A couple of weeks before exams were finished, I treated myself to a little trip home from Sackville to eat food and sleep (I said I’d study too).

I stopped by silverorange to visit old war buddies, and Isaac showed me his marvelous new contraption; he showed me his GameCube¹.

It was smooth and amazingly great. I also hear it’s the least expensive of the competing game consoles. I played with one all weekend and I have determined my favorite feature.

Back in time, during my wide-eyed game programming days, I was destined to wrangle DirectX with Visual Basic and kick the QBasic habit (I wasn’t familiar with OOP back then, someday I’ll come back). Anyway, one feature I was rather excited about was DirectMusic. It would give realtime control over the block-rocking MIDI tracks to breathe life into the format. Nice ‘rasterized’ soundtracks were doing just fine, so it never really caught on. But, I really liked the idea. I think Half-Life attempted active music too, but didn’t realize it as well as SSX Tricky or Luigi’s Mansion did. They managed to have active on-the-fly mixed music in their own creative ways.

In SSX Tricky, (a physics-free snowboarding game), the beat would kick along and each slope would get its own tune. But when your magic tricky-meter would max out (allowing you to do insanely impossible and entertaining tricks) they would mix on some guy rapping “(rap-rapity?rap-rap-rap) It’s tricky! It’s tricky!”. And if you caught giant air off big jumps, the music strips right down to the beat. For a “I am holding my breath” type feel that can’t be beaten.

In Luigi’s Mansion, poor, frightened Luigi hums along to the music. Sometimes he whistles, sometimes he makes nervous noises to the tune. Depending on what room of the mansion you are in, different instruments play along, and they smoothly cut in new ones as you step from room to room. There is also a puzzle involving getting a bunch of stray instruments (a 3-headed saxophone being among them) to play themselves, to make an amusing arrangement of the classic Mario theme. Good stuff.

So my verdict is, buy GameCube, it’s great. I haven’t tried the other systems, so I’ll assume they’re horrible. I have never been so impressed by the audio in any game. EAX was cute, it fleshed out games and if you run a guitar through the filters you can have hours of fun. We’ve had voice snippets since SNES, since then it has all sounded the same to me. The threshold which seems to have been static CD tracks has been shattered! Long live active music²!

1. I am unsure about how to capitalize ‘gamecube’, on Nintendo’s site, they always used SMALLCAPS leaving me confused).
2. Is it still called that? Was it ever called that?

The latest from the good people at Google: catalogs.google.com

The wacky folks at the MIT Media Lab have created BlogDex, a system that maps and monitors the connections between web logs. Their latest creation is particularly fun to use. The Social Network Explorer lets you browse the web sideways, sort of, by showing you similar/related sites as you browse. Try it yourself.

Great story at The Register about a 15 year old reporter for the BBC’s kids news show who asks some solid questions to Bill Gates.

She actually asked him: Does your computer ever crash? Gold! Bill’s total bullshit answers were actually a bit disappointing – she’s 15 Bill, not stupid.

You can see some of the interview in RealVideo.

I was thinking today about getting new envelopes printed. In itself, it is a trivial matter. Since I bask in trivial matters, I was thinking about how we could have much cooler envelopes if the printing shop had more selection and options. Then in occurred to me that there are probably loads of good print shops that could produce our envelopes that would offer loads of options – they just aren’t on PEI. Not problem – I think I dealt with the local printer completely via email and phone anyhow.

Then the thought comes – as I’ve been programmed to think – I should probably keep my business local. Then – out of nowhere – another thought: why? Why is it any better for me to spend my money in the town or region where I live than in any other town or region? I’m sure there’s a printing company in Chicoutimi (randomly selected town that I don’t live in) who would love to have our business (and may offer a cooler selection of envelopes).

At my business we don’t expect people to go with us because we are ‘from here’. We are also glad that our clients don’t ‘shop local’ – since many of them are not from this fair Isle.

I know there’s an environmental cost of shipping goods unnecessarily. But doesn’t that only apply to things whose raw materials are produced locally? For example, if I buy my turnip from Uzbekistan (randomly selected county that I don’t live in and whose existence have only discovered recently) then I cause an unnecessary plane trip that pumps all kinds of bad stuff into the atmosphere when I could have just grown the turnips in my backyard or bought them from my neighbour. However, when it comes to goods where the raw materials come from elsewhere, does it even matter? I mean, the local print shop is probably getting the envelopes from Malaysia anyhow.

It seems that you only want people where you live to buy local. If our clients did it, we’d be out of business. I learned in philosophy 101 that a good way to test a concept is to see if it applies universally. This doesn’t.

I suppose it has a lot to do with which groups and regions you associate yourself with. I’m from Charlottetown, I’m from Prince Edward Island, and I’m from Canada. Trouble is, I don’t really identify myself with any of those groups in any strong way. I’m glad I live in a country where you don’t get shot at and you can think what you want – but it was just dumb luck (or a cruel and vengeful god, for the religious types) that I was born here and some poor chap was born in Somalia. I don’t feel any more connected to the guy at the local print shop than I would do the print shop in Chicoutimi (again, randomly selected).

So tell me, why should I buy local?

I got this message from Windows Messenger this evening. It’s a clear and simple message that asks me to finish up any conversations as the service will be shutting down for maintenance in 5 minutes.

While the obvious ideal would be for the service to never shut down, this is a smart and simple way to handle any downtime. It would also be nice if they told me how long they would be down (although I sympathize with their tech people). This message would go a long way to preventing a zillion confused, lonely, and disgruntled users.

Good call MicroShaft.