MichaelandChrissy.com

After hearing about the Xobni plug-in for Outlook from Misty Khan on Twitter, I went over to the site to get a guest invitation. I was surprised to get one within a few hours (beta test invites are usually hard to score). Xobni creates a new box in your Outlook client that spotlights contact information and relationships for each email. The install was quick and painless, and the plug-in itself is smart and intuitive, but I have a few issues.

Although the implementation is fantastic, the color scheme is very distracting. It’s bright purple and bright orange, with a hint of light green.  It embeds itself in the middle of Outlook, so I can’t focus on the sea of pale blues around it.  I’m too distracted to read my mail! I sent the Xobni developers a suggestion to add a CSS color scheme changer (or something like it). We could have a light blue version to blend in better with Outlook, as well as seasonal colors for the more festive users.

However, my email habits are a little different from others. Ninety percent of my email comes from or goes to about half a dozen people in my office.  The Xobni plug-in would be great for people who need a free customer relationship manager built into Outlook, but I’ve only got six contacts, each with 500 conversation threads and eighty attached files. Xobni can identify related threads and attachments for each email author, but I’ll still have to manually search through each of my contacts for that data.

I’ve suggested it to many coworkers though, and they enjoy it. Our licensee management team here at the University of Chicago is putting it to great use.  They have about two hundred inventors to track and dozens of licensees to keep in touch with, so they are putting Xobni to use as it was intended. The ability to access message statistics and monitor email use is ideal for them. As it is, I may uninstall it within the week. I still have some invites if you’d like to try it though.

Since I made a decision to avoid the 2007 Movie toys, I haven’t aggressively pursued my hobby in the last year. I picked up some chain store exclusives along the way, mostly repaints from earlier lines, and a few eBay auctions for older stuff, but no real conquests.  I spent an awful lot of money on vintage toys at last year’s Botcon, but then there was a “collecting lull” until this year’s Botcon.  So, I wanted to cut loose and gobble up whatever I wanted in the dealer room this year.

What I ended up with was a cornucopia of Transformers that spans all lines. Although I was specifically looking for HeadMasters and TargetMasters from the G1 era, I found only some PowerMasters and Triggercons. From the G2 line, I got a packaged “Road Rocket” and a set of Sideswipe’s weapons. I completed my Universe collection with “Dinobot Stryker“. I picked up a couple of Robots in Disguise figures, “Super Sideburn” and “Super X-Brawn”.  I finally found an elusive Energon “Rapid Run” with both of his biker Mini-cons.

The majority of this year’s haul might be Micromasters though. I got accessories for my incomplete “Groundshaker”, an almost-complete “Anti-Aircraft Base”, the “Race Track Patrol”, three of the “Hot Rod Patrol” (still need that orange car), a hard-to-find missile for the “Astro Squad”, and the “Countdown” rocket base. I only started collecting the Micromaster sets a year ago, so there are still a few that I don’t have, particularly the base sets from the final year of their run. Maybe I’ll find them next time.

I have to thank Cory from Decepticon-Matrix again this year, since he once again came through for me.  Cory is a good guy and I wish that all of the dealers were as helpful and pleasant to work with as him.  I also did a lot of business with TFSource again this year.  They had a good deal on the Japanese Masterpiece Megatron ($75 with no orange barrel!) and the fan-made “Scope and Silencer” set.  They also took credit cards, so I splurged a little on a knockoff “Metrotitan” and the Asterisk “Position Cassette” set.

Chrissy didn’t want to spend the entire weekend waiting for me to get out of the Botcon dealer room, so we planned to go to the Cincinnati Zoo for a few hours on Saturday morning. Unfortunately, it was cold and rainy that day. So we decided to drive across the river into Kentucky to visit the Newport Aquarium instead. We showed up a little early, so we hung out in the area and took some pictures. Once we got inside, we found that there was plenty of stuff to see and do.

Early on in the aquarium tour, they had small pools of water, each with a horseshoe crab that people could walk up to and see. Aiden got to touch one of the horseshoe crabs, but he didn’t like it very much.  Chrissy turned one over and was freaked out by its wiggling legs. There was also an aviary where the birds would fly over to you. Chrissy was jumped by a lorikeet, which was funny. She managed to get it to land in her hand.  Aiden loves to watch fish swim around, so he really enjoyed the aquarium.

And we found out that Aiden is afraid of sharks, especially ones that have lots of teeth that are a foot away from your head.  The aquarium had many glass tunnels that allowed the fish to swim over and around you as you walked through them.  The last tunnel had huge sharks.  One of them snuck up behind Aiden, and he turned around just in time to see the shark up close and personal. We’ve never seen him jump so high. We also had a chance to touch some sharks at “Shark Central”, but they were much smaller and friendlier. 

We had a good time at the Newport Aquarium.  It was a smaller version of the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, where we usually go to see fish outside of Red Lobster.  We were the first ones in, so we didn’t have to fight through the crowd of first graders that entered behind us.  We bought Aiden a hairy turtle and some other souvenirs on the way out, and then headed back to Cincinnati to continue our weekend.

We began the annual pilgrimage to Botcon on Thursday. We left home after an early lunch so that Aiden would sleep the majority of the way there. He normally naps for about three hours after lunch. The drive was four and a half hours long, however. Aiden was not the least bit happy about being stuck in the car seat after he woke up, so he yelled a lot during the last hour of the trip.

When we got to Cincinnati, we were confronted with a grid of one-way streets. It took a few tries to get to the valet entrance of the Millenium Hotel, but we finally made it. I even got to go down the wrong way on a one-way street, which you could never get away with in Chicago. We had originally made reservations at the Hyatt, across the street, but they had accidentally overbooked the Botcon rooms. They gave us a free night if we would just accept the lower rate and stay at the Millenium. Sure, why not? Our room was tiny; we barely had enough room to store the crib and the stroller at the same time. I wonder if the Hyatt had bigger rooms?

Due to the time zone change, we had an hour less to make the drive than I had thought, so we made a quick dash to the convention registration lines shortly after checking into the hotel. Chrissy pushed Aiden around the huge hall in the stroller while I stood in line. As usual, they lumped everyone with last names of “S” through “Z” together in one queue, even though “R” through “T” should have their own. We complain about this every year, since our line is always the last to finish, so we never get to the Store line to buy the souvenir sets.

We signed in and received our exclusive “Shattered Glass” box sets and attendee-only figures and then shuffled over to the Convention Store, but the line was already snaked around the hall and back. We were too hungry to wait in that line all night, and it was after Aiden’s bed time already, so we went out to find some food. Apparently the convention planners didn’t look into restaurants in the area, because there aren’t any that are open after 6 PM. I guess the whole city shuts down at 6 PM. So sad.

We ended up eating in the restaurant in the Millenium, which was our only (and worst) option. The service was terrible. They never brought us a high chair for Aiden or a booster seat, even after we asked several times. The waitress literally threw menus at us. I was sure that this place must be Cincinnati’s version of “Ed Debevic’s” (where they’re deliberately mean to tourists). We couldn’t wait to get out of there, which was difficult because the waitress never came back to give us our check.

We finally made it back to our room and put Aiden to bed.  Chrissy had requested a crib ahead of time, but the one that they sent to our room was cheap and flimsy.  Aiden didn’t seem to mind, and it was big enough to hold him, so we made some room for him and tucked him in.  It had been a long day, but Botcon had barely started yet. 

I’ve been playing the single player mode of “Crysis” for the last two weeks, and it’s been so much fun that I’m still playing it after beating it.  The gameplay is great, but I’m entertaining myself now with the graphics settings.  You have a lot of options to set: texture quality, shadow quality, physics quality, volumetric effects, etc.  The game requires a pretty high-end machine to run everything in “high” quality, but I’ve been able to tweak the settings to come up with a good balance of frame rate and image quality.

I started off with all of the options set to “low” and the anti-aliasing set to “off”.  I had absolutely no confidence in my 3.2 gHz P4 to get the job done, even with a 512 MB ATI HD2600 XT video card.  I was just happy that it ran at a fairly fast clip, but I soon noticed the jagged lines, bland colors and bad textures.  I increased the anti-aliasing from “off” to “2x”, which decreased the amount of jagged lines and didn’t effect my frame rate.  Anti-aliasing usually hits the processor pretty hard, but my machine handled it.

I wanted more, so I started to crank up the graphic settings until I noticed a lapse in game speed.  I was able to get texture quality, objects quality, shaders quality, game effects quality and sound quality up to “high”.  I left the shadows quality and water quality at “low”, since these tend to eat up processor cycles.  I tried to increase them, but noticed some lag in frame rate, so I switched them back. The changes that I kept made a noticable difference (click on the images to see the details).

Just for fun, I cranked up all of the graphic settings to “high” and increased the anti-aliasing to “8x”. Predictably, this made the game crawl to the point that it was almost unplayable. My computer just couldn’t handle it. What I didn’t expect, though, was the very slight difference that was made. The jump from “low” to “medium” was very obvious, but the only difference that I could pick out at “high” quality were the shadows (notice the VTOL shadow against the tower in the second picture below) and maybe the smoke effects. This looks nice, but it’s not a critical leap. So, I’m happy with the gameplay at “medium” quality.

There was a 5.2 magnitude earthquake in Mount Carmel, Illinois this morning at 4:36 AM. Chrissy heard about it on the morning news when she woke up (video). The epicenter was along the Indiana border, but much farther south than us, closer to Kentucky. CNN said that people as far away as Milwaukee could feel the ground shaking. Apparently, we had slept right through it. Aiden was up earlier than usual, so maybe he noticed it.

I think that we’re just desensitized to light shaking. There are train tracks about a thousand feet from our house, and we can sometimes feel the vibrations when a particularly heavy train goes by. We can’t always hear the trains because we have heavy duty windows, but I can sometimes feel them if I’m watching TV in the bedroom. If I can regularly sleep through that, then I can sleep through an earthquake 300 miles away.

I don’t think that I watch all that much television, but I keep seeing this commercial pop up that really bugs me. It’s a commercial for “J.G. Wentworth” where all these people stick their heads out of their respective windows and shout, “It’s my money and I want it now!” It’s annoying and repetitive. Then this old guy says that if you get regular annuity payments, they’ll be happy to exchange that into one lump sum for you. Why in the hell would you want to do that? The prospect of “instant cash” may seem like a good thing, but you would be shooting yourself in the foot if you did that.

I might be assuming that all people inherently know things that I take for granted, but isn’t it common knowledge that the value of an annuity is greater in the long term than in the short term? For example, let’s say that you win the lottery for a million dollars. You don’t actually have a million dollars. You have $300,000 that, if left in an interest-bearing account, will afford you regular payments that will equal a million dollars over the course of twenty years. If you decide to take the lump sum, you only get the original $300,000. Until the government takes their 25% in taxes and you settle your early withdrawal penalty of 10%.

So JG Wentworth wants to buy your annuity from you in exchange for that $300,000 (minus taxes, fees and their cut). If you do this, you now have about $200,000 to blow. Once you buy all your buddies new cars, you’re out of cash again within the year. “It’s my money and I want to spend it now!” Meanwhile, J.G. Wentworth is slowly cashing in your one million dollars worth of annuity payments, because they’re smart enough to be patient and let the power of compound interest work for them. They’re laughing all the way to the bank with your cash!

I might make an exception here for huge medical emergencies or catastrophic loss. If my house burned down with everything I owned inside it, I might have to cash out that annuity. Or if that lottery win was for a hundred million dollars, since I would settle for the lump sum payment of twenty million (how ridiculously rich do you have to be?). But given the status of things the way they are, I find that commercial offensive. It’s obviously targeting stupid people, playing on their greed and short-sightedness.

There was a scene in last week’s Battlestar Galactica, “Six of One”, where “Caprica Six” brought two Cylon Centurions into a meeting room.  The ones, fours and fives were all represented there, and they tell her to get lost.  In reply, the two Centurions open fire on everyone present while Six watches. The whole episode had Cylons double-crossing each other, culminating in this massacre.

This immediately reminded me of the hit job scene in “Pulp Fiction“, in which Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta are sent to kill some people that crossed Marcellus Wallace.  “Jules” goes into a diatribe of “Ezekial 25:17” every time he whacks somebody. I’m thinking, “How cool would it be if the Cylons recited that same line before gunning everyone down?” I might even be able to get ”Cavil the Cylon” to play the entire “Brett” role in post-production.

So I decided to make it happen.  First, I located a copy of the Battlestar episode online and set it to download. Second, I located a recording of the scene from Pulp Fiction in MP3 format.  Once I converted the file into WAV format, I was able to use a free Vocoder program to make the speech sound like the classic Cylon voice.  I just needed to merge the two and perhaps juggle some scenes to allow more time for dialog. This would have been sweet.

I say “would have been” because I failed miserably.  There were several problems. First, the copy of the episode would not open in Adobe Premiere Elements.  It crashed the program repeatedly. While trying to figure out how to work the Vocoder, I located and downloaded a second copy, but it didn’t work either.  I even tried to split the files up into smaller pieces, in case Premiere was having trouble opening larger files.

Then the Vocoder output would not load into Premiere either, and it would only play in “Media Player Classic”. I updated my audio and video codecs, but no luck there either.  It took forever to get the Vocoder program to work properly, so I was in no mood to try another tactic.  So I gave up. Too little return for too great an investment. Maybe someone with more video talent than I will take up the cause?

I can’t wait for Botcon 2008 to happen. I look forward to Botcon every year, even though my Transformer collecting days seem to be winding down. I’m looking forward to seeing the exclusive figures as well, since there seems to be a lot of good ones this year.  One of the extra figures available to attendees this year will be “Shattered Glass Blurr”, who will be a repaint of “Cybertron Blurr” (2005).

This mold was a retool of “Armada Blurr” (2002), which came with a Mini-Con sidekick named “Incinerator” instead of a “Cyber Planet Key”.  An additional ”flight mode” is common to all three figures. The entire rear end of the vehicle mode was retooled to allow the wing gimmick to be triggered by the Planet Key instead of the Mini-Con.   In addition, a new head was given to Cybertron Blurr to make him look more like “G1 Blurr“.

“Universe Swerve” was released in 2004 with his Mini-Con, “Roadhandler“, as a repaint of Armada Blurr. This character was named after G1 Swerve, but that version was a white and red truck, a retool of the red and blue G1 mini-bot, Gears.  Swerve was once again upgraded in 2005 as “Alternators Swerve”, a figure that I was never able to find (and still fetches a huge sum on eBay).

I work on Chicago’s South side in a neighborhood called “Hyde Park“.  I miss working downtown, but this is a nice place, with Lake Michigan to the East and the University of Chicago Hospitals to the West.  The Museum of Science and Industry is here too.  Unfortunately, what it doesn’t have is adequate parking.  Regular commuters to the area tend to call it “Hyde No-You-Can’t-Park”.

The problem is that Hyde Park is a university neighborhood, so parking becomes difficult to find whenever classes are in session.  You have to get here pretty early to beat all of the students who drive in (parking is a cakewalk during winter break).  Incidentally, I recently changed my work hours so that I could get in at 8AM.  I used to have to drive around the block twenty times to find someplace to pull in, so I was amazed at how much easier it was to park when you come in extra early.

Until it gets relatively warm, which is when the street cleaners come out of their wintery hibernation.  About once a month, the city blocks off half of each side street for cleaning.  Street cleaning usually lasts for about a week, during which time the amount of parking in the area is effectively cut by half. Competition for parking suddenly becomes fierce. I had to park a mile away from my office this morning, and I was none too happy about it.

I’m sure that this is an elaborate plot to bring more money into the city coffers. First, they post temporary “No Parking” signs everywhere.  Then, when you park somewhere illegally, they swoop in to ticket you.  I got two tickets in two days once during street cleaning week.  They’re quick too, they’ll get you within ten minutes of the posted time.  All of this may soon be a moot point, however, since I’ll most likely be taking the train in once the price of gasoline hits $5 a gallon this summer.