Twenty-Four Seven

I finished watching season two of 24 on DVD, and despite some outrageous plot devices and a few technical slip-ups (“that uses Huffman encoding so you should be able to use it anywhere”) I liked it a lot. At the end of every episode I laugh out loud at how they manage to create a cliffhanger every hour, on the hour.

It may just be that Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, is the perfect embodiment of some of my most important values: freedom, loyalty, and progress. Elisha Cuthbert, who plays a blonde version of my first wife, doesn’t hurt either, and the constant Kafkaesque shifts in the characters’ realities make for gripping, if somewhat far-fetched, spy drama. The final season of West Wing just came out on DVD, so I’ll watch that, intermixed with Paul Phillips’s movie recommendations, before getting season three of 24.

Being a guy who bleeds Microsoft blue, I faithfully downloaded Internet Explorer 7 when notified it was available by Windows Update. I was excited to try out the tabbed browsing that users of alternative browsers are always crowing about. I still can’t see much advantage to it other than speed, and the implementation by Microsoft has a couple very poor design decisions. Now I need to train myself to close tabs in two different ways: the X on the tab for all but the last one, and the X on the window to close the browser itself if I am done with the last tab. It’s just silly for there to be no X on the last tab; it should bring you back to a blank page or the home page as you opt.

The second problem is there doesn’t seem to be any way to get all new pages to display in a tab by default. Why on earth would you want it do default to a whole new browser window once you have these tabs? And if you use the nifty little arrow on the Favorites menu to open a new tab, it takes three clicks (plus the click to drop down the favorites menu) to actually see the new page! As Bill used to whine in design-review meetings, “Doesn’t anybody actually try to use this thing?” I guess it’s unreasonable to expect such a megacorporation to maintain what Charles Simonyi used to call “the craftsman’s fine hand” but come on! This is the flagship product! Guys, just call me any time and I’ll make your design decisions for you at only double my usual rate.

I found and plugged a leak in my Chuzzle game and I am now very close to even on the non-illegal Skilljam non-gambling site, non-illegal because you gamble with Chuzzles rather than cards I guess. Look for me at the final table of the World Series of Chuzzle. Oh yeah. I guarantee a win.

Second Life

I read an article about the Australian government deciding to tax money made on virtual-reality sites such as Second Life. I hadn’t played a dungeon game since Zork so I signed up, created a character, and went over to Help Island to try out the basics. I had a great time flying around all over the place. Now when I was a kid my parents were always trying to get me to go outside and play but in reality I only left the house on Wednesdays to ride my bike to Countryside Pharmacy and buy the new shipment of comic books. If Second Life had existed I doubt I would ever have left the house.

Players in Second Life can build anything they are willing to put the time and effort into. There is an economy of “Linden Dollars,” which can be used for any mutually acceptable transaction among players, or purchased with real dollars. In a few minutes of wandering around I found a bowling alley, a gallery of erotic art, and a casino, in which anyone could get a job as a security guard or dancer for L10/hr. I searched around for a poker game but haven’t yet found it.

I asked a few of my friends if they had accounts in Second Life. Matt Maroon said it best when he laughed, “Then I’d never get anything done at all.” Bill Gates, for whom I used to work, drove a diesel Mercedes with no radio. The reason for the diesel was a plea bargain with the traffic judge after a ridiculous number of speeding tickets. The reason for no radio was the same reason he never watched TV: in his words, “There are too many interesting things on.” Second Life seems overwhelming in its ability to provide endless interesting things. It’s like the old Richie Rich comic where every month he would wander around some wing or other of his mansion and find a cool room he’d never been in before.

I don’t think I’ll spend much time in Second Life. I’ll be 47 this week and, as Thoreau said on his death bed when asked if he expected an afterlife, “One life at a time.” But as the megatrend moves the economy from information, which is approaching free, to entertainment, which requires human creative effort, it seems pretty clear that virtual reality is here to stay. Once they get this thing hooked up to a holodeck it could even end up putting an end to the oldest profession.