Nectarine Juice

I realised the cloudy photos in my last post didn't really do the Tararuas justice, so here they are on a sunny day. And I promise my next post will return to something about code, design or animation!

As mentioned in a previous post, after months of work we have a shiny new office upstairs. Carterton is a gorgeous place to live and now we're finally making full use of the beautiful views around us.

We've barely moved in, so things are still messy, but it's nice having more space:

Those small, high windows maintain privacy and give a view without being blinding behind the computer screens. It's a bit cloudy today, but you can see the Tararuas in the distance.

One the right side of the office we've got big windows because we back onto a huge park, so when I'm contemplating a code issue or taking a break, I'm looking out at this...

Bek's also now got an official painting space- no more working at the end of the dining table (and having to pack everything up so the kids don't add their own artistic input!)

And finally, our boardgames have a home!

All right, I'm off to do some more work, and probably some more shuttling of books and DVDs from downstairs later tonight...

Well, as you can probably gather from the lack of blogging activity recently, it's been a madly busy and somewhat frantic ride over the last few months! Let me see if I can condense those events into a tasty, bite-sized summary.

First, the Melbourne office is now closed. This was a heavy-hearted decision, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to give it the attention it deserved while things were flourishing in New Zealand. Believe me, after almost 15 years of working with a great team on wonderful projects, it felt mightily sad to wind the Melbourne side up. But we're pleased that by making the decision before it hit a crisis point, we allowed a couple of months for staff to find other jobs, and they all have. Not hugely surprising— bright, talented people are usually snapped up! So our sadness is tempered by that result, and by the excitement of being able to focus on opportunities in New Zealand.

Speaking of which, Vicki Taylor of Taylor Boutique has really been flying with the blog we set up to support her Flash site! She's Twittering away too, and it all seems to be working— they recently opened their first Wellington boutique, so folks nearer the lower part of the North Isle can get their fix of fab fashion.

We've enjoyed doing some smaller websites too- just the right size to get some local businesses onto the web and let the world know about them! While we love large projects, there's something very satisfying about being able to whip up a clean, quick site and see a great result. Have a gander at Trevor Lamb's astonishing leatherwork at Leather And Art and Julie Madden's gorgeous tiling projects at TileIt.

There's been more action on the boardgame front for IQ Ideas, with Bek's gorgeous graphics (and my rule tweaking/mechanic suggestions) fronting two more games. There's Frogmail, which will be out in the new year, and Off The Beaten Track, the first expansion for the highly successful Amazing Moa Hunt. OTBT will be in-store for Christmas at Whitcoulls and The Warehouse and other game stores throughout New Zealand.

Oh, and we're noodling away on the early stages of a educational boardgame about food and digestion called Snacks and Bladders... tee hee.

In February 2010 I'm off to the Nürnberg Toy Fair, one of the largest events for toys and games. Very excited about that- it will be a huge opportunity to explore the wider world of gaming, especially in game-mad Germany!

Whew. Okay, that's about it, except for the fact that just to add to the fun, in the midst of all of this we've been building an upstairs and after 6 months of dust and debris have finally moved in. I'll post shots of our shiny new office with gorgeous views of the Tararuas soon. Oh, it's heaven!

Vodafone just asked me for feedback on my recent call to Liam on their tech support line.

I thought I'd post it here to see how many of you out there using the intertubes find themselves nodding in agreement, or experiencing a sense of deja-vu...

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"Dear Vodafone,

Liam himself was fantastic, within what he was able to do. But the whole system is flawed.

We got notified that we'd hit our broadband allowance after 2 days- and then AGAIN after 8 days- ridiculous!

I tried ringing- "unable to take your call at this time". Posted issue via your support page- no reply at all FOR A MONTH.

When I finally got the very helpful Liam on the phone, he said that the faulty usage issue was 'a known problem' -- superb, but why does it take me a month to find out about KNOWN problems? Why does your phone service kick me off, and then your email contact is a black hole?

It now appears the issue was posted in your forums (which Liam admitted wasn't exactly obvious) and even then it was under Network Issues (usage monitoring is a network issue??) and then under a misleading title ("Bandwidth Checker not displaying usage" is hardly "Faulty email demands about exceeding usage limits").

What was Liam allowed to do about it? Refund a whopping $10 and then assure me that, despite this, the bandwidth checking really was okay, send me a list of our usage that showed it was Vodafone's issue and not ours, and say that you were working to make the customer response faster.

As it took almost 2 months for our last issue to get replied to (with a full refund for another Vodafone error), excuse me if I'm cynical.

Liam's great- smart, friendly, capable. But do we both really need to suffer from Vodafone's monumentally pathetic response system? Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is akin to malice. Your system may not be aimed at completely pissing off your customers, but you could make good money licensing it to people who DO want to do that...

Now bugger off and do something about it.

Minty."

So we all know about the theory of adding a flaw to a perfect creation, thereby even further highlighting the glory of the endeavour?

Well, that ain't what happened here. It's a simple cockup, and we don't like to be at home to Mr. Cockup.

Last year the card game contained Adobe software icons. This year, reflecting WebDU's expansion into a massive five streams of presentations and the broader context of the conference, including Silverlight, Javascript, Pipes, Android & iPhone, BlazeDS and much more, we added further software icons and even skills as a scoring bonus.

Unfortunately, the edits to the rules in your conference book left the word "Adobe" in, and as much as we love them, in this case they need to go!

So here's the rule tweak:

"Every unique Adobe software icon or skill icon in your hand will be worth 15 points."

becomes

"Every unique software icon or skill icon in your hand will be worth 15 points."

Because after all, whatever tools you use are irrelevant- it's all about the cool stuff you create. We're all unique in our own ways, and that's what makes us special. I think we can all hold hands as developers and designers, look beyond our respective software desires, and walk off into a magnificent, shining future together!

Oh, and be assured that the person who edited the rules for the book will be soundly beaten.

WebDU is only ten days away and I'm getting more excited than a tweeny at a Jonas Brothers concert!

There's a stellar line-up of speakers across 5 massive concurrent streams. My only concern is that I'll probably jump from stream to stream, and as we all know, you should never cross the streams!
(If you don't get that reference, you somehow missed Ghostbusters. Which probably also means you weren't born in the dark depths of the last century, unlike yours truly. Sigh. Kids these days- no sense of history.)

Anyway, I'm also super-duper-trooper thrilled to be running the WebDU Trading Card Game again with Agent K, the infamous Kai Koenig. If you're going to WebDU, feel free to say hi and pummel us for rule hints, but note: we cannot be bribed*.

Finally, if you've found some excuse NOT to attend, be it economic or pandemic, zombie invasion or bikie warfare, those fine folk at WebDU have two excellent initiatives that let you score FREE tickets: a Twitter competition (ends this weekend) and a WebDU 2009 Scholarship (a community initiative sponsored by Daemon).

So I hope I'll see you there. I'll be the one with glazed eyes from geek overload!

Our favourite tech conference is WebDU (Web Down Under) and it's fast approaching. It's shaping up to have the usual stellar line of speakers, but this year there are a massive five streams of sessions!

We'll be ramping up another animation and I think Kai and I might be planning on another evolution of the hugely successful Trading Card game.

Woot! It's going to be exciting! Hope to see you there...

The Webstock Trading Card Game was an evolution of the one Kai and I ran at WebDU, but this time there were 28 cards (instead of 15) and more attendees. So with lots more rules and potentially heaps of entries, how did it go?

Well, from my end, brilliantly! There was a real buzz, and wandering around you could see people swapping cards, bargaining, haggling and teasing each other. Ange Vink's graphic work was simply gorgeous, and the envelope that the starter cards came in gave them a real sense of being precious objects.

The Webstock game cards and envelopes.

It seems like the Webstock atmosphere of jumping in and getting involved had everyone going. Some workshop attendees from the earlier days had even managed to cobble together impressive decks before extra cards were released, just by harvesting starter cards from the conference bags! By lunchtime there was already one group who had a document up and running with almost all the cards and rules laid out:

Whew. Back from Webstock, and I'm both exhausted and inspired!

It was my first Webstock, but I loved the genial atmosphere and excellent organisation. Mike and Tash, ably assisted by their fabulous special agents, have something very special going on. And hey, it included free coffee and ice-cream! Ah, life is greatly enhanced by affogatos made with Peoples Coffee and Kapiti Vanilla Bean ice-cream...

There were some sessions I missed due to running the Webstock Trading Card Game, but the highlights of what I saw were:

• A blistering, wide-ranging harangue/rant/critique/sermon/call-to-action from one of my Scifi heroes, Bruce Sterling. Simultaneously insightful and magniloquent, you fell out the end of his tsunami of ideas and rhetoric needing a good, stiff drink- fabulous!

• The delightful performance of Ze Frank as he recounted the quest to find the humanity in his work. I've been a fan for a while, so I was familiar with a fair amount of it, but seeing the man present it live was something else again. Wow.

• Jasmina Tesanovic's session about her blogging of the Kosovo War and the ongoing war criminal trials were both horrific and inspiring. I can't imagine how anyone finds such fortitude and bravery in the face of such attrocities. It was also a reminder that sure, the internet's a kludge of brain-dead YouTube comments, spam and porn, but it's also an astonishing outlet for the dissemination of truths that would be quashed by traditional media propaganda.

• Michael Lopp's definition of what is it to be a geek or a nerd (and hopefully not a dork!) that had everyone groaning and laughing at the same time.

But the crowning moment for me was the final session by Damian Conway. It was a comedic tour-de-force that at the same time provided a framework for guiding web design to purer heights. A perfect blend of humour and insight, of cheap shots and science-nerd brain-teasers. I highly commend his Hippocratic Oath of Web Design to you- as soon as the videos of the sessions are on the Webstock site, check it out!

As you can probably gather, Webstock was a blast. I'll be back next year- hope to see you there!

Wow. Just wow.

Those crazy cats at Webstock have managed to secure a mondo-cool Weta Goliathon 83 Infinity Beam Projector as a prize for the Webstock card game.

Surely it wouldn't be in poor taste for me to enter the card game as well as run it? I mean, sure, I wrote the rules and therefore have slight advantage, but c'mon, it's a Goliathon!

Sigh.

Those of you who were at WebDU last year will no doubt remember the joys, tears, triumphs and trauma of the Trading Card Game that Kai Koenig and I ran. Well, we're at it again at the fabulous Webstock Wellington!

Here's one of the cards, designed by the fab Ange Vink:

On the insanely remote chance you unavoidably missed WebDU, the lowdown on the game is below.

I'm really looking forward to running the game- it was a blast last time, with attendees racing around haggling and pleading and then falling into an Analysis Paralysis stupor as they tried to max out their hands.

At Webstock there'll be more cards, which gave me a chance to write even more incredibly witty rules and flavour text about a whole group of astonishing speakers (many of whom I've never met, so I may well be burnt at the stake for wandering into taboo personal space...)

Speaking of speakers... is it too fanboi-ish to bring along my copy of Schismatrix Plus for Bruce Sterling to sign? In blood, so I can sequence his DNA on my home-built testing unit? That's not too weird, is it?

Anyway, I hope to see you at Webstock! Come and say hi- I'll be the one called Minty looking a little harried as I debate the semantic meaning of my use of the word 'card' in the rules. :-P

UPDATE: Read about how it went in the Trading Card Game Post-Mortem!

All you need to do is collect a hand of cards and submit them. Each card has a point value, and the highest scoring hand will win cool stuff. Easy, right?

Except... each card also has a rule on it (expertly blurred in this one, but if you really squint... it looks even more blurred.) And those rules provide various ways to increase (and perhaps decrease!) the value of your cards. Furthermore, even rules you don't know about may still apply to your cards!

The best way to discover rules is to get more cards, or else *shock* *horror* talk to your fellow attendees. (For those of you who are programmers, refer to 'social engineering'.)

Trade cards! Haggle! Offer inducements! Swap rule information! Remember, rule knowledge is scoring power! But it also helps to have a good set of cards.

Donate to Wikipedia!

I just did. Here's why, and if my reasons resonate, I hope you'll kick them a few dollars too!

• I find I use it every day, and often many times a day.

• It's become magically ubiquitous and the first port of call for enquiring minds at our end of the world, in much the same way that Google became the default for searching.

• It's a living incarnation of the idea that civilisation progresses through shared knowledge.

• Hell, it's the Library of Alexandria at your fingertips- surely that's worth something!

But perhaps most importantly for me, it's because of how it succeeded. In the early days, detractors scoffed at the idea of a compendium of knowledge that anyone could contribute to. They said it'd fall apart under the weight of bad writing, faulty facts, and general bickering; that it'd bring out the worst sides of online communities. And to tell the truth, I had my doubts too.

It didn't implode- despite some struggles and controversies along the way, it grew into something that serves me usefully every day. And that gives me hope. It's easy to be focused on the tragic and horrible things happening in the world and worry about the human condition. But here's a massive collaborative endeavour that suggests that, as a species, the averaged result of massively diverse humans working on a concept is astonishingly successful.

And if that's too naively optimistic for you, then how about:

"Oh Wiki, you're so fine you're so fine you blow my mind, hey Wiki, hey Wiki!"

A couple of days ago I noticed Bek's gorgeous 24" iMac screen was suddenly looking fuzzy. Some of it seemed sharper than other bits, but some areas were definitely soft and slightly out of focus. Uh oh...

A bit of googling suggested it could be font-smoothing settings, but playing with that had little effect- except that I did notice that when I moved the cursor over the smoothing drop-down menu, the whole screen would shift a pixel or so to the left! Roll off, and it popped to the right.

I felt my heart stop for a couple of seconds. Not some horrific motherboard or video card failure, surely? We'd bought the iMac second hand at a great price from someone who was heading to a MacBook. I zipped off to Apple's warranty check, and sure enough, we've just moved out of the coverage period. Ah well, you takes your chances and you rolls the dice...

More googling suggested that resetting the SMU (System Management Unit- sometimes labeled the SMC or System Management Controller). It's a microcontroller chip on the logic board that controls all power functions, and is sometimes implicated in video/fan/sleep issues.

Well, that was a saga of trawling Apple's arcane Mac labelling system (is your iMac an early/mid/late model, or the 'ambient light' model, or...?) and cross-referencing that against the SMU resetting methods: remove all cables including power, wait a minute, replace power while holding down the start button- unless you've got the revised model, and then you don't hold down the start button- oh, wait, you've got that iMac, no it's different again!

Suffice to say, none of it made any difference.

With a heavy heart, I came close to calling a Mac store to book it in. Then I thought "No! I'm not done!"

Something had twigged in my mind: that single pixel shift when over the font smoothing menu. I moved the cursor to where that menu had been on screen- and it happened even without the menu there! Something swam out of the depths of my random Mac arcana- screen zooming.

And sure enough, a quick trip to System Preferences/Universal Access/Seeing showed that screen zooming was on. Turned it off and Shazam! - crystal sharp screen display again!

Somehow Bek had activated zooming- probably an accidental hot-key activation, as she's Queen of The Hot Keys in Flash/Photoshop/Illustrator et al. The zoom level must have been something like 101%- just enough that the interpolation lead to areas of fuzziness. And exactly enough zooming to mean that when you crossed the centre line of the screen, it panned to show the single pixel of lost screen real-estate! (Didn't happen if you moved the cursor vertically across the centre- the zoom that way must have been less than a pixel, and only the extra size of the horizontal dimension pushed it to a full pixel and panning).

So it's back to 24" nirvana, and a regular heartbeat again. Hopefully, this post can save someone else from Mac screen trauma too!