Quixotica

I'm not done yet.

Some friendly PR types brought a dozen or so 3DS demo units to the office today, and after the GamePro folks had their fill we wrangled an hour of hands-on time for ourselves. I wish I could say we brought all the class and atmosphere of a shady backroom deal, two teams of four questionable characters facing each other across a Lucite no man's land as a dozen prototype units change hands.

Hardly. After an hour goofing around with the hardware, I can tell you it works, and it works well; if the case is durable and the battery can hold strong through sustained use it's going to be a very successful product. Quixotically, the 3D effect is the least interesting aspect of the 3DS; it works and it's entrancing for about half an hour, but it's quite limited in the illusion of depth generated; most of the games and movies we saw topped out at what appeared to be an inch or so of simulated depth. Presumably this is due in part to the need for all games to be enjoyable in 2D as well as 3D, but the small screen also trivializes the experience.

Playing with these devices, I came to understand that part of the appeal of 3D movies like Avatar or Tron: Legacy is the feeling of existing partially within the story and being able to peer past the first "layer" of 3D to explore the scenery at my own discretion. Since different levels of the background now have different priority depth-wise, I perceive a clear hierarchy without a clear ranking system of importance (excluding the action of the film.) The screen is so large it takes me up to a full second or two to swing my eyes around and refocus on different layers of the scenery, and thus I feel more active and engaged in the fiction of the film.

That feeling of exploring a world was not present when I played a few minutes of a few 3DS launch titles like Pilotwings and Steel Diver, and I think it may well be because the screen is just physically smaller and more limited when simulating depth.

To be clear, the games were still quite enjoyable; I just feel that the hype surrounding the first portable 3D gaming system may leave a few folks underwhelmed, especially when you consider that the 3DS games available when the system launches are pretty unimpressive. The AR stuff that comes packed in with the system is arguably more exciting, though the AR game we saw today was just a simple snipe hunt designed to show off the tech.

I had to consult Facebook to remember what sorts of music I liked; a clear signal that it's time to punch out on life.

I don't really miss Ireland any longer, but I sort of miss missing Ireland.

In a similar vein, I don't have any great passion for The Big Lebowski, video games or expensive cameras, but I really like people who like those things.

Today I learned that hagiography is the study of saints.

Also, Gravity's Rainbow is exceedingly well-written and perplexing to peruse without a Google page handy. I should stop buying so many books.

I briefly interviewed Georgia Weidman this afternoon; she's a security nerd who recently presented her Android botnet at ShmooCon 2011, the latest in a long line of hacker-centric security conferences held annually in D.C. I'll be writing up our interview this weekend for a Privacy Watch column so I won't bore you with the details here (plus I'm itching to dig back into Alpha Protocol, but what's so interesting about her work is that she's developed one of the first Android botnets that communicates via SMS instead of IP. This is important because SMS messaging places much less strain on the battery than constantly checking in with the C&C via your Android smartphone's modem, and her code operates within the base OS beneath the application layer so the user has no idea he or she has been infected.

Essentially, if Georgia can get you to download a bot builder on your phone (either packaged inside a cool-looking app or from a third-party website) she can build a malicious program in your phone that can access all the data going in or out of your phone and communicate with everyone in your contact list without you ever having a clue. It's pretty cool shit.

Pretending to write about printer security and listening to some of my favorite jams from junior high, high school, big kid college and junior college.

Guess it's easier to just call it Orange County Radio: hitting the greatest hits of your most embarrassing lows.

I met an old sorta-kinda-sometimes-totally friend for coffee on Sunday. She just quit her shitty retail job for a slightly less shitty desk job as a temp with a pharmaceutical reimbursement consulting company.

This friend, she's got style. Anger. Passion. She needs something from life, and looks at this job as something to keep a roof over her head while she tries to figure out a better way to satisfy that need. It's a strange way to live; sometimes I flirt with the notion that work is what you do when you're not out having a life, but it never seduces me completely. I'm not content to work just to live, but neither am I living for the work I'm doing. In a sense, it's a case of separation anxiety; my personal persona and the one I wear at work can't be kept apart, but neither can they coexist quietly.

Do you work to live, live to work or just...live?

Today I learned many things.

I learned the secret trick to getting past the locked gate that seals Noisebridge. Once inside, I sat and talked shop with a number of network security buffs; one of the most fascinating things I learned was how difficult it is to prosecute hackers due to the global reach of the Internet.

For example, let's say Korean Hacker A builds a botnet that scrapes credit card data. Your system is compromised, and now there's a text file containing your account and identity data on a server in Croatia.

We know where it is, but how do we secure the right to cross into Korean jurisdiction to arrest a citizen for data stolen in one country and stored in another? If a U.S. citizen has been targeted we have a bargaining chip, but what if that hard drive in Croatia holds damning personal data from people across the globe? Who can you trust to safely dispose of that data? Is it any better that the agents of a foreign government possess the keys to your identity, instead of some anonymous Croatian citizen?

Curiouser and curiouser.

Also, this was taped to the bathroom wall; nerd graffiti.

I have an ancient secret for you: in the dark before the dawn of the 20th century, Austrian military leaders seriously considered employing bicycles as engines of war.



Credit for unearthing this ancient history goes to the History of Ideas blog, curated by the folks at J.F. Ptak Books.

I took my ball and went to Twitter, now I'm bringing it back where it belongs.

One post a day. No refunds, no regrets.

On the weekends I meander down to Philz for a morning cup of coffee. I pay $5 to shelter for a moment amidst the pleasant peculiarity of a coffee haus that plops a honkin' great grey monolith of an ancient ATM smack dab in the center of an ever-shifting mandala with arms of overstuffed armchairs and spokes formed from old wooden park benches. Come for the coffee, stay for the calculated eccentricity.

This morning one of the cashiers kindly helped me seat a disposable lid atop my steaming styrofoam cup. He's an elderly gentleman with a passion for jaunty headwear, reliably classy when it comes to both his service and his sense of personal style; when I complemented him on his facility for fixing flimsy coffee cup lids, he smiled and claimed it was an ancient secret.

There ought to be more ancient secrets.

Nearly every waking moment of the past year has been clouded with thoughts of all the better ways I could be spending my time.