I haven’t coded seriously in almost five years. Actually, seven, and that was writing some testing tools to do log scanning in Perl. I’ve tinkered a little since then– when I was unemployed, I toyed with using Ruby to prototype a startup idea, for instance.

I’ve been writing an interactive fiction game (think Zork) relating to baseball, in which the player is a general manager of a baseball team, and hilarity ensues.

The funny thing is I’m having the exact same feeling I used to have when I was coding, where I don’t entirely know what I’m doing, so I’ll go in and write out the desired behavior, and then in implementing it resort to increasingly ugly hacks until I can get it to work. I can’t figure out how to get a character to only take certain objects, for instance, so for now I’ve got them accepting anything you give them. While it works, it makes me wince to play through when I can give someone two redundant objects.

Or following: for a plot point I need to get someone to follow the player and then stop when they meet someone else. The only way I’ve figured out how to do that is to turn the follow rule off when they’re near the someone else, which works okay, but it’s also not a particularly good way to do it. And I’ve ended up doing a lot of making environmental behavior location-specific to the player and it just seems unsatisfying.

Part of the problem is that there’s no K&R book for Inform 7. There’s documentation and a recipe book that almost but don’t quite ever seem to tell me what I’m trying to figure out. I have a wishlist for things I want to be able to do and can’t yet.

So my process right now goes:
– pick an item off the to-do list, be it feature or bug
– re-write it
– compile (if fail, troubleshoot)
– test (if fail, troubleshoot)
– repeat

It’s slow, slow going.

The game’s 4,000 words now, which I believe would make it the longest post in USSM history if I pushed it out now, and it’s still a ways from being finished.

The really weird thing is that as much as interactive fiction’s been a niche for ages, it’s been a fairly viable one, but I cannot figure out where to get help on this stuff. I joined a list, it’s dead — though the mod approved me that day. I don’t see updates. I feel like I’m wandering around a ghost town where everyone decided to leave in June of 2007 without bothering to pack up or anything.

Even when I was programming in Fortran 77 in college, you could still find other people tasked with the same kind of work maintaining obsolete systems. But this, this is a little eerie. I can’t seriously be the only person writing a text adventure, can I?

Interestingly (to me, anyway) the only place people seem to be actively discussing this stuff at all is on Usenet, which I haven’t used seriously in many, many years. To see that it’s still living on, well… it warms my heart a little.

Netflix doesn’t let customers sign in on the front page, which is the most absurd, ridiculous design decision they could possibly make: they have a default no-cookies-detected home page which includes fields *with which you can register* but if you’re a returning customer there’s absolutely no way to sign in there. You have to click “login” each time, get a new page to render, then submit.

I can’t think of another large-scale ecommerce site that makes this so difficult, and certainly not one that, like Netflix, you have to return to continually.

But let’s say you want to drop them a line and say “look, instead of having the login page render on a second page, even if for some reason you don’t want to immediately draw one, why not just have the “login” link create a small box where you can enter your name/password, like many other sites do?”

Nope.

“Contact Us” has no contact information.

The Help Center supposedly offers ways to contact them, but you can’t actually send them an email: there weirdly is a “Answers by Phone” box when you dead-end, but there’s never any contact information besides that. So I have to call someone, wait on hold, and then talk to someone? Why? And running a call center is expensive — it’s far easier to do something useful with email feedback.

There’s a host of stuff like this — they recently made it impossible for not discernible reason to browse some things in the same way you used to be able to

It’s amazing that Netflix somehow managed to create a help system more difficult and frustrating to use than eBay’s. Congratulations, Netflix. That must have taken some doing.

Microsoft’s thinking about targeting ads to Sync users in their car.

“We know where you are and we know where you’re headed. We could target that advertising directly to your car.”

When I worked at AT&T Wireless, I used to have an argument about this pretty frequently. They all went like this:
“We’ll be able to deliver ads to your phone based on where you are! So you’ll be next to a Starbucks and we’ll send you a coupon for $1 a latte!” (it was always Starbucks)
“Do you realize how many Starbucks locations there are in Seattle?”
“What?”
“There are dozens of Starbucks. Are you going to send me dozens of Starbucks coupons as I drive up I-5? I’d turn off my phone to avoid that. It’d be a horrible experience.”
“Um…”

You could, of course, solve this by only sending a few messages and upping the cost and the incentives for the user (“free latte at the Columbia Center Starbucks? I’m there!”) but the implementation ideas always ended up delivering horrible user experiences.

I’m not surprised that the idea hasn’t died: it’s so easy to think that there’s an impressionable customer base just out of current reach, and if only you could reach out and touch them, you could drive them to take a particular action. They just don’t ever think it through to the user’s perspective.

… will be entirely determined by whoever first promises to have the FTC shut down companies that include a “subscribe me to all your spam lists” checkbox that resets to checked on re-draw (say, if you recalculate shipping, or attempt to continue with a phone number that doesn’t quite meet their formatting expectation).

Sure, it’s petty. I don’t care.

“The Great Apathetic Revolution” is one of the best simple pieces on the destruction of the content industries I’ve read, and I highly recommend it.

I wrote earlier about what could go wrong if you allowed the MPAA/RIAA/whoever to determine which torrents were violations of their copyright and go after them.

There’s actually a great example already out there: The Church of Scientology abusing copyright claims on eBay.

Another in the continuing series of posts on topics only of interest to me…

My favorite pair of sunglasses ever were a pair of Killer Loop Pandemoniums. They fit perfectly, they looked good, they were light and comfortable. So of course I lost them. Now, at the same time, the first Matrix movie had come out, and the Killer Loops were similar to the Blinde Neo (which they were inexplicably not selling). Killer Loop, having designed a pair of sunglasses I liked, promptly stopped producing them (bonus: their website’s USA page doesn’t work). Which is sad, since Bausch and Lomb at one point called them out in their 10-K (“The Killer Loop Pandemonium sunglasses combine a contemporary new style with a bold attitude and youth relevant advertising to drive worldwide expansion. “). Which makes me a little embarrassed that I liked them so much. (More embarrassing: “Intended to be worn to the limit, this sleek line of eyewear was designed for extreme sports — snow boarding, in-line skating, mountain biking and surfing.”)

The Blindes from the movie, when you could find them, were listed at $250. I bought a pair on clearance for ~$50 on Overstock, and one of the lenses popped out in a few days (woo-hoo!) and couldn’t be repaired.

Here’s the Blinde, the official, actual, worn-in-the-movie version:

From the now-sold-out Overstock.com page.

And so, down two moderately-expensive pairs, I descended into the world of knock-off sunglasses. It is, as you’d guess, a lot easier to find knockoffs of the movie sunglasses than my favorite Killer Loops. It’s also a lot harder, though.

Here’s a site (“Matrix Eyewear”) which uses Matrix trademarks pretty shamelessly and has what appear to be a fairly high-quality, looks-like-the-real-thing pair for $38 (of course they’re sold out). Or the pretty-good $27 knock-offs.

These are a lot like and probably the same as these $14+ shipping sunglasses

Then there’s a strain of knock-offs which don’t look like the Blinde but are sold as a knock-off:

The big difference is that there aren’t any lens rims — the arms and nose bridge are both essentially bolted into the lenses themselves. They’re horribly constructed, and once you recognize them, you’ll see them everywhere. I bought a pair for $5 and promptly destroyed them through a few hours of wearing.

These absolutely dominate the eBay listings, though, as “Matrix sunglasses” and sell for $7 + a ton of shipping.

Ah — here’s an image from one of the auctions that shows off how they’re built.

That’s pretty awful. Compare them to the original, and it’s pretty obvious that they’re not even really copy cats: they were probably a design they were stamping out and the wholesaler thought “hey, they’ve got oval lenses, the Blindes have oval lenses…”

Some places, though, sell these awful things for $25. Or $17, and they’re sold out.

The market is flooded with those horrible, super-cheap glasses that don’t even look like the real thing, for prices of $5 (where they’re plentiful) to $25 and up (where they’re apparently so hot they can’t be kept in stock). Meanwhile, though there’s clearly a continuing market for these kind of knock-off shades, it’s quite hard to find any that actually look like the Blindes — though some exist, if you dig through ebay listings, and they’re just as cheap.

It’s a really interesting economic problem: if you can produce knock-off sunglasses for so little that they’re extremely profitable to sell at $5, why do the horrible-looking pairs survive against the reasonable facsimiles? And did Killer Loop get out of the market entirely? Is there somewhere a single Chinese manufacturer that happened to be putting those horrible ones out that lucked into a 10-year knock-off market niche as wholesalers passed them off as “Matrix” glasses?

That hard drive I didn’t get to work turns out to be defective, so I’m returning it… and paying for shipment back. How is that reasonable? I didn’t break it — I’m essentially now paying an extra $10 for this item, assuming the next one isn’t broken. And this is Newegg, which has pretty awesome customer service for an internet computer parts retailer.

Here’s what I don’t get about the Clinton campaign’s “all the states we lost don’t matter” strategy: it’s not true, obviously, and it’s silly, but beyond that — I think about the people here in Washington that went out to the caucus to support her. The organizers and everyone who are now hearing from the campaign they tried to help that our state’s meaningless.

How can that campaign go back to those people now and ask for money to compete in other, presumably more important states? Why would someone who has been told that their state and their support wasn’t worthy of attention give money for Clinton to run ads in Ohio and Texas?

And moreover, doesn’t that make those people much less likely to support, much less volunteer, for a national campaign if she wins the nomination? After all, they’ve already been helpfully informed that they don’t play an important role in the national political life.