This all went down the Wednesday before last (July 7th, or 7-7-2010… seven might be her favorite number…) while we were visiting a friend’s cabin in northern Minnesota.

Now, below the cut, some (goofy) photos of us on the dock where I proposed under the stars…

Two star-trekked lovers.

Nick points out the ring.

We’ve started the initial planning process. There are many, many decisions to be made in the coming months! (We’re currently eyeing a small wedding on a date sometime next spring.)

Did I say “huzzah” yet? Huzzah!

There once was a lady from Boston,
a city she often got lost in.
She made so many merlimewes
it put her hair in curlicues,
so none stopped for the walk she crossed in!

What, I’m an engineer, not a poet. Points for effort, right? Bonus points for pedestrian-squishing?

And yes, I do take requests.

Campus hasn’t changed much since I left; the Parrish remodel I had seen in 2006 makes a much nicer first floor lounge, New New Dorm is in place next to New Dorm (where I lived senior year, now called Kemp and Paul respectively), and the arboretum building got expanded. The newest trees planted around the science center (which was completed my senior year) have grown a fair bit. The napping couch in Hicks (the engineering building) was reupholstered. Otherwise, the campus is a very familiar place.

My sense of calling Swat home really struck me Sunday morning, as several of us met up to go to brunch at Java Joe’s. Since my parents moved to Seattle, I haven’t had a sense of permanent home. There’s not much tying me to Minneapolis other than high school friends I visit occasionally, and while my parents are associated with home, their current condo is largely unfamiliar. It probably also doesn’t help the sense of home there that my sister is still far, far away! I like Boston a lot, but I don’t feel Bostonian in a number of key ways. Swarthmore, however, is where I spent a good chunk of four years of my life (almost straight through in the last three years, since I did summer research twice). Now that I’ve been back, I can see myself returning more often, if for no other reason than to keep an anchor there; conveniently however I can expect to see a lot of old friends every time I go.

A more detailed rundown of the weekend is below the cut. Overall it was great to see everyone, but the official events were pretty lame. Apologies if I left anyone out!

Friday

I had initially planned to take the train down, but with Fritz up in Boston for a summer internship, with his car, he offered to drive my licenseless behind down to Philly in change for navigation skills and gas money. We both left work early on Friday (I definitely didn’t get much done that morning), so that we’d be able to meet Emery and Joanna for dinner at one of our favorite brewpubs, Iron Hill in Media. The drive was relatively uneventful, although we ran into a lot of traffic crossing the Tappan Zee.

Friday night, after having a delicious Coffee-Chocolate Cask Pig Iron Porter, we went to the Ladies’ Night reunion party outside of Willets. Ladies’ Night was a weekly party I went to regularly junior and senior year, so named because the early smaller parties in PPR were pretty much a bunch of guys sitting around and watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

It was very strange having the on campus alumni housing be in Willets, given that it is generally known a the gross dorm. The humidity certainly made it live up to that reputation. The funny thing is that I think I increased my total time spent in Willets by close to two orders of magnitude… I didn’t know many people who lived in Willets, and those who did generally socialized elsewhere. I think I was in there no more than 10 minutes when I was on campus, so it was a little weird sleeping there.

Saturday

Saturday was all about the official events. We started off with a surprisingly expensive continental breakfast in Sharples, the main dining hall. Good conversation, reasonable amount of mocking the Fritz. This is normal. An gave us an update on her moving plans, which was fun, having heard a bit of that when she visited Boston last month.

Collection was totally lame. I think it was geared to the older alumni? The speaker was talking all about history in the context of experiencing the Civil Rights Movement, which due to the length of time just didn’t speak to me. I guess it’s a reminder of how much has changed in this co unitary within living memory. The rest of the ceremony was about alumni giving, unsurprisingly. They handed out awards to the classes with the best stats. We also sang our alma mater, which I wasn’t even aware that we head. Maybe that’s also something for the older alumni, and it’s gone away for more recent classes?

The rest of the afternoon I bounced between the SWIL rooms for snacks, conversation and gaming, the Engineering Department open house (only two professors showed up), and the CS Department open house (nonexistent, although nominally combined with Math and Physics). I also helped move beer from the car to the tent for the 2005 class dinner.

The definite highlight of the day, and possible the whole weekend, was when Fritz got a current member of SCCS Staff to let us into the Media Lounge. We both have many memories there, Fritz more than I since he was on Staff longer. We both did a lot of our CS assignments there as opposed to the CS lab or Hicks lab or our dorm rooms. I know Fritz slept there on more than a few occasions. One of the more amusing moments was discovering that a haiku I had written on the whiteboard in the server room was still there, over 6 years after I had written it. I was also very happy to see that many of the old Mac games I had donated (Rebel Assault, YDKJ, Masters of Orion II, etc.) were still being played on the one old PowerPC Mac OS 9 machine that they have running. We also talked to Ryan (the Staff member who let us in) about changes in the CS department curriculum, and the future of jobs vs. grad school with a BACS degree. The experience convinced Fritz and I that a proper SCCS Staff reunion (probably covering roughly 2002-2007, the core social group we overlapped with) sometime in the next year.

The 2005 class dinner was pretty disappointing. People were kinda rude about taking seats, the food was meh, and was mostly out by the time we got through the line. I think the main problem was that they weren’t enforcing tickets, and so a lot of people who hadn’t signed up online were getting food. Most ridiculous of all was that it cost $37 at registration. I guess we were subsidizing our classmates’ booze. I’m not sure if that was a problem caused by the Alumni Office or our class officers, but definitely something to keep in mind next time I attend.

The evening was spent gaming with SWIL; I failed to get Dominion off the ground, but had a fun Name Game (in which I provided most of the ridiculous quotes). Also discovered that the word “bookcase” isn’t really in my dialect… For me it’s just “bookshelves”, which contain “shelves”. After that, a group of us, including Rafa and Katie, sat in some chairs on Parrish Beach and had typical Swattie conversations on the future of American politics, the BP disaster, and so on.

Given the unsatisfying dinner, and a general lack of interest in partying, Emery, Fritz, and I decided to go to the Denny’s on Baltimore Pike for more food. Huzzah 24 hour service. There was a group of young punks there after their prom or something. I got some fried dough since I wasn’t up for some of Emery’s nachos. It’s a lot of fun being all together again. Now that we’re all on the same coast, I hope to make is happen more often.

Sunday

We started the day meeting up for brunch at Java Joe’s. There were a few swatties at other tables, but Joanna, Emery, and I stuck to ourselves. I got scrapple, eggs and toast… I generally can’t find scrapple up here in Boston, though Fritz introduced me. It’s a sort of special breakfast treat when I’m in the relevant Mid-Atlantic states.

We made a final stop at the campus bookstore (I picked up a new coffee mug, pint glass, and t-shirt), and used the bathroom next to the SCCS Media Lounge for old time’s sake before hitting the road. Fritz loaded his phone up with several recent episodes of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, which was very entertaining for the drive back. We exactly reversed our route, hoping we’d stay south of the Raingnarok hitting Boston, and then had a nice pizza dinner stop in northern Connecticut. The service was very slow, but it was a tasty local pizza place. We had a long talk about the nature of academic computer science and our respective futures therein.

Fritz dropped me at my place in Watertown, and I left my umbrella and sunglasses in his back seat (which I retrieved on my way to work the next day). Then I crashed after two nights of bad sleep in sweaty Willets. All in all, a weekend well worth it.

PAX East was my third Penny Arcade eXpo, and in many ways my best… but as others have addressed, also an unfortunate reminder of how hard it is to manage a convention hall full of geeks, nerds, dweebs, and all the rest. The whining has been handled by others, and I have a positive attitude and had a great time in spite of the logistical problems, so I’m not going to talk about those problems much.

For me, the two huge differences were location (that the event was local to me, in addition to not involving a visit to my parental units in Seattle) and people (in addition to more random run-ins, I spent most of the con with my old roommate Fritz and my girlfriend Andrle, as well as bringing my Little Brother on Sunday). Since it was a much more social event for me, I didn’t enter any gaming tournaments (as I did both of the last two PAX Primes, even placing in RoboRally last year and winning a PAX medal), nor did I attend any sessions (in part due to line issues).

As per my usual, I caught Paul and Storm and Jonathan Coulton in concert (the 6th time I’ve seen them play live!), as well as the opening act with the Video Game Orchestra. Like last year (but unlike my first year at PAX ‘08), I watched the keynote by Wil Wheaton and the final round of the Omegathon (the third round of which was in this case was the opening for the Saturday night concert).

As always, amusing nerd-watching, interesting demos, tons of free crap, and good times gaming. A few pictures, some game and product comments, plus my concert videos, below the cut.

Friday

I took the entire day off from work as a vacation day (although I did jokingly inform my supervisor that it was a religious observance). Fritz and I met up with Andrle at Trident for brunch, then headed over to Hynes to get in line. After the aforementioned keynote, we sampled  the expo floor in a fairly quick sweep, and then met up with Mark from Swat but more recently of Snooth fame for dinner and drinks at the Cactus Club.

We closed up the evening with a couple of games of Carcassonne, an old favorite of mine from SWIL that I never got around to purchasing since so many people I know own it. We called it a little early (and ignored the Anamanaguchi/MC Frontalot concert) at around 11:30 given that Fritz and I were T-ing back to Watertown and would be returning pretty early in the morning.

Yes, I'm gloating. Fritz and I had a bit of a farm war for this one, but I claimed it 3 to 2 to get most of the cities.

The Third Dimension

One of the largest booths there was NVIDIA’s, and in addition to their usual graphics hardware (showing off assorted game demos, including the Starcraft II Beta), they were really pushing their new 3D Vision™ graphics technology. As I’ve commented recently, I remain completely unconvinced of the coming 3D revolution. That said, in spite of the “one size fits all” goggles being too large for my head, the 3D game demos were pretty impressive. The huge difference between this tech and the 3D movies whose effect I’ve panned is that the graphics card has access to the complete depth buffer, and so can provide perfect perspective throughout the entire shot for a natively three-dimensional environment. It is definitely up to the game designers to design things properly, however; I tried a racing game where the UI was at a significantly different layer from the car, which caused a major usability problem since my eyes had to shift focus between them. I plan to comment on 3D in general more in a future post.

Saturday

We met up with Andrle and got in the line around 9:30 am, which seemed to be a good balance between the line being too large and waiting a long time. Part of the line was zipping ahead for the Penny Arcade and Bill Amend panels, but we waited for the expo hall, since we were going to meet up with Twitter connections Devon and Tiffany for brunch. Mark also ended up joining us, this time at the Daily Grill. Unfortunately, due to the tail end of Restaurant Week, their brunch menu was unavailable, but we had other tasty things and some great conversation.

We headed back to the expo hall for more demos, plus the reserved special showing of the Civ V alpha (more on that later). Then we had a great (but vicious!) game of RoboRally with Fritz’s potential summer internship employers, which resulted in this excessively cute tweet. I’m sorry. It happens but rarely.

One of the cooler games I saw (which I went back and bought on Sunday) was Turba, a music puzzler that was part of the Boston Indie Showcase. My game schedule and budget are both pretty tight for the rest of this year, between WoW and STO and Civ and the Mac version of Steam (all of which are to some extent sunk investments).

Among the various freebies, I purchased a PAX East 2010 T-shirt, and Fritz bought a Maw plushie. I think it fits him quite well. Reminds me of the old Month Python killer rabbit with big icky teeth thing he had when we were at Swat rooming together.

Fritz being goofy with his new Maw plushie while we play RoboRally.

Civ V

I’m really excited about this game. Fritz pointed me to a Facebook fan page post the week before PAX, which gave instructions to sign up for an exclusive preview. He and I both grabbed a 2pm slot for Saturday, and after interacting with Amy (one of 2K Games’ excellent booth wranglers) we got into the right line. You must understand, I have a special relationship with the Civ series. My first all-nighter of any kind was at my friend Gus’ 10th birthday party with his copy of the original Civ running on a Macintosh LC III.

They obviously didn’t allow pictures (although two people were immediately That Guy and aped taking pictures with their phones), but I think I can talk about the features, since they’re covered by official sources already. The big changes are the switch to a hex map, and only allowing one unit per tile simultaneously. The latter change is really exciting, because it should prevent the AI’s “excuse me while I land 4 ships full of guys right next to your capital from just outside your view radius in one turn” trick.

Otherwise, the engine looks very pretty. Of course, they’re only talking about a PC version for now… so the question is do I buy that and put it on my Windows 7 partition right when it comes out, or do I wait hopefully for Aspyr to make a non-crappy port? It may all come down to how the release date synchronizes with the release of Cataclysm…

Saturday Concert

We grabbed a quick dinner at the Dartmouth Street b.good, and then encountered my largest logistic complaint of the convention: when we had left, a sign read that the concert line would open at 7 pm, but by the time we got back at 6:50, the sign had been edited to read 6 pm. While I realize the Enforcers needed somewhere to put overachievers who were lining up early anyway, I thought this was very Not Cool and was worried that we wouldn’t be able to get into the concert at all. In general, there needed to be a much larger emphasis on breaking up pre-lines, and telling people to have fun until a maximum of 30 minutes before an event.

That said, Mike, a friend from UniLu, had the right idea based on his experience with Friday that we should get in line for the balcony. We played some Monty Python Fluxx, which Fritz had just purchased (the references alone make it my favorite Fluxx edition that I’ve played), as well as some stand-up scoreless Dixit, to which Mike introduced us. I can only describe it as “Fictionary meets Apples to Apples meets modern art”. I can see it being a lot of fun. I have it on good authority that Andrle obtained a copy, so there’s a good chance I’ll play it again.

We ended up getting pretty good seats in the balcony, actual seats no less (unlike the standing areas on the floor), slightly right of center. There was some mild amusement with “That Guy” sitting behind us, and the Enforcers trying to get The Wave started in the nerdy crowd.

The concert opened with the Omegathon’s musical round (an odd choice, I thought), which consisted of two of the worst Rock Band singers I’ve ever heard. The second guy somehow managed to be worse than the first (and they even failed the song briefly). In their defense, I doubt either guy had heard Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler before. The second band ended up winning, I guess because the guitar and rhythm sections scored more highly.

After Mike and Jerry left the stage, we had to wait for the stage crew to reset everything, but eventually Video Game Orchestra got set up and played a bunch of classic video game music, including Mario Bros., Final Fantasy VII, Castlevania, and my personal favorite, this medley from Chrono Trigger:

I was lame and didn’t get any video of Paul and Storm this year (although I did last year), but they played a variety of good stuff for their set. I think their TMBG-style parody was new to me; they also announced their new CD. Also epic was their lip-synced trolololo opening (see the article on the original artist, Eduard Khil) featuring a guest appearance by Wil Wheaton (not my video). “The Captain Wife’s Lament” as usual got ridiculous, setting Jonathan Coulton up for a set full of “awwww”s and “ARRRR”s, although not as bad as the show Andrle and I went to see at the Paradise last fall at which “that’s what she said” became the crowd meme of the evening.

JoCo went all out, although there weren’t any songs new to me specifically. I didn’t get any video of it, but near the end of the set in addition to bringing on Paul and Storm for additional vocals, he added the guys from Metroid Metal, resulting in some significantly more rocking versions of a couple of his songs, which I really enjoyed. I swear I’m not singing along for “Still Alive”. Sadly, I stopped my video of “Mr. Fancy Pants” before some extra silliness in which Jonathan jumped around on the stage, setting off his Zendrum sound effects in amusing ways.

After the concert, we staggered back to crash at Andrle’s, since she lives near the convention center and the T was long shut down at that point.

Sunday

I got up early to meet up with my Little (I don’t use his name for obvious reasons) outside of Hynes, and let him drag me through the expo hall to see whatever he wanted (while also suggesting a few good items). Fritz and Andrle slept in, which was possibly wise. I think he saw what he wanted to see throughout, although we couldn’t wait in the long line for Skate 3 to try and win a PAX East custom skateboard deck. I heard some were waiting for over 2 hours, but since he could only hang with me until 3 or so, it was right out.

Andrle and Fritz eventually met up with us, and we cruised the expo hall some more. My Little definitely enjoyed the Immerz KorFX “chestphones” demo (possibly just because we played Left 4 Dead 2). It’s hard to explain them, but they basically play the audio channels into some chest-facing audio coils that make you feel the sound through the resonance in your chest cavity. Definitely better than a rumble pack, but I’d have to play with them more to see if it’s worth the added immersion. It is a Boston local company, which is cool.

After a quick lunch at Thornton’s Restaurant, at which our server asked to take a picture of my Little for looking “so fly” (he has this oversized aquamarine hat from Lids), we checked out some more of the classic gaming room, including some Waverace 64 (my first rental for N64), and the various classic pinball and arcade cabinets. It was very interesting to see the old (at the time) high-quality vector displays used in some games.

When I dropped my Little off with his mom out front, I saw what was apparently a PAX East attendee in handcuffs being arrested, with a police officer and a couple of Enforcers around him. I figured he either tried stealing someone’s bag or got in a fight in a line, but it turned out he allegedly tried to steal the code of an unreleased game. It will be interesting to see the details of what he actually did as the case trickles through the system.

Our PAX experience wrapped up in a line as we waited for the Omegathon final round and closing ceremonies, playing some more Monty Python Fluxx. We got seats in a similar spot up in the balcony, and watched the four remaining Omeganauts play in a 2-man NES relay, in which they had to earn 50 coins in Super Mario Bros., 1500 points in Rad Racer, 10 lines in Tetris, and finally, have both team members beat the first level in Contra (with Konami Code).

Andrle, Fritz and I closed out the evening with take out pizza from The Upper Crust and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

Conclusion

Awesomesauce. I will definitely go next year. I apologize to those of you Boston peeps I didn’t end up meeting up with at PAX East, but the schedule was packed and I was prioritizing the out-of-towners. I will probably “visit my parents” and go to PAX Prime in Seattle later this year, probably staying longer, modulo my sister’s and brother-in-law’s schedule for coming to the US.

Like every other critic and salivating fanboy, I feel compelled to chime in on yesterday’s religious experience in which The Steve descended from on high bearing a tablet. However, this is not a review, but merely a (lengthy) answer to a simple question: is the iPad for me? I won’t be talking about the market for digital content distribution, I won’t be whining about what software and hardware widgets weren’t included, I’m not going to rant about Apple’s closed ecosystem, I won’t be begging to lick someone’s boots for a chance just to touch one. Additionally, although hopefully this is obvious, this is heavy on speculation, since I have yet to actually hold the product, let alone use it for any length of time.

I’ll also take this opportunity to brag that I got 29.5 points on the prediction score card, with only one question as yet unanswered: will textbooks be available (I said yes, and I think this is eventually likely, based on the list of publishers involved). I was briefly unsure if my existing Apple Wireless Keyboard would be supported, but the Design page indicates that in will be, in spite of the existence of the iPad Dock. I got the name right, and most of the detailed features based on the rumorsphere. The substantive places I was wrong were the absence of a camera, the price point (cheaper than I expected), and the lack of any information on iPhone OS 4. I had a hope for an open development environment, but I knew that wasn’t going to be true, so that’s more a self-docking principle point. I failed to predict the dock, and I gave myself a half-point for saying no 3G when there are models both with and without.

Below the cut I’ll start off with a brief history of my personal electronics habits from college through today, and then consider where the iPad would fit into my little niche… and, if it does fit, whether it’s worth it. I’ll also look at what still-open questions about the device would affect my potential buying decision (not the least of which is that I need to try it out in an Apple Store to get a sense of the ergonomics). While I’m only speaking for myself, maybe my analysis will be useful to people similar to me.

Usage

For the purposes of this post, I’m discussing a subset of my uses for various electronics in rather broad categories. Over time, the breakdown of which device(s) I use for each task has changed, mostly due to the addition of new devices, but also to some extent due to changes in my tasks breakdown over the past 8 years.

• Programming
• Gaming
• Taking pictures
• Listening to music
• Reading news
• Making phone calls
• Remote access
• Online socializing
• Taking notes

I’m not going to get into how my time breaks down into those categories, but it’s safe to say what dominates given my employment (software engineer) and primary entertainment activity (video games). Taking notes is mostly only relevant for school, online social networking has increased since I got on Twitter, and I rarely take pictures or make phone calls.

In all four of the charts below, click to embiggen for a more detailed view (although they’re pretty broad generalizations, given that my percentages are rough estimates at best).

In the Beforetime

I jokingly refer to the period of my adult life before I owned an iPhone, which significantly changed my usual “loadout” when going anywhere by combining my mobile phone and music player into one device and also carving a few of the above tasks away from my (relatively much heftier) laptop. While it is reflected in the chart below, I’m not going into detail about how my habits changed as I accumulated new devices over the course of college.

Chart breakdown of my personal electronics from 2001 to 2005, during college.

At school, my laptop was my sole computer. I still have that PowerBook G4/400, and the only thing it’s needed over the years has been a new battery and a new power cord. Still going strong (more on how that affects my decision later). I got my first iPod at Christmas 2002, and my first mobile phone (a mid-range Siemens that had Mac Bluetooth support) at Christmas 2003. Before then, I had a Koss CD player for mobile music, and I was wedded to a landline. I still have my old Olympus digital camera, even though it’s only 2.1 megapixels and uses one of the losing memory formats, Smartmedia. I’m not a big picture-taker anyway.

The next big change was getting a home desktop computer once I was employed and out of school. My laptop, Chronos, became relegated to 2nd-class status, mostly taking on the roles of Remote Access and Note Taking, and being my primary computer when traveling for all other tasks. Gaming moved to the desktop almost exclusively, since newer games required newer and newer hardware, more than the Rage 128 card in the PowerBook could provide. (As you have read here previously, most of this gaming is World of Warcraft.)

Chart breakdown of my personal electronics from 2005 to 2007, as a young professional without an iPhone

The iPhone Cometh

The iPhone (I got a second-iteration EDGE one) significantly changed my electronics usage by replacing the iPod and phone in one fell swoop. Because I now had mobile data, it also reduced how often I brought my laptop with me, since I could do some limited forms of online interaction while out and about. Now instead of a laptop requiring a backpack (the titanium powerbooks are light, and beautiful machines, but still a lot heftier than a phone-class device), I could bring a device that just clipped to my belt.

Once Apple added the App Store, I suddenly had my first mobile gaming platform (I think my first purchase was Trism, downloaded over EDGE somewhere in Wisconsin while headed to my friend Gus’ wedding). These are all casual games, and mostly only occupy me while waiting somewhere or riding public transit, although I do occasionally play while sitting at home. The state of my electronics post-App Store is below.

Chart breakdown of my personal electronics from 2008 to present, covering two iPhone generations

This past summer, I upgraded to the iPhone 3GS, which meant I had a better camera (in fact, except for the lack of a flash, on par with my old Olympus), and one capable of video. It was otherwise a 1:1 replacement of my old iPhone, which I then promptly unlocked for use in Mali.

Room for one more?

So, how does the iPad likely fit into my usage patterns? In my case, it basically needs to be able to replace the few tasks still assigned to my PBG4. I don’t need a full-power laptop because I have my desktop at home, but I do need a device that has a bigger screen for graphical remote access (Microsoft RDP through work VPN, VNC tunneled through SSH to home Mac), and sufficient input capabilities for taking notes in class. It can also take over a few of the tasks that my iPhone had carved away from my laptop, such as Online Socializing while traveling. Pretty much everything else (larger screen web browsing, iBooks) would be an ease-of-use bonus or creating a use I don’t currently have.

Given my proposed usage breakdown in the chart below, the big questions are whether I can easily get a secure remote desktop connection to both my work and home computers, and how easy it is to take notes in class, possibly using the iWork app, particularly if mathematical notation is involved.

Chart breakdown of a possible fit for the iPad in my usage

I definitely do not see the need for two 3G-capable mobile devices for myself, so I’m glad there’s a WiFi-only version. The other advantage of not being tied to a mobile contract is that I’ll have far fewer qualms jailbreaking the device to run arbitrary 3rd-party apps, as I’ve done with my old iPhone, which might solve my remaining concerns.

Conclusion

At this point, I’d say I’m fairly likely to get one, although I have a hard time giving up on a perfectly functional (albeit old) laptop. It clearly fits in between my laptop and my iPhone in terms of functionality, with some overlap, and I think it might be just enough to retire the old TiBook. Another big advantage is that I won’t feel guilty about playing games while mobile as much, since I don’t have to worry about the necessity of the battery of the device-I-use-as-phone.

If, however, it is very lacking in editing capabilities (The Steve was certainly emphasizing it for content consumption for the most part), or cannot easily access my work and home desktops (possibly requiring jailbreaking), I probably won’t be interested except as a new shiny toy I can lust after until a second generation with improvements.

The verdict is still out until I feel it in my hands. What do you think?

Avatar is visually stunning. It has precisely all of the elements you would expect from a modern science fiction epic. I give major credit to James Cameron for an original idea, although the plot itself is a pastiche of mostly unoriginal classic memes. My snarky tweet-length review is “a visually stunning remake of Disney’s Pocahontas“. That said, the film is on its way to become one of the top-10 grossing films of the decade, which until now has consisted entirely of remakes/reboots, sequels, and/or book/comic book adaptations (i.e. not a single original idea). (Note that a non-trivial factor in Avatar’s opening weekend success is the higher ticket prices for 3-D and IMAX showings.)

A word of warning for my typography nerd friends (you know who you are): all of the subtitles are in Papyrus. Hey, at least it’s not Comic Sans, right?

I, like many other commenters, am very interested in the technical aspects of how the film was made, and I do expect that, like the motion control techniques invented for the original Star Wars, we’ll see a significant shift in how movies with fantastical elements are filmed. It also seems likely that some of the performance capture technology will be applied to video games, especially those with more immersive plots like single-player RPGs.

Another thing I’d add: the 3-D version isn’t strictly necessary to enjoy the visual experience of the film. While RealD, as a single projector polarized 3-D technology, is certainly better than the old red-blue systems, or the ones that required bulky electronic goggles to alternate flickering in each eye, I don’t think it adds a huge amount.

So, overall, I liked the movie, but I wasn’t blown out of the water, due largely to the tropeful plot. That said, it certainly got me thinking about a wide variety of topics, including racial issues, exobiology, and linguistics. I plan to see it again, probably in IMAX. Detailed thoughts below the cut (with some vaguely spoilerful comparisons to District 9).

Visuals

Simply put: amazing.

Basically, the entire movie is a special effect. The main advantage of this is that there are very few noticeable seams between the live action acting and the computer graphics, since much of the time only one or the other is visible onscreen. Compare to even the advanced effects in the new Star Trek, or the just-released Sherlock Holmes, and you can see the difference between quality special effects that are noticeable and totally immersive effects.

I went to see the movie with @Andrle and the both of us were totally immersed in the movie, which is impressive considering its length. A number of my friends have posted that they were similarly impressed.

One thing that I thought was interesting about the performance capture was that I could recognize Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, and Wes Studi in their Na’vi bodies, but I couldn’t really see Zoë Saldaña in Neytiri. This might be a function of having seen her in only one film, namely, the new Star Trek.

Technology

As I addressed above, I don’t think 3-D is necessary for an enjoyable Avatar experience. Part of the reason is that even the polarization method causes at times jarring depth perception problems, and I think it also encourages the direction and cinematography to overemphasize depth-of-field in making shots. On this point @kylejames and I disagree. I’ll grant that I know approximately jack about cinematography, but my sense is that you end up with non-standard shots, which can sometimes be used for interesting artistic commentary, but in this case I just found a little odd.

I fully expect the performance capture technology to catch on for other epic-style science fiction and fantasy films. Cameron is probably going to make a mint on the patent licensing (I’m assuming he has such things?), because this kind of digital puppetry is more flexible and easier to use than heavy prosthetics, and allows the actor more freedom. We might see this in the video game space as well, where motion capture is used heavily for character moves, but not much for character faces (as far as I know).

As for the in-universe technology, the 3-D holographic displays were particularly impressive, especially given how close we’re getting with current research. I think there tends to be a lot of back-and-forth between science fiction and actual research in this regard. Most of the rest was your standard space-marine fare; helicopter-like gunships, mecha suits, and ridiculously hefty-looking combat rifles with multiple ammunition types, etc. Overall this had a very Vietnam feel (the airships hitting the Home Tree was particularly reminiscent of a similar sequence from Apocalypse Now).

I had one criticism, which is that even given the mentioned value of “unobtanium” (ugh, really? To borrow a phrase from a friend, did someone forget to run find/replace on the script before printing?), I have a hard time believing it’s worth it to ship that much mass (in the form of military hardware) to an alien world. Mass is still really expensive to move (as far as I could tell, they were using sublight propulsion and sleeper ships). I suppose I can give them some credit and believe that more of it than I think was built locally, but that was never explicitly portrayed and seems unlikely given the absence of factory-scale manufacture that could produce the mining equipment and such.

Exobiology

They had a really amazing science advisor, or team of them, because I found the flora and fauna of Pandora to be remarkably consistent, with a few exceptions. I found myself throughout the movie wondering how a standardized biological neural interface would evolve, and be preserved across species.

One of my complaints is that they were fairly consistent about showing most of the megafauna as having four forelimbs and two hind limbs in pairs… with the notable exception of the Na’vi themselves. What happened to theirs? I assume the real reason was a desire to have the characters be more human, and be more easily puppeted by a two-armed human actor, but it was still a glaring hole in an otherwise believable alien biosphere.

I was initially annoyed that the Na’vi didn’t look more arboreal, particularly wondering why they would have evolved bipedalism, given that they still lived in a large tree, but this feeling was assuaged when they later revealed that there were savanna-dwelling Na’vi. If one assumes a parallel evolution on Earth, this makes more sense, and then the humanoids would have later returned to the jungle.

I thought the flying creatures were very cool; I’d say someone did some extensive research into the recent transitional fossil finds of flying dinosaurs and the first birds. However, instead of four wings consisting of all four limbs, these had the wings on the four forelimbs with the rear legs as landing gear.

The planetwide neural network on a world orbiting Alpha Centauri is nothing new – and it was probably done before I was exposed to the concept in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, my favorite turn-based strategy game of all time.

Linguistics

In theory, this is probably the aspect of the film I’m most qualified to speak on, but I’ll let my actual linguist friends @kobutsu and Comma get into this topic a little more. If you want some crazy detail on the Na’vi language, check out this LDC post.

I love constructed languages, and my interest in tlhIngan’ Hol (Klingon) and Quenya (Elvish) as a kid are a non-trivial component of why I took any linguistics coursework at all. I also very much enjoyed recently reading In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent.

Overall, the Na’vi language sounded believable… which I think is its biggest problem. It was designed to sound like what Westerners (particularly American English speakers) think tribal languages sound like. This falls more under the category of cross-cultural perception below.

My biggest linguistic complaint was how much colloquial American English was used. I understand that they need the characters to speak in a language moviegoers can understand, even though the film is set almost 200 years in the future, but there was to me an excessive use of colloquialisms. If there’s anything that the sudden rise of the Internet and mobile communications has taught us, it’s that the pace of language change (sorry prescriptivists) can be viewed right in front of us. On the other hand, it’s often obnoxious when science fiction decides to go overboard on word invention. (Note: I am a total Neal Stephenson fanboy and really enjoyed Anathem.) Given that, I would have expected a little bit more technology-oriented slang than we saw, but on the other hand, most of the background characters were ex-military employees of RDA, so maybe all the military slang fits better than I think.

Plot

Umm… well, the film has one, so there’s that…

I’ll chime in with just about every other internet blag and say that this movie is Pocahontas combined with Fern Gully, right down to living in a tree, communing with nature, and stopping big scary futuristic bulldozers.

As I said in the introduction, I give Cameron credit for penning an original story. Unfortunately that story consists entirely of standard tropes, monomythic plot devices, and unoriginal plot “twists”, all mashed together.

It’s not so much boring-unoriginal as comfort-food-unoriginal. I think it says something that we’re culturally attracted to the same plot elements over and over again. I guess the question then is (and I’m sure people much smarter than me have debated this already) is whether those things seem true because they speak to something innate in the human experience, or that we’re all just acculturated to accept them as such. In this film, this manifested as nothing being terribly surprising, but at the same time, it didn’t really bother me much.

I did have a problem with some of the character development; in particular, it was unclear to me why Michelle Rodriguez’s standard tough-as-nails female-in-a-male-world character had a change of heart. They portrayed that she did, but I didn’t know enough of her background to know why she had a problem with the military plan. I also got the sense that the one lead soldier was supposed to be more of a villainous character… I wonder if some of his development got cut?

Cross-Cultural Issues

For once, as a WASPYSM (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant YUPpie Straight Male), I’m eminently qualified to speak on a cultural topic… because it generally seems that this movie is about white guilt. :oD It’s all about the early exploration and colonization of the Americas Pandora while searching for gold unobtanium and dehumanizing/reeducating/relocating/oppressing any amerindians Na’vi who got in the way of “progress”.

This critical discussion at IO9 covers the topic with more expertise than I could, although I don’t think I agree on all points. At least, in my experience of cultural sensitivity (largely developed during my undergrad time at Swarthmore), the “becoming their leader” thing is not what I find interesting. I would agree that District 9 had a much better (and more real-world relevant) portrayal of alien-human interactions. A great discussion of the racial issues in that film, from back in September, can be found in Swarthmore History Prof. Tim Burke’s blog.

One thing that’s mostly absent from Avatar, and the linked discussion, that was a key component of the relevant history is the religious conversion aspect, that a non-trivial amount of cultural suppression was justified through the claim of saving souls. While aspects of the Na’vi religion were portrayed, they also got heavily scienced, in that their perception of god (well, the earthmother deity Eywa) is in fact a manifestation of a physically measurable planetwide neural network. When their “soul” departs the body, some aspect of the individual is stored in that network (making the destruction wreaked on the sacred groves all the more devastating, because the sacredness is real).

I can see why this topic has parts of the right-wing blagosphere up in arms. The movie does not pull any punches in its statement of white guilt, its statements on the environment and resource management with regards to industry, or its statements on private military corporations and the military-industrial complex. I think Cameron tried a bit hard to update the politics; there were a few blatant Bushisms that I found pulled me out of the movie (I heard “shock and awe” used once, and there were others that I now do not recall).

Conclusion

Overall, the film got me thinking, which for me is a sign of well-executed entertainment. We definitely need to figure out our own racial history as a species before we encounter other intelligences (or more intriguingly, create our own artificial ones).

It was visually impressive and enjoyable, and I will certainly see it again. I would recommend the movie highly, in spite of my complaints above.

What did you think?

I just did this freehand; this was my first try. Not as hard as the instructions make it sound.

I think it’s pretty cool. Impress your nerdy friends!

Specifically, certain characters which much be escaped in the GSM 03.38 character encoding are getting treated as the wrong encoding when posted to Twitter from Verizon Wireless SMS, and showing up as ? in text messages sent by Twitter to Verizon Wireless customers via SMS.

I should add that I didn’t find this bug alone – @elliotreed asked why I used question marks to note something in a tweet when I had actually used square brackets around some text. Some quick investigation with him revealed the more specific nature of the problem, but it wasn’t until I actually found out that there was such a thing as GSM encoding that I came up with a hypothesis to explain the character weirdness.

As far as I can tell, Verizon’s HTTP/SMS gateway is now doing the GSM/UTF-8 mapping internally, but Twitter is assuming it still has to send GSM bytes to Verizon, so the encoding is happening twice, or at least attempting to happen twice. Verizon chokes on the GSM two-byte characters, since they’re not valid UTF-8, while Twitter receives certain ASCII-range one-byte UTF-8 characters but converts them as if they were GSM one-byte characters, resulting in a totally different UTF-8 character!

The GSM-to-UTF-8 encoding bug, shown here for square brackets, curly braces, tilde, backslash, and carat.

The GSM encoding doesn’t allow certain characters as single-byte characters; this appears to be a way to shove a number of European characters into a 7-bit mutant ASCII, with control characters and certain punctuation replaced by characters from the Latin-1 codepage. To some extent this makes sense, given that with the 160-byte length limit on SMS messages you want to avoid multibyte encodings while still supporting commonly used characters (UTF-16 is used for non-roman languages). Unfortunately, this leaves [, ], ~, {, }, \, |, and ^ out in the cold. As a programmer, I use these punctuation characters often as separators in various notations, so it is perhaps not surprising that one of my tweets revealed the problem. These characters can be sent as a two-byte sequence in the GSM encoding, but those start with an escape byte 0×1B, which since it starts with more than one initial bit high will always be invalid as the first byte of a UTF-8 character.

I would have thought that the Age of Unicode would have ended many of these non-standard application-specific encodings (and plus, given the way mobile carriers love to gouge on SMS, if they make your characters take more bytes, they get more money!). It looks like that’s exactly what Verizon is trying to do, in moving to exposing UTF-8 on the edge of their network… they just didn’t tell anyone that they had changed encodings, or if they have, Twitter hasn’t acted on the change yet.

Since Twitter disabled their help ticket creation (probably because too many stupid people were posting the same questions without reading the FAQs), I reported the bug using the Twitter API ticketing system on Google Code.

Short story: if you use any of the punctuation characters above in your tweets, expect texting Twitter users with Verizon to see ?, and expect to receive tweets from them with weird European characters, until this is fixed by one or both parties.

My 2005 Trek 7500 FX, fresh off the moving truck, clean, and unused.

It was a solid bike, and it served me well, in spite of occasional abuses such as forgetting to oil the chain often enough or wiping out on wet leaves and bending a pedal out of whack. I certainly put money into this on top of the base purchase price (adding cargo racks, new handlebars, replacing shifter cables, new brakes, etc.), but it is still well below the cost of dealing with a car… and I get some form of exercise, as well.

As for the theft itself, I have learned the hard way regarding cable locks. I had switched to one a while ago for the weight and convenience of being able to lock to more things, but they are of course eminently more cuttable. This particular one, a Kryptonite KryptoFlex 1218 6′, was sliced mostly silently right below the window of my girlfriend’s apartment, locked to a lamppost. I took a taxi home, and first thing in the morning filed a police report and an insurance claim.

Thankfully, my renter’s insurance from Liberty Mutual (obtained through work) covers loss, theft, or destruction of personal property even if it’s outside of my apartment; there’s just a $250 deductible (and potentially depreciation calculated) that comes out of the value of the item(s), which means it’s really only useful for replacing something on the order of a laptop or bicycle.

In the end, I’m getting a check for almost $500, which should mostly cover a new bike purchased during the Eastern Mountain Sports winter sale. My natural disposition then is to see the silver lining, and take this frustrating theft as an excuse to get a new bicycle for cheap (even after you amortize what I pay biweekly for the insurance).

Incidentally, while googling for the insurance quote, I discovered that when he still lived in Chicago, Obama rode a 7500 FX :oD.

Hopefully, the new bike (I’m currently leaning towards a Trek Valencia) will serve me as well as the last one.

On a whim tonight, I whipped up my first Google Chrome extension in about 2 hours. A non-trivial amount of time was spent writing it up and making the icons. It’s obviously very simple, but it replicates one of my favorite features of Safari 3: SnapBack (the feature got eviscerated in Safari 4).

Basically all this extension does is add a button to the Chrome toolbar that you can click to jump back to the first page in a tab’s history. I realize the button and icons are ugly; I am not a design-type person.

The BackSnapper button once installed in Chrome 4

You can read a bit more about my BackSnapper extension, download it if you’re using the developer edition of Google Chrome (currently version 4), or view the code on github.

As Chrome rolls out the Extensions Gallery, I’ll deploy the extension out there. It could probably use some better options, and some smarter heuristics for determining where the beginning is, but for my purposes it gives me the magic button I want.

Installation

You can install the BackSnapper extension from the .zip file more or less by following Step 4 in these instructions. Note that at present this only works for the dev channel (version 4) of Google Chrome.

1. Download and unpack the .zip file
2. Select Extensions from the Tools menu.
3. Click “Developer Mode” on the right in the Extensions display.
4. Click “Load unpacked extension…” and select the unpacked BackSnapper folder

Development Tips

There were a few things I learned getting this working that weren’t immediately obvious from the documentation:

• The debug console is per tab
• You may need to select your injected content Javascript in the debug console to view logged messages
• For simple calls into content scripts, chrome.tabs.sendRequest() is sufficient, you don’t need to use the more complicated connect() message passing calls.

There were also a few things I couldn’t figure out:

• Why won’t the current developers-only Extensions Gallery accept my unsigned zip file?
• Why can’t I determine the current URL in the history after having called history.go()? location.href remains unchanged, and history.current is undefined.