Full interview here.

If you actually look up his (main) character here, you’ll see he’s not actually an accomplished raider as he claims. Many WoW players speculate that he’s not giving the name of his real character, to avoid being hassled by fans.

Not the blogger, but his old research machine that I bought a few years back.  I’m donating it to ACCESS (a BCEC-affiliated Chinatown ministry), which is looking for any WinXP or even Win2000-capable machines for their computer classes.  I’m glad they’ll be able to put it to good use!  If anyone else has an old computer to donate, please contact beatawan.

I’ve found that a laptop serves all my computer needs, and I’m trying to save electricity by not running a desktop.  These days laptops seem to have plenty of computing power and storage space that most users would need.

This is the last xanga post I am writing on braymp.  Farewell, machine — you’ve served me well in this life, and best wishes on your future computations.

A few years ago, my friend Bryan helped save a little boys life by donating bone marrow [post].  It made me intend to register as a donor myself, but I never got around to it.  It was one of things like, “I should exercise more” or “I should learn a new foreign language.”  Probably a combination of laziness and needle avoidance.

This week I learned that a friend’s newborn child is desperately needing a bone marrow transplant in the next 5 weeks.  I also learned two amazing facts about bone marrow donation:

1. The registration to become a donor no longer requires a blood sample.  Now they only need a swab from the inside of your cheek.  It must be CSI technology that’s filtered into mainstream medicine.
2. If you are selected as a donor, it’s possible to donate marrow without surgery — they just extract some blood stem cells from a blood donation.

Here’s the website with full info: http://www.savejonah.com/.  It looks like they have an extended family and church community looking for bone marrow donors in California.  Here in Boston, they are taking cheek-swab samples this Sunday 9/30 between 10AM – 2PM, at BCEC, 249 Harrison Ave. [map].  The chances of matching are higher if you are of Asian descent, so please consider registering.  If you can’t make it on Sunday, you can order a free home cheek-swab kit here: http://www.aadp.org/pages/register.php.

It’s true!  Bank of America has raised their ATM fee to $3 for non-BofA customers.

So if you withdrew $20, you’d be paying a 15% surcharge.  That’s like a restaurant tip!  To mitigate that percentage-wise, I always withdraw a hefty amount.  June asks, “Why do you want to have that much cash on you?”  And I say, “So I can be our own ATM for a while!”

Full story in the first comment below: http://www.thebostonchannel.com/money/14104141/detail.html?rss=bos&psp=money

This last weekend June and I went to the mall to see if she could get a free upgrade to her Verizon phone.  It turns out she couldn’t because she’s not the primary account holder.  One free phone upgrade per account, apparently.

While we were there, I stopped by the Apple store to browse the web and get some phone numbers of BBQ places for dinner.  I stopped in front of an enormous 30″ LCD and a sleek 1/4″ thick keyboard, and fired up Safari.  While I googled for Blue Ribbon BBQ and Redbones, I noticed a docked iPhone.  I pulled it out and admired its shape and heft.  And lack of buttons.  Having never touched one before, I tried the first thing that caught my eye: the Maps function.  The touchscreen button took me straight to Google maps, where it began to download.  I put it down and continued my googling on the big screen.  I found Blue Ribbon’s phone number, called, no answer.  Then I found Redbones’ number, called, and got their store hours.  During these two minutes, the iPhone was stuck at loading 1 tile (1/9th) of the map.  The phone showed 3 bars of connectivity, so that wasn’t the problem.  Why does Apple demo something that works so poorly?

Later I googled “slow browsing iPhone” and found similar complaints blaming AT&T’s EDGE wireless data network.  Whatever — I don’t really follow 3G standards.  I just think that if I ever paid $600 for the phone and who knows how much for wireless internet, I’d expect it to be faster than a 600-baud modem.  Hope they improve it with the next generation.  Edit: today’s NYT has an article on the iPhone: apparently they’re dropping the price to $400, but no news about the browsing speed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/technology/05cnd-apple.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (registration required)
Full article text in the first comment.

Using google, I can’t find the source or even this exact quote.  Does anyone know?

“The difference between men’s movies and women’s movies is that men’s movies involve many deaths and little crying, while women’s movies have one death and lots of crying.”

Excerpted from http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2007/03/gdc_miyamotos_k.html .

The speaker, Miyamoto, is a game developer at Nintendo, as in Wii gaming console.

[laughter]

This wifeometer measures one variable: the interest level of my own
wife. Maybe some of you can remember when you played Pac-Man, or a game
like Mario. And maybe you think that these were important moments in
your lives. They were not important moments for my wife. But then
Tetris came out. The problem was that, when I thought my wife would be
interested in this game, she was not, but then when my daughter started
playing Ocarina of Time at home, there was a little change. My wife had
gone from complete disinterest to a background observer. She watched my
daughter play. I thought, oh maybe there is hope!

[laughter]

Then came Animal Crossing. Now when this game came out I assured my
wife there were no enemies to fight in this game, so she agreed to
actually touch the controller. She was soon happy cutting down trees
and exchanging letters with our children. The wifeometer went up a bit
more. I thought I’d going to get that thing higher!

As some of you may know we have a dog in our house, and my wife
loves cats but I’m a dog lover. We put a question out on the Everybody
Votes channel recently. Cos she’s a cat lover and because she likes
dogs too, but see… 63% of the world’s Wii owners agree with me, and
only 36% prefer cats. What’s interesting is if you go into Latin
America, in Guatemala, more than 90% prefer dogs. Do they have cats in
Guatemala?!

This is our dog. He’s 6. He sleeps on a better mattress than I do.
If you look at his face, he looks like a guitar pick. So we named him
Pick. Now since Pick joined us, we’ve been studying dog training, and
we made new friends through the other dogs our dog has met. He brought
us new joys and discoveries. Getting back to my point today… this
relates to growing the wifeometer.

I was watching our dog friends and my wife, I thought maybe if we
could get these people and turn them into game players, if we could
interest them, we could expand the user base, there were elements too
of dog training that I thought I could turn into a videogame. So when I
showed her Nintendogs, she finally saw a different perspective.

Then game Brain Age. This has turned her into a true gamer. She has
accepted games as part of her daily life. She understands the unique
interactive entertainment found in games. And today we have a Wii in
our house. So last month, on Valentine’s Day, in Japan on Valentine’s
Day women give chocolates to men, it’s very nice!

As usual I came home rather late from work, expecting her to be
asleep. I opened the door and heard the sounds of the Wii, so I thought
she waited up to give me chocolates, so sweet, but actually she was
just casting her votes on the Everybody Votes channel. So she herself
downloaded the channel and voted on her own, this is an incredible
occurrence in my household, it would be more normal to get home and
find Donkey Kong eating at my dinner table!

[laughter]

This is the second version of Brain Age. It has a mini Mario game in
it. Now my wife comes to me and says, I can beat you at this game,
anytime. She’s bragging! To me!

[laughter]

Looking at her scores, she’s right. She turned into a hardcore gamer
much faster than I expected. Wifeometer has shot up dramatically. So
there it is. Now she’s playing Wii sports. Not only that, she invites
our friends over to play Wii sports. I don’t know if she’ll stop making
Miis – she makes them for everyone in our neighbourhood. This is very
lucky for me, see because now she’s getting a taste for what it‘s like
to create something. I see this as a first step towards game design. I
think we’ll be competing going forward, eventually she’ll come up with
a unique idea, and when she does … I can retire!

[laughter]

I’m looking to hire a really smart software engineer with 1-2 years of relevant work experience in Visual C++.  Ideally the candidate will have excellent communication skills and an interest in photography and image processing.  The primary job responsibility will be to develop and maintain a GUI for high-dynamic range camera control and algorithm development.  More product info is on the Sensata website here: http://www.sensata.com/products/sensors/auto-vision.htm

If you’re interested or know anyone who is, please send me your resume.  Thanks.

20 feet is a long distance, about one and a half car lengths.  I’d say that 80% of cars in Cambridge parked next to an intersection are within 20 feet of it.  This gives the meter maids a lot of leeway in deciding who to ticket.  So on a weeknight in Harvard Square they can evidently go down the street and ticket all the cars that are near intersections.  Beware!

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal has an article on people who make lifestyle cutbacks in order to increase their charitable giving.  Interestingly, religious faith is not mentioned.  I wonder if the article intentionally omitted it, or whether the people sampled were non-religious.  And I wonder in general whether religious people (including Christians) give a higher percentage of their wealth to charity, excluding their own place of worship.

Full article in the first comment.