A Few Links I Can't Resist

I promise to not just turn this into your very own un-customizable RSS feed, but I've got a trio of links I have to share. The first is very exciting because I own a Wii, as should everyone. Apparently, Nintendo is releasing something call WiiWare, which "gives at-home developers the tools to create content playable with those magical controllers." Read the whole Engadget story here. It's not exactly an in-depth look at the product, but it gives some more detail and definitely piques my interest. I sure as hell can't design a video game but I bet some other guy that doesn't own a billion dollar publishing company can and I'd like to see what he can come up with.

The other thing is related to a somewhat typically amusing conversation between me, Chris, and Sean at work a couple days ago. Somebody mentioned nanotech, and I said that nanotech is a really loaded word for me because no matter what real applications it may have all I can ever picture is robots in my blood. Chris was somewhat onboard, and Sean thought we were both crazy people. As I said, a typical conversation. I even drew a diagram on my whiteboard because I literally have an exact image in my head that pops up every time somebody says the word nanotech. I recreated it here for you. I must thank the people who make Inkscape for allowing me to do this in under ten minutes without it looking like balls. It's truly an incredible piece of software. At any rate, another Engadget article today showed me this. Now that is nanotech.

And finally, an old-style electronic baseball scoreboard that gives live updates. That's freakin awesome. Too bad it costs 300 damn dollars.

Super Paper Mario

So the grand idea for North Carolina posting ran into the brick wall of reality about a week ago and I've been too busy and/or tired to post much of anything, never mind a brilliant illustrated narrative of that week. Fortunately, about ten people read this, and nine of them have already heard the stories in person, so all I'm gonna do here is reiterate that hang gliding is very very awesome and that everyone should try it if they get the opportunity. I think the time and expense required to pick it up as a real hobby will prove to be prohibitive, but I'd certainly like to go up to Ellenville and have another lesson or two just for fun.

And now to the main point of this post: Super Paper Mario. Nina got it for me for my birthday, and it's really quite awesome. The more I play the more I find to love. The real basic premise is that it's a Mario platformer with two twists. One, you (and the enemies) have hitpoints instead of lives, and there is an RPG element that allows you to increase your max HP and attack power, but you don't have the movement/battle scene split of a typical RPG. Two, you can "Flip." Flipping changes the perspective of the game by making the world 3D and rotating the camera so that what was previously a left-to-right path is now a front-to-back. The way the elements of the 3D world compress to form a 2D world is quite interesting and allows for a lot of fun secrets and whatnot. Those bits alone should make the game a lot of fun, but they keep adding more fun as you go. Like Pixls, these little assistant guys that you find along the way. You can have one active at a time, and they do lots of cool things. One acts as a sort of grappling hook, grabbing things and bringing them back to you (or triggering switches). Another is a bomb that you can detonate on demand. My favorite so far allows you to become one-dimensional so that you are really thin and can't be hurt if you stop moving. There appear to be many more.

Then you start to unlock additional characters. Right now I have Princess Peach, who can float using her umbrella. You also get Bowser, who breathes fire. I suspect the fourth is Luigi, who I think jumps higher than Mario but Nina thinks I'm just fooling myself about the jumping part. At any rate it adds another element and they don't do too much of that crap where they force you to switch characters every two seconds.

The final two things you learn early on are Recipes and Cards. The recipe thing is fairly simple: you bring an item to this lady and she cooks it for you. Sometimes you get a cool new item, sometimes you don't, and they store the successful ones as recipes in the menu so you can make them again. I was one part disappointed and two parts relieved that recipes didn't require 2 or 3 items at once. The cards are little cards with pictures of enemies or NPCs on them, which you can find or buy in various ways. Each card you have of an enemy gives you bonuses when you fight them, and they provide a nice obsessive collection element. You can also get Catch Cards (of various strengths) which allow you to capture a weakened enemy and turn them into a card.

Again, that would be cool enough, but while exploring I found two awesome secrets. The first is in the wilderness surrounding the town (think home base) of Flipside. It's called the Pit of 100 Trials. Once you go in, you can only leave by dying, finishing, or using an escape pipe that you get every 10 trials. The trials are just rooms with a one-way door in and locked door somewhere in a small platformer level full of enemies. One of the enemies has the key, and I'm sure you get the idea. The prizes are whatever experience, coins, and items you get, plus you get a Pixl card every 10 trials. The first time I found it I went through the first 50 and bailed because I was getting a little over my head and running out of curative items. I made sure to make it to 50 though so I could see the next Pixl I was gonna get (he's a ground pounder).

The second cool find is he arcade, which I found inside a tavern. You buy tokens and then play one of three arcade games to try and win more tokens that you trade for super rare items. The three games are a memory matching game, a shoot everything on screen before it gets you game, and a tip the platform to make Mario get the good stuff and dodge the enemies game. All are fun and free of glitches or stupid irritations, and the hardware performs beautifully throughout. Nina and I beat the crap out of the memory game but my favorite is the tipping one.

One last note, I did find one interesting oversight (or maybe they planned it who knows) with the economy. A shop in one of the dungeons sells a certain item for 50 coins. The shop in town sells it for 100, but that doesn't actually get you anything since they buy at 50% of sell price. The key is that you can make this item into a pretty sweet item with the cook lady, which sells at the shop in town for 96 coins. So with only 50 coins and a lot of time, you can fairly quickly amass as large a fortune as you need. Pretty handy.

And now I feel this has been going on long enough so I'll call it quits for now. I'll try to return to the shorter posts less often model that we're all used to.

Back To Work

So I'm done with the second of three days here in Armonk. Day one (Monday) started at 2:45 PM, which was a very pleasant happening because it let me not get up at oh-dark-thirty to get down here. We did the same paperwork I've done three times before, did the stand in front of a wall and try not to blink thing for security, and were sent on our way until 5:00, at which point we were shuttled from the main building to IBM corporate HQ for a little tour. We arrived before our tourguide, and we had the most negative experience I have ever had while dealing with IBM personnel. The man at the front desk in the almost-very-nice suit with a tie that just missed pulling the whole thing together got very irritated that a bunch of new-hires would dare show up without a chaperone and then have the nerve to not be able to fully explain the situation to him. He also informed me when I turned on the billion-inch TV in the lobby, next to the chairs, that "everything was off for a reason" and that we should not touch "anything mechanical." I bit my tongue before I asked him how many gears he thought the TV had. Fortunately he stormed out shortly and we all watched the door close behind him before taking turns making jokes about whether or not the book on the table had too many moving parts to be read or if the chairs were turned for a reason, and then our guide showed up. It is important to stress that everyone else we encountered before and after said man in the lobby was incredibly friendly and helpful.

The tour was cool. A little long given how hungry I was but very interesting. We got to see a ton of old machines (some back from the 20s when IBM was still the Computing-Tabulation-Recording company -- I think I got that right) that they display around the place and that was quite interesting. We also looked down the hallway at the offices of the top four people at IBM, and got to walk around The Boardroom. The table in there was one of the most impressive and beautiful pieces of furniture I've ever seen. Not much else on the tour was terribly noteworthy for most of my limited readership, but I'm glad I took it. And then it was on to dinner.

The food here is great. Nothing is particularly amazing, but the quality has been at least of the "very good" quality and the two things have really impressed me. One, the variety and selection has been very impressive. Two, every time we have taken a break, the lobby outside our classroom is restocked with cookies, snacks, pretzels, soda, coffee, all the good stuff people in class all day would want. And nobody ever disapprovingly informs us that the food is intended for more important people.

As for the class, it's about what you would expect. Some good info, a little corporate cheerleading, the occasional team-building activity. The guy running it has done a pretty good job and was nice enough to speed up a couple of the more tedious spots so that's cool. Honestly my only gripes are -- shock! -- with a couple of the other participants but it's nothing major and I assure you I have kept it to myself. And I have come to enjoy being around several of them for meals and the like. Most people are pretty sociable so that's of course good.

After class today we got laptops. I was very pleased to see that they are T60s, so I can finally stop using my personal machine as a work machine. We then started in on initial workstation setup and familiarization, but seeing as how I'm putting Gentoo on it the minute I get back to the office (probably just copy everything off of the current machine and go from there since the hardware is the same) I was allowed to leave early, at which point I found out that my hotel key had deactivated itself but fortunately nothing more than a little trudging and a helpful guy at the front desk fixed that. My hotel room is nice, by the way. Not mindblowing but highly satisfactory.

That's about all I've got for orientation. I'm getting really excited to get back to the office and see what they're going to have me working on. I kind of hope it's not what I was doing before but I'd be okay if it was, and I really can't wait to see everyone again, especially John (Jon?), because not only is he the only person in Poughkeepsie who will really talk baseball with me (and Justin Verlander threw a no-hitter tonight), but he also used to hang glide and really wanted to hear about my experience in NC. He even said he might be convinced to go with me if I get into it up here. But everyone else is great too.

Alright this is more than long enough and I'm missing baseball highlights, so I'm gonna call it a wrap. I promise to get something about North Carolina up soon.