Say you run a pharmaceutical company. You have a highly lucrative business manufacturing drugs that treat erectile dysfunction. However, at the edges of your business are a couple of problems:
– gray marketeers buy drugs bound for export and re-sell them in the states through shady means
– black marketeers sell counterfeit drugs

What do you do? Law enforcement’s going to prove ineffective in the long run, and stamping out one results in another one popping up. Plus, the gray marketeers are harming your reputation because someone in Estonia can’t get the real thing because it’s been rerouted.

You enter the black market: control the high and the low. You don’t even have to do it directly: given a distributor of sufficently poor morals, you can supply them with a ton of drugs at a really low cost and watch them flood the black market. Because your drug only costs $.01/pill, you’ll still make a huge profit undercutting what they would pay to pick off those Estonia-bound drugs, and the gray marketeers are screwed.

And voila, your problems are solved (and you’ve created a whole set of problems for other people). Your involvement in easily-deniable cut-out companies now makes you a ton of money, protects the legitimate supply of the drug, and profits go way, way up.

Houghton Mifflin seems really happy with the first draft, but it looks like Spring 07 now: they want time to get full galleys out to everyone and their family so they can get quotes, and it’s not a particularly timely book, so I guess that’s cool.

So good news: it’s looking good, everyone’s happy
Bad news: another year? Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnn.

The supposedly third-most-important member of Al-Qaida may have been killed by a missle in Pakistan.

This makes, by my count, five #3s killed or captured. So… say that they all really were the #3 man, and also that Al-Qaida’s a pretty strictly vertical organization. Since 2001:
1-2: no problems
3-7: killed or captured

If you were in Al-Qaida and the #8 man back then, at this point you need to either quit or kill the #2 guy, because the US is coming for you. No kidding. This country is serious about pursuing anyone in Al-Qaida who isn’t one of the two guys right at the top.

One of a continuing series.

When I built my new PC, I set it up with RAID-1 because, being a writer and all, I’m amazingly paranoid about my data but don’t want to run full backups every night.

I had to go through this long and annoying process to set it up which involved me having to buy and install a floppy drive (which I suspect is the only time I’ll ever use it), but it worked fine and I was happy.

Until one day, Windows gave me this weird message on startup (“Installing new hardware… found Seagate… found Seagate…”) and then both drives started showing up. For a week I didn’t notice that somehow, the array had been split and one of the drives wasn’t working until today. I went to fix it, which was long and annoying, and when I got it up and going, it rebuilt itself off the older drive, so I lost a week of data (fortunately, I didn’t do anything really interesting this week).

I don’t mind tinkering with boxes. I’ve done it most of my life. It’s tedious and annoying, but I understand that when you want to do cool, non-standard stuff, you end up getting into loading drivers and reading manuals. I’m okay with that.

But once working, can’t it stay working for a week? Is that really too high a standard before everything — without explanation or any kind of chance to troubleshoot — blows up on me?

Argh.

Watch ads enough, and you’ll start to note that much of the time, the ad is an attempt at an almost Rovian sales philosophy: selling the weakest part of your product as a strength (SUVs with huge gas tanks saying “get 300 miles on a single tank!”).

But Xbox 360 marketing’s taken this up hilariously:

Limit 1 per customer. Due to high demand, orders placed after October 26th may not ship until March 2006.
If you’re a serious gamer looking for the ultimate console, the search ends here. Fully loaded, the Xbox 360 Ultimate Bundle

It’s $699.92.

The search doesn’t end “there” so much as this is the waiting room for the actual place where the search ends. If you’re looking for a “the ultimate console” you haven’t just found one: you’ve found the queue. Now just wait a long, long time.

It’s crazy. You could sell anything out of stock this way. “Are you tired of pedaling around on a bike that weighs over 10 pounds? Well, for only $5,000,000 you can buy a bike made of pure Unobtainium, a substance we haven’t even invented yet, but which we’re sure will offer amazing handling and performance sometime after 2050.”

“Hungry? Get on the waitlist for Snickers.”

One of the interesting things about having a blog with a relatively high Google ranking is that other pages will do things like link to you in an attempt to make themselves look relevant. So, for instance:

scotts faves alicublog busy busy busy talk left si vague nihilism alterdestiny
south knox bubba orcinus altercation the gadflyer uss mariner iraqd martini
republic war and piece american street madkane dogblog lance mannion camos axis.

Hee hee hee. A lot of “lawyer” sites lately, too, which is strange. Discount cruises.

It’s interesting that search engines, in attempting to make the web navigable, have created an entire new category of noise, and the battle has changed from being trying to make information usable to trying to pick information from the chaff.

A Flying Tigers flight jacket.

I believe the patch on the back says “This foreign person has come to China to help in the war effort. Soldiers and civilians, one and all, should rescue, protect, and provide him medical care.”

I recently played two games, “Gun” and “Xenosaga 2“. One’s an RPG and one’s an action shooter. Both received mixed reviews.

I gave up on one after the amount of time it took to finish the other.

The first Xenosaga had a bizarre sci-fi plot, some weird game elements, long, long cut-scenes (one ran 45m, if I remember) and while it didn’t make a whole lot of sense, it was kind of an enjoyable ride.

The newer one’s plot makes less sense, and it’s boring, and the combat system is bizarre, complicated, and not worth figuring out. The boringness and general frustration make it a lot harder to sit through a long cutscene (which, in turn, is 50% awkward pauses). Some of the characters were amusing before, now they’re just annoying. The weird stuff still doesn’t make sense. It’s not worth the effort.

Now, take Gun. Gun’s this Wild West story, and you run around and shoot a lot of stuff and run people over with your horse and get into gunfights and cheat at poker (which is hilarious). It’s got some gore, a dark sense of humor, and it’s super, super short. I looked at the progress meter at one point and thought “there’s no way I’m this close to the end.” Whoops… turns out I was. But at the same time, it’s fun. This is why I play these games: instead of vegging out with some bad television, I’d rather play some random game and trample people or roll up a giant ball of stuff.

There’s always a balancing act going on with games, and especially RPGs. I want challenge and detail, a good, preferably somewhat complicated story, good graphics, gameplay, but those things are all really hard. If I had to choose again between those two, it’d be Gun every time: Xenosaga was hours of me trying to justify continuing to play, while Gun was hours of me blowing up trains and laughing.

This is why I loved games like Champions of Norrath and Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance — while not long on story or character development, they strip out all the not-fun stuff from the genre. Running back and forth to town’s annoying. Voila! The portal scroll! Complicated controls whittled down into something smooth, easy, and powerful to use. And so on, until you’re left with dungeon-crawling goodness with no rough edges. Sit down, clear an objective, save, and you can walk off. If hack-and-slash games are your thing, this is perfect.

Generally, that doesn’t enter into game reviews written by professionals. If Xenosaga sucks to start playing, and you don’t want to spend hours figuring out the combat system so you can win quicker victories and spend more proportional time running from place to place and then watching the equally unfun in-game movies, that’s a crappy game. I have no idea how it got an average 72% rating.

I will now move on to Dragon Quest VIII, whenever I can get a copy.

Driving down the coastal highway back to Cairns at four in the morning, I got pulled over by the cops, who were coming in the opposite direction. They wished me a good morning, and warned me that there would be a couple of trucks coming after them (four, I think) and that I should stick to the shoulder until they had all passed.

Then four big trucks went by, followed by another cop. That’s how narrow that coastal highway was: shipping required the police to pull people over and clear the corners.

Which brings me to another aside: the truckers in Australia are crazy reckless. People complain here (rightly) that any moron can buy a Ford Extinction, which is an entirely different vehicle than their old Caravan or Civic. In Australia, the truckers drive like they’re still in Civics, and they’re mad about it. Compared to what we’re used to as standard U.S. behavior, those guys were like rabid cab drivers.

Anyway. On the Qantas flight, I zonked out and came to not long before landing. One of the Qantas attendants chatted us up, talking about the hurricanes and Bush (“He’s so stupid!” she said incredulously). Every time I encountered this, I had to keep from getting into a long political discussion (“Okay, so here’s what you don’t know about American politics…”).

Uluru is a giant sandstone rock, part of a larger formation, and it sticks out from the almost dead-flat desert and it looks like it’s a mile high. It’s a big red rock that shouldn’t be there. Even from the air, it’s eerie to see.

From afar, it’s a big red thing
Closer, there are small vertical ridges
Closer, there are subtle wide variations in color, and long horizontal ridges
Closer, there are pits, differences in erosion that have given sections different textures, like pits and caves
From an arm’s length, the sandstone looks almost like scales

As the sun sets and the light goes farther into the red end of the spectrum, Uluru seems to glow.

Being around it provokes primal reactions. The rock seems familiar, though it shouldn’t, and because of that, it’s also a little threatening. It inspires awe.

We hiked around it one morning (this takes about three hours) and what was most amazing was how it changed as our perspective changed. There are sections that have eroded to look like they’ve been taken off cleanly with a blade, revealing curved, bulbous, almost brain-like formations. The light will catch the ridges one way and give it the appearance of tipping, and fifteen minutes further walk you can imagine the water flowing off it when it rains.

It’s beautiful and inspiring and scary, and it’s worth the trip. I would have sat on a trans-Pacific flight just to see Uluru.

Port Douglas is not far north of Cairns, but it was the first time I had to drive in Australia. I did this by repeating “left left left” whenever I got into the car. The coastal road from Cairns is long and hazardous, more hazardous if you’ve only just gotten used to being on a different side of the car.

Pulling out or making turns, I always had to think it through:
– Where does my direction go?
– Where’s the other direction of traffic go? Do they stop?
– Where do other people who are turning go?

and
– Are there any Americans around who might run into me even if I think this through properly?

Port Douglas is a lot nicer than Cairns. The nightclub-and-touristy thing hasn’t overrun the whole town. You could get a decent meal, for instance, without being forced to pay $20/entree. There was a lot of real estate for sale or rent, and some development going on, but it wasn’t so big a deal.

We stayed at a place run by a couple of Germans, so I got to use a bit of my extremely rusty UW-brand language skills on them (this, naturally, was amusing).

On the Zumsteg name
, a brief digression
I grew up with it as Zum-steg, like reading it aloud with American English pronunciation. I understand back in Germany it’s more Zoom-schtaag with a quick “zoom”, but I don’t particularly care one way or another. Anyway, the woman who checked us in told me that Zum-steg was incorrect, and that it should be pronounced “Sum-stahg” and I smiled, nodded, and didn’t protest. I’ve had my name butchered so many times that having someone come up with a new pronunciation was novel. And if she’s right, so be it.

We spent our time in Port Douglas geeking out on the rainforests. We walked Mossman Gorge, and the Daintree National Park, finally getting up to Cape Tribulation, where the rainforest runs right out to the shore and into the water, one of the few places in the world where this happens (or so we’re told).

One of the beaches had this great set of signs:

Yes — don’t swim, the stingers’ll get you! And if you do get stung, even though you’re a moron we’re not going to let you die… here’s some vinegar to use while you wait for the medics.

Then we went to the Atherton Tableland. This involved driving the Gillies Highway, which is absurdly long and twisty. The map has a road. Driving that road is crazy. The emotional roller-coaster went:
– amused
– bored
– frustrated
– angry
– amused
– exasperated
– despairing
– bored
– incredulous

Turn right. Turn left. Repeat forever. There were numbers painted on the road for no reason, counting down from 100. I grabbed onto them, knowing that something had to be at the end of the numbers. They counted back up in the same manner. I have no idea.

We stopped for a road crew once and the guy holding the stop sign wandered over.
“First time?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Pretty curvy,” he said. “Should be about five minutes.” Then he walked back to talk to the next car.

Aussies. They’re crazy.

We checked out a crater lakes, Lake Eacham (nice and all, but Crater Lake is way better). We got to see “bum breather” turtles that, the sign helpfully explained, have specially adapted so they can draw some oxygen out of water they cycle in and out of their… bum. We saw a 500-year old Gadgarra Red Cedar tree (possibly the last accessible native one in all of Queensland). And again, I felt aware of the wonder of all things, seeing this ancient tree in a forest of young growth (settlers had logged around it, sparing it for reasons no one knows) reaching up through the canopy.

Next up: Uluru, and the Flies of Dooooooom.