
PPS - I prefer automation over manual tasks in most things, where possible.

The Cleverness in The Fear

I know it's an older song now, but I just realised that there's a bit of a clever lyric in Lily Allen's "The Fear":

"I look at the sun and I look in the mirror,
I'm on the right track, yeah I'm onto a winner."

So just this week I figured it out. She's not just talking about vague self-reflection, gazing off into the distance or examining herself, although it's that, too. Because, you know what? The Sun and The Mirror are tabloid newspapers in the UK. She's talking about getting tabloid-famous! How did I miss this? Well, probably because I don't live in the UK and I don't read newspapers at all.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I like discovering that kind of layer in music.
PPS - Or in anything, really.

Democratic work approvals processes

Could you run a business where a team's approvals are democratic? I'm thinking of things like timesheets and leave approvals, and using online tools to keep visibility for everyone. That way, everyone can see what days everyone else wants off work and can approve or reject it based on that, or can see what time everyone has spent on which projects, and whether that might be a problem.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course, it gives everyone more work to do, too.
PPS - And doesn't relieve the need for managers entirely.

Over-structured data

Data can be overstructured. That's as bad as too little structure, because it doesn't take exceptional circumstances into account. For instance, say you've decided that a postal address always consists of a street number (strictly numeric), a street name, a street type (eg "Road", "Street", "Avenue"), a suburb, a state and a postcode. Well, in this case, maybe you missed a street type in your list, which means a certain type of street (eg "Place", "Esplanade", "Boulevard") is excluded. Or what about unit numbers? They all share the same street address, but delivering to unit 7 is very different to delivering to unit 17. You get the point. You need to strike the right balance between structuring your data to give it meaning and consistency, and leaving it unstructured to allow for unforseen circumstances. It can be a tricky balance to strike.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The worst part is that the right structure is always changing.
PPS - Everything is always changing.

I don't channel-surf online

I don't feel like I have "bookmarks" any more for sites that I need to remember to visit every day. I have three places I go for online entertainment: feedly, Facebook and Pocket. The only reason Facebook is on that list is because I can't get my friends' posts in Feedly. Pocket is where I put items from Feedly that I can't (or don't want to) read or watch right away. That's it. If your website doesn't provide a feed I can load into Feedly so that it comes to me automatically, I will probably forget about you forever.

Is this harsh? I don't think so. Is it unusual? Perhaps. The thing is, I'm not looking for my internet experience to be like channel-flipping on a TV. I don't gain any pleasure from hunting around for something new when I could program it all to come straight to me. That makes far more sense, to my mind, plus it means I don't miss anything just because I didn't go to this or that website today. This is important if I want to read certain web comics, because they're telling one long story, in order. Missing one is like missing a chunk of the story, a chapter of a book, and the rest never makes sense again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - One day, perhaps, I'll have to accept missing out on some articles online.
PPS - The best articles should show up in multiple places, though.

Internet law and order

What should be the law enforcement model for the internet? A police force that patrols and investigates to prevent and fight crime? An armed force that develops an arsenal and deploys troops to trouble spots? A spy agency that secretly infiltrates hostile or potentially-threatening organisations to destroy them efficiently and covertly from the inside? Private fiefdoms with individual guard troops to defend just their own territory? Something else entirely?

It matters how we think of this, because it affects the way we treat the internet as a resource and the threats we find there. If we imagine a war metaphor, we will talk about collatoral damage, attacks, strikes and operations of attack. If we talk about spies, we prioritise exploiting vulnerabilities instead of fixing or reporting them. Right now, we're working with a mix of everything I've mentioned.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Personally, I believe it should be a combination of police and private security.
PPS - And that unfixed vulnerabilities make us all less safe.

Two kinds of habits

Building a habit of quitting is much harder than building a positive habit. When I talk about a positive habit, I'm talking about, for instance, doing pushups every morning when you wake up. It's a definite action. When you wake up, you do some pushups, then you know you're done. Even if you do it later in the day, that's a kind of success.

To quit something is a much more empty kind of act. Say you're quitting smoking. Today, you throw out your cigarettes and don't buy more, but the victory is when, every single time the urge to smoke rises up, you do nothing. Then tomorrow, when you want to smoke, you do nothing. You continue doing nothing until, hopefully, eventually, the urge to smoke doesn't come up again, and "not smoking" is no longer a goal or a victory but your default state of being. There are certainly rewards to quitting something destructive like that, but they're less tangible and more long-term than the satisfaction and reward of doing something positive.

Perhaps that's something to consider. Instead of aiming just to quit something, you should aim to take up something positive instead, like the pushups. Maybe, eventually, you will associate the same triggers with an urge to do some pushups instead of an urge to smoke. I'd like to see that clinical trial.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure it's been done.
PPS - It seems to be common enough advice, anyway.

Satire of yourself

Playing satire in public where people have to know you to know that you're kidding is a dangerous thing. If it starts to reach enough people, plenty of them won't know you're kidding, just because they don't know you well enough to know that's not "really" you. At that point, the honest defence of your actions - "I was just kidding!" - sounds over-defensive and insincere.

So, to summarise, if you tell a joke by acting out of character, someone won't get it, and then it's very difficult to take it back.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm aware I'm advocating a chilling effect.
PPS - Or, from another perspective, a good PR move.

Thick skin

People sometimes excuse their own lack of tact by saying that people need to develop thick skins, and they're only helping out. But needing a thick skin doesn't mean that nobody is ever going to be nice to you again, does it? There are plenty of people being mean in the world, or just being tactless. Be one of the good ones.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I like to think I am.
PPS - I guess most people want to believe they are the good guys.

Too tired for your mental health

Like muscles that are overtired and can't work properly any more, good mental habits can be undone by mental stress or overwork. Those "good mental habits" might be anything you've learned in your lifetime, such as "not having panic dreams about being naked in school just before a test you haven't studied for" or "not slipping into bottomless depression for no reason".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The funny thing is, sometimes you don't know you have these good mental habits until they disappear.
PPS - And then you don't know how to get them back.

Encoding trust

Security of any form is a system of trust. So what is trust? It involves delegation of authority - I allow you to act on my behalf - and it also implies an alignment of goals or interests, or at least an assumption of such. I believe that the actions you take on my behalf, or the actions you take that will affect me in some way, will be in my best interests, or at least will be a decent compromise I can live with.

Employers trust their employees to act as part of the company. Spouses trust each other to respect boundaries of online accounts or to treat shared finances with respect. Friends trust each other to keep private stories, pictures and other shared secrets private. In many cases, fear of social or professional repercussions are the limiting factor. If we violate this trust, we lose our friends, lose our jobs, put strain on our relationships.

A lot of the time, though, trust is a very difficult thing to codify into a computer system. Real-world trust can be very granular. I trust you in this area but not in that. I trust you only for about half an hour when left alone, and only if I lock up the petty cash. I don't trust either of you alone with these nuclear launch codes, but I trust you together to keep an eye on each other. What you can never account for is secret intent. If I have decided, on my own, that my employer of fifteen years is doing something corrupt and illegal, and that my best course of action is to take some evidence to outside authorities, how can you tell what I'm doing? If I normally copy certain documents every morning for work purposes, and today I'm copying similar documents in the same way but for untrusted purposes, the computer system won't know that, no matter how it is coded.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Whistleblowers will always be a "threat" to corporations.
PPS - Personally, I think whistleblowers are a security feature for society.

Is there any freedom of speech online?

Is there a public space on the internet, or just a series of private spaces we all perceive as public because they're available to everyone? People arguing against "censorship" online are often actually arguing for their "right" to say whatever they want in "public" spaces, but when every space on the internet, from Facebook to Twitter to your own blog is actually owned by someone (your blog is probably owned by Google, Wordpress or your web host) then there's no space where someone else doesn't have the right to take down what you say because they, personally, disagree with it. From that point of view, there might actually not be anywhere on the internet where the notion of "freedom of speech" even applies. There is nowhere you can say something online that someone else can't just say "no" to, and take it down again, no rights violated.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I am not a lawyer, though, so don't take this as any kind of legal opinion.
PPS - I'm also not American, so the American Constitution, with its Amendments, does not apply to me either.

I missed a spot

Yesterday may have been the first weekday in years that I've not posted here. I'm not going to go back and check how long it's been, though. I think, sometimes, in the past, I've even back-dated a post just so that it still looks like I've been diligent. This time, though, I think I'll just leave it.

I've been sick, on and off for the past two weeks or so, and this has been a major disruption to my normal routines, including blogging. The details of my sickness are disgusting, so I won't share. The secondary effects are lots of sleeping and staying home from work. I really hope, this time, I can recover properly and put it behind me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I also haven't been writing or reading much.
PPS - At home, I gravitate more towards YouTube and other internet activities or television.

Could anything replace Linux?

At this point, could some other open-source operating system topple Linux off its perch as the dominant open-source OS? There are others around, but they'd have to match Linux's stability, functionality and support levels before they'd be seen as a significant contender. That would mean attracting the same number of dedicated developers, and that's unlikely, in my opinion. All the developers who would be working on some other open-source operating system are already either working on Linux or on their own pet project. Those pet projects, lacking the developer effort and organisation of Linux, will move more slowly and will therefore feel like they're being left behind by all flavours of Linux, not to mention Windows and OS X as well.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It takes a lot of effort to make a modern OS.
PPS - And in software, effort means time and people, which in turn usually means money.

On this day in the future

On this day in the future:

2084: The Olympic organising committee votes to allow traditional pole dancing as part of the female gymnastics program. Lobbying for male pole dancing inclusion begins immediately.
2123: The majestic Cadbury Creme Pigeon, source of all Cadbury Creme Eggs, is declared extinct. The last specimen goes on display at the Cadbury Natural History Museum in New Atlantis.
2191: A motorcycle with a horse's brain, called Grey Matter, wins the Melbourne Cup in 58 seconds. Muddy conditions the following year prevent Grey Matter from retaining the cup.
2208: After lengthy discussions between the Australian and New Zealand governments, The Commonwealth of Australia finally accepts statehood in New Zealand.
2253: Arnold Schwarzeneggar's brain dies at the age of 306. A stand-in brain is hired to complete filming of his 267th movie.
2288: Brazil successfully enters an ape in the Olympics for wrestling. Broadcasts are stopped mere seconds into the ape's first bout for undisclosed reasons.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wrote these all at different times, for different reasons.
PPS - There's more about the sports and brains than I remembered until I put them together.

Removal of software features

Software sometimes faces the removal of features as it goes on in life. This is especially true of large, complex software with lots of users. Maintaining features through upgrades costs time and effort in development and support. Sometimes the justification is made that this or that feature or option is being removed and replaced with a permanent setting based on how many people don't use it, or the way most people keep the setting. This stands to upset as few people as possible.

The problem is that it does upset some people, and if you have thousands or tens of thousands of users, you're going to be upsetting a large number of people, however small the percentage is. That can get lost in the analysis. If "only" 35% of your users sort oldest-first, but the majority keep their lists sorted in the default newest-first order, you may be tempted to set the sorting option to newest-first permanently. However, if you have 100,000 users, you're about to cause problems for 35,000 of them. Some will adapt. Some will leave for software that still does what they want. Are you willing to risk those 35,000 users for the sake of not maintaining a sort option?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For me, a lot of my software has an audience of one.
PPS - And when it doesn't, removal of features is not up to me.

One-way content sharing

I'd like to know when and how the "roach motel" business model for online service providers will fall down again. Well, I say "again" because I think it's similar to the Compuserve and AOL "walled garden" business models of the early web. Those companies aimed to provide everything their users could ever want or need in curated collections, but the Weird Wild Web outdid them and they collapsed. These days, companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft are all vying to be the only service provider you need, but in a different way. Now they provide search, calendars, personal posts, email, maps (or some significant subset) and all their APIs are aimed at getting content in, but not letting it out. Google demonstrated their commitment to this model recently by shutting off external RSS feeds of each user's YouTube subscriptions, forcing tech-savvy users like me to go directly to YouTube instead of keeping up to date on my subscriptions via my feed reader. Content checks in, but it doesn't check out.

Can this business model succeed where the walled gardens failed? I don't know, but I kind of hope not. The one-way sieve operating here is strong, and it's difficult to disrupt. You can start yourself as a tiny content provider, but as long as the big players can suck in your content, they get all the same benefits without needing to change. If you don't allow them to pull you in somehow, then you wither and die because they are the gatekeepers of online attention now.

The only bump in the road I can see is if they start disrupting each other. If Facebook users want to start sharing content from there to Google+ for some reason, and they can't, and this problem grows larger, then Facebook has to cave to user demand, but this would just lead to them being swallowed up by Google, in my opinion. They need to defend this border or they die.

So I guess I don't have an answer. The only remaining idea is that these giants of the internet get too big to keep growing and break apart on their own, like some kind of Google Civil War. Perhaps a generation from now, when their founders are gone and the core ideals rotted from the inside, there will be a breakaway group that forms a new company, large enough to compete but small enough to react to the web we will have 20 years from now.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Whatever that will look like.
PPS - If I knew that, I'd be rich already.

Fallibility

Nobody can do no wrong. Your heroes are fallible human beings who make mistakes, overlook things, and sometimes hold problematic opinions. They tell lies, they dislike some things you love, they love some things you hate. They say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing. They get into accidents, sweep things under the rug, would rather not discuss certain topics. They run out of energy, get sick, get injured. Sometimes their bodies don't work properly, sometimes their minds don't work quite right. They forget, they remember incorrectly and they will occasionally deceive themselves.

It's easy to forget, when you only interact with them one-way, from their public persona and appearances to your perception and mental image of them, but if you weren't familiar with their work, you could sit next to them on the bus and never know how much they mean to the world.

They are people, and people are fragile, complex, emotional, intellectual beings with faults and failures as big as their strengths and successes. Try to remember that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You probably won't remember it all the time.
PPS - I certainly don't.

Does my ideal job even exist?

When I think of the kind of job I would like to do in my 40s or even closer to retirement, I still think of software, fiction and acting. As always, however, I tend to picture a job that doesn't involve any of the things I dislike doing, or that fill me with a sense of dread and disgust. Those would be any sales and marketing activities, and, if I'm being honest, management and leadership, too. I don't want to be a leader. I've never wanted that. And if my mental self-image ever overlaps with smarmy, greasy, sharks-in-suits salespeople (which is obviously a caricature or stereotype) then I'll be very disappointed with my life.

I know everyone has to do things they don't want to, but every now and then, you come across a person who, with a huge smile, says she is exactly where she wants to be and, if they stopped paying her tomorrow, she'd still be doing this job. That's the kind of job I want. Is there a place for me like that? If not, I'll happily take the financial freedom to just retire.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - As would plenty of other people, I'm sure.
PPS - But I asked first, so there.

No, I did not have "man flu"

I've been sick for several days and counting now, but I'm back at work, coughing, sneezing and snotting my way through the day, trying not to infect every surface I encounter. I've been asked by some coworkers if I had "the dreaded man flu". Now, because I am a man and had flu-like symptoms, some people will not believe me regardless of the evidence I present. As a man with flu-like symptoms, of course, my judgement cannot be trusted on this issue. However, I would like to present Exhibit A: fevers, experienced over the first two days, Exhibit B: constant nasal and sinus congestion and Exhibit C: a cough producing yellow-green phlegm from my lungs. I'm sick. No question about that in my mind, and I wouldn't call it "man flu".

To me, "man flu" means exaggerating your symptoms, demanding to be waited on while lying comfortably in bed. Picture Homer Simpson, lying on the couch, ringing a little service bell and yelling for Marge to come and serve him some specific food or drink. He's clearly not as sick as that, and neither am I. I'm still running the domestic micro-errands requested by the lady of the house ("Can you get me some water, please?"). If I were to accept the diagnosis of "man flu", that would have to be the first thing to go.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I could possibly have gone back to work one day earlier.
PPS - Since I wasn't getting paid time off, however, that's my call to make.

Crowdsource what can't be computerised

To a large extent, almost anything you think can't be automated by computers can be crowdsourced. Do you think an HR job can't be taken over by a robot? Try asking 10,000 people for hire/fire decisions on your potential and existing workforce and compare that to your HR department's decisions. I bet they'd be close. The only question is whether crowdsourcing is cheaper, faster or more reliable than hiring one good person.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The problem gets very meta when talking about hiring HR people.
PPS - I'd love to see how well a crowd can act as CEO.

Escapism

Escapism should be used as a way to get an external perspective on your problems, rather than trying to leave them behind. All within reason, of course. Nobody will begrudge you a little escape now and then, the same way you're meant to take regular holidays from work. The point is more for creators. Take the time to make your creations relevant to the problems you see in the world, they'll have more depth, even if most people don't realise why. To me, that's a pretty good win.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And a very tricky thing to do.
PPS - But worth it, I think.

Too big for Twitter

I'm sad to hear that Joss Whedon quit Twitter. It seems, lately, that social media is a bad place for people to get attention. Or maybe I'm trying to say that a lot of attention online will also bring you a lot of negative attention, regardless of what you do, and exposing yourself to that level of toxicity is less likely to get you any super powers and more likely to get you into therapy.

This is what we do to famous people these days. Back before Twitter, famous people were a rare bird, only seen in sleazy paparazzi rags, publicity events and their own work, or, if you were very lucky, in a random encounter on the street. Then Twitter opened up and said "We have the celebrities! In a cage! Come and poke them!" And we did. Oh, how we did. They didn't like it much, but what could they do? Not be on Twitter? Please.

Except it seems like that's the best option now. Rather than trying to filter a little signal out of the torrent of noise, gaining a tiny bit of happiness for hours of wading through humanity's excrement, your better odds for happiness are to avoid the general public altogether, which is how it used to be anyway.

There was a reason celebrities became recluses. It's because humans, en-masse, are terrible people, who will abuse, berate and harass you for making the things that they love.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Thankfully, being too big for Twitter would have some pretty great consolation prizes.
PPS - Like huge piles of money.

Can we convince trolls that it's not funny?

How do you change someone's mind that trolling is funny? We all go through this stage, it seems, when we aim to get a rise out of people online (or in person) because we find it funny, because at some time during puberty we turn into gaping a-holes spewing poop at the world - just coating it in our stinking, festering monkey-poop - and lauging at people who get upset that we have covered them in our poop. Then some time later we realise that, when we did that, we were being gaping a-holes who didn't deserve the free room, board and internet we got from our parents and we settle down.

Is there a way we can train kids early on not to be that particular kind of a-hole to each other? Is there something we can say to them to indicate that the descriptor "clever insult" doesn't apply to the phrase "you should shut up and kill yourself"? I hope so. The internet gives our words vast reach and permanence, so when you're an a-hole in person, it can be damaging, but when you're an a-hole online, it can be so devastating that people do kill themselves.

So, pre-pubescent trolls, listen up: when you aim to make someone upset online, I'm going to need you to explain to yourself, first, why it's hilarious. You need to go far deeper than "It just is, because now they're angry, so shut up". You're angry, too. That's most of the reason you're smearing your own feces on the internet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you can explain why it's funny, it still has to be something you'd be happy for your parents to read.
PPS - I'm well aware that this post, on its own, won't change any troll's mind.

The real problem with nepotism

The reason nepotism is a problem is not necessarily that the wrong people get the jobs. If a relative does a terrible job but his family refuses to fire him, the company will just collapse or, at best, not fulfil its potential, and then the job goes away entirely. No, the real problem with nepotism is the mixing of power structures. If I work for you, but then you hire your son as my subordinate, I can't actually tell him he's doing a bad job or fire him if necessary, because that counts as a slight against you, my boss. The person who is supposed to be my responsibility is actually someone I have to treat as my superior, even if you tell me not to.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That particular arrangement won't usually happen, though.
PPS - Because, if you're going to hire your son, you won't put him more than one level below you.

Magic and comedy

To me, I think there are two subtly different ways of combining magic and comedy. On the one side, there are magical comedians like The Amazing Jonathan, who seem to have started in comedy and use magic for their act. If you go expecting amazing illusions, you'll be disappointed, because The Amazing Jonathan is there to make you laugh, first and foremost.

On the other side are comic magicians like Sylvester the Jester, who is clearly a magician first, but flavours his magic with over-the-top cartoonish comedy and sound effects. Sylvester the Jester performs for the magic, and comedy is just his gimmick.

For me, a fan of both magic and comedy, I think I prefer the magical comedian approach, in part because the comedy in a comic magician show feels too tacked-on. If you're aiming to make people laugh, that takes a certain type of performance, and the magic gets in the way of that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There's probably a way to lift both of the aspects up to a truly great magic comedy performance, but I've never seen it.
PPS - I've never actually seen a live magic stage show.

Nesting doll houses

Someone should make a matryoska doll house for those Russian nesting dolls. Just nest smaller and smaller doll houses inside each other, one for each size doll. Bonus points for observing that, once you unpack it all, it's bigger on the inside.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My dad went to Russia and brought back souvenir matryoska dolls for everyone but me and my brother.
PPS - Twice.

A white featureless room

When I'm writing, I tend to leave out a lot of environmental descriptions. This might be because I want the action to move along quickly. Excitement! Explosions! People flying through the air! No time to tell you what colour the walls are, we're DOIN' STUFF over here!

This might be because I trained myself on flash fiction. Whatever the cause, I need to consciously practice writing those descriptions that I otherwise leave out of my work. I'm not yet sure how to do this, but I'm trying something at the moment where I take something I've written before and just write another version that is all environment and description. No dialogue allowed, so I can't get expositiony, and no character names, either. I'm not sure if the "no names" policy will work well, but trying to tell the same story with nothing but environment and explicit facial expressions or gestures - no interpretation - is much trickier than I'd expected.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm also not sure how to integrate it with the rest.
PPS - I guess that's a whole different struggle.

Societal security practices

Individual security, in some instances, is a personal choice. You might leave your phone completely open with no PIN or lock pattern. Someone else might install a PIN lock per app. I lock the whole phone with a lock pattern. We all choose what works best for us, and most people choose convenience (no lock) over security (lock).

That aggregate choice, however, affects or even creates the broad security landscape in which we operate. If most people lock their phones, then most thieves can never get into a stolen phone, making phone theft basically pointless. However, since most people do not lock their phones, phone theft is still viable and a locked phone can instead be more vulnerable when stolen, because a locked phone will just get discarded while an unlocked phone gives you time to hunt it down.

This is exactly what happens when the general public get to choose how convenient they want their technology. What can we do about it? Well, one option would be to all leave our phones unlocked and just track them down when they're stolen. Another option is to demand, at the manufacturer level, that all phones have locks installed from now on. Take away the choice. Either way works, but I have a feeling that the second way would make a better world, even if it's a less-convenient one.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course, that won't happen, because it's hard to change.
PPS - And, as we've learned, law enforcement opposes anything that makes it harder to spy on us.

The full cost of cheap software

You should always count the ongoing cost of software you buy for your business. You might pay less for a particular package, but if it takes a lot more time and effort to set up and maintain to do the job you want it to do, the long-term cost is more than other software that's easier to use. Even if that other software costs more up front, the lower maintenance costs will quickly overtake the "cheaper" option.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, consider how rare and expensive are the skills needed for the software.
PPS - There are a lot of factors to consider.

Control vs Security

You can't secure what you can't control, but control alone is not security. People mistake control for security when they say the iTunes App Store is safe because it's curated, or that only registered taxis are safe. The iTunes App Store and registered taxis are controlled, but that does not automatically imply that the control exercised over them is perfectly secure or even that their criteria for control is in your best interests.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Spoiler alert: Apple is not out for your best interests.
PPS - Neither is any other for-profit corporation, just to be thorough.

The Big Red Button

You know those locked plastic covers they have over the Big Red Button in movies, regardless of what that Big Red Button does? They need that same thing over the "Reply All" button in email programs. That action needs to have some real gravitas. Not a pop-up asking "Are you sure?", but the action itself impressing upon you that this is a big thing you are doing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's going to be a fair bit more annoying.
PPS - And that's kind of the whole point.

Being Batman

I see one of the arguments in favour of Batman is that he is a testament to the upper limits of human ability and training. If that were all he was, then fine, but it's not, is it? I mean, yes, he's well-trained and all that, but also a very large part of being Batman is the gadgets. Can Bruce Wayne even be Batman without armour, a grappling hook and bat-shaped boomerangs, not to mention a sweet ride? Take away all the gadgets and Batman is just Gravel-Voiced Punching Guy. He might be good at that, but it's not everything we think of as Batman.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure, in his long history, there has been an exploration of what non-billionaire Batman would look like.
PPS - I'm sure it felt like there was something missing.

What makes a robot?

Personally, I find it a bit misleading to call something a "robot" if it is completely remote-controlled by a human. Yes, it might have some neat features and perform a useful task, like a snowplow I saw recently, but that just makes it a sophisticated power tool, not a robot. I mean, if a remote-controlled vehicle is all it takes to be called a robot, then I had a robot toy car when I was a kid.

I'll grant that there's going to be a blurry line here. If a remote controlled vehicle has on-board sensors that it uses to, say, avoid rolling off cliffs, but you are otherwise controlling it yourself, is it really a robot? Any question of classification ultimately devolves into this kind of nitpicky legalism, so at a certain point the question becomes a bit of a meaningless time-sink. I just think that using the word "robot" sets up certain expectations of autonomy that are often not delivered.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's the semi-autonomous machines that give the most trouble.
PPS - Taxonomically, that is. I'm sure fully-autonomous ones are the most trouble behaviourally.

Arimaa

I'm kind of interested in the way a game was created specifically to be difficult for computers but easy enough for a 4-year-old to play with standard chess pieces, called Arimaa. It's an interesting goal to push computer game-playing research further, and it seems to have worked. The game was invented in 2002 and then a computer won the yearly human-vs-computer tournament this year (2015). On the one hand, this might represent massive gains in processing power and algorithmic research since the game's invention, or it might represent an unforeseen weakness in the game design. Most likely, it's a bit of both.

My question is: what comes next? Does someone else design a new iteration of game that is really tricky for computers to play but comparatively easy for humans? Do we modify Arimaa to bump up the computer difficulty? When do we reach the point where "easy for a 4-year-old" also means "trivial for computers"? If it takes decades for computers to beat human grandmasters at chess, but only one decade for computers to beat human Arimaa masters, how much difficulty can we expect to squeeze out of a new iteration of game difficulty? Probably a year or two, I'd think, given the pattern.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd love it if a computer designed a game itself to this goal.
PPS - Which, I guess, would make that game a kind of CAPTCHA.

How small can a dishwasher get?

I think it would be possible or beneficial to create a little in-sink automatic dishwasher rack that connects to your taps. It couldn't hold much, and it probably wouldn't do such a good job, but think of the space savings. For small apartments or small kitchens, this could be a real benefit.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or maybe, by then, the benefits are just too small.
PPS - Because, really, you'd only fit a couple of plates in there, wouldn't you?

To achieve a meaningless first

I want to be the first person carried up Mount Everest on a sedan chair. Sure, it's a kind of achievement, but I could easily be replaced with a sack of potatoes and it would make no difference. I like that kind of weirdness.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That is all. I'm tired.
PPS - Which is the perfect time to be carried around. Anyone interested?

Making online workspaces for teams

To bring together the widely-dispersed teams of the future, we need people who can build virtual office spaces as much as today we need people who fit out physical offices to the specifications of clients. The difference is that today's business says "we need space for 60 desks, each with two computer monitors and a phone, plus we need three eight-person meeting rooms" or whatever, while tomorrow's global business might say "we need a connected workspace for a team of 20 people, including easy video for private meetings, plus of course some shared file storage, and we'd like people to be able to work offline and re-sync later". The virtual architect of that workspace will need to know how to bring together existing and new software seamlessly so that the virtual office just works. That should mean that nobody needs to think about the where and how of talking to each other after a 5-minute tutorial.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Very small businesses may have off-the-shelf solutions for online work.
PPS - Very large corporations will be an altogether different beast.

ASMR

Autonomous sensory meridian response, if real, might just be the pleasure centre of the brain reacting to a feeling of intimacy generated by whispering, plus the blessed relief that comes with finally getting some peace and quiet from the noisy world for once. The white noise represents that quiet nicely and, as a bonus, comes with the high-gain settings necessary to capture whispering on a microphone.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not completely convinced.
PPS - I haven't had it myself, anyway.

Super-speed

I've always thought, if I could have a super power, that super-speed would be pretty great. I just think I'd get a lot done, plus the opportunities for messing with people are huge. We discussed this at a recent dinner with friends, because I have awesome friends, and we bounced back and forth different ideas of what you could do with such power if, say, someone was giving a speech. With a couple of props, you could make it look like they were trying to avoid giving the speech at all by performing a bunch of magic tricks. Imagine putting ping-pong balls in their mouth any time it opens up, releasing doves from their sleeves every time they gesture widely, then replacing them with a monkey in a critical moment. Hilarious.

Of course, this assumes that the force and speed don't disintegrate anything, create sonic shock waves or superheat the air, which is a real danger with super-speed and not at all fun. It has to be a weird kind of magical, non-destructive speed power. Quicksilver, in X-Men: Days of Future Past, holds Magneto's head so he doesn't get whiplash, then runs at a speed that would disintegrate a human body anyway. You want to avoid that, if you're super-speeding about. Just a tip.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd probably get a lot of reading done.
PPS - Then I'd probably get super-bored, to be honest.

Are backer rewards worth it?

Do backer perks kill or at least bog down creative projects funded through Kickstarter or other crowdfunding sites? If I were attempting a project like that, I'd be surprised if I didn't spend half my time signing things and shipping them out, rather than doing the actual project. And a significant amount of the funding would have to go to those backer rewards, too, which leaves less available for the actual project. That could easily be a trap that creative people fall into when asking for crowdfunding money. If you think you'll need $100K to complete your project, and you reach that goal, but you have to spend $50K on backer rewards, you're going to fail, because you're really only half-funded. Or if you're making some new device and you promise one to every backer, then you fund your whole first production run, send them all off to backers and you're back to square one.

While I realise that backer rewards are something people can easily comprehend, I think crowdfunding should probably work more like ordinary venture capital. I invest in your project, you make it happen, I get dividends in return from your sales. If I want a copy of the movie, TV show, nifty gadget, I can buy one like anyone else. Freebies for backers work pretty well if you've got two big investors. Throw them a bone to sweeten the deal. Why not? But if you're funded by ten thousand of your biggest fans, then you give away the work to them afterwards, I think the money would all just form a complete circle and cancel itself out.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Presumably, though, you learn some stuff.
PPS - And are in a good position to start a second run, if you made any profit.

Calorie counting made easier

Counting calories is a massive pain, especially when cooking for yourself or eating out. Who knows exactly how much of each ingredient has gone into a meal? All the charts and tables are really, really precise - often listing individual meals from popular fast food chains down to single-digit accuracy. This means you need to find the exact thing you're eating, not a reasonable facsimile, and if you can't find that, then you're kind of screwed. Calculating calories for your own home-cooked meals means measuring each ingredient, finding that on the chart and adding it all up. If you're eating out at a unique restaurant or little cafe, you'll be guessing more than anything.
My idea of the day is to draw up a rough-idea grid of calorie counts in different classifications of food - not "chicken", "pizza" and "beer" but "bad", "so-so" and "good", with a breakdown of portion sizes, "small", "medium" and "large". From this, you should be able to get a good enough idea of your calorie intake without needing to look up the difference between white rice and brown rice. We're sacrificing some precision for better usability. You do need to know enough to say whether a meal is good or bad, and that might get subjective, but how much difference does it make to your system if you think you've eaten 50 calories instead of 60?
So here's my chart. Consider it a work in progress, able to be tweaked if you want, but remember the goal: simplicity over precision, but maintaining accuracy. By all means, adjust the values, but if you start trying to add in the difference between chicken and beef, stop.

	Healthy	So-so	Unhealthy	Sweets/Desserts
Large	300	600	1200	1600
Medium	150	300	600	800
Small	80	150	300	400
Bite	0	50	100	200

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's weird, but I put off writing up this table for weeks.
PPS - I guess I thought it would be hard.

Whole-system design

I think there are probably some gains to be made in whole-system design in houses, for energy efficiency. After all, we have one device to pump heat out of a small box and into the air (fridge), a different box to pump heat from the inside to the outside (air conditioner) and then a tank to put heat into water (water heater). I have a feeling that all of these heat pumps could be connected for greater efficiency somehow.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd be surprised if that were the only gain to make.
PPS - A good architect probably designs this kind of system all the time.

Domestic training

I used to take some offense at the idea of women "training" their men. It sounds so degrading, like teaching a pet a new trick. It puts the woman in charge and the man in a subservient role, and it's not truly enjoyable for either person. It's not a partnership at that point, but more of a matriarchal dictatorship. Neither side is supposed to be "in charge" of a healthy relationship.

However, I do recognise that many men grow up with terrible domestic habits. We leave wet towels on the floor, we don't cook or clean or tidy up, things like that. These are habits and behaviours that we should have grown out of, but if a boy has his mother picking up after him all of his life, it won't even occur to him that towels should go anywhere else. Why would it? Don't count on self-awareness and consideration developing naturally. We do need to be told things sometimes. If you pick up after a man and wait for the guilt to set in after self-reflection, you'll never get what you want. If you ramp-up the consequences of inconsiderate actions ("Put his wet towels under his pillow!") then you will grow to see your man as a child. I think the better move is to talk about it. It's still training, in a way, but respectful.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also remember: nobody is the perfect partner.
PPS - Not even you.

I need sports info

At social gatherings, I often feel left out when other guys start talking sports (which, in Australia, means cricket and two codes of football, plus the soccer world cup). The last time I thought to myself that there must be some news feed I can follow that gives enough info for me to fake my way through these conversations.

Then I thought, maybe there isn't, and I could create it.

Then my last thought was maintaining the site - adding content - would mean making it my job to watch these sports live (so the site updates would be timely) and suddenly I've signed up to be Full-Time Sports Guy when my goal was not to have to deal with sports directly at all.

So, in short, this is probably not happening, but I wish someone else would do it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I need this for world news, too.
PPS - Right now, I'm only as informed as John Oliver can make me.

Cargo cult consumer design

Samsung's new phones have no removable batteries or storage card expansion slot, probably because that's what Apple does. Hey, Samsung, you know what I'll buy if I want something like an iPhone? An actual iPhone. I buy Android phones because they aren't like Apple's lock-in crap. You're giving up your differentiating features in a cargo-cult mentality, believing that if you copy Apple, you will copy Apple's success. That's a flawed concept, as far as I'm concerned.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - When you're a little Apple, you might have a little bit of Apple-like success.
PPS - But not a lot.

Dealing with the entertainment singularity

We are already at an entertainment singularity. Not only is there already more entertainment of every form (books, movies, TV, cat videos) than any one person could experience in a lifetime, but we are already producing far more of it than any person could hope to keep up with. What is the best way to deal with this flood? I have a system where I keep a very large list of items, carefully prioritised, and add anything new to the list so that it gets the same chance of washing up on my beach as anything else. It is, however, always getting longer, and will continue to do so for the rest of my life.

The only other way I can imagine dealing with it all is to learn to let go of the idea of doing the "best" things and just let absolutely everything wash over me all at once, doing whatever new thing I have time for right now and forgetting about the rest forever. Is there a new book coming out, but I'm reading another one? Too bad, new book. I guess I'll see you in Heaven. New TV show, but I have no time? Oh, well. I guess I'll never know what it was about.

That feels like giving up, to me. I know being the latest thing doesn't mean it's the greatest. I just can't let go like that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess most other people are already at that last stage.
PPS - I might have a fear of missing out.

Amazon Dash is disruptive

The Amazon Dash button, announced just before April Fool's Day, caused some confusion among people online. Was it a joke? Is it necessary or just lazy? Is it a bad thing to be lazy this way?

If you missed it, Amazon Dash is a dedicated physical push-button reorder system for household consumables like coffee, paper towels and laundry detergent, for Amazon Prime customers (so, not for me in Australia, then). The promo video is an unselfconscious revelling in consumerism, but that's another post.

I'm kind of torn about it. On the one hand, it's a neat gadget, and that seems cool. It's like convenience shopping inside your home. Very "Internet of Things", in a way. On the other hand, it does seem really goofy. I look forward to a lot of parody videos.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The thing is, I can't think of any ways to make it really funny.
PPS - Just sort of mildly amusing.

Board games on mobile

I really like the idea of board games playable on mobile devices over the internet where it doesn't matter how long each person takes to play their turn. Because it can be hard to organise a group of people to get together all at once to play a game, this way everyone is always playing, and the game just goes on, even if one person delays a bit. It will take a lot longer to play a game through, but who cares? The fun is still there, and you've got other games to play, too. This is just a way to play specific games with friends that would otherwise take a lot more effort and commitment to play.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wish there were more of them.
PPS - And that I could play them. Obviously.

On-demand basic services

Here's a weird thought. With internet services for on-demand travel and shelter (eg Uber and AirBnB) plus storage lockers and wireless data, could some people live "homeless" but as fully-employed, fully-functional members of society now? Or, if not now, then when? It might not be too long from now that robot cars provide transportation as a subscription service, and it's not too far-fetched to picture the same deal for accommodation and storage.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - People who sleep in robot cars will be a very weird sub-tribe.
PPS - Though I plan to do that myself on my way home all the time.

Self-forgiveness

I find it really hard to forgive myself for mistakes. I make plenty of them, so you'd think I'd have enough experience, but I'm still just as bad at it today as when I started beating myself up about my screw-ups, which was many years ago. "Progress" is managing not to call myself names while I am figuratively punching myself in the guts in the aftermath. That progress is often short-lived. I even get into some meta-self-flagellation about my self-flagellation, this post being a soft example of that.

I think part of it stems from (or is at least related to) my long-standing behaviour of trying to elicit pity as an attention-getting strategy. I would cry at school, I'd tell people how my mother died when I was young, I'd loudly and publicly lament that I'd never had a girlfriend, I'd avoid bringing up people's mistakes about my name or about overlooking me in order to spring it on them much later to maximise their shame and the pity they'd feel for me.

It's pretty pathological behaviour, when you look at it like this. The point, in context, is that seeking pity is now a long-ingrained reflex for me, and tearing myself down is just one step in that process. I need to be low to get pity, and if I'm not low enough, I'll make myself lower.

This does not mesh well with forgiveness, or the problem-solving mindset I have to use for my work. Often there's no solution and nothing to do but accept the loss and move on, trying to do better next time. I never feel like I can just move on without trying to figure out how it all went wrong this time. This leads me to focus obsessively on my mistakes and the costs associated with them, which can be exhausting.

Take a recent example: I had a function to attend after work, and this would have been most easily managed by driving to work that day so I could drive there and drive home at night when it was finished, instead of taking the train as I normally do. I didn't plan my transport and didn't discuss it with my wife until I had already taken the train to work that day. We only have the one car, so if I drive to work, she needs to know that. I could have discussed it in advance, the night before. I could even have tried discussing it that morning, though that wouldn't have been so easy. I leave early, and let's say not everyone in the house is alert in the mornings.

Still, there are a lot of ways I could have done better, and I was well aware of these in advance. I didn't do them or even make an attempt, resulting in some tense exchanges of texts that made me feel like an irresponsible child. That's a recurring feeling here: that of an irresponsible child. It readily feeds into a number of other anxieties and personality issues, too, such as not being good enough to be a father, not being worthy of being a husband, remembering all the poor organisation and problems I have caused at home and so on. It's what makes me feel, most often, that I am not a Real Man, whatever that means. Real Men, says the voice in my head, communicate properly with their wives so they don't have to ask for a lift home at night. Real Men are confident, in control and show a basic life competence far beyond yours, obviously. Self-flagellation. And, in the end, it turned out not even to be a big deal.

Wanting to break out of this cycle is not enough. Knowing how, clearly, is not enough. Suspecting that I might have mild anxiety or depression is not enough, because you can hardly go to the doctor and say "Doc, sometimes I feel like an irresponsible child and that makes me feel bad, is there something wrong with my brain?" I need therapy. I need to do better. I need ... I don't know what else I need. I feel like forgiveness is just enabling my problems, most of the time. It's not that I don't feel I deserve forgiveness, because true forgiveness isn't deserved or earned. What I feel is that I shouldn't get forgiveness because it wouldn't help fix me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sorry if this is too long and heavy.
PPS - It bothered me, though.

What separates programs from queries?

Sometimes the line is quite blurry between what is a program (or a programming language) and what is an expression. I'm not even completely sure what to call the second one, actually, but after reading about "runnable tweets" written in Wolfram Language and seeing the graphical plot results, it seems to me that these programs are more like search expressions or queries. They require a very rich interpreter with access to a lot of very complex data sets and extremely heavy functions to manipulate them. It's difficult for me to think of something like "GeoListPlot[GeoEntities[Atlantic Ocean, "Shipwreck"]]" as a program. It might be meaningful and unambiguous when interpreted against a particular data set, and clearly Wolfram can produce results from it, so I'm not sure what is my objection. Perhaps that there is only one system in the world that can run it? Well, that would be true of any very specialised software. I've written expression parsers that only my programs use, but I never called the input a program.

One objection might indeed be the power of the functions available. You could write a "language" whose only function is "List The Monarchs of England In Chronological Order", but is that input a program, or is the interpreter the program?

Maybe it's a size issue. Because of the massive scope of the language, and its inherent complexity, every program written in it will be many orders of magnitude smaller than the interpreter itself. I think that's what's bugging me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Plus there's something about the native data sets.
PPS - It doesn't feel like big, real-world data sets should be considered part of a programming language.

Majority content

According to Bruce Schneier's blog, his book _Data and Goliath_, when read on Kindle, reaches the end of the main text when the Kindle app (or device) says you're 44% of the way through. Basically, there's more raw text in the form of citations and references than in the main body of the book.

What amuses me about this observation, however, is that 44% means the "main text" is not the "majority content", and you could make a point that what Schneier has done is to gather a very extensive list of relevant reference materials, then written a kind of index summary as an appendix.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I haven't read the book yet, but it's on the list.
PPS - I have a very long and complex list.

Overloading the name "bible"

I'm not a big fan of the overloading of the term "bible" in a lot of contexts. It's not from any kind of religious offense or hurt, though. It's more of a clarity thing. I had a friend once say, out of nowhere, that she'd been reading "the bible", by which she meant "Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus". I've heard the primary documentation on software projects referred to as the "project bible", which always gets shortened to "the bible", and it always takes me a few seconds for my brain to latch onto the real contextual meaning rather than the one with which I am automatically most familiar (the actual Bible).

My point is that communication is supposed to be clear, although poetry can sacrifice clarity for emotion. When you refer to some other book or document as "the bible", you are probably being just a little bit too poetic, sacrificing just enough clarity for the sake of your point about the importance of that book.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We'll all know how important a document is, in context, from experience with it.
PPS - Or because you say "this is our most important document".

Mundane time travel

Time travel will be used for the most mundane purposes imaginable. Corporations will hire multiple copies of the CEO for all management positions. Employees will be forced to go back in time so as to never have any time off - sick days will be a thing of the past, because you'll just come back when you're well. On the plus side of that scheme, you can have whatever preferred schedule you like. Two days on, five days off? No problem, as long as you're in the office Monday to Friday. Three months of leave per year? Go for it, just come back to the beginning of your holiday when you're done. It would get tricky to track, and some employees would, as a result, burn out a lot faster than others. Some, who take a lot of time off, would age a lot faster than others, who don't. That would be weird.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Time travel, used this way, would lead quickly to the tech singularity.
PPS - Because corporations will want whole research eras to be done, literally, yesterday.

Cinderella is not an insulting name

With the movie "Cinderella" opening in Australian cinemas today, it seemed time to make this observation. To me, it's never made much sense, in the story of Cinderella, for her name to be an insult. I mean, I do understand that it's meant to refer to her menial household labour, especially cleaning the chimney, but from a purely linguistic point of view, "Cinderella" is a remarkably beautiful name. Flowing and feminine, and reminiscent of the common observation that "cellar door" is one of the most beautiful phrases in English. "Cinderella" and "cellar door" are just a couple of letters away from being anagrams of each other.

So, to me, using "Cinderella" as an insult name has the same kind of meaning as saying "We'll call you Rainbow McBeautifulface Sexybody Unicorn Glitter! Ha! See how you like that!" You know they're trying to be insulting, but it's just coming out all wrong.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you want an insulting name, just go for "Poop".
PPS - It's not as creative, but there's no chance of confusion.

Shopping online

I don't do a lot of my shopping online. This might be weird for someone of my age and technical expertise, but it's been informed by several bad experiences. First, there have been a few times when I've got what I ordered, but it wasn't the right thing. I bought a $199 router from Kogan, paid $9 shipping to get it to me, waited four days for delivery, then had to send it back because I was mistaken about its capabilities. The return shipping and the restocking fee cost me a further $38, so by now I'm out $47 and back to square one. If I had just walked to Dick Smith instead, 5 minutes down the road from my house, I would have had the correct device in my hands immediately. Oh, and I still don't have my money back, more than two weeks later, so there's that, too.

The other thing is that Australia Post delivery drivers don't bother looking for our front door. We live in a townhouse complex with a lot of little twisting roadways and paths, so I understand that it can be hard to find a particular house number, but they don't even try. They get to the mailbox, toss in a "sorry you weren't home" card and sod off again, leaving me to pick up the package from the post office during office hours anyway, or on Saturday morning, which is when I can actually get there. While there's supposed to be parcel pick-up outside those hours, the arrangement where I live is that this is done from the PO Box bunker, and that parcels are not kept there, but inside the shopping centre. Guess whether the PO Box attendant can get to your parcels outside normal shopping hours. Go on. Guess.

So online shopping hasn't exactly sold me. I don't trust the delivery drivers to actually bother delivering, and I don't trust myself to order the correct item without talking to someone about it. Does this make me a shopping luddite? Yeah, probably. So what? It's still working for me, and until online shopping can actually provide me some savings or benefits, I think I might stick with bricks and mortar for now.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do order flowers online now and then from our local florist.
PPS - They regularly misspell our street name, and they abandon flowers on the doorstep, but it does seem to mostly work.

The perfect house is a myth

Will you ever have the perfect house? Of course not. Your circumstances and needs change, so the perfect house for you this year might not be the perfect house for you next year.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We need our houses to be more adaptable.
PPS - Perhaps that's what makes it perfect.

Published!

Today I'd just like to let you know that the good people of PodCastle, a weekly fantasy fiction podcast, have done me the great honour of publishing my story, "Lord Darq, Regis and the Orb of Power". You can find the audio file on their site. I've been a fan of PodCastle for ages now, so it's super-cool that they're the ones to publish my first ever sale!

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's only 5 minutes long.
PPS - Go. Listen now.

Motivation is BS

I recognise that a lot of people find exercise "too hard". They "can't get motivated" to do it. I've had people ask how I find the motivation to get up and go for a run. You want the real, honest-to-goodness answer?

I don't.

I'm not motivated to run like that. I don't have some magical inner coach urging me to get up and at 'em, that reaches down through my laziness and bad moods and pulls me up by my collar to get myself moving. That's the secret. I frequently don't *want* to go, but how effective should that really be as a method of stopping me? If someone put up a little sign at the foot of your bed that said "I don't want you to go running", would that stop you? That's what your lack of motivation is: a little sign somewhere in your world that doesn't want you to go and do anything, and the only reason it's standing in your way is that you are sitting there paying attention to it.

Next time, try this: set a time to get some exercise. When that time comes, stop what you're doing and go exercise. When your "lack of motivation" comes up, picture that little sign and ask why it should have any power over you at all, then go exercise, because you are the only reason you aren't getting over your own lack of motivation. When you need groceries, you go get them. When you need fuel in your car, you go get it. When you need water, you go and get it. When you need exercise, just go and get it. Motivation is not in your way.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - "But how do I get exercise with this little sign here?"
PPS - You ignore it. That's how.

How I'd spend one billion dollars

If I were a billionaire, I'd build a hotel in the city and just let my friends and family stay there for free forever, with free food from the kitchen, free laundry service and all those things. I want my family and friends to have everything they need for survival, to allow them to focus on the bigger things in life.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or if someone wanted to do this for me, I'd have no objections.
PPS - I prefer a river view. If that helps.

All you need to prototype a card game

If you're desperate to prototype a card game, you can make basically anything with a label printer and a normal pack of cards, with the added bonus that they're very cheap. You're welcome.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've been meaning to get a label printer for ages.
PPS - And I have lots of cards.