Charlie

My new thing is Env.

As I went walking that ribbon of highway

I saw above me that endless skyway

I saw below me that golden valley

This land was made for you and me.

As you know, I’m not a big gamer, but I have something I’d like to present to you. It’s an immersive, fully interactive first-person tactical adventure I call Sheep Go. It’s not ready for wide release, but I think you’ll be impressed by the screenshots.

An opening cutscene establishes that you’ve woken up early to pack to go to Portland today. The backstory for going to Portland can be, I don’t know, whatever young people are into these days. Voting or watching music or visiting with friends or something – doesn’t matter. You’re the only one home and awake. You’ve started the generator, walked the stove, and lit a fire in the dog, and are catching up with your podcasts while eating breakfast and waiting for laundry to dry. Your camera – i.e., screenshot interface – lies nearby. The obvious soundtrack choice here is Morning from Peer Gynt, but that’s not firm.

You glance out the window and see two of your family’s three sheep strutting around the yard. End of intro – it’s all you now. On the screen appears a slowly and irregularly but exponentially increasing number: this is the number of important items you’re going to forget to take to Portland as you eat into packing time. (Actually, it’s only an estimate; you real score is made known about 48 hours later.) Make your way outside.

The sheep are standing around nibbling grass and wearing what they think are audacious expressions. This is the core gameplay experience of sheep go.

Jerks.

The game boils down to this: the world is divided into two parts, the electric fence enclosure and everywhere else. You win when all the sheep are in the fence and it’s closed. The sheep are winning the rest of the time, and they win even more if they come to harm by breaking legs, getting lost, learning to fear humans, being eaten by dogs, etc. Scattered around the world are obstacles like trees, ditches, sharp tools under grass, piles of lumber, and vital water pipes. Many of these apparently cannot be seen by sheep, while others, such as ley-lines, ghosts, especially dog-urine–heavy zones, other ghosts, places where they once heard a funny noise, and ghosts of dogs, can only only seen by sheep.

Your influence on the sheep is strong yet subtle. By moving and adjusting your posture in ways their tiny sheep-like brains arbitrarily pick up on, you exert a kind of moyo or telekinetic force which nudges them around. In their physics they are like magnets on a table: under low force, friction constrains them to move in small scoots, but if you let them build momentum they will slide right along. Conversely, they read your moyo as directional, and will extrapolate your motion liberally, so taking a tight corner can spook them. Spooking them is a terrible idea.

A spooked sheep.

After playing for about forty minutes, slow-chasing the sheep both ways around the garden and so forth, the dog which you have left inside will bark urgently. Obviously, CRM-aware and non-stupid players will leave the sheep for minute to see what she means, but let’s just pretend you’re dumb enough to call “Java, no bark” and ignore her.

The player may choose to use the plentiful apples from the orchard as lures. The sheep love apples and will do anything for them except move in the direction of the pasture.

Those apples are not for sheep!

I forgot to mention that the sheep have a great deal of muscle, mass at knee height, and ever-so-sharp hooves. Luckily, they are bred to be docile, which is a euphemism for dumb as stumps. If you open a segment of fence (because they can get tangled in fence lying on the ground) and the sheep that’s still inside comes over to stare at you, you are grateful for this.

Too stupid to just push past.

Eventually, more by chance than by your agency, the sheep end up back in the pasture. As the credits roll, you re-stake the fence as best you can (not very well at all) and hook the electricity back up.

Inside, you discover what the dog was barking about: you left a pan on the stove and the house is full of smoke. Time to pack!

You win!

I’d play.

I’ll be in Portland for a few days starting tomorrow. I’ll probably be hanging out at Tiny’s and the Black Cat a lot – get in touch.

We’re getting pretty good, with the computers and whatnot, at moving information around. It’s easy to publish, to read widely, and to do certain kinds of work with strangers and distant friends. But we still put up with a lot of trouble, especially in multi-way conversations. It’s hard to collaborate live – to get a group of people all working on one thing at once.

Well, it was hard until pseudomammal and I fixed it with a little thing we like to call Draftastic.

I think you might like it. I’ve been using it for a while and slowly normal text editing has started seeming restrictive.

It’s early days. There’s a lot in our heads that isn’t running yet, and you’ll notice things changing as we muck around. But the core of it is all there, and I’d like to know what you think. Sign up for a free account, get some friends involved, and start submitting bugs and requests.

At the end of the month it’s time again to leave Portland. What a good place this is. I lived in London and Seattle, famous cities of gravity and influence, and was impressed by both. Each has a trustworthy wealth, confidence, and grayness, and I would still be happy to live in either. But Portland – barely smaller than Seattle – is a city with a human scale, and life here is like the company of a person. Portlanders are as those who, however at odds, have a friend in common. And indeed the city feels like an equal among those to whom I say goodbye this week.

Burnside will be our street
Where the kids and the hookers meet
Diners and stripclub junk
Bookstores and punk rock clubs
I’m as green as this blade
In the grass that bends
In the wind that blows
On the long weekends
Where I cross the bridge
To the water fountains
And drink in the hope
That the city brings

— Sleater-Kinney, Light Rail Coyote.

You know my e-mail address. Atoms to:

C. E. Loyd
144 Harvest Moon Farm
Waldron WA  98297

I was looking at a freight container the other day and it occurred to me to hope that the number on it was what it turned out to be: a tracking mark under an international standard with a single namespace. Well! That’s a bed for some planetwide infrastructure nerdery. There are plenty of people taking down plane, train, ship, and currency numbers (sometimes discovering things of wider interest), and here’s another set of things with that seductive property of being the most widespread, often-moved, and recognizable objects their size in human space. When people start tracking them (possibly via OCR of trainyards), I’m in.

But first there’s something else intriguing, and it involves me buying you coffee. ISO 6346 marks, as general tracking numbers ought to be, are checksummed.

— All right, hang on. This is where I normally say “if you don’t know what a checksum is and aren’t already Wikipeding or Googling it, you’re incurious and dull”. But I don’t really like what Wikioogle has to say to the lay person. So we can discuss them in some depth later, but for now what you should know is that checksums are small numbers derived from bigger numbers that reassure you that the bigger number arrived free of errors.

Anyway, quite reasonably, ISO 6346’s precaution against error is a check digit: a single numeral. Now, I don’t know a lot about checksum practice, but I thought it was usual to pick a function with an output in your chosen alphabet (the Luhn algorithm for the decimal digits on credit cards) or an alphabet that covers your chosen function (0–9 plus X for the ISBN check’s 11 possible outputs). However, the ISO 6346 check has a range of 0–10 represented by the numerals 0–9. Conceptually, the space that would be used by 0/10 is spent on making sure every single-digit error changes the checksum. So they recommend that you not assign numbers that check to 10.

In celebration of this, the most byzantine and debatable piece of standardscraft I’ve seen all month, I introduce the following challenge:

1. I will buy a coffee or equivalent for the first person to post here with a non-doctored photograph of themselves or a close associate pointing, preferably while wearing a humorous expression, at a freight container with an ISO 6346 mark with a checksum of 0 representing 10.
2. Another coffeequivalent for ditto but any other checksum error.
3. A third for anyone who wins either of the first two by buying a freight container.

For your convenience, some checksum code (thanks for the highlighting, SubEthaEdit!):

Another month, another kludged GPS plot! Notice:

• A trip to Uwajimaya, out in far SW. The Max ride there is invisible in the tunnel, of course, but it also took a few minutes to re-fix in the metal train between cement sound walls. Then I walked through construction to Uwajimaya, which as you can see is just south of the road, and bussed home.
• A walk to the St Johns Bridge. I didn’t really know how to get there, but bearing northwest worked well. A mile or two off, I saw a tiny glimpse of the pylons to the WSW and headed toward that. I listened to five or six entire Get This podcasts while walking. Bussing home on the 4, I saw that I must have remembered some of the route from bussing there before.
• Some real spotty readings up to the NE. This seems normal, but the sky visibility is good there; it’s a gentle ridge with mostly single-story buildings. Perhaps it’s that I tend to go there late in the day when the tracker’s batteries are weaker, and often in heavier weather.
• Two stretches on Sandy. I can’t remember why. It looks like one of them ended up at Got Phở, though, so that’s all right.

I notice, a month late, that Jurgen Gothe will leave DiscDrive in September. I listened to his show more or less daily in the 90s. In years since, unwilling to suffer the CBC’s shoddy internet streaming, I’ve listened to highly regarded classical/jazz/folk shows on KBPS, KING, BBC Radio 3 and several shortwave stations, but nothing there has even approached Gothe’s humble breadth, quiet precision, and sagacious ad-libs. The CBC site used to have clips of some of his notably bizarre riffs – reward for working links.

Gothe’s only match in that niche was on his own station, in Shelagh Rogers’ Take Five, which is already gone. English-language public radio’s response to the internet is so shambolic that there will probably never be another show comparable to them. I suppose I’ll still be bringing them up in fifty years. If we’re lucky, the archives will open one day.

Anyway, in spelunking on the Radio 2 site, I recalled the time when every week Take Five would wrap “Organ Thursday”, the only regular instrument-specific segment, presented by Jurgen Petrenko. He was an organist himself and did a good show, but it was hard not to wonder at the presence of a second Jurgen. One imagined that the CBC programming directors had a meeting in which someone pointed out that, relying heavily on Jurgen Gothe for the main drive-time show, they might be left catastrophically Jurgenless should he, the primary Jurgen, experience unexpected difficulties. In their wisdom, then, they were preparing for disaster by maintaining a secondary Jurgen as a backup, kept warm by its weekly presentation so that it could take over at a moment’s notice until the primary Jurgen was repaired and brought back online. Those guys thought of everything.

It’s spring ahead day in the US. If I haven’t complained about summer time to you before, let me do so now.

DST doesn’t work in Indiana, doesn’t work in Australia, and moving it forward doesn’t work. It wastes energy. The overall health effects of the time jump are unclear but certainly non-positive, and there will be a 7% spike in road accidents tomorrow.

The problem that DST is trying to address is that business hours are asymmetrical around solar noon. Instead of declaring time discontinuous, we might consider fixing the problem at its root by popularizing flextime and staggered work hours. This would presumably drift toward the effect of year-round summer time, and we wouldn’t have to do it by redefining time itself.

Well, from 1 February to today. I still don’t have a good way of organizing this stuff.

Please to be noticing:

• a drive to bikko’s
• a short expedition into Macleay Park, to which I will return with a tripod
• a drive across the Fremont Bridge
• my first walk across Ross Island Bridge in ages (yielding tram photos)
• a dead end up in the northern hinterlands

pseudomammal gave me a little DG-100 GPS tracker for Xmas. It has no display, but two far better things: negligible weight and an outstanding chipset. After a few hours of thrashing buggy C (work redone by someone else a week later), it was spitting out eerily accurate tracks. With a clear view of the sky and not too much metal around, it’s sub-meter; under heavy trees or in the RF canyons downtown, it’s 10-meter or so. The project, obviously, is spooling it all into a handy database and working on things like automatic photo tagging, hours walked per day, and path smoothing. But for now, just the above: everywhere I’ve been in Portland proper this month, minus a few trips I’ve greened in where I forgot to bring the tracker, turn it on, or keep it charged. The arrows in the SE were a trip to Mt Tabor which would unbalance the map.

Last year I posted a Powell’s wishlist for my birthday and y’all embarrassed me by getting pretty much all of it. Let’s keep it a little more modest this time. I’d be delighted if you got me one (1) medium priority item. (Amazon used only for convenience – support your local economy. Likewise, used is as good as new.)

I predict, within the next fifteen years or so, in no particular order:

1. More good news about women in the developing and undeveloped world. Microcredit especially is a big deal.
2. Better computer input methods. Qwerty keyboards and two-button pointers are getting mighty stale.
3. Several more cross-cutting tricks in the style of Exposé; the window GUI will fade gently into the next big thing. (Phones seem to be pushing UI at the moment, but desktop screens are still getting bigger, so I dunno.)
4. More huge statistical and data-mining projects, many of them indirect. The example I’ve been using is extracting climate data from photos on Flickr.
5. Far more GIS, geotagging, local services (like Craig’s List), etc. It may seem like a big fad now, but it’ll look measly in ten years.
6. Likewise, more amateur and indie music and movies. Just you wait.
7. More from Southeast Europe and the Balkans: Hungary, Romania, Macedonia, etc.
8. India and China will keep getting scarier and more interesting. This may be the conventional wisdom, but nonetheless. There are more English speakers in China than in the US, and they will eventually start voting on Slashdot and commenting on Metafilter.
9. Ex-Soviet Central Asia will be a more obvious enigma.
10. Better investigative journalism all over the world – fewer state media monopolies and less room for major corruption of conventional kinds. Robber barons will rely less on hiding and more on spin.
11. Better point-of-sale systems, especially receipts. Leaps and bounds in credit and debit card processing.
12. Fewer 7-segment LCDs and visible printed pixels.
13. Needless to say, I hope, far more LEDs everywhere. Colorful commercial signs will look way better and we’ll pity the days of incandescents, neon, and half-burnt-out six-foot-tall store names (“S FE AY”).
14. Likewise, street lamps such as will make our orange beasts look amazingly dated. Astronomers will have to give over to the safety and comfort of properly lit night driving.
15. A wider variety of better food for cheaper.
16. Better consumer batteries. Lithium-ion will seem like lead-acid.
17. In graphic design:
    1. A return of neat looks: Magritte-like matte abstractions, Tintin-like clean-line illustration, and spare, Japanese-influenced red, white, and black compositions. These will be reminiscent of the saner parts of the 70s and 80s.
    2. More (attention to) serifed and modulated fonts with distinctive terminals and plays on straight lines, like Electra, Californian, and Dante. A revival of Dutch and English typographical history.
    3. New deep looks with woven and woodcut textures – see, e.g., “embellish”, “filigree”, and “blankets” here. Lots of fabric themes: silk, Persian carpets, batik, Latin American weaving, etc.
18. Cheaper, smaller, more personalized lots of consumer goods. Shirt slogans, shoe shapes, posters, dishes, and so on will be of your choice for something like a 20% markup on the mass-produced version.
19. Entertainment set in prehistory – a sitcom about dinosaurs, a drama about the Clovis culture, etc.
20. More and more popular third-party food and trade certifications.

Ideally there would be a stronger way of expressing these – as cheap long bets, say – to make sure they’re controversial and well defined.

I’ve been paying more attention to my Flickr than my LiveJournal lately. I have a project or two boiling up which make it seem unlikely that I’ll get back to regular stuff here, but who knows?

Shh. Just watch.

The sender of A Pattern Language will please step forward and be recognized. It’s a terrific present and I can’t tell who it’s from. [Edit: It’s from Mom. She’d not so bad.]

This wishlist-posting tactic has worked extremely well. All week books I really want have been appearing out of nowhere. I strongly suggest it.

If you want to get me something for my birthday, you’ll be pleased to know I have a Powell’s wishlist. If you don’t, I sympathize – let’s call it even.

Here are 97 photos (making maybe 10 megabytes) from 2006. I’ve captioned sparsely; please ask for details if one catches your eye.