SWAT 4 Expansion

Posting this from Blogger’s new “Post from Word” thingy.

http://www.teamwarfare.com/forums/showthread.asp?forumid=281&threadid=256078

SWAT 4 is coming out with an expansion pack; I’ll have to wait until February, but it’s sure nice to see police tactical action still getting some marketing.

"Sweet and Salty Nut", a Play In Two Acts

Hide your IR Emitters

From "How High Tech Is Coming to the Rescue"

"What you need are comms, lift and power," said Eric Frost, co-director of San Diego State University's Immersive Visualization Center and another veteran of the tsunami relief effort. In fact, aerial capability can dramatically augment communications capability, he said.

"You can have planes 'spraying' the Internet down and sucking the data back up," he said.

I just want to call out the excellent metaphor; that's an image to remember. I get pictures of the return to a retro future - giant data zeppelins blanketing cities in wireless communication grids.

But we've got a little fad phase to get through first, and it's called the UAV.

"Dude, we're GI Joe, you put on the Cobra decal!"

It seems like the buzzword these days about automation is "UAV", short for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. Everybody wants UAVs - rescue, reconnaissance, reduction of targets to rubble...remember how just three years ago those little robots on treads that went down the pyramid vent shafts at Giza were the toy that everybody wanted? Sorry Robbie, we've gone from Giza to Gaza, and the little package with the big taste is here; it's got angel's wings and $3 billion in backing from the United States government. (1)

Hell, there's even a movie, Stealth, which I really haven't felt like seeing, that pits Jamie Foxx and some other forgettables against an AI-driven super combat jet...which is just a glorified UAV. Oh no, will they have to use the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon to knock it out before it starts World War III, and they'll have to sacrifice Jamie Foxx to do it? And the crying wife shows up at the last minute to kiss her suicide-patriot goodbye before the Pentagon general pushes the big red button?

Give it a year and a half, and there'll be real flying UAV toys for kids, loaded with replica Hellfire missles, but they'll need to be called "Freedom" missiles because you can't go printing Hell-anything on toy boxes, but they can do a pretty good imitation of that neat Israeli aerial assassination thing where they Hellfired a car because that's kinda-sorta-America-fuck-yeah!

Power to the purchaser!

1. I pulled the $3bn figure out of my ass but decided to Google "uav budget" for the hell of it, and got this from the Air Force's AIM Points Magazine: The DOD's UAV budget is expected to reach about $3 billion a year by 2008-2009. Now I know I'm starting to get jaded - I can hit economic balls into the ballpark without looking.

1 out of 1

A book review by Nicole M. Zalesky

Hey Nicole - way to go, girl. Knowledge is power!

Hey, Skipper

sailing_test_freddie
Posing with "Freddie".

I hope nobody bestows this honor on any part of their life without seriously thinking it through first, least of all for me, but I'll go ahead and venture to say that this past week has been one of the best in my life.

It doesn't feel like it's really all it's appearing, but I realize I'm censoring my happiness; when you get excited and happy for yourself these days any number of factors move quickly to intercept and bring you back down to earth, many of them pre-programmed into the social acceptance part of your brain.

Don't get too happy.
Don't get too proud.
Don't get too comfortable.

Fine - but I am happy. I am proud. Why?

Because of sailing. This weekend marked my induction into marine sailing certification; I am now ASA certified to act as skipper on sailboats up to 30 feet in length, for coastal daysailing.

Because of the Widget. Over 10,000 downloads! Way to go, T-Nuts, we made it!

Because of all that's coming up. My birthday party, sailing, parasailing, and skydiving, all in September.

But really, the best part - I'm a skipper!

Now, if I want to be a Captain, that's going to take exactly 359 more days of sailing, but I'll build to that.

Artillery, Your Area

Last night at midnight marked my passage into a world previously unknown to me: the world of video cards that require a supplemental power adapter. The GeForce 6600 GT, the XFX edition with factory overclocking. It's not top of the line, but it beats the pants off my Radeon 9600. But the power thing!

Now, I've got power to spare - I've got a 450W Antec, so I'm not complaining. But good lord, what does it need that extra power for, anyway?

So I can clearly see the grimace on the enemy squad leader's face when I pop him at 700 yards with my M24 in Battlefield 2, I guess. Watch out for that handicap ramp! *BOOM*

It feels so good to play that game with a new card. Stayed up until 2 this morning, and that was being conservative. I'd still be playing if it wasn't for this whole "work" thing.

Reasonable Cases

Remember hearing me talk about powering my way through a brick wall? I realize that a lot of what I've been doing in this powering is really denying - strictly, denying that the wall was there, and denying that it required a different response than just aiming my nose right at it and punching up the throttles.

Among other things, I wasn't being clear. I'm getting a good opportunity here in a class I'm taking (and am currently on break from) to remember that denial is common, but fatal.

The question is: what am I pretending not to know?

I love how it shows itself in all kinds of things. I've been playing Falcon 4.0: Allied Force, an update to a very famous combat flight simulator, repackaged with all the requisite patches and a 700-page instruction manual.

The thing about this simulator is that they make all the buttons work. Just about all of them, anyway. That's a neat thing for a guy like me that likes whiz-bang technology, but this aircraft is complicated. I'm having to re-learn all of the flight sim crap that I learned in the many adolescent years I spent with "casual" flight sims like Jane's ATF or Jetfighter.

Many a time in recent memory while flying the F-16 Falcon in this game, I found myself punching the same button on the plane's Multi-Function Display going "Why won't it just work?" It took some experimentation to find out that the aircraft had a process: button A, then button B, and then button C, or you can forget about it, because if you don't do it in that order, it won't work.

Good example - Maverick optical-guided missiles. These things are a riot - you get a little camera on your MFD that you can see in infrared with, pick out targets, zoom in, lock on visually, and your missile will nail 'em when you launch. That's if you press the button to take the lens cap off. I kept forgetting that part. No visual, no way to lock on, no satisfying explosion. Again, it doesn't matter what I want or how I power through it, it will be done A, then B, then C, or it won't be done at all.

The amazing part is that I know this; I'm just pretending that I don't know it, hoping that it'll change on its own. That the circuits will just choose to link up in a different way if I push that button a few more times. Maybe it's just a "human thing", but I doubt it's how successful people - not even talking monetary success either, I mean people who just get things done - run their day-to-day.

I think the point comes around in different ways. I have said to others that I've been wanting clarity, but often I don't recognize it when it's there, or when I do recognize it, I don't like the weight that it carries and I ignore it, pretending not to see it. Often to my peril.

Night By Night

I love finding more music that inspires me. Steely Dan comes through again. Love this little set right here.

When the joker tried to tell me
I could cut it in the smooth town
When he tried to hang that sign on me
I said 'take it down'
When the dawn patrol gotta tell you twice
They gonna do it with a shotgun
Yes I'm cashing in this ten cent life
For another one
Well I ain't got the heart
To lose another fight
So until my ship comes in
I live night by night

Donald Fagen, you're at the top of the world, buddy.

So I'm here slamming out the same passage because I want to get the feeling and I realize - boy, you've got a manic streak in you.

LOOOOONG ENTRY BELOW, NOT SAFE FOR KIDS OR OLD PEOPLE

The work, the sailing, the writing, the music, I get these times that light up for me like I've been plugged with propane and a spark. I don't know what this is. I don't have a name for it other than what I've gathered over the years but I swear to God food even tastes better. Hunger returns, desire returns, life pulls up in the drive and my god, the car it drives is beautiful.

It's times like this that I think about being every shining star in the sky and really think it's possible. Something always comes along to put that reminding, cautious, adult voice in my head to shut me up and keep me thinking about a happy retirement, but I know what I am and I know what I get if I don't do anything. I know what happens when I don't make it happen for me, when I don't use this energy and feed it.

Nobody knows, not even me, how hard the last three months were on me. I was looking in the mirror and witnessing my ribs sticking out my sides like pointy armor plating, seeing those damn black circles under my eyes that will never go away, and the acne that I hope some day will, I realize I've probably dumped more stress on my body than I should have, and for what? What good reason?

I tried to power through a goddamn brick wall for ninety days, maybe even longer, and it flattened me.

When I was just a little kid, I always talked to adults. Didn't really talk to other kids. I didn't like them, and I got the feeling they didn't like me, either. Put that with the fact that I always talked to myself or some pretend audience - you know, typical only-child bullshit - and you've got an eight-year-old feeling like a forty-year old pretty fast. By twenty-three I'd gotten a house and a professional job and professional bills and a retirement building up and I'm starting to realize that maybe, just maybe, putting on some brakes would have been good, because now I'm thinking I want this car pointed the other direction and I don't know if she'll go any other way.

I'm afraid of being wrong. That's why I try to be right. That's why I'll say things without researching them all the way. We all know that. But it's almost like I feel that a forty-year old shouldn't not know certain things, and then I catch myself and go "You're not forty. You aren't. No matter how much you think you are."

Well, it's starting to suck. Yeah, suck. That's a twenty-three-year-old's word for "be regrettable".

It's regrettable that I've been playing a pompous asshole on this TV show of life.

It's regrettable that I've put myself into an awkward hole where I think that people might respect me, but probably know deep inside that I'm playing at being something I'm not, and just don't have the heart to burst my bubble.

And it's regrettable - no, it sucks - that it's taken so long for me to get to this epiphany.

Yeah. It sucks. And I've been here a million times before, it feels like.

Every time it's the same daydream-nightmare thing where there's 'being myself' and 'being respectable' and both of them are guns I have to put to my head and pull the trigger for better or worse.

I know what I am inside. I'm a big ball of confusion. I can't pick one thing to do and I can't tell you that I ever will. I've started and stopped and pioneered and abandoned and forgot a thousand crazy things. I've had some horrible ideas and made serious blunders. I've blamed others and hated the world and the situations I've been in and I've been stupid about the responsibility for it.

But I also know this: I love the world and the people in it and all of the machinery that makes it go with the same wonder and passion I had when I was just this tall. I never, ever want to lose sight of that.

Every time this nightmare comes to blot my stars out of the sky it's not wholesale. It's a nagging voice in my head that tells me that the world isn't as I see it, that the only way I can really play the game to win is to play it so smooth and know everything and everyone and have that handshake and have that article in the Wall Street Journal committed to long-term memory and if not, fake it so well it doesn't matter, and that's how I'll win the big prize and leave this world smiling.

It tells me I can't win it by being the little boy I know I am inside.

Fuck that. Fuck that, and fuck this world if they want to pretend they can't see me, a little boy that just wants to show them a miracle or two.

Fuck it all if the world wants to tell me to do one thing and that thing has to have the word "pension", "lawn", or "church" in it.

I've spent so long inflating myself with that dream and all of the self-importance that goes with it that I feel that all I am half the time is air. Goddamnit, when I had a dream about getting my legs cut down to a shorter size, I woke up happy! What kind of crazy sonofabitch is happy about getting his legs amputated?

Well, how about a guy that's been worried about his height?

Well, put on your headphones, crank up your music, and let me tell you something right now.

I have one life. I've already lost so many months I can't get back. I am tired of duality coming up on my six and gunning me down with all of the bullshit ammo I've been feeding it for years. I can't go back, and frankly, I don't want to.

But with what I've got left, I know this much. Whatever makes me want the world to be a wonderful place, like this feeling I have now, whatever that is, it has to stay. I have to do what I can to bring out this feeling in myself and others. It is the world and the body and the mind in balance and every time it drains out of me, I've been hit with something poisonous and I've never been so stupid that I couldn't see it. I always pretended it wasn't there.

The pretending stops now.

Whooah. That was a major fucking ride. I need a beer. 45 minutes of almost straight writing this thing. Did anyone actually finish this? Sometimes it just feels good to get it out, you know? *tap tap* Hello? Sal, you sure we're broadcasting?

The Last Straw

...and Arby's doesn't even serve onion petals anymore.

Hide Your iBook

$50 laptop sale sets off violent stampede
People trampled, beaten with folding chair as 'total chaos' takes over
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8973616/

I think what's amazing to me about this is the implicit civil order that the establishment of fair market value imposes on society, and, by extension, the civil disorder that results from either negligent or deliberate diversion from the "rational market".

There is a price. People pay it. A certain amount of people will invest a certain amount of energy to pay less, but only an amount of energy proportional to their expected savings. They clip a coupon and save 5%. They fill in a rebate form, affix a stamp, and get back 15%. Nowhere does anybody get trampled.

$50 laptops are something like 90% off the used price.

This, apparently, causes people to consider a disproportional amount of energy justified in getting the savings.

I start to wonder if those folks involved in the business of policy realized this inherent risk in allowing free markets, and thus was at least part of the argument for outlawing price "dumping" in the early days of the Japan vs. US electronics trade wars.

Sure, it's about maintaining export vs. import ratios.

It's also about not kicking off a consumer riot that could spread like wildfire and plunge entire cities into chaos.

Ridiculous?

$10 for an iPod at every Wal-Mart from 9AM to 11AM. One day only. Put that up and every major metropolitan area in a blast zone around the local Wal-Mart stores would look like the Red Cross station grain mobs in Somalia. People would die. Literally, they would be killed. Perhaps not intentionally, but tramplings, smotherings, crushing deaths, auto accidents and other impact injuries would claim the lives of hundreds, if not thousands. Snarls of roadways will impact local commerce. Diverting of police and military forces to contain the threat of rioting will stress budgets and resources, as well as leave other areas of cities vulnerable. In short, order might well become chaos.

We have had social, political, and religious systems in place for a while now that have been responsible for bearing the standard of order and predictability, and at some point we added to it an economic one: we now depend on our pricing structure to command a certain level of civil order, and policy has reinforced this structure - my opinion is that among other things, that's because they realize it is important, that economic tools like price dumping can cause social panic effects, and that's not just economic anymore - that's social, political, humanitarian. It affects the bottom line. These things begin to look like weapons in the right light.

Might not be news to anyone, but to me, it's just amazing to see what we've got in place to keep the dam from breaking. It looks an awful lot like duct tape and chewing gum, but then, I haven't had my eyes checked in a while.

My Most Dreaded Enemy

I was in the cafeteria just ten minutes ago. I was finishing up with three eggs, two pieces of sausage and a yogurt. A bit of eggs were dumped into the trash and half a sausage patty. I figured I wasn't hungry - I had a heavy, lead-weight feeling in my stomach that comes around when I eat eggs. I don't know why eggs, but there it is.

I trek back to my office and spy an open bag of tortilla chips on my desk. They've been there a few days but they're still fine. There are a million of 'em; you can't buy tortilla chips in anything smaller than Naval Fleet size.

What comes to me upon seeing these chips is a feeling I didn't think I had. A feeling I thought I had quashed. I was getting hungry. I was realizing I was hungry. Still hungry, even after that lead-weight, cold-rock, asphalt egg stomach.

And I realize that it's not that I'm full. It's that I got bored. The eggs and sausage got boring and my mind didn't want them anymore. I could still eat, I could still consume calories and maybe it'd mean more energy if I did - it just had to be something different for my mind to let my body accept it.

I realize, too, that the same could be said of my personal life, with hobbies and work - perhaps I just get bored of things. Ennui. The Sherlock Holmes dread disease. In this culture, it's not okay to say you're bored. Kids say they're bored. Rich spoiled blonde brats say they're bored. Rich housewives say they're bored. Nobody with any integrity says they're bored.

Well, I get bored. There were some parts of New York that were boring. There are parts of work that are boring. I consider 40-50% of the time in a movie, on average, to be boring. That goes up to 60-70% for books. 30%-40% for video games, much more if they're repetitive. Double for RPGs. Sorry to whoever's offended, but I'm not really sorry.

I'm starting to wonder if inside I've got the heart of an adrenaline junkie, or just the raw untempered whiny entitlement of your classic only child, where I look out upon this great land of ours what with its lazy Sundays, half-priced clearance events, fertilizer companies, and Highway 101 and shout, "Boring!"

I realize something new now, or maybe I've just stopped lying about it. Perhaps I ended chapters of my life because they got boring. Airsoft got boring. 2AM bowling got boring. Links Night got boring. Aikido got boring. Xbox Live got boring. Sierra got boring.

The natural extension is, of course, horrifying. Will my current job get boring? Will sailing get boring? Eventually, sure. I know better today what I am, and how things appear to me. Is it that these things are by their very nature boring? Of course not. It's me. It's how I perceive them.

But there's not much I can do about that now. It's a metabolism that'll run itself down over the course of my years. I'll settle in, eventually. The big wheel will stop on something, and where it stops, that's what I settle on. God help me, but it'll probably be something like croquet and cucumber sandwiches.

Pictures from NYC

http://www.flickr.com/photos/agentcox/sets/762088/

Check out the trip. It's a lot of pictures. No, I won't really be explaining any of them. Well, okay, I might, but later.

NYC v1.0

Wow. This place is nuts.

It has garbage everywhere. It always smells like something's burning. People flow like a thousand crossing rivers. The humidity has fogged my camera lens and I can't take pictures with anything but my camera phone. I'm dodging drops of water from AC units dozens of stories in the air.

I'm having a wonderful time.

And I've been watching that Widget. 3000+ downloads, rated 3 1/2 out of 4 stars!

We Made It!

Tyler and I got our oilPrice Widget on Konfabulator's Widget Gallery today! We're already at over 150 downloads, more downloads every few minutes. We think we're looking at one download of our Widget every two minutes.

It's available for both Windows and Mac, download right here.

Might not mean much to the world at large, but to us it's incredibly exciting, crack open a beer with us and celebrate!

Testing Bloglines

Rojo's losing it - they can't seem to update my feeds, and that's a big red X on the sheet when you don't do that.

Going with Bloglines, as they seem on top of things, and little Konfab widgets are available that let me know when one of you fine folks has posted something new.

Testing out this Widget now, so I'm making a post.

What?

Yeah, so I'm subscribed to my own feed temporarily, I'll unsubscribe once I get the widget verified working. I know I'm vain, but I'm working through it!

oilPrice Widget!

Tyler Havlin and Charles Cox are the Widget Workshop. If you saw anything about the recent Konfabulator purchase by Yahoo, you'll know it's about Widgets. Cool things that hang on your desktop and do stuff.

Tyler and I decided to make one. I did the code, he did the art.

It goes and grabs the price of a barrel of crude oil off the Net every thirty minutes. Stay on top of oil, grab this Widget.

It's been submitted to the Widget Gallery, and I'll let everyone know when we go live, but for now, you can sneak it from here:

Download the oilPrice Widget for Konfabulator 2.0

Special thanks to Shiner Bock beer, Camel Turkish Gold cigarettes, and Mom's tuna noodle casserole. And Javascript. You all rock.

9 Reasons We Don't Do What We Should

Dave Pollard has put together a list of the nine most critical reasons we don't get things done even when we know we can and should.

It's a good list, with a few interesting divergences from popular motivational thinking, such as don't keep lists.

I'll reproduce the list here:

1. Fear
2. Lack of Self-Confidence
3. Lack of Knowledge
4. Trying to Do Too Much Alone
5. Trying to Do Too Much
6. Loss of Self
7. Lack of Energy
8. Lack of Reward
9. It Can't Be Done

Dave expounds a bit on each, but what I'd like to remember is this, his proposal for the solutions to each:

So what do we do about these things? How do we overcome these obstacles to doing what we should do? For the most part, the answers are pretty obvious once we recognize which of the nine reasons are in play. Lack of knowledge (#3) requires more research, more sharing of information. Trying to do too much alone (#4) requires learning to collaborate, and to delegate. Trying to do too much (#5) requires learning to say no, and to focus on doing one or two things really well. Lack of energy (#7) requires some introspection as to the cause -- physical (in which case the solution may be improvements to diet or exercise) or emotional (in which case meditation or a life change may be in order). Lack of reward (#8) requires being good to ourselves, and to others, in balance. Trying to do the impossible (#9) requires some navel-gazing, and either stopping trying to do it (which may require some candid discussion with others who may have put it on our list), or changing it (or our lives) in some significant way so that it becomes possible, or recognizing it is just a dream and focusing energies on other, attainable things, until and unless circumstances dramatically change.

The solution to #2 and #6 is much more difficult -- these causes of inaction are part of what we are, and will take a long time to overcome. Perhaps just realizing that they are the reason why we're not doing what we should is an important first step.

And there is no solution to #1, except courage.

Recent events in my life, at least, remind me to take #5 to heart. I can't do it all.

One for The Books

The world's dead, but I'm not. I don't need to be drinking Coke at zero-thirty, because this is the result. 2:30 AM comes around and I can't sleep. So I jump up and the first thing I see is the little ceremonial Japanese short sword on my bedstand.

And the part of my brain that only works when juiced up on caffeine at latenight-or-is-that-earlymorning says something clever like: hey, that looks like _fun_ -

Half an hour later, having done the sword katas I can remember in the dark, spinning and swinging around like the village idiot, both of my ears and all of my fingers are still attached - the blade's dull anyway, nobody meant for this thing to cut anyone - but I'm still wired up.

I've heard it all now - I've been losing weight and at least one person's asked does he do heroin?

I've gotten the anorexia jabs here and there, but that's the first time anyone's accused me of doing anything harder than the "writer food pyramid": that's nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, and pizza, for those that don't have a copy of the home game.

Note to employers scouring the 'net for "character references" - here's your chance! I occasionally smoke! I drink caffeinated beverages! I eat greasy food! I post to my blog at 3 AM! If a health index is a precursor to employment in the future (as I'm assuming it will be), take off ten points and call it even, we're all dead in the long run.

This workweek ended on a note of relief that puts a cap on a month-long skate across the stress-edge of burnout; my body has some work to do to re-calibrate. I know I've been stressing - I don't usually drink Coke, I don't usually stay up until two. But that's what's been happening. I guess the fact that I've been putting up with a summer cold for the last week wasn't a big help either.

At this point, I'm streaming out what's left in my rapidly-draining neurons while I wait for sleep to sneak up on me and slit a brain passage. Come on, man, put on your night vision goggles and do me already...

Now Serving Number 535

Tracking my dreams. Tired of losing them after I wake up.

Track along with me at http://www.the-agent.net/dreamblog/.

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