When I was nine, stunt flying like the Thunderbirds was cool, and I was an Air Force brat so we were a little biased against the Blue Angels. After having lived in Seattle for a few years, I found the annual Blue Angels show to be annoying. They have to shut down at least one of the main Seattle-Eastside bridges to fly or practice--cuz apparently the risk of them hitting the bridges is non-zero, like that wouldn't be a utter disaster for the city--, and it makes traffic a nightmare.

Now that I live on the Seattle-side and commute to the Eastside, I despise the Blue Angels. They had I-90 shut for both morning and afternoon Thursday for their practice, and it meant completely giving up on going to work until the hour break at lunchtime when the bridge was open. At the moment I can hear them tearing around the airspace above Seattle from inside my house with all the windows closed.

I guess it was just a taste of the nightmare to come when I-5 is closed 8/10-8/29, but it was definitely not appreciated. I don't know any Seattle native who actually enjoys the Blue Angels or the Hydro races. The crowds of people, terrible traffic jams, and the lakes being awash in boats all indicate somebody does, but I'm guessing they don't have to put with the crap all week leading up to it.

Update: And there they go again, scaring the cat...

The PBS series on America at a Crossroads is not easy to endure, but it's important to understand what is happening in our name. The Operation Homecoming show is particularly powerful. These stories are just amazingly moving.

One of the interviewees said something that really struck me. He said "I think there is a false notion that we all ought to recover from everything: divorce, a broken home, war [...] There are some things you shouldn't heal from [...] There is something to be said for not healing and remembering." I know he was referring to his experiences in Iraq, but I recall feeling something very similar years ago. It isn't "healthy" to feel that way, but it is perhaps very human to value a memory so highly that we won't let it fade even though it continues to bring us pain. I often wonder if that choice is in reality noble or selfish. I do know that once you make such a choice, it is hard to turn away from that path.

Here are some fun spoofs of those insufferably inaccurate* Mac v PC ads.

Of course, the Linux guys are always feeling unloved:



* = ( RANT! )

Windows Vista RTM'd today. Volume license business SKUs are out this month. Stand-alone and OEM versions of all versions on January 30, 2007. That's both x86 and x64 flavors of Windows Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, Ultimate, and Starter.

NVidia GeForce 8800 Direct3D 10 hardware has shipped (which requires Windows Vista to actually use the new API).

Office 2007 RTM'd Monday.

We released IE7 three weeks ago.

So naturally our stock rose a grand total of sixty-three (69) cents since Oct 19th. Feh. Guess everyone is still pissing money down the Internet Bubble hold-out Google. Yup, their stock has gone up by about $49 in the same period of time and they've not shipped a damn thing.

Still all that combined with the news about the Dems taking back the House and Senate has made for a really great day. And Rummy quit to boot.

You may not agree with the content or even the premise, but it's certainly passonate. Damn.

Olbermann's special commentary on Clinton vs Fox

For 25 years, people have used the Windows OS and one of the main reasons it has gotten such lasting use is that each generation runs the important applications of the previous one or two generations if not more. This despite the fact that 99% of the software written for the Windows OS makes at least one horribly bad assumption about the system behavior. Usually far more than that.

Achieving that compatibility has not been easy or cheap. Application developers, as it turns out, are completely unsympathetic to the fact that their broken software is making it hard to improve the platform. Besides, Microsoft has always done the work so why should they bother?

The way we do it is by having this magic little thing called a "shim", a tiny hack in the operating system that we turn on based on testing the applications to make them work. There are thousands of entries in the shim database. Some of them do stuff like lie to the silly setup program that fails if the OS version is "6.0" instead of "4.0" saying "Hey, this is NT 3.51 and we don't support it!" Some of it emulates the behavior of previous releases of Windows because the application does buggy stuff like release memory and then proceed to use it for the next hundred cycles or so because Windows 95 didn't notice. Sometimes we have to lie about a particular DLL being present on the system that they never use, but crash if it isn't present or endlessly try to install some component that no longer applies.

Each of these solutions is crafted by hand, applied with a debugging skill more akin to alchemy than science, and is one monstrous pain in the ass.

The really sad part is this doesn't just apply to old software. Major games released in the past few years by developers who should know better are rife with this kind of crap.

It is made even more difficult by three major factors:

(a) sticking to legacy APIs years after Microsoft tells you to stop. No really, Direct3D Retained Mode was dead on arrival in 1996, much less by the time Direct3D 7 came out in 1999. That was 7 years ago. Cut it out. Really.

(b) the proliferation of the hackery that is 'copy-protection' schemes. These things don't actually stop hardcore pirates and are typically hacked within days by 14 year olds in China, but make using standard debugging techniques impossible. That means in 2-3 years when we try to get your application running on the next version of Windows, we have to resort to black magic and sacrificing a goat to even figure out why the application is crashing much less fix it. As our AppCompat guru said, if you guys are going to use this crap, then you should be patching your game every OS release.

(c) despite having a version info resource record system in place for binaries since 1995, too few applications actually use them. That means our appcompat database has to resort to all kinds of scary things to try to determine if "Game.EXE" is the exact thing we need to fix-up or not--which, btw, is primarily what Windows is doing when you run "Setup.EXE" and it seems to just sit there a few seconds.

If you learn nothing else from this post, application developers, learn this: for the love of god, try not to make future appcompat gnomes lives hell and use accurate version information! For the rest of you, next time you run your favorite game from the 90s and it actually runs on a computer made 15 years later, quietly thank the poor bastard who had to figure out how to make it work without a clue from the people who wrote it and made all the money ever made off it. Hell, thank the poor bastard that got the game from last year to run on the new OS given the team that wrote it was likely laid off the day it shipped.

They made another Garfield movie. Bleck!

Maybe Bill Murray needed another house or something. Did the 2004 movie not bomb hard enough to convince the execs that perhaps a Garfield movie is a bit late at this point. What's next? A Ziggy film?

Asshats.

For the cost of one of these pieces of crap ($50 million), they could fund a dozen smaller films that might actually be worth watching. Or perhaps open an orphanage. Something. Anything.

If you bought one of these CDs with Sony's silly rootkit/spyware DRM solution on it, you should check this out and file a claim online with the link on the top of the page.

So I had my "Mid Year Discussion" today, and it went pretty well. Note that it is not called a "review". A "review" is a stressful thing that requires lots of formalized paperwork, self-evaluation, and a conversation with your boss that ends in an arbitrary number assigned to your value to the company. A "Mid Year Discussion" is a supposedly non-stressful thing that requires lots of formalized paperwork, self-evaluation, and a conversion with your boss that ends in the discussion of the arbitrary number you will likely be assigned in six months.

Anyhow, it went pretty well. I mention this because during the "discussion" my boss asked me where I wanted to be in four years at Microsoft. It struck me at that moment that my 36th birthday is Saturday and that the question was really "Where do you want to be when you are 40?" Yes, that's F-O-R-T-Y.

Holy shit. Where did those years go? Oh yeah, I spent them going to school, starting my career, getting married, starting my own business, then in the midst of immense depression, financial and personal turmoil, divorce, moving to a new city where I knew nobody, and basically starting my personal life over.

Pretty much ever since my personal life imploded, I've had a hard time making a firm statement about where I want my life to be. The game industry conditions you to not plan too far into the future, because you'll probably be laid off within 2 years. The mess I made of my life in Austin conditioned me to try to keep your dreams small, to not risk too much of your heart on love and moments of bliss because they are gone in an instant.

I know I don't want to be longing for loves who long since gave up on me, or regretting the choices I made that I feel I could've or should've done differently. I don't want to be sad at the things behind me, and would really like to be looking forward to each day to come. It's been a really long road to get to this point, and I just don't know that I want to spend another 8 years living the life of a single apartment-dwelling geek.

I guess knowing what you don't want is the first step to figuring out what you do want.

"After weeks of divisive bickering, the Senate has finally voted to approve Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

All you need to know: Stock up on condoms."
-- Stephen Cobert