“A Moment of Fallout 3”

Once I figured out that there was a way to load the content w/o using Games for Windows Live (with which I’d downloaded it), and used a pre-messed-up-save, it was a good time. It just took easily 2x as long to get it installed and working as it did to play… which is messed up

I can’t wrap my head around how badly this thing is designed. It’s the worst experience I’ve ever had. Any game company that signs on for this instead of (say) Steam deserves to sell zero copies of anything.

The thing:
– there’s a Games for Windows Live standalone client. It sucks. You can log into this, but if you start a GfW-enabled game, like F3, it won’t recognize it… you have to login again.
– if you playing before w/o GfWL, and start playing it with it, you’re screwed for save games etc. Which is nutty.
– for reasons I cannot fathom, Fallout 3 will not connect within the game
– once you decide to use GfWL within Fallout 3, you have a new set of problems..

So pretty much, buying the downloadable content for Fallout 3 went like this:
– go slog through installing a stupid client
– pay some money
– download it
– it doesn’t work
– much frustration

I’m no closer now to playing this than I was when I started. I have zero clue what went wrong, or why, or what to do about it. This is horrible. The value of this expansion so far is like -$50.

“Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account” Mary Rickert, F&SF Oct/Nov 2008.

I just came across an old F&SF and read “The Tamarisk Hunter” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 2007). It’s easily one of the better stories I’ve read in a long time… A fine farmpunk tale, since reprinted ever as it crossed into mainstream republication. Now I have to go check out his book.

… that I can believe in.

Here’s the Fox Reality channel schedule against the inauguration coverage:

I’ve written about the Clover (and Starbucks and the Clover) here a couple times, but the short version is the Clover’s this crazy drip coffee maker that well-tended produces an amazingly good cup of coffee in under a minute. Starbucks bought them out and now you can’t purchase them new.

I saw one on ebay (link) selling for $4,000 (with a buy it now price of $18k).

And I kind of stared at it for a while. I emailed the link to fellow Clover people. I reloaded a lot. I started to come up with this plan in my head for how I could make it worthwhile (“…if I had it on my desk at work, I could collect donations for cups and it would only take four, five years…”). I stared at the picture. I wondered if I’d be able to get as good with it as Trabant, say. I looked at the seller’s feedback.

And even now, having realized it’s a little crazy to have spent that much time tossing the idea back and forth, I write this up and think “well, it’s not thaaat crazy, you can see where…”.

Stupid coffee.

The huge project I’ve been fighting for months and months is live now, and you can see it here on one of my favorite hotels’ page, the Hotel De Anza:

An image of the hotel de anza page at expedia.co.uk

Here’s the use case. Someone goes to google, types in “Hotels in San Jose” and goes to our handy Travel Guide page (my co-worker and friend Dirk Zoller, who I whole-heartedly endorse, was the Program Manager for a host of sweet features on that page) you click through to the De Anza.

I was the program manager for two new pieces: the breadcrumbs

Screenshot of breadcrumbs on the Hotel De Anza Page

and the cross-linking modules

Hotel De Anza crosslinking modules

There are potentially five on any point of sale. You only see four on the De Anza there because it’s not a chain hotel (otherwise you’d see a fifth one for, say, other Hilton hotels in the area).

Here’s what I want to talk about, though.

Hotel De Anza Overfelt Gardens link module

Though this doesn’t look like it, this is the coolest thing on the Expedia points of sale that carry it. It’s not as smart as some of the rocket science back-end stuff that handles flight search, or booking hotels, and all of that good stuff. But it’s the only feature I know of that can potentially surprise and delight a user.

Here’s what’s going on. When you come to a hotel’s page, we do a couple of hotel searches to find stuff in the neighborhood, the same (or better) class, the neighborhood, and then we look at whether you were already searching for hotels near a landmark. If you weren’t, we take a guess from the landmarks the hotel is near. It’s potentially random. For some small percentage of people who work in similar jobs like mine, that’s already enough awesome.

The result is that sometimes if you’re looking at a hotel in Seattle, you might be presented with other hotels near Seattle Center, which you’d expect. But you might get hotels near the Lake Union Sea Plane Base (airport code LKE). Or Dick’s burgers. Or Chief Seattle’s grave.

I don’t know how long it’ll take before someone out there finds something they didn’t know was out there based on this, but it’s inevitable. I have this image in my head of a user shopping for a hotel, and maybe they’re a little bored as they go through the results, or they’re tired, and out of nowhere they see hotels near the Bellevue Doll Museum.

“Doll Museum?” they think. “I didn’t know there was a doll museum in Bellevue. Let me go check that out…”

Or “Doll Museum? There’s a Doll Museum in Bellevue? Why?”

Or whatever their reaction might be. Something causes them to pay attention. Expedia’s suddenly gone from being to a pretty staid online travel agent to a place where every once in a while we’ll do something interesting and unexpected. Willing to throw the Doll Museum out there on a lark if we don’t know what you might be interested in.

It makes me happy.

I went to go take another crack at a short story that’s been dogging me today and came across something titled “Veggie Sandwich Combo for the Unseen”. It’s two pages long, hilarious, ends abruptly, and I have absolutely no recollection of it even though the time stamps are not that old.

Writing is weird.

Paradise Roasters has a rare small-lot Colombia (the “Colombia-Delgado Micro-lot”) at 50% off ($12/12 oz bag). It’s a chance to get some really high-quality coffee geek-style beans for normal-bean dollars. Derek says check it out.