Blessed by the Potato

My new computer arrived the other day, but I had to wait until the weekend to have time to set it up. Setting up a new computer has definitely gotten faster from the old days when you practically had to reinstall Windows to get rid of the bloatware. Nonetheless, it still takes hours to track down all the little programs I had installed, transfer files off my old hard drive (which yes, thankfully, was still working), and get going.

Anyway, I’m just about fully up and running again over here, now under Windows 8. So time for a quick review! I’m not going to get too far into Windows 8 just yet as I haven’t had much time to use it. In short, it’s fast yet annoying. In the desktop mode, Windows 8 is pretty much just Windows — it’s only under the tablet mode that it’s gone full retard, but aside from launching less-frequently-used programs, I have no reason to venture there. The default PDF viewer is an “app” and just really really dumb and bad, but there are a number of “desktop” programs that do the trick (including Acrobat). I’ve been hitting the web trying to find solutions to a number of things, only to find that there really isn’t a way to fix some stuff. For example, even with “small” icons, quick launch items will spread out and take up valuable taskbar inches, and it appears as though there is no way to make them cuddle up closer together actually this quick launch work-around does the trick, but still, why isn’t there a spacing option to avoid the work-around? It reminds me of Office 2007 and that idiotic “ribbon” — changing the default UI is fine, but leave me the option to make it work the way I want it to work. Also weird is that instead of “clicking” on something, the tooltips and prompts now suggest “tapping”. Further proof that Win 8 is a tablet product MS kludged onto a desktop.

One point in Win 8’s favour is that the confirmation dialog to delete things has gone away — the recycle bin is there for second-thoughts.

As for the XPS 8500 itself, there are a few things that really annoyed me before I even got to turning it on. The first is the video card: it has a DVI and HDMI connector. And that’s it. It came with a DVI to VGA adaptor (which I threw on the pile of the other 4 I have now), but not a HDMI to DVI adaptor. WTF, Dell? The Dell monitor I bought just a year ago was top-of-the-line, and didn’t have HDMI-in. Of the dozens of monitors in my home and lab, only one aside from the TV had HDMI-in. I can’t run dual monitors until I run out and buy a dongle (or downgrade to my old video card). HDMI is a nice feature if you want to use your computer on your TV (as a gaming system or home theatre PC), but two computer-monitor-friendly outputs should have been standard, with the HDMI as a third, particularly for the XPS line. At the very least, the appropriate HDMI-converting dongle should have been included. [Update: there is a bios option to use the the integrated VGA port to control a second monitor, strange because it beeped at me and refused to start when I tried that out of the box. I’m still going to have to buy the dongle though, as there’s a “wiggle-woggle” of scan lines on grey backgrounds with VGA — it’s not quite meant for 1650×1080 resolution.]

One thing I’ve been impressed with in the XPS line has been that extra bit of care Dell takes to neatly secure most of the wires, so you don’t open up your case to a rat’s nest. Unfortunately, they’ve gone too far this time: there aren’t enough expansion power cables to do much upgrading later on. Though the case has room for up to 5 drives, with 4 SATA heads, there are only two drive power cables. Now, they are the type that has a second SATA power connector located partway along the cable, so in theory you can power 4 drives from the two leads. In reality, the connectors are so close together that you can only power a pair of drives that are in adjacent bays. So if you want to put in a 3rd hard drive (as I was planning to do, and as the specs and reviews indicated I could), you have to put it up in the 5 & 1/4″ bay (somehow), buy an extension, or de-power the DVD drive. I do have a bunch of 4-pin-Molex-to-SATA power converters, but there aren’t even any old-fashioned 4-pin Molex power rails to use. I already thought that the case should have supported more hard drive slots (if I’m going to use 2-3, there’s almost certainly someone out there who wants 4 for a RAID array), but the power set up will really limit expandability, even if you get a PCI-e expansion SATA controller.

The keyboard is a “chicklet” style, which I associate with laptops rather than desktops. Pity, I rather liked the old Dell keyboards, and it was getting time to replace my old one, so I thought that was a benefit of buying vs building my own system. There’s no numlock key, which at first I found a little strange, until I realized that I never used my number pad for anything but entering numbers, and I only ever toggled numlock to make the light turn off. The insert/delete/home keys have been squished to make room for some media keys, including a mute button. Things that are missing and that I find weird in their absence are the little plastic tabs to adjust the angle of the keyboard. Instead, the keyboard features little rubber feet that help keep it from sliding around on my desk. Fortunately the keyboard is at a bit of an angle. That works for me — I always have the little feet fully extended — but I know a lot of people prefer a flatter keyboard.

The case itself is a fair bit smaller than I was expecting. It’s not quite a compact form factor, but it’s definitely smaller than my old desktop (which is “standard” ATX, with a total of 10 drive bays). It’s nicely optimized for living on the ground under my desk: the power button is on the top, along with the headphone jack and some USB ports, including one that can be used to charge devices even when the computer is off. There’s a little dip up there to help hold phones or MP3 players in place (and I’m sure one day soon, the cat).

What’s impressing me so far is how quiet it is. I think a lot of work in advancing computer technology in the past few years has gone into making them more power efficient, which reduces the cooling needs. My old system had six fans (plus the one on the video card), this one just two. I haven’t run a game on it yet, but with web surfing and installing programs it’s staying cool — my old system made my room noticeably warmer than the rest of the house.

Anyway, at least I’m up and running without data loss. I’m sure at some point soon I will join the chorus of old fogies ranting about the slew of minor changes in Windows 8 that herald the end of civilization as we know it.

After Blueberry was born, I spent a fair number of nights up late with her playing (single-player) turn-based strategy games. The turn-based part was key: I never knew how much attention I’d be able to give the game, when I’d have to walk away, and even when I was playing, I often had a sleeping baby in one arm. So I returned to that old well-loved classic, Master of Orion 2. Indeed, if you have access to the family photo album, you’ll see a MOO2 screen in the background of one of the cute shots of me and her.

A few weeks ago I heard about a new game called Endless Space that promised to capture many of the important elements of MOO2. I bought it through Steam immediately. I’ve now had a chance to play through a few games so I can give a bit of an informed opinion. In short, it’s fun but slow, and not in the “book off a week of time” slow like a huge CivIV map on epic speed is slow, but in the inpatient “ok I clicked the damned end turn button and now I’d like the next turn to begin already” way.

Like MOO2 and many other 4x space games since, ES has a bit of backstory about ancient advanced civilizations, but the game universe is fairly sparse aside from a bit of flavour text here and there. You won’t be travelling to Orion to dig up ancient tech, and Antarans won’t be appearing over your colonies to extract vengeance and then disappear. So as a practical matter, it’s a pretty straight-forward 4X game without any underlying plot or external events to worry about.

The good: Well, I’ve played more than one round, so there’s obviously some good in there. The balance between system/planet level and galaxy level is pretty good: there’s some micromanagerial options to tweak your systems’ output, but you won’t get bogged down in minutiae. It’s not too hard to monitor your empire at a glance — though I wish there was a “take me to this planet” button when you got a notification about building being done so you could see where it was on the map.

The AI seems reasonably clever, and has put up a decent fight in the games I’ve played so far. Otherwise there isn’t a whole lot that really stands out in my mind as being note-worthy: it’s just fairly-well put together and balanced, with a few points that I’ll mention specifically below.

Travel: One item I liked was the method of faster-than-light travel: they have star lanes connecting stars that are close to each other in a cluster, and using those lanes is the starting tech, though you continue to use them later as they’re the fastest way to get around. Wormholes link different clusters, and you have to research the ability to use those. Later, you’ll be able to develop warp drive to fly between any two points without the need of having a wormhole or space lane linking the systems.

A pretty cool way to do it. The Sword of the Stars had really attracted me at first precisely because of the different FTL technologies the races had. However, I never could get into the rest of the SotS gameplay (never got past the demo, even). So I was excited to see this. However, aside from opening up more systems to explore in the galaxy, I don’t think warp drive was implemented very well. One particular feature that I found lacking was the option to force warp travel. The pathing AI automatically uses whatever combination of star lanes, wormholes, and free-flow warp drive will get your ship to its destination the fastest. But there are times when an enemy may have a natural starlane/wormhole chokepoint system, and have that planet heavily defended. If I have warp tech, I could in theory fly directly to a system in their rearguard and wreak havoc. Yet there’s no way for me to force a warp journey: the pathing AI will always try to send me through the starlanes (and thus, the enemy fleet) where possible.

Ship Battles: ES has a very simplified tactical battle system, where ships automatically engage each other while closing distance, which is broken into three phases (far, middle, near). At each phase the player gets to choose one action (termed “playing a card”), such as buffing kinetics damage by 25%, or sabotaging enemy laser accuracy by 15%. Sometimes your action will nullify the enemy’s action, which is kind of like a double bonus for you. Really basic stuff.

So I can’t for the life of me figure out why it’s so slow. If you choose to manually control a battle (picking your card(s) yourself), you’re presented with a loading screen, then a pretty 3D-rendered movie of the battle playing out. It looks good, and it can be kind of helpful to see which of the enemy weapon systems is tearing you apart… but you can’t interact with it in any way. You can’t even fast-forward once it’s started. It’s just pointless and slow. Even the automatic battle resolution is slow, with a big timer bar (a “feature” that seems to be there for the benefit of multiplayer). I’m not sure why there isn’t a hybrid option giving you the ability to pick your cards, but not actually watch the action unfold.

To complement that simple enagement, ES also has a simple 3-weapon-type combat system, with 3 corresponding types of shielding. It’s not quite a rock-paper-scissors type of arrangement: though each offers benefits, lasers don’t lose to missiles but beat kinetics. Supposedly each type is good at a different engagement range: missiles for distance, lasers for medium range, and kinetics to tear shit up in close. However, lasers have the barest of range penalties for distance, so I’ve found in practice (my whole 3 games played) that kinetics get ditched in favour of the other two technologies. Indeed, all engagements after the first few technology steps end in the first round (distance), which exacerbates the annoyance of a manual battle: all that loading just to play one card.

I wish there were more tactical options beyond just picking which buff or debuff card I wanted to play that time. For example, what if I built a ship that was faster than my opponent’s? Shouldn’t I be able to choose to close the distance faster, passing through the effective range of missiles and lasers to open up with my kinetics? Or if I had missiles myself, to kite the opponent and extend the duration of the long-distance phase of combat? Plus many of the other neat tactical options that MOO2 had that are missing, like boarding enemy ships or racing past a fleet to bomb a planet.

Indeed, that’s another missing element from the combat system: the option to bomb the enemy into submission. If they built a wretched colony on a gas giant, and the people are starving and rioting and just generally detracting from the empire rather than adding to it — or even if it’s just in your way and not something you can afford to defend — there’s no option to just glass the planet from orbit and move on. Your only option is to invade and take it over, though I have to admit that I do like the mechanism for that: you spend a certain amount of time with your fleets in orbit on an invade mission, and the ownership bar moves steadily towards your side. When it’s full you have the planet, but just barely: the people are angry and upset, and it will take very little time for the enemy to take it back — when their fleets take back the skies, they’ll find the takeover progress bar already nearly filled. No marines and transports to micromanage.

Events: There are random events, but so far they seem very dry. Except for one (you magically get a colony ship), they’ve all consisted of buffs/debuffs adding percentages to some trait, sometimes permanently, but more often for a set number of turns. There are no space monsters, hyperspace fluxes, or archaeological digs uncovering the ancient secrets of mass driver technology. Even the boring percentage effects seem to magnify their dullness by almost always affecting all players at once.

I think the space monsters are one of things I miss most from MOO2. To make up for it, ES has pirates that rampage across the skies, seeming to originate from neutral systems. Thing is, in one game the pirates were pretty much non-existent: there were so many players crammed onto that map that very quickly there ceased to be any neutral systems (at least, none outside the scanning range of the other colonies, which seems to be another pirate prerequisite). In another game, the pirates had this little arm of a spiral galaxy to themselves until after wormhole travel was discovered. By that point, the pirates had more fleet strength than all the other players combined, which was kind of nuts — and that was on “normal”. There’s another level of amped-up pirate activity available in the game options that I’m frankly afraid to experiment with for fear they will come through the screen to overtake the earth itself in our reality.

Speed: My biggest problem with ES is the speed. I don’t know if the game is just inefficiently coded, or if the delay is a carry-over from multiplayer that screws up single-player… but it is slow. You click the end turn button and a progress bar worms its way around. Even at the very beginning with nothing to resolve it takes at least 3-5 seconds per turn to complete. So even if I have all my build orders queued and am just trying to burn through turns until I discover a technology (or whatever it is I’m waiting on), it can still be a slow game to play. The slow loading and playout for combat (when all I want to do is pick my buffs) really adds to that — and even automatic combat has a timer to wait through. Indeed, the slow speed of the game is ultimately what will relegate it to the dustpile for me.

Bugs and Miscellany: There’s the option to blockade your systems with fleets so enemies can’t just sail through to the next system: they have to park it or fight. Yet even though I never seem to be able to run a blockade, the enemy never seems to be slowed by mine. In one game there was a player I just couldn’t kill because my ships simply refused to accept their system as a valid destination.

One staple of the genre is cloaked ships, which don’t seem to exist here, though one technology’s description (of spotting all ships orbiting the system) suggests that at one point in the development cycle there were. There’s also no spying or technology stealing, though there are faction traits that give you research points and/or money when you blow up enemy ships.

It’s tough to think of hidden terrain existing in a space 4X game: surely your astronomers can at least tell you where the stars are, even if you have to send ships to survey the planets. Yet in ES you’ll find that even knowing how many systems lay beyond the wormhole you just found (and thus how big your opponent’s empire might be) is left as a mystery.

Each race has a good/evil/neutral alignment, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it is they do [a search result suggested that it indicates how the AI will play the race — so no effect on the player].

Conclusion: To sum up, Endless Space is a fun 4X game that mostly gets the strategic formula right. Though I may miss the GNN robot, the dry atmosphere is perfectly fine for multiplayer, and I think the slowness in the single-player stems from that. The tactical game leaves a fair bit to be desired, but that’s ok — except for the odd important fight auto-resolution is the way to go with these games anyway. If you’ve been looking for a 4X game that’s like MOO2 but not just another game of MOO2 (and important to some, with more modern graphics) then it’s worth a shot. Though they don’t quite get the formula right, it comes closer to the mark than many other 4X attempts out there.

I read the The Hunger Games books not that long ago, in part because of the hype for the upcoming movie. I enjoyed it, plowing right on into the 2nd and 3rd books in the series. The action seemed well-suited to a movie adaptation, so I had high hopes going into the theatre today.

Unfortunately I can’t recommend the movie. The biggest drawback is the terrible camera work. It’s shaky cam, like the Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, except worse: instead of just being one shaky camera, it’s rapid cuts between many shaky cameras. And not just for the action scenes (which are likely deliberately motion blurred to nothingness to get a PG rating): even just sitting down to eat dinner seems to require rapid cuts to different shaking viewpoints.

So here is what I propose: director Gary Ross and Michael Bay should be put into an arena where they will fight to the death. The winner will get a tripod, the loser, well… But a much-needed tripod! So worth it!

Other than that, it was okay: they seemed to do a decent job of streamlining the plot to fit the time and format. The acting was pretty decent, which is a tough feat with so many child actors. The movie had some behind-the-scenes looks at the arena and the gamemakers, which I think were good additions. There were a few points though where I had to question if people who hadn’t read the book would be able to follow along.

Spoilers!

For instance, Katniss and Rue decide to blow up the food & supplies cache of the careers, but don’t explain why in the movie, so it seems really random. Watching the movie, you wonder why Katniss doesn’t just put an arrow into a few of them from her cover in the bushes, and what blowing up their stuff serves to accomplish — in the book it’s explained that they’re dependent on the supplies from the cornucopia, so if she can take those away they’d be on a more even footing, or even an advantage to Katniss with her superior survival skills. Plus the story does a pretty good job of not having Katniss run around terminating other kids with her superior archery skills, even though that’s what it looks like the book is building towards at first.

Then, after Rue dies, it’s kind of strange to see Katniss get so worked up, since Rue had all of like 3 minutes of screentime before that. I think their relationship was built up much better in the book, and I didn’t catch any hint of “you remind me of my kid sister who I loved so much I volunteered for this freak show to save her” in the on-screen relationship.

I just finished Dave Chilton’s The Wealthy Barber Returns (and a big thanks to Nelson of Financial Uproar infamy for not only giving me a free copy of the book, but also eventually shipping it, too! [And a further aside: he gave me some free slurpees to make up for the delay in the thing he was giving me for free anyway, which shows that deep down inside, he’s really a super nice guy] ;)

I really enjoyed it. It’s a short read, just over 200 pages with block-formatted paragraphs and many blank filler pages to make it fly by even faster. He writes with a very casual, humourous, down-to-earth tone and conveys the simple yet important financial lessons we all need. The book is broken up into many short chapters of just a few pages each; in fact the whole thing reads a little like a well-put-together blog printed out and bound. It reads like my blog, or at least, what I imagine my writing voice reads like outside of my head (though that may go over about as well as how I imagined my speaking voice sounded outside my head before I had a tape recorder).

There are no complex calculations, just common sense (or uncommon sense) and some rules-of-thumb. I’m going to find this a very easy book to recommend and pass along.

About the first half of the book is spent on the basics: living within your means, controlling debt, paying yourself first. He does a good job of covering the psychological tips that can help people set and meet goals, and candidly discusses some strategies that have and have not worked for people he’s met with over the years. The second half is more on investing, and covers index investing, the importance of fees, reasonable rates of return (and how important the rate of return can be to final outcomes), and so much more. He very nicely hits the main points on the eternal RRSP vs TFSA debate, including two important behavioural ones that don’t fit into the math: what if you spend the tax return from your RRSP so you aren’t really contributing pre-tax dollars, or are tempted to raid your TFSA for non-emergency spending?

Other random take-aways: he calls the Vancouver and Toronto housing markets crazy. It was just one paragraph, but I was glad to see it — the bubbles really do impact the financial planning in the rest of your life. He didn’t have a definitive position on emergency funds or LoCs either: EFs are great, but entice people to over-spend. But so does having a LoC at the ready. He’s got a very sensible answer for the eternal question of paying down the mortgage or investing (yes, and right away!). Mentioned at several points, living within your means and saving for the future actually leads to people being less stressed and happier, even though they don’t have as much stuff to enjoy right now. Stuff isn’t that awesome, anyway.

All-in-all, good points.

Now if I may be permitted to wander off into unnecessary criticism land (where I spend enough time to be a dual citizen), the lack of math and scary details cuts both ways. It’s a very easy read as it is, and not at all intimidating, which makes it easy to recommend to the financial novice in your life or the financial expert who will just enjoy it as a breezy bedtime read. But the lack of details mean people are going to have to fend for themselves or go off and do some further reading before they get into the tricky business of actually following through on creating a financial plan and investing. That extra step may slow them up, and some details, tucked safely away in a protective appendix where no one could accidentally hurt themselves, might have helped with the get-up-and-start-now aspect. Or it might have doubled the length of the book for no good reason.

Anyway, that leads me out of unnecessary criticism land and into the kingdom of self-promotion (whose customs I find strange and foreign). As you may recall, I wrote a book called Potato’s Short Guide to DIY Investing (one I now have to update, if only to include The Wealthy Barber Returns in my reading list for what you should have read before reading my book to get the basics of having money saved and ready to invest down). It is a short book, written by me, about do-it-yourself (DIY) investing, and it was written by me! Wait, I’m doing this self-promotion thing all wrong.

What I was thinking as I was finishing off this book is how well my book complements it. David’s book does a good job of telling you that it is important to invest for your future, explaining the ways you can invest, and most importantly, prefacing all that with a lot of good advice about how to budget and save enough so that you’ll actually have money left over to invest. He tells you about the importance of fees (though I have a graph), and does a better job than I do about explaining why indexing is the way to go. From there, my book picks up and tells you how to do that: what a few examples of low-MER index-following investments are and where to find them. Step-by-step instructions on how to open an account and actually buy or sell the bloody things. A bit about basic asset allocation (though admittedly, that could use a bit of spit-polish in v1.1). What you need to write down as you go along so that you have a head start on panicking at tax time. Basically all the stuff that’s not in the other personal finance books.

I wrote my book intending for it to be so short, so easy to read, and so practical that it could be the first book you read on investing, and use it to get started so you could get the power of compounding working for you as soon as possible while you continued to educate yourself. I was clearly wrong on at least one point: it should be the second book you read.

I’ve long been a user of Trend Micro’s Internet Security largely because it worked without eating up an unreasonable amount of system resources, wasn’t too intrusive, and because it was cheap (just $20 a copy as a UWO student, and each license could cover 3 computers). But beyond inertia, I didn’t have any particular devotion to it.

My new laptop came with a subscription to McAfee, and I figured that would be fine: all the big anti-virus programs are pretty competitive in terms of protection offered, since it’s not an area they can afford to fall on their face over. However, the other aspects have just been terrible. A lot of restart-nagging for updates, but worse is the subscription nagging: I once every week or two it pops up asking me to renew now, even though I still have over 6 months left on my subscription! And the pop-ups don’t have little X’s in the corner to quickly dismiss them. You have to click on a drop-down menu and select close to get rid of it. I just got two renewal ads tonight, so I’m thinking of blowing it away and starting over with something else (likely Trend Micro), it’s simply inexcusable to start nagging me about renewal that far in advance.

But there are other issues too:

• Details are buried 3-4 menu levels deep. Great McAfee, you found a trojan and saved me: but on what file? How do I know it’s not a false positive and something important is about to break?
• It’s slow. I know full system scans can take a while and slow you down, it’s just a fact of life with antivirus. But usually there’s a bit of a trade-off: a scan will only take an hour or so, or it won’t noticeably slow you down. McAfee’s scans are taking 4+ hours, and I can barely use my computer in the meantime. That’s worse than any other antivirus I’ve used.
• At a friend’s work a recent McAfee update appears to have upped the firewall sensitivity, and killed the network.

In short, McAfee sucks, and I’m to the point now where even for free with it already installed and running on my computer, I don’t want to use it any more.