Heroes: The Angry History

OK, so I saw the season finale and wow, just wow.  What a pile of shit!

Really, the evil mastermind can be defeated if everyone just walks away?

He doesn't try to raise a bunch of walls to keep people from leaving?

How about locking the individuals away in cells and making them stay?

No, they puss out again and the whole season has built up to...drum roll please...a talking to.

That's right, they talked the bad guys down.  Sylar was so damn cool being able to fight off like one damn guy.  Oh wait, it should have ended with him fighting the entire carnival and not being able to let any of them die, so he goes all berserk and beats the shit out of all of them while protecting all of their lives at the same time.  How's that for an ending?  And I just came up with that...while I was writing it...and I'm on the john.  OK, that last part is a lie, but my point still stands.

And don't get me started on the Peter v. Samuel confrontation.  They pushed dirt.  I don't care how you slice it...they pushed dirt.

So, what did they stop, like 1000 people being violently killed by Samuel.  Oh, wait, in the time they did that more people died of hunger and disease in Haiti (probably).  So, why don't they just grab the guy who can make shit grow, convince him that Samuel is a douchy guy and have him grow cabbages for Haiti.  Why cabbages you ask?  Why not carrots and apple orchards and a bunch of other stuff that is really good for you? Because free food should not taste good, it should just nourish you so you don't die, otherwise you're OK with getting handouts, but that's a different matter.

Why didn't they make it more epic, like Samuel was going to cause an Earthquake and hit Manhattan with a tidal wave 600 feet tall so it will kill millions of people across the eastern seaboard.  You know, some really epic shit like in season one where they were going to nuke New York.  You see, that was really messed up and so had to be avoided.  1000 people dying at a carnival.  You can write that off as the ferris wheel spinning out of its holding and crushing them all to death.  You can't write off 6 million people, but 1000, well there's lots of example throughout history where a few people in an isolated area can just be written away by the media.

All in all, the bit with Claire revealing that she has powers was awesome and it does set up a neat next season, but the rest was a pile of crap.  I'm still waiting for the main characters to go all X-Men on us and they haven't.  I blame all of the bad ratings and the declining popularity on the writers and their inability to move forward with a perfect setup each season.

Season 1 ended well.  Then you had a rival team of supers in season 2.  So what happens, they go rob a bank.  Really a bank? Not a nuke silo or a toxic gas storage facility?  They want cash?  OK, why not.  They also have an immortal guy who wants to kill off humanity with a virus.  Great idea, but wait, he gets frozen in time and buried alive.  Yeah, that's a good use of evil Wolverine with a great accent and the ability to deliver awesome one liners.

Season 3 started off all right.  You had an evil corporation, headed up by a guy who can steal powers from the good guys.  You even had a pair of twins with the power of life and death. Awesome, oh wait, the life brother gets clubbed to death.  The death sister gives up her power (which she could not control, which basically writes plots by itself) and then the evil guy with the power over death gets his powers frozen and then shot in the head.  Does his regeneration kick in when everyone walks away?  I would think not otherwise he would have shown up again.  And surely they weren't stupid enough to just walk away without checking.  Oh and for good measure, why don't we make it so the main good guy who was the ying to Sylar's Yang can't have more than one power at once.  Yeah, that's some good writing.

And then we got the disaster that was Season 4.  Carnies...the bad guys are carnies...think about it.  Oh, and the main bad guy is a walking Irish stereotype.  He should have just had a rant about potatoes at some point just to complete the insult.  Plus he attacks civilian population and has a family of outcasts.  Why didn't we just call Samuel Ira and complete the idea.  He could have worked for a snobby British family and had then shit all over him in his childhood.  While we're stealing random things from history and mixing them with racist stereotypes, let's just to town on it.

Overall, I used to be a huge fan of this series and it has become a very sad thing over the years.

Lack of Speech Skills in Star Trek

So, before you all jump on me for going down this rabbit hole, I want to state that this is just a mental exercise and should be taken lightly and as a humorous logical argument.

In Star Trek, every time the Federation crew meet a new species (with a new an exotic set of forehead ridges or funny looking ears) that species speaks English.  Maybe they speak British English or with a strange accent, but they still speak English.  Why is that?  According to the show’s creators’ the Federation has universal translators that translate on the fly.  Let’s go ahead and assume that such a thing is possible and proceed from there.

First, why do the universal translators translate to English and if so, why the funny accents?  Well, you can see how you can poke holes in this all day and have a lot of fun with that mental exercise, but let’s assume that the programmers wanted to throw some flair in their translator and wrote the code to do funny accents and dialects.

The bigger question is: since the translators work both ways, what do the Federation crewmembers speak? You would think English, but let’s think about that.  Even if the whole world were to start speaking English, after a while, everyone would just use the universal translators, so the words would be lost and only the most basic sounds required to convey ideas would remain.

If you follow that train of thought through and apply what we see with modern language evolution (think texting and how some people can read it as if it was plain English), then you realize that in reality the Federation must speak in formalized grunts.  So if the power ever fails, then they would be stuck grunting to one another.

That would make for some terrible television, but it does make logical sense and I dare you to watch Star Trek after reading this and not smiling about Picard and Riker grunting at each other about the meaning of life and command.

Star Trek Online: A Brief Beta Impression

I pre-ordered Star Trek Online as it is one MMO that I have been awaiting for a long time.  The open beta has started a few days ago and aside from some technical issue which I’ve seen in just about every beta I have ever played (server downtime, a random crash here and there, some goofy animations that are clearly not quite done yet), the game is great.

The ground combat is nothing to write home about, but the feeling of being with an away team (red-shirts and all) is pretty cool.  You get to zap bad guys with phasers and pulse rifles, go hand to hand and coordinate fire with other team members.  Overall, a pretty decent experience based on the source material’s rather blase ground combat.

The space combat is where the game really shines.  You have to consider your shield, the placement of your weapon arrays, reload time and  the shielding of the enemy vessel.  I have found that the best way to beat someone is to pound on one section of their shields and then hit them with a torpedo.

The combat looks like Trek, sounds like Trek and feels like Trek.  Overall, a really good job there.

The interface is a little confusing, but you do get used to it pretty quick and it is just a beta, so I cannot really complain.

You can also customize your ship’s look and color scheme, which is pretty neat, although not really that important in my opinion as I personally want my ship to look like a Federation vessel.

The uniform customization is pretty neat as you get a big variety of styles and colors to pick from.  So, if you want to walk around in formal wear all the time, you can.

I am really hyped for the release of this game, when we will hopefully have a lot more servers up so the server issues that have kept me from playing the game more get resolved.

Mockups: A Guide to Visual Design

A picture is worth 1000 words.  We have all heard this expression before and there is a lot of truth to that expression.

When going through the initial phases of any project, vision is important.  In fact, I believe that vision is the most important part of all projects.  If you know what it is that you are trying to make, you know when you get there.  If your vision is blurred, you can never be sure that you have achieved what you set out to do.

I decided to refer to the goal of a project as vision since words are such abstract things.  You might think that words are fairly absolute things, but think about their usage.  Inflection, context and culture can warp and change the meaning of a given word to the point where the root is lost and its meaning is totally changed.  However, pictures are more absolute.

At this point you might be thinking that I have lost my mind.  You might think that I am suggesting that pictures should replace words or something along those lines.  That is not the case.  However, pictures should be present to re-enforce and clarify words.

What do I mean specifically?  Well, let’s say I am describing something to you.  It is an object, has tufts of cotton coming out of the top, a floral pattern over most of its surface, is covered in a plastic wrap for protection and can only be used a given number of times before it should be discarded.

Based on that description you might thing that I am talking about some sort of medical scrubs or pillow for senior citizens.  However, I am referring to the facial tissue box on my desk.  In this example, I could have just said facial tissue box, however, what about new ideas, processes or products.

How does one describe a MacBook Air in words.  Well, it is doable, but if you have ever seen the whitepaper for a complex product, you know that it takes a lot of words and most whitepapers contain diagrams to aid comprehension.

Wireframes, mockups and pre-visualizations all help in getting concepts across to your customers.  And from a business standpoint, if you can get signoff on pictures that show the product, you at least have a vague idea of what the customer wants.  Otherwise, you risk scope-creep and loss of money on every project.

Holiday Travel: A Postmortem

The holidays have come and gone and so have I.  Travel was again in the cards for me this year and it was an unpleasant experience.

The first clue that I had that this was not going to be a good travel season came on my first day of travel.  I bought a ticket online like most people do these days.  The ticket was a US Airways flight.  I had never flown US Airways, but it also mentioned something about United Airlines, so I assumed they were some sort of United Airlines subsidiary.

The day of the flight comes and I go to the area near the gate from which the flight is supposed to take off.  It is a United Airlines check-in area.  I ask one of the agents in the area if this is where I am supposed to check in and am told that I need to go to the US Airways check-in area.  OK, I have never flown US Airways before, no problem, I’ll just walk down to the US Airways area.  The US Airways area is 30 gates down (about a 20 minute walk in the spacious DFW terminal).

I then queue in line at US Airways and after a long wait (expected due to holiday traffic), I am told that I am actually on a United Airlines flight, so I need to make the walk back to the United Airlines area.  After rushing back to the United Airlines area and checking in as quickly as possible I barely make it to the gate as boarding is happening.

My issue with the whole episode is the person who told me that I was to check in at US Airways.  I did not see them when I came back, but word to the wise, US Airways flights operated by United Airlines are simply United Airlines flights, just forget that US Airways is even mentioned.

On my way back to Dallas, I sat in abject anxiety waiting to hear that my flight would be cancelled.  It turned out that my flight was not canceled, not late, but in fact early.  However, the fact that up until 30 minutes before takeoff, they were not sure if it was going to be ready or not.

So, moral of the story, don’t fly, it sucks and apparently the fine folks at all the airlines barely know what they are doing after being in business for almost 100 years.

Shameless Plug: JustHost.com

Now, I am not one to shamelessly plug stuff.  I generally dislike even endorsing products or services, but I have recently (about 1 month ago) purchased hosting from JustHost.com and have been impressed with the service they offer.

First off, they are dirt cheap.  I pay less than 5 dollars a month and I don’t have to watch the bandwidth or size as they offer unlimited of both.  They do have a fair usage policy, so all you Fortune 500 companies, steer clear. However, for those of you who want to set up a personal web site or a small business site, it works pretty well.

It is a standard Linux/PHP/MySql package, with all of the bells and whistles you expect, but I was expecting a much more bumpy ride than what I got.

On top of this, they give you a free lifetime domain with purchase, so you don’t have to worry about the additional cost of that.

All in all, I would give them an A+ and would put them even with or just about GoDaddy due to the price advantage.

Web Presence

We all want to be successful in life and for most of us, that means making a lot of money.  But how does one make a lot of money.  Traditionally you could get a trade and make a good or even great living plying that trade.  Doctors, lawyers, engineers; these used to be the professions of choice for “successful” people.  However, with the rising cost of healthcare, the increasing pool of law school students and the globalization of technology, these professions are falling by the wayside for really making bank.

It is in content and presence that the money really lies.  You may have a negative opinion of someone like a Paris Hilton, however, you cannot argue that she does have a line of clothing and even a line of fragrances, all of which make her large amounts of money.  Is she a bad person?  That’s not for any of us to say.  Is she talented?  In my opinion, no, but that is just my personal opinion.  Did she figure out a way to make a lot of money? Definitely.

So what about the rest of us? Most people do not have a famous last name and the ability to get our picture in the paper, so we have to go about things in a different way.

People have personal passions, things that interest them for no logical reason.  I happen to like football and fast cars.  Do I drive fast? Not really, but I still dream of having some supercar one day and keep up with information about new vehicles.  Do I think that I will be playing in the NFL? No, although I have the body of a Greek god (you know Dionysus, who has put on a few pounds over the years), my odds of being the next QB for the Cowboys are about on par with me sprouting wings and flying away.

You might ask, so what, I like some stuff, how do I make money off of it.  Well, you don’t own that thing that you like, so you cannot make money off of it directly.  However, repositories of knowledge are highly prized.  For example, the TWiT network of programs technically does not create any more content than you friends sitting in your living room.  However, they research the topics they talk about and are generally very accurate in what they say.  People value the presentation of the content and the friendly banter that the shows have, so some people donate and some people buy hats and T-shirts, and the people working on those shows get a little money from it.

Do they make enough to live on? Well, I don’t know, but I would think not.  However, they get some monetary reward for doing something they enjoy, which is more than most people can say. So, if you like knitting, make a website about knitting, and maybe sell some of your knitting on there for people who are interested.  Will it make you rich?  Probably not, but it is far more likely to than just working your 9-5.