Quartz City

After a couple more lunch hours of gameplay I’ve hit the tribal stage and things turn into a entirely different game. Nearest I can figure is that you need to throw away any strategy you might have from years of playing Civilization. It won’t work - just kill your neighbors.

Meanwhile, my Godzilla knockoff now has big arms.

Yes I’ve been playing Spore during lunch. These guys are the end result of a half-hour or so of swimming and eating.

My Spore online account is “quartzcity” unsurprisingly.

We got married!

First round of photos at Ned’s (who was stellar as the officiant along with Rachel) Flickr stream.

Going against the tide of Flickr curmedgeons, here’s some Flickr video from the QC archives:

Alkali flies on the ground at Mono Lake. They don’t bite at all, but it’s unnerving walking around them and seeing them flee and reorient as you walk around.

Some Mono Lake shoreline to go along with the flies.

A flyby of the last remaining Northrop Flying Wing prototype.

Seven days after my 16GB iPhone arrived, my gut reaction from last July still stands. To me the iPhone feels more like a piece of high-end test equipment or something from the glory days of HP’s calculator design studio than the flimsy plastic phones I’ve had over the years. Sure there will be a 3G model in a few months, but that final “push me over the edge” purchasing moment wasn’t solely the release of the SDK, but a aggregation of things: the SDK, the big iPhone seminar track at WWDC, all the excitement among developers I respect. I’m certainly not enough of a developer to be on the 2.0 beta fast track, but I did conclude that’s it’s kinda important for me to get up to speed on it. Not because it’s a phone or an iPod Touch or whatever the hell Apple comes up with, but mainly because it’s the first new Apple OS since OS X and I believe that most of the interesting new development stuff is going to happen on it rather than on OS X. At least until Lion or whatever cat 10.6 ends up being.

Some notes so far:

• The only way I could get AT&T to transfer my mobile number from T-Mobile was if I contracted under AT&T’s pre-paid GoPhone plan. AT&T couldn’t give me a satisfactory answer and suggested that I switch to a regular plan later.
• I’ve barely used my iPod since getting the phone. Using it now feels like going back to OS 7 on a Mac Plus. My observation last year about “eventually all small devices like this are going to work this way” is apparently still holding.
• Sound quality is substantially better on the iPhone than on my 5G iPod, even when holding earphone variables constant.
• Mobile Safari is pretty handy, but I appreciate mobile-browser optimized web sites much more. If anything, they’re less cluttered and rarely have advertisements.

I haven’t added a screenshot to the Command Shift 3 Flickr pool in awhile….

Forget all that motivational poster crap, there’s no greater way to get your butt moving on work than a determined Lee Marvin on his way to open up several drums of whoop-ass.

Screencap from the always great Nostalgia Party No. 2 blog.

There’s a ton of hysteria about the extra box you have to check if you’re a non-partisian voter in L.A. County who wants to vote on the Demoocratic ballot, and unlike Kos, et. al who are fanning the flames, the directions were pretty explicit from the sample ballot I received in the mail (page two says to check the box!) to the instructions you read on the ballot itself.

Bureaucracy doesn’t have to make sense.

Anyway I suppose I should have joined in with the folks who were taking pictures of their polling place, but everything was running smoothly this morning (I voted at the Oasis Christian Center on Wilshire). Took all of ten minutes.

There was a video crew from Time.com down the street and they ended up interviewing me for the site (note to self: when thinking, make sure your eyes are open). Techincally though, I’m not part of “a group of California Democrats,” - I’m non-partisian and just happened to vote on a Democratic ballot.

Despite being born with ocean-deficient genes (itself a further irony because I was born about 200 meters from the Pacific), I managed to get myself down to the beach at Ka’anapali and into the ocean. Twice. I know I know - I can hear the peanut gallery already, but we’re talking baby steps here. Thankfully we’re a very long way away from shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.

Honestly, there’s pretty much no way not to have a brilliant time on Maui and even with the Holiday invasion, things are distributed around enough that you never feel like you’re part of a mob. Some notes:

• Wailea is the place to go if you want to feel like you’re on the Las Vegas strip. The Grand Wailea Hotel is architectually neat to check out, but is also the only place where we encountered rude staff and hollering kids.
• Save $$$ on rental car extortion and take the Maui Bus. It’s only a buck per ride and you can spend more time looking out the window (trust me, you’ll do this a lot). Skip the car until you absolutely, positively need it.
• Grady from ILX suggested that we check out Colleen’s in Haiku. We did, and holy crap was it good. Haiku itself is a great little town and felt most like the Maui that I was picturing to myself (jungle, farm, damp air) before arriving. When it’s time for a return visit I’d see about finding a weekly rental or B&B type of place there.
• Kona coffee is indeed all that it’s cracked up to be.

Obligatory Flickr set.

Couple of ExDetectives shows on the way… We’re playing this Sunday at the Knitting Factory (we go on at 9pm). We’re also playing The Mint on Wednesday, Nov. 28.

Holding down the high score on Tempest at Ground Kontrol in Portland.

I’m vaguely ashamed by my rather weak 109,526 high score. Back In The Day my average score would be around 200-220K after twenty minutes or so. Still, I’ll take what I can get. Ground Kontrol’s machine is in terrific shape (along with their Robotron machine which gave me a quite a workover)