Review: Nokia Lumia 521

As previously mentioned, I've settled on the Nokia 521 as my European phone for the year. I ended up using it earlier than expected, however, as I noted that our Ting phone bill rising due to unexpectedly high data charges from my Galaxy Nexus. Since I had a prepaid T-mobile SIM lying around, I deactivated my Galaxy Nexus, went to the T-mobile store, and moved the SIM account into a micro-SIM to install it onto my Nokia.

The move came at the right time, as we ended up going to Yosemite for a few days. Unlike Google Maps, Nokia's HERE mapping and navigation applications work even without a data plan. If you've ever used Google Maps' offline feature, you know what a crippled application it is when bereft of a data plan. You can't search, you can't re-route when you go off course, and god help you if the phone ever rebooted in the middle of the drive. Well, Nokia's HERE Maps and navigation applications are a breath of fresh air compared to that. Even in the middle of a National Park (where no data availability is to be had for any carrier), navigation is a cinch and works. To my surprise, search, and POI (point of interest) locations like gas stations, etc are also available. I'm impressed and very pleasantly surprised. On top of that, you can even download map prior to leaving the country for foreign destinations.

There are a few glitches, but no more than my Galaxy Nexus had. The one big flaw is bluetooth pairing. For whatever reason, audio pairing (as opposed to phone call pairing) is spotty and requires an explicit connection very time. I have no idea why that is, but there's no way to fix it. Fortunately, the speakers of the Nokia 521 are more than loud enough for navigation purposes.

Speaking of phone calls, Nokia here demonstrates that they really understand how to put together phones that work for voice calling. After years of having gotten used to crappy Samsung calls, phone calls through the Nokia 521 are crystal clear, and the 521 receives far better signals than any other T-mobile phone I'd ever had. I had previously assumed that my home was  a T-mobile dead zone, but the Nokia 521 happily receives and makes phone calls in my home. Either T-mobile's network has improved (unlikely) or Nokia really knows how to make a phone that can make and receive calls.

The battery life is also nothing short of amazing. I'd gotten used to never going out the door with the Galaxy Nexus without also carrying along 2 spare batteries in addition to the extended battery that's already in my phone. I broke that habit with the Nokia 521. Not once did I run out of battery during the course of a normal day, and even when cycling out of cell coverage for a day, the Nokia's battery never dropped past 80%. I couldn't believe my eyes the first time I checked the battery life after a day of riding in the Santa Cruz mountains.

All in all, I'm very happy with this phone as a primary use phone, and when my prepaid minutes run out and I come scrambling back to Ting and the Galaxy Nexus, I'm going to miss the Nokia 521 badly. Highly recommended.

Review: If You Can: How Millenials Can Get Rich Slowly

If You Can is William Bernstein's financial planning booklet for people starting out in their careers. It is normally $0.99 at the Kindle Store (free today), but you can download it for free from Bernstein's website. At 27 pages long, it is short and can be read in a couple of hours. However, if you actually do do the homework in the book (which only of reading other financial books), the claim is that you will know more than most financial professionals about investing.

The prescriptions in the book are fairly straightforward: save money (at least 15% of your income), pay off all debt, invest in a diversified portfolio (the suggested 33% even splits between domestic stocks, international stocks, and bonds is a fairly good one), learn a bit about finance and financial history, rebalance your portfolio about once a year, steer away from financial professionals who will try to steal your money and only buy indexed funds (preferably Vanguard ones).

Of course, straightforward doesn't mean easy.  Being able to do all of these would qualify you to manage money not just for yourself, but for any one and any institution. Similarly, doing all of the homework assignments isn't easy, since it's actually substantial reading. Here's the reading list:

• The Millionaire Next Door
• Common Sense on Mutual Funds
• Devil Take The Hindmost
• The Great Depression A Diary
• Your Money And Your Brain
• How A Second Grader Beasts Wall Street
• All About Asset Allocation

Bernstein carefully steers away from promoting his own books (which are very good), and leaves out several classics such as A Random Walk Down Wall Street , which are useful but also not as much fun reading as the above list.

In any case, the irony of all teaching is that the people who need it the most won't show up in class, hence the people who need this booklet the most probably won't read this book. But if you're the kind of person who gets asked for financial advice, in the interest of saving your time and your breath (since sadly, this type of advice is more frequently ignored than followed), this is a great little free booklet to point people at so you can talk about more interesting things.

Recommended.

Review: How to Win Friends and Influence People

How to Win Friends and Influence People is currently $2.99 on the Kindle store. I'd gotten this far in life without reading the book, but a friend of mine told me she used a technique from the book and it worked, though she felt slimy about it afterwards. That's intriguing enough to get me to buy and read the book.

This is a great book, as far as being an effective politician and getting what you want from people goes. Fundamentally, the book is all about helping you tell people what they want to hear, as opposed to what reality is. For example, in one anecdote, the manager of a singer who refused to get on stage simply lied to him over and over again until he did so. In another example, Dale encourages you not to tell people that they are wrong, but to pretend that you could be wrong and asking to check the facts. In certain circumstances, that could easily win you favors, sales, and deals. In other circumstances, it could make you look like an easy pushover and mark, and you will get out-maneuvered by more politically savvy folks, especially if you're an engineer. Dale Carnegie, however, doesn't tell you how to distinguish between those circumstances. For instance, if Galileo had read this book, he might easily have avoided the Roman inquisition. It would have done immense harm to the scientific enterprise, however, so I'm glad the world is not full of people who've read Dale Carnegie's book.

People occasionally ask me for advice on their careers. Given that I'm completely oblivious to office politics, I'm a bad person to ask. But I do refer them to books such as Career Warfare. It's quite clear to me that How to Win Friends and Influence People is also a great book to read if you want to succeed at a large company, where perception is much more important than reality. Keep in mind, however, that if you're an engineer, you're a much worse liar than anyone who's not an engineer, so some of these techniques absolutely will not work for you.

Highly Recommended.

Review: Android Studio

Since helping my wife with her Nutrition Tracker App, I'd had a chance to try both Eclipse and Android Studio for android app development. Both of them run on Windows, my preferred platform, but it didn't take 3 days with Eclipse before I got frustrated with frequent crashing, features not working, and a lousy layout tool. I found Android Studio and downloaded it and soon persuaded my wife to switch to it.

Android Studio is based on IntelliJ IDEA. Back at Google when I was doing Java work, I avoided it like the plague, preferring to stick with Emacs and gtags. That's because Google's Java source base was so big you couldn't possibly load it into IntelliJ on the puny workstations of that time (yes, Google only supplied machines with 2GB of RAM in 2003), and even if it had been possible, those machines would have slowed to a crawl under the load of processing that much code. IntelliJ/Eclipse die-hards were resorting to wacko tricks like subsetting Google's code base so it could load into IntelliJ and then writing plugins into gtags for accessing the rest of the source code. I have no idea what Googlers do today, but my suspicion is that things haven't gotten much better.

For small Android projects like Nutrition Tracker, however, an IntelliJ is just about right. If you're unfamiliar with the Android API, it would supply you with method name completion, tell you which arguments to supply in which order, automagically add imports, allow for automatic refactoring tricks such as moving methods, renaming variables safely, and moving inner classes out of their outer classes, shifting classes between packages, etc. The layout tool helps you avoid having to learn the lame layout XML language, so you can actually try to make things work (as opposed to making things look pretty and usable --- I think Emacs is a great UI, so I have no expertise on those topics).

Android Studio is slow. It's slow to startup, it's slow to compile, and it's slow to run the debugger. A typical edit-compile-debug cycle would take around 10-20 seconds in order to build a tiny app. Note that I'm not complaining about Android Studio's massive use of resources while I'm editing. I think that's entirely appropriate. I want all my 4 cores/8 threads to be utilized in order to make my coding experience faster and more pleasant. I don't even mind the startup, since it doesn't need to happen that frequently, and it's a one time cost. But the Gradle build system is not only a resource hog, but it introduces additional latency into my think-time, so I begrudge every second it's spending traversing dependency graphs instead of actually compiling code. I have no idea why the Android Studio engineers chose a clunky system like Gradle, as opposed to rolling their own and integrating it fully into the IDE. I never want to edit the gradle build files manually, but the system forces me to. What's more, the syntax is really obscure and the documentation is inadequate.

For instance, when doing an android release, the documentation only covers Eclipse. Worse, the documentation lies to you. It tells you to modify your Manifest file, and I did. Until I kept scratching my head as to why that never worked. It turned out that you had to modify the Gradle config, since the Android Manifest XML file was ignored in the presence of Android Studio. Well, that took so much googling around that I can't remember what search term I used to uncover the Stack Overflow answer any more.

The source control integration is also funky. It supports Git, Mercury, and Subversion, but not Perforce. Given that Google uses Perforce internally, I surmise that Google's internal projects do not use Android Studio. This does not bode well, since that will mean that Android Studio's most serious problems (build performance) will most likely never get addressed because its non-existent internal customers will not feel the pain.

For quick and dirty Android projects, Android Studio is probably the best there is. If you're serious about building an Android app, however, my suggestion is that you use Emacs and roll your own build system that's decently fast. Otherwise, the benefits from using an IDE will be swamped by inordinately long compile/edit/debug cycle times. Note that though my machine is old, it's still decently powerful compared to even the fastest rig today, let alone the kind of laptops most "hip" developers favor, so it's unlikely you can solve Android Studio's problems by throwing more hardware at it.

Recommended only for non serious Android projects. It's a great tool for getting started quickly though, so use it to bootstrap yourself into doing Android development if that's one of your goals.

Why it now makes sense to build your own PC

I've always been tempted to build my own PC. I'm no stranger to the tools, since my internship at Geoworks effectively required me to take apart and put together the machine I was given at work. But until recently it made no sense. Machines were increasing in performance significantly, so every 2-3 years it made sense to get a new machine. When you're getting new machines that frequently, it doesn't make sense to build your own, since the beige box vendors can get you much lower prices, and the cost of your time to swap motherboards, CPU sockets, etc., in and out would swamp the ability to bring over your hard drives, etc. Given Moore's law, every 2-3 years you'd have to buy all new hardware anyway!

I recently took a look to see if it was worth replacing my 5 year old desktop. To my surprise, the answer was "no." Looking at the CPU benchmarks, it looks like a "modern" i7-4770 would clock in at less than twice the performance of my 5 year old i7-920. In the old days, 5 years would have been enough to get at least a quadrupling of performance. Not even getting a doubling in 5 years would have been unthinkable. Part of it is that Intel's no longer getting any competition from AMD. Part of it is because getting up past about 4GHz would overheat a PC, so the easy way out of just merely increasing clock speed is out. Increasing the number of cores have already hit diminishing returns as far as most PC users are concerned (I'm an exception: I regularly process video).

The flip side of this is that the base operating system hasn't been using more hardware resources recently. Windows 8 is actually less resource hungry than Windows 7, which would have been unthinkable in the old days. Thanks to Microsoft's desire to compete in the tablets space with Apple and Google, Windows 8 actually runs decently on a tablet with just 2GB of RAM. This gave me the courage to replace my wife's 4-year old X201 with a Microsoft Surface Pro with half the RAM. My wife didn't even notice the missing RAM, despite running the resource hungry Android Studio, which is enough to spin my desktop PC's fan up.

This has several implications for users and developers:

1. Rather than buy a mid-range machine and planning to replace it every few years, it might be cheaper to build a high end machine and upgrade components. Given that CPUs and motherboards are no longer going to have to be trashed every few years, you might as well get a chassis that supports easy hard drive and SSD replacements/expansions, and GPU upgrades, if you will run GPU-intensive activities.
2. I/O standards do make a big difference, but any PC with a free slot will let you upgrade to USB 3 and other standards, so again, expand-ability might be more important than "planning to throw it away."
3. An adequately high end machine will probably last a good 10 years in this environment (i.e., a i7 4770k wouldn't be obsolete for 10 years), which means that it makes sense to put money into a high quality power supply, since the higher quality power supply would provide cost savings when you plan to run a machine for that long. This is in contrast to the "buy-and-replace" strategy, where spending $20 more on a better power supply wouldn't pay for itself in power savings.
4. This also seems to be applying to laptops, though laptops do benefit from the power efficiency gains of the latest processors, so if battery life matters to you, an upgrade every 4-5 years might make sense. The way most people seem to use laptops (constantly plugged in and never actually used as a mobile device), I think most people should replace laptops every 10 years, getting new batteries every 3-4 years or so, assuming that their device supports it.

I never thought I'd see the day when PCs would be expected to last as long as cars, but then again, I never thought I'd see the day when Microsoft would roll out huge new products and initiatives and everybody would just yawn. But yeah, my next PC is going to be something I build from the case in, and I'd be planning for it to last a good 10 years, something I did not expect when buying my previous desktop. I would have taken a completely different approach otherwise.

Review: Nuun Active Hydration

I've long been a user of Cytomax as a supplement for my water bottles. It's cheap, easy to use, and keeps the cramps away adequately. I'm a heavy sweater, so having an electrolyte drink is pretty much a necessity. Unfortunately, they recently changed their forumla to use stevia instead of sugar, which means that it's no longer the same as before. In any case, even prior to the formulation change, Cytomax had other problems for on the go use. It was difficult to carry, didn't provide a convenient way to meter usage, and I usually ended up doing without rather than bringing it on tour.

Endurolytes were our go to source for touring. They're essentially salt pills, and eating them a handful at a time was good enough to eliminate Mike Samuel's cramps during a particularly hot tour of the alps. They're relatively low density, so you really have to pop them like candy to have any effect. And of course, being capsules, you essentially have to stop to eat them, unlike Cytomax.

I recently ordered Nuun at a website in order to top up an order to receive free shipping. It comes in a tube and each tube has about 12 tablets. You use 1-2 tablets per bottle, solving the metering problem. Since it dissolves into your drinking water, it's particularly suited for touring cyclists who don't like to stop just to take capsules. It's considerably more expensive than Cytomax, though with Amazon's subscribe and save option along with Amazon Mom and my reduced riding load nowadays, it's still quite affordable.

The taste is much weaker than Cytomax, and that's a good thing. I frequently do get sick of Cytomax if I use too much, but this minor fizzing flavor is just right for me. My biggest problem with it is that it's not calorie dense at all. Come on guys, if you're designing an electrolyte for cyclists and runners, don't skimp on the calories!

In any case, I've turned on a subscription and will now use it for bicycle tours. Recommended.

Why I can't help PMs, Sales People, or Marketing folks negotiate

Occasionally, I'll get a sales person, product manager or program manager, or even a marketing person ask me to help negotiate their compensation package. With one exception, I invariably turn all of them down. The reason is this: negotiate is a core skill for product managers, program managers or sales people, while the core skill for engineers is being able to design and code, with negotiation being secondary. In fact, one of the ways an engineering manager adds value to an engineering team is negotiating on their behalf with other engineers and with product management and/or UI designers.

If you look at how we train engineers, it's pretty clear that negotiation is out of the picture. Engineering exams aren't graded on style, readability, or collaboration. They're graded on correctness of solution, ability to apply principles and data structures to new areas, and of course, whether or not your project works. What negotiation there is in the engineering curriculum is informal: you might be asked to work in teams to turn in your homework (as a former instructor, I can say with confidence that this is usually so that we only have CLASS_SIZE/N papers/projects to grade, rather than CLASS_SIZE). As a result, engineers are singularly unprepared to negotiate their compensation in a way that sales people, PMs, or marketing types are not.

There's also a fairly subtle effect going on when engineers negotiate their compensation package. Most engineers are in a position to find a new job only because they're unhappy with their old one. Why are they unhappy? Usually it's because the old position did not make full use of their abilities: either they've been stuck in a junior position for years (I've heard horror stories about engineers at Google being stuck at SWE 3 for 5 years, despite performing way better than their grade), or because they've not been given raises, or both. In these cases, usually the managers have consciously or unconsciously beaten down their egos and repeated told the engineers that they're not worth much in the market. One of the things I do is to get such engineers to interview and receive multiple offers. The change is almost immediately visible in such candidates: they gain confidence as they realize that they are valuable employees, and this has an effect when they negotiate. The extra confidence enables them to negotiate and get better deals from their employers. Sales people, product managers or program managers, for whatever reason, seem to be immune to such beat-downs, retaining a healthy ego even when consistently denied promotions.

My negotiation service is unique because it's an irrational thing to do. The real money in compensation negotiation is on the other side of the table. Recruiters and head hunters get 30% of your salary (i.e., your entire engineering salary for a year * 0.3) for getting you to join their client companies. That's why there's no competition for what I do. There's no engineer who'd be willing to match what corporations pay in order to get a better deal.

First Impressions: Microsoft Surface Pro

Our trusty X201 had been getting long in the tooth, and Xiaoqin decided to try some Android development. If you've ever tried Android Studio, you'll know that it's a CPU intensive process since it's based on IDEA IntelliJ. The build system associated with Android Studio, Gradle, is also a massive CPU hog, and introduces no small amount of latency to the process. I never thought I'd miss the days of Visual Studio, but it's quite clear that compared to Microsoft's tool set for development, Android is quite a bit behind, and extremely unstable. Of course, in terms of market share, the positions are exactly reversed.

After trying out a Surface Pro in the store a year or so back, I vowed never to buy a conventional laptop again if I could buy a Surface Pro-type device. Fortunately, Microsoft was having a sale on refurbished Surface Pros, so I was able to pick up a 128GB model for $450. You can find them for about $500 if you're willing to put up with a 64GB model. With USB 3 and a microSD card slot, it's probably no big deal if you can't find the 128GB model.

As a laptop, it's quite impressive. It's about 50% faster than the older X201, and 3X faster on boot up, hibernation, and recovery from hibernation, with boot times going from 30s to 10s. And yes, this is with the X201 upgraded to an SSD. There are a few strange fit and finish issues, such as the mini display port slot not being very deep, so when inserting a standard cable there's a little bit of chrome sticking out. The tablet comes with a pen, but there's no place to put it except in the magnetic charging port, and the magnetic charging port isn't strong enough to retain the stylus without loss if there's any pressure whatsoever on it. Since this is an expensive Watcom digitizer stylus, you really do want to keep track of it!

Running Lightroom is fast as you might expect, with no hitches and the Surface Pro had no problem driving the 27" HP monitor with a 2560x1440 display. One nice mode you can run is to have the touch screen run the Start screen, while the big display runs the desktop. This gives you a nice touch UI for the touch part, while having the desktop to do real work. Of course, Microsoft had to glitch this up---in this mode, desktop apps still launch onto the small screen instead of automatically selecting the big screen. It's this kind of inattention to detail that gives Apple its edge over Microsoft, though I've found Macs to have their share of problems when using multiple screens.

The device has a fixed, 4GB of RAM, but surprisingly, until I told Xiaoqin about it, she didn't even notice it didn't have as much RAM as her old device. At least part of the reason is that Windows 8 Pro actually consumes fewer hardware resources that Windows 7 did. The other part of it is that in recent years, software developers just haven't been able to assume more than 4GB of RAM anyway, so as long as you're single tasking or running just one web browser and an application, you're generally OK.

As a tablet, the Surface Pro is quite hefty, though not as hefty as the X201. It makes up for that, however, with power. I'd already written about how much faster the Dell Venue 8 Pro is than my Nexus 7. Using the Surface Pro is instantaneous. The Type Cover is also a joy to use, giving you keyboarding performance akin to what I'm used to with the X201.

The real revelation, however, is the stylus. I'd never tried any of the previous PCs in tablet mode, other than my use of the Wacom Bamboo tablet for producing Independent Cycle Touring. But while I hadn't noticed, Windows' handwriting recognition has become nothing short of amazing. My handwriting can compete with any doctors' for sheer inscrutability, but the Surface Pro handled my cursive with aplomb, as long as I was writing common English words. Write something not in the dictionary, and just like any other machine translation program, and you end up with gibberish. There was no training period, however, and I could pick it up and use it. You could even turn on Chinese handwriting recognition, though Xiaoqin pointed out that Pinyin is faster and much easier to use with a real keyboard. Unfortunately, having multiple languages on the machine is problematic if you use a keyboard, since Microsoft used Windows-Space to switch between languages, and Xiaoqin found it far too easy to hit that combination by mistake. In past versions of windows we tried to change the language key bindings but to no avail, so we gave up and uninstalled the language pack instead.

All tablets are compromises. The Surface Pro does not have great battery life. 3-4 hours with Android Studio and that's it for the battery. When fully powering Android Studio, the device also gets hot enough to turn on its fan, which sounds like a low hissing noise. It's quieter than the X201, but still noticeable if the room is otherwise quiet. Next to my Core i7 920 box going full bore, of course, it might as well not make any noise. At no point would you burn your hand grabbing the Surface Pro, however, so there aren't any safety issues.

Long term, the biggest concern about the Surface Pro is the battery. With the machine running hot, and the battery fully charged most of the time in desktop mode, I would be surprised to see more than 3 hours of battery run time after the first year, and 2 after the second year. Most laptop batteries get abused this way as well, but the Surface Pro has a non user-serviceable battery, with the only option being the $200 power type cover. Fortunately, for the price (which is much less than what I paid for the X201 way back when), we can treat the Surface Pro as a disposable computing device. This is much more of a concern nowadays, however, than it would have been 10 years ago. 10 years ago, you'd expect to replace a machine every 3 years. Now, an adequate machine (which the Surface Pro most definitely is) could have a potential life time of 5-6 years. At the rate Intel is improving (or not improving) CPU performance, I'm likely to keep my desktop for another 2-3 years at least!

There are a few accessories that I would recommend for the Surface Pro. The first is a Type Cover. We tried both the Touch Cover and the Type Cover in the store, and the Type Cover was hands down the winner. Secondly, you need a USB 3.0 hub if you're going to attach a debugging phone as well as a wireless transmitter for wireless keyboard and mouse. The Surface Pro comes with bluetooth, but it was easier to just use the existing Logitech mouse and keyboard than to shop for new ones. USB hubs can be powered or unpowered, and we got an unpowered one for convenience when traveling. It'll make the device drain that much faster, but having one less power adapter to carry will be essential.

In any case, so far, I'm liking the Surface Pro far more than I expect, and Xiaoqin hasn't asked for the older X201 back. I'm expecting not to send this back to Microsoft after the 30 day return period.

Review: Flower

I picked up Flower as part of the Journey Collector's Edition, but if you pick up the digital PS4 edition, you'll get it for the Vita and PS3 as well. Given that Journey is a great game, the collector's edition is worth getting as it gets you the soundtrack as well as a few other specials.

You play the wind (or maybe the spirit of Spring) in Flower, picking up flower petals by making flowers bloom. That's it. It's a simple mechanic, made only more difficult because rather than using joystick controls, the game uses motion controls using the Playstation controllers. (I bet most of you didn't know that the Playstation had motion controls that weren't associated with the Playstation Move, did you?) That's not a good thing, because those controls are imprecise, but on the other hand, this is not a game that calls for a lot of precision.

The first few minutes of the game feels puzzling. You almost feel like you're in a tech demo, rather than a game, as there seems to be no purpose. Then after a while, the game picks up and you learn that yes, there actually is a goal, other than floating around swirling petals and admiring the scenery, and there's even a story. It's not a very human story, as there's no dialog, but you also notice attention to detail at the game's level. For instance, there's background music to the game, but you add to it every time you make a flower bloom, and depending on how you control your speed, you can bloom flowers at varying rates, so you're contributing to the soundtrack as well as the game play. This is so beautifully and naturally done that I didn't notice it until I missed making a flower bloom at one point and then the music sounded different. Not wrong --- there's no real punishment for mistakes, but different, giving the game a different mode. Very well done.

The game's story leads you through 6 chapters, though you can go back and replay any of them in any order. Bowen loved the first and second chapters, and made me replay the first 3-4 levels over and over. They are beautiful, and the controls are a sheer joy. The 5th level is where it gets serious and you can actually take damage, and it can be much more confusing as to what you're supposed to do. However, even that level is not very long, and you're unlikely to get stuck in it. The final stage is enjoyable once again and a lot of fun, even exhilarating, and all too short.

As an experience, Flower isn't as strong, long, or contemplative as Journey. However, it is short, and very accessible for even toddlers. I can recommend it for everyone, but do not consider it as much of a "must play" as Journey is. Judging by the trajectory of the developer, thatgamecompany, I'm looking forward to seeing what they produce for their next outing. I don't think there's anyone else doing the type of games these folks are doing.

Review: Journey

Journey, for me, was a magical experience. When I sit down a reflect on the games I've played since December last year, many of them fall into the "interactive movie" category. There's nothing wrong with that. The Last of Us, had me thinking about its themes long after I'd finished the game, and Arkham City is an excellent story that would hold up to any of the Batman stories in any other medium. But those games wouldn't lose all that much if they were translated into movies. In fact, without the constant repetition and restarts due to player deaths, The Last of Us might even make a better movie than it did a game.

Journey, however, is the kind of experience that only works as a game. The wonderful thing about it is that it's an incredibly accessible game. Using only the twin analog joysticks and two buttons, it's a game that eschews complexity, timing based controls, and high speed reflexes and hand-eye coordination for a contemplative travel through the virtual landscapes it renders and the emotional spaces it evokes. What's more, unlike hard-core games that require hour upon hour of slogging and skill mastery, Journey is relatively short, and if you have time to watch a movie, you will have time for Journey.

You control a traveler, rendered in simple fashion little more sophisticated than a stick figure. The start of the game has you contemplating a mountain far away, and it is understood (though the game never explicitly tells you) that you are going there. Along the way, you traverse a desert landscape, an underground cavern, underwater spaces, and a snowy tundra. You visit ruins, and encounter creatures, most of which help you, and perhaps, another traveler representing another player who is also making the same journey.

You can't die, though there are moments when you are threatened, even succumbing to those threats won't hurt your ability to finish the game. The other player who might travel with you can't help or hinder you in your travels. In fact, other than a couple of gestures, you can't even communicate with each other explicitly. Yet the nature of the game is such that mere presence still grants you camaraderie. The puzzles will never stump you for more than 10 minutes, if that. There are no difficulty levels, no ability to save or restore the game. At no point are you forced to move forward, and nothing shoots at you when you're having a contemplative moment or just enjoying the scenery.

If Journey was made into a movie, it would be flat, lacking the emotion it was designed to evoke. But by taking on the character in a virtual space, and providing the means for various forms of traversal, Journey managed to invoke in me feelings of exhilaration, as I slide down a sand dune or soar through the skies towards my goal. I felt fear, when a monster detected my presence (even though I knew I could not die), and came after me. And there were many many moments of wonder as I wandered through a new landscape, not knowing what would come, but enjoying the moments of beauty and solitude that came with making my way through the virtual spaces. The combination of the design, the music, the simplicity of the controls and the way the game teaches you what to do with just dialog and just a handful of on screen prompts in the first 15 minutes of play is nothing short of amazing.

I don't want to over-state the pleasures and the strength of Journey. I wouldn't go as far as to say that you should acquire a PS3 just for this game. (I'd say that for Uncharted 2) But it truly is a game that I think just about everyone should play just to understand why video games are art. Just as missing out on great books like A Wizard of Earthsea would be a great pity, I think missing out on Journey would also subtract from your life.

I bought Journey as part of a collector's edition. However, I will review the other two games on that disc (Flower, and Flow) separately. You can also purchase Journey directly from Sony as a download for $14.99. Highly recommended.

Review: Pixeljunk Monsters Ultimate HD

I'm a big fan of the tower defense genre of games, and have sunk countless hours into the original flash-based game, as well as much nicer looking Defense Grid. Strangely enough, there aren't very many mobile versions of the desktop tower defense that are worth playing, with Space Station Frontier being the only one that's really any good. (I found a common recommendation, Fieldrunners HD to be extremely lacking in imagination compared to even the original flash-based game --- other games were filled with in-app purchasing which sucks all the fun out of gaming, as far as I'm concerned)

That is, until I picked up Pixeljunk Monsters Ultimate HD for my Vita. The game's also available on PC, but I feel it is best played with a joystick and control buttons rather than mouse and keyboard, so I would encourage you to get a controller for the PC, if that's your platform of choice. Obviously, the PC version would be much less portable than the Vita version.

This game is extremely challenging. On Easy difficulty, I found myself having to play most levels more than once. In particular, sections of the game are locked away unless you score perfect scores on a certain number of pages, so I found myself replaying levels over in search of the score. On the easy difficulty at least, the game offers multiple paths to victory, with a great selection of different towers to use on various challenges.

The game features several unique mechanics. The first is that you control an actual character on the game board, which constraints you several ways. Your character creates and sells towers, as well as picking up gems and coins (to purchase new towers). Your character can also upgrade towers by dancing on a tower, or you can upgrade towers with gems. Your character also needs to run back to the base in order to purchase new tower types. With all these constraints in place, the game ensures you always have a plethora of choices to make, which forces you to pay attention to every detail.

Another unique mechanic is the concept of earned interest between waves. By not spending your coin, the game grants an interest bonus between waves that generates more coins. This mechanic basically adds tension between setting up additional towers right away or waiting for the last moment in order to garner the most bonus interest possible.

Your character can also get run over by the invading monsters, which would cause you to lose a number of coins as well as rendering him incapacitated for a period of time. If you don't pick up coins or gems within a certain amount of time, they'll disappear off the game board, which again generates a certain level of tension between running after the coins or staying put and upgrading towers by dancing.

The monsters are typical of the genre, with slow, fast, numbers, shielded, and flying monsters ensuring that you have to build a variety of towers in order to win.

Now, the most important part of a tower defense game is the maps or gameboards. The game features approximately 21 game boards, and the variety between them is pretty cool. They range from the difficult to the nearly impossible to get through without taking losses, and are ranked in difficulty with certain special missions granting you additional tower types or upgrading your character.

The game's extremely replayable, will be free this month on Playstation Plus if you have a Vita. In any case, I definitely got my money's worth for the game and can recommend it.
UPDATE: PixelJunk Monsters is available for $5 on the PC/Mac directly from the developer. This sale will last for 5 days.

Review: Aggressive Tax Avoidance For Real Estate Investors, 19th Edition

While I'm not quite an accidental landlord, since we got married we've had a rental property to manage. There are all sorts of issues with landlording, and I've covered many of the short-term solutions in a previous post. Aggressive Tax Avoidance for Real Estate Investors deals with longer term issues. Logistically, you can buy this version of the book from John T Reed's website, or you can buy a used 18th edition from Amazon. While there's unlikely to be much difference in content between the two editions, if you're running a rental business properly, there's no reason to cheap out since the book is tax deductible for your business.

A good measure of a specialist non-fiction book like this is the ROI. Within the first 3rd of the book I'd discovered that there was a certain approach that I'd not used because I'd succumbed to an old-wives tale and it would have saved 10X the price of the book. Live and learn.

The most useful part of the book is John T Reed's aggressiveness in approaching IRS issues. Basically, he tells you not to be afraid of tax courts, how to do research on tax issues, and how to fight the IRS in tax court if it comes down to it. This sounds really aggressive and it is. If you're renting out a room in your house, you're probably better off not being this aggressive, but if you have significant income from rental or run a multi-family rental property unit you want to take this approach as more conservative approaches would cost you significant amounts of money. John T Reed doesn't just assume this, but walks you through the Net Present Value/Expected Value Decision Tree for most of the approaches he espouses in this book. This is a very rational (one might say hyper-rational) approach to tax strategy and decision making as a landlord (or any other business owner), but you have to be capable of taking the mindset that Reed espouses. If you're easily stressed by the thought of an IRS audit, this is not the book for you, though you might want the managers you hire to read it and use it!

Reed not only walks through all the different types of tax courts, and the probability of the tax payer succeeding in winning the cases at the various courts, he also provides the probability of an audit, depending on the type of rental property you have and how much revenue and income you're generating. If you own any rental property, this type of information is invaluable and is worth the price of admission alone.

As a stalwart member of the 1%, Reed is definitely anti-Obama and anti-Democratic, and doesn't hesitate to write political comments throughout the book. I found this irritating, but tolerable given the usefulness of the information he provides.Then at the end of the book I came across something which just made me chuckle:

When you work at a job, you earn taxable income. Part of which, the government is entitled to confiscate. But if you work at increasing net worth---and refrain from selling the asset whose value you are increasing---the government has no right to confiscate any of the gain... It seems to me that if the taxes on work are too high---and they are---then you ought not to work for a living... (Page 180)

Sounds like a prescription for raising capital gains taxes and dividend taxes and reducing income taxes to me!

Anyway, if you own rental property that's more than just a room in your house, you need to buy this book. It will save you multiple times the cost of the book. If you run a business, you need this book just to understand the approach to taxes and how to do the NPV decision tree. Highly Recommended.

Review: Bioshock Infinite

One of the interesting things about catching up on 10 years of games is that since I'd been exposed continuously to only good games, it's extremely jarring when I play a bad one. I don't review most of those, because I never get far enough to finish them, since they don't hold my interest past a couple of chapters. Bioshock Infinite, however, came with stellar reviews, so I persisted despite my not having made it past a the first mini boss from the original Bioshock.

When I reviewed The Last of Us, I complained about how very unfun it was until I finally understood the game system and how it worked. A lot of it was that the game was continuously teaching me how to play, and between me being a slow learner and the reviews I'd read prior to the game, I'd approached it completely wrong. But by the time I really got it, the game became fun. The final scene where Ellie rescues herself from her kidnapper was like a final exam in everything the game had tried to teach you. (The fight against Mr. Freeze in Batman Arkham City serves the same function) Everything was put together right and I was never tempted to even look online for help.

I bring up these examples because they illustrate so clearly how a game can be done right and the game play leading into the climax exercises all the player skills that the game has taught him. Bioshock Infinite does it completely wrong. For one thing, none of the encounters prior to the climax require the kind of tactical and strategic thinking that was required to survive. Furthermore, the power-ups prior to the encounter all had the default selection set to the worst possible choice you could have made coming into the encounter. The result was that the game felt seductively easy enough to play (on easy settings), that you got to the final encounter only to get a whammy that felt like an infinite difficulty spike.

Now, I would probably have powered through anyway if the story had a decent payoff. Now the technical differences between the Naughty Dog team and the Irrational team really shows. The cut-scenes in The Last of Us are full of human interaction and expression, with every nuance of character reflected in the facial animation, body language, and acting. Bioshock Infinite doesn't have cut-scenes, but the animated models used by Irrational aren't subtle enough to carry the story off. Elizabeth is flat, and doesn't interact with  Booker anywhere close to the way Ellie interacts with Joel. The result is that the connection between Booker and Ellie feel forced and not as believable, which reduced my motivation to finish the game.

The net-result is that I watched the ending of the game on YouTube instead of playing through the climax. It's a decent ending without howlers, but definitely does not have the emotional tension and payoff from The Last of Us, or even Tomb Raider.

In any case, if you're a hard core first person shooter player I think Bioshock Infinite would be for you. For the rest of us, I'd recommend giving it a pass. The payoff just isn't worth the work, and the game play is unfun and breaks down right at the end of the game when it matters.

Review: Sennheiser CX 200

My favorite headphones for on-the-go sonic isolation are still the Etymotic In-Ear Monitors. Mine are several years old and still going strong. Being a parent, however, means that those get increasingly little use, because complete sonic isolation isn't actually what I want, since I need to hear my kid. Moreover, putting on and taking off the Etymotics is an involved operation, and frequently I just need easy-on/easy-off use.

Enter the Sennheiser CX-200. These are relatively cheap, retailing at $18, and you can occasionally find a deal for under $15. They're twist in, and you get a little bit of sonic isolation, but not so much that you can't hear your kid (or your wife). They're light and easy to carry, and not bulky at all, though on a plane you'd still rather have the Etymotics.

The sound quality is decent, though of course if I'm at home, I'd much rather use my PortaPro or PX100s. But you can't buy the PX100s any more, and the PX200s that replace them have terrible reviews and cost a lot more. The PortaPro, meanwhile, sounds great but is really bulky, so you're not really going to carry them out of the house.

Of course, these beat the heck out of the ear buds that came with your phone, iPod, or other portable music player. So if you're still using those, I'd recommend these as an upgrade.

The Oculus Rift "Sellout"

Yesterday's announcement of the Oculus Rift acquisition by Facebook has already garnered negative reactions amongst gamers and game developers. If you're a bystander, you might wonder why they got such a hugely negative reaction by people who should be their biggest supporters. Introducing a new technology requires high volume and in gaming, usually requires loss-leading hardware sales in order to drive that volume. Who better than Facebook with its deep pockets and huge profits is well-suited to such an endeavor? Google and Apple have deep pockets but both would restrict such technology to their favored platforms rather than more open systems, while Facebook would be more platform agnostic than just about anyone.

The negative reaction can be explained by the principle of reciprocity. The initial kickstarter backers of Oculus Rift and game developers thereof provided a gift to Oculus Rift. The gift was intended to bring about an independent hardware platform that would be (rightly or wrongly) dominated by the requirements driven by gamers. The backers did not intend to provide venture capital for Oculus to make a quick exit, and certainly not to sell out to a big company with a history of indifference towards games, and has a platform that has historically supported games like Farmville, anathema to the hardcore gamers that comprise Oculus' demographic.

As for Facebook, this acquisition is an counter to the usual industry trends. The amount of compute power required to drive something like the Oculus Rift is enormous and power hungry. It is unlikely that the Oculus Rift can be tethered to anything less powerful than a Playstation 4 any time soon, and certainly won't be able to run on any of the laptops typically distributed to a Facebook employee, let alone the smartphones favored by the trendy. It looks geeky, is unfashionable, and looks ridiculous when worn. The only possible good it could do Facebook in the medium term is if it got them into the living room.

Corporate head-honchos at Google, Amazon, and Apple have long looked at the living room game console as the entry point to taking over the entertainment center of the home. The numbers look tempting to the corporate types. Hardcore game consoles from Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have only penetrated 56% of US households. The other 44% looks ripe for disruption. However, these corporate types tend to have zero passion for gaming, and most have never so much as held a gaming controller in their hands. They tend to envision something like the Ouya or the Chromecast, neither of which provide sufficient power or quality content to get 6 year-olds excited about them, let alone the hard core gamers. They fail to understand that the quality of content (whether it be a video game or high quality blu-ray viewing or streaming) is the reason why so far, the game consoles have had a huge market share for living room usage.

The Facebook acquisition of Oculus Rift runs counter to that type of corporate thinking, and might actually succeed, if it doesn't start off by pissing off so many hard core supporters that it has poisoned the well. That disadvantage is possible to overcome, but only by Facebook doing a thorough job of winning over gamers and the developers through the kind of largesse that so far, only Sony has proven to be capable of doing. Since Sony's morpheus platform would presumably be tied to Sony's platforms, the Oculus Rift is still the best hope for mass market adoption of VR technology.

My prediction is that Facebook will screw it up with gamers (it's very unlikely given its corporate culture that it would do otherwise), and 5 years from now will look at Oculus as a poor acquisition, while Sony's morpheus project will see a very small niche similar to that the Playstation Move has been. Sony simply does not have the financial ability to take big losses in order to drive market adoption, while Facebook lacks the cultural understanding of gaming to be able to do much other than to poison the well with its ideal early adopters.

First Impressions: Nokia 521 Smartphone

Microsoft can't seem to do anything right, so when they paired up with Nokia (who can't seem to make a fashionable smart phone) to make phones, I expected the results to be irrelevant. In the past, whenever I've made a trip to Europe, I've carried an unlocked phone, and bought SIM cards in every country I visited in order to make phone calls or surf the internet. There were several problems with this approach:

• Cyclists tend to visit small towns and rural areas. It's frequently difficult to buy SIM cards in those areas. In 2011, it took multiple days in France before we could buy more than 1 SIM card.
• Pre-paid SIM cards with internet plans aren't always cheap or easy to get.
• You end up with this big collection of SIM cards and swapping them around as well as keeping track of how much money was on each card became problematic.

T-mobile's International Roaming plan changes this dynamic in a big way. Not only do you get unlimited text and data while traveling, you also get calls for about $0.20 per minute in nearly every European country. Now let's couple this with some very specific features of the Nokia 521:

• Off-line navigation and maps. Prior to travel, or any time you have WiFi, you can download maps of any and all countries onto the device. If you're familiar with Google Map's off-line modes you're probably thinking that this is useless. But this is Nokia's maps we're talking about. Nokia owns Navteq, and and it's maps are actually designed to operate off-line. What this means is that routing, address search, etc all works without access to online mode. This is FAR more useful than Google Map's off-line mode. This not only reduces your data use while traveling, it enables you to find destination even in places with no data connection. Yes, the device has a real GPS unit, so navigation while offline is accurate and reasonable.
• FM Radio. This is a very unusual feature, in that it's implemented by using your headphone's wires as an antenna. This means no need to worry about paying for Spotify, etc. Of course, in some countries, FM radio might not get you any English songs or programs, but if you're a cyclist on an independent cycle tour, getting in part of the culture is a plus, not a minus.

The Nokia 521 is available on Amazon for about $68, which means that for a trip to Europe, it's less than 5% of the cost of a typical plane ticket during high season. You might imagine that for that price, you're getting a slow, old phone. And you'd be wrong. The phone is fast! It's faster than my 2 year old Galaxy Nexus, and that $248 phone even now at loading e-mail, and browsing the web. It's the same speed as my wife's Galaxy Note 2, which is a $400+ phone. It's hard to imagine that the same company that produced the slow, bloated Windows Vista produced Windows Phone 8.

The phone has an SD card slot, so you can load up with videos, music, and a replaceable battery, if you're not going to be able to charge it for a while. It has a rear camera which is lackluster, and interestingly enough, is missing a front camera, so you can't easily video-Skype with it. The battery life is incredible, easily going a couple of days without charging (though expect that battery life to fade quickly if you're navigating).

The lack of apps is a problem. Fortunately, the only apps I care about when traveling in addition to the above listed ones are Facebook and Amazon Kindle, both of which are available in the appstore. I don't expect Google+, Blogger, etc to be available any time soon, but the web browser on the phone is perfectly functional for those websites. The phone even comes with WiFi calling, which disconcertingly uses your T-mobile phone limits, but does come in useful for those of you who (like me) live in houses with poor T-mobile connectivity.

All in all, this is going to be my approach for the 2014 edition of the Tour of the Alps, and I'll report back on how useful everything is at the end of the trip. In any case, if you're running T-mobile, I highly recommend this phone as a backup phone or even for general use. It is as fully featured a phone as you can imagine, and much faster than other phones that cost double or triple what this one costs.

Cameras for Kids

If your kid is anything like mine, he's at this point had plenty of photos and videos of him, and has by now figured out to pose for pictures. This weekend, he not only decided to pose, but also has asked to review photos on my camera after the shot was taken.

I took this to mean that he's now ready to have his own camera, and I set out to try to get him a camera. If you read the various photography blogs or search for a toy camera on Amazon, you end up with links to the VTech Kidizoom Camera. This is a 1.3 megapixel camera, and contains a few games and have on camera editing, but has very limited storage (128MB), and is clearly not a real camera.Unfortunately, my kid has figured out what is real and what's a toy. If you want to splurge, you can buy the 2 mega-pixel version for $137. This comes with 256MB, and a few video games.

But what really caught my eye, was the Canon A1400. For $62, you get a 16 megapixel camera running off 2 AA batteries, with a real zoom, 720p video, and for another $5 you can get a 8GB storage card. It's clearly a real camera, and even has a viewfinder, which is a rarity these days. Of course, real cameras don't stand up to drops and spills, but you can buy an additional warranty for $8. I don't expect any of the "kid cameras" to last more than the warranty period anyway, and a camera dropped by a kid doesn't fall from as high as one being dropped by an adult, so Canon's quality should take care of ensuring you're not sending it back for repairs all the time.

In person, the camera's quite a bit smaller and lighter than it looks on Amazon's web-site, easily comparable to the Canon S100 and much smaller than the RX100. This is a good thing. Kids' hands are small and there's no reason why they can't handle small cameras. The hardest part for Bowen is the shutter button: you have to hold it down for about a second, and he had a hard time doing that at first, not to mention holding it steady while doing so. He spent the first hour doing nothing but turning the camera and on off, and then trying to rip apart the lens protector. So far, the camera has withstood his abuse just fine, though I'm not about to bother cleaning the lens any time soon.

Bowen's first few pictures are blurry, upside down, and not much fun to look at. On the other hand, a kid's perspective is very different than an adult's. They're much lower, and what they care about is very different. Here are a couple of shots from Bowen's camera:

As you can see, there's no IS, but it's fun to see what I look like from his perspective, and touching to see that the object he most wants to take a photo of is his security blanket. It might be that I'll look back on some of those shots in the future with nostalgia, but for now, it's a relatively fun toy for him, and he hasn't tried to use it as a hammer --- yet.

Recommended.

Review: Caffeinated

It's true. Being a parent can drive anyone to try drugs. I'm definitely a testament to that: after being a parent, I started getting a cup of coffee every other day. Hence when I saw the NPR article about Caffeinated, I checked it out from the library. It's a short quick read, but unfortunately didn't provide much more information than another book, I'd read recently, Buzz.

Buzz spends a lot of time on the physiology and biology behind caffeine and the effects it has on your body. Caffeinated, however, spends more time on the commercial side. For instance, it covers not just coffee and tea, but the plethora of energy drinks, pick-me-ups, and military applications of caffeine, as well as various food incidents that caused the FDA to take action. For instance, it mentions that the earliest documented source of caffeine was from chocolate, which I thought was interesting, since I'd always thought that the use of Tea in China and India long predated that.

It did provide several pieces of information that I previously didn't know, such as the fact that the orange soda drink, Sunkist, contains caffeine! And a significant amount of it at that! Fanta, by contrast, does not. It never ceases to amaze me what the FDA is or is not allowed to regulate, and the book provides quite a list of kid-enticing snacks that surprised me as containing caffeine.

In any case, the book does explain why in recent years, it's been harder and harder for me to find power-gel or gu type products that don't contain caffeine. It appears to have been used as a performance enhancing drugs by professional athletes ever since it was removed from the prohibited list in 2004!

All in all, I'd say that the book's a quick read and well worth a shot, but I found myself skimming several chapters in boredom as the author never wants to say in a paragraph what he can use an entire chapter to write about. Not really recommended, but as I wrote this review, I realized I learned more from the book than I thought I had, so I can't really dismiss it either.

Price Reduction: Independent Cycle Touring

Spring is here, and if you're planning a bike tour, now's the time to do it. I've reduced the price of the PDF copy of Independent Cycle Touring to $4.95, which is 50% off it's previous price. It is no secret that of all my books, this is the one that has sold the worst, but took the most time and effort to write. Nevertheless, it's also one of the books that I'm proudest of, and the information in it is timeless, for as long as cycling touring is practiced. If you've not tried the book, at $4.95, you cannot go wrong.

I went through the book this morning looking to see if there was an easy way to convert it into a Kindle book. The truth is, it's way too graphics heavy to do well as a Kindle book, and I would feel terrible doing an automatic conversion: the results would be truly horrendous. So buy this book on PDF or on Paper. That' the way it was designed, and that's the way it should be read. I know that makes me a holdout, but when you see the book you'll understand why.

Update: The print copy of the book has been price reduced to $25.16

Review: The Rise of Superman

The Rise of Superman is ostensibly Steven Kotler's book about Flow, as experienced through extreme athletes. In reality, it seems to be Kotler's attempt to break into the corporate consultancy/sponsorship world, using pseudo-scientific words (such as his organization's name: The Flow Genome Project) to try to get corporations to buy into his brand of "mindfulness extreme" as the next big competitive advantage.

The way you can tell Kostler's a poseur is that he uses terms like "source code" inappropriately through the book, as though trying to show that he has some deep insight that he is uniquely qualified to tell. No engineer or computer scientist worth his salt would use the words "source code" the way he does, and on closer inspection, it appears that Kostler did a "search-and-replace" for "source" with "source code" throughout the text.

I'm not dismissing Flow or Mindfulness in any way. Nearly every unimpoverished human has experienced flow at one point or another in his life. I've threaded harrowing descents down Italian mountains with inches to spare between my handlebars and a pick up truck coming up on a narrow winding road, and piloted boats out of ports with sidewinds where mistakes would mean disaster, but I don't claim to have any deep insight to flow that are inaccessible to others. More prosaically, nearly every video gamer that has played a perfect level of Tetris or say, Naughty Dog's sublime Among Thieves has experienced flow, since of all the genres of media, video games are the best at eliciting and enabling flow.

Kotler, however, is after the multi-billion dollar corporate contract, so writing about how video game companies engineer flow into their games wouldn't be interesting. Instead, what he has to do is to flatter corporate head-honchos into thinking that they can be compared with such luminaries as Shane McConkey, who pioneered extreme skiing. The reality is, most corporate VPs or CEOs (Richard Branson and Gary Erikson excepted) couldn't do an independent cycle tour in the alps without a supporting entourage, let alone do any of the death defying stunts described in this book. Even the late Galen Rowell would have been happy to tell you that a National Geographic expedition is anything but flow-inducing, with 300 porters toting huge amounts of camera equipment and film.

Now the stories in this book are  interesting, and are the saving grace of the book. Since I'm not a big fan of Surfing, snow sports, or BASE jumping, this was my introduction to athletes such as Laird Hamilton, Shane McConkey or J. T. Holmes. Of course, note that McConkey died trying to do one of those death-defying stunts, as did several of the athletes described in this book. Any sane person would say, "Yeah, this shows that no amount of flow-hacking can eliminate the laws of physics and probablity", but of course, Kostler merely claims that McConkey's survival for so long doing so many insane stunts shows that Flow enables you to be a superman.

Kotler's attempts, then, to link the extreme athlete's in-the-moment flow to the businessman's startup, or investment, or management of a meeting, is laughable in the face of all this. Certainly, nobody's life is at risk when attempting a corporate takeover (though several livelihoods are, the members of the 1% who do this aren't risking anything except next year's bonus, if that), or investing in a startup, or doing the next performance review. As my college class mate Jonathan Blow said, "anyone conflating the risk of business with the actual risk a rescue worker has to take is either stupid or wants to take your money by flattering or impressing you."

All in all, the book is worth reading for the stories of the extreme athletes in it. That's the only reason to read it. All the other business mumbo jumbo needs to be ignored. And for heavens sake don't give Kotler any business if you can help it. Check the book out from the library or borrow it if you're an Amazon prime member. Do not buy!

PSA: New RSS and Atom Feeds

I was previously using Feedburner, which is now dead. As a result, your existing feed reader probably is no longer receiving updates for my blog. I've constituted new feeds for Atom and RSS, so please update your feed reader accordingly.

These disintegration of services I used to rely on, like Google Reader are annoying and painful, but none have been irreplaceable yet, though I still have yet to find a suitable replacement for Reader. My deepest fear is that Google Voice will be discontinued, and that for me would be an irreplaceable service.

Review: Telltale Games The Walking Dead Season 1 (PS Vita)

I got The Walking Dead as part of my PS Vita package. However, the loading times for the game was so long and the loading frequency was so high that I gave up, only to restart again when The Wolf Among Us persuaded me to give it another shot.

Just as with The Wolf Among Us, The Walking Dead is an old style point and click interactive adventure. It claims that the game adapts to the choices you make, and that your decisions can affect the rest of the game down stream. This is true, but only to a very limited extent. For instance, characters will remember the decisions, speeches, and actions that affected them and talk to you about them later. Sometimes, you might have to choose between rescuing one person or the other, and that decision will carry over to the next episode. However, the combinatorial explosion from providing a fully branching story-line would be too much even for the 2.5GB of storage the game consumes on your memory card, so the game cheats.

The problem with this cheating is that it robs you of the game's promise, and it's particularly obvious during emotionally tense moments of the game. For instance, episode 3 has a mystery that the player solves very quickly by meta-gaming: there's one character you're not allowed to interview or accuse, and of course, that character did it. Well, that's frustrating by itself, since there's a reveal in episode 4 and you're supposed to be surprised. But the worst thing about this set up is that the result is that one of the characters you saved previously is shot and killed instead, and another character is left behind. It's one thing to be not smart enough to solve the mystery, it's another to not be allowed to solve the mystery even when you know what happened and who to accuse.

If this was an isolated event, I'd be inclined to forgive and forget. But something extremely similar happens in the last episode, where despite your pleading to the contrary, the plot moves ahead and removes agency from you. Now, you'll note that I was more than happy to forgive and forget Uncharted 2 or The Last of Us despite both games being essentially linear with zero control over the story, but The Walking Dead kept reminding me at the start of each episode (there are 5 in total, plus a 6th collection of related short stories) that I'm constantly reminded of the failure to fulfill that promise. Furthermore, both those afore-mentioned games are primarily action games which do their jobs really well.

The Walking Dead, however, is full of technical glitches, at least on the Vita. The game frequently stutters, sometimes even loops, and has unsatisfying controls. If you use the touch screen controls, you don't get to selection actions on objects when you touch them, but at least the "action" portion of the games like shooting zombies is easily achievable. If you use the joystick controls and buttons, you have much finer control of the action, but the "action" portion of the games (like in episode 4) are virtually unachievable, taking me upwards of 6 tries. This would be fine if the game allowed you to use both interfaces at once, but no, you have to pick one or the other and can't switch during the episode.

In any case, I cannot recommend this game for anyone other than die-hard fans of the comic books or TV series. The story is decent, and many have reviewed the game as having a better story than the TV series, which saves me the time of having to ever watch the TV series. Even for those die-hard fans, I would suggest either the PS3 version or the PC version, with the PC version preferred for $8.50. If you can wait for a steam sale you can get the games for under $5. The reviews for the game online are nothing short of stellar (and Sony believes those reviews, since it created a bundle for the holidays), but for this reviewer anyway, I felt the premise of the game was not delivered because of the technical problems and the ham-fisted approach to plot. Not recommended.

When will the next generation of game consoles launch?

While I'm thinking about why game consoles are likely to be around for quite a while, it was instructive for me to take a look at what the most likely launch period for the next generation of game consoles would be. This is discounting Android consoles such as Ouya, the future Amazon game console, and whatever Apple or Google cooks up. My expectation is that those game consoles will be under-powered and unattractive to hard-core gamers and will not attract AAA titles.

The one possibility that could derail my predictions is if Steam boxes take off, but given that Steam boxes will run Linux, and not support much of the existing game library, I do not expect them to be a major player. Steam boxes have a bunch of issues, not least of which is that each steam box would have a different configuration, meaning that the uniform platform that game developers would get as far as consoles are concerned wouldn't exist. I expect steam machines to combine the worst defects of both PCs and consoles.

The driver for the next generation of consoles will most likely to be 4K TV. If you look at what would be acceptable for 4K gaming today, the anandtech analysis would be that no less than 4 Titan GTX video cards would be needed to drive a AAA 4K game at 60+fps. This is at max settings, however, and consoles do not need max settings to be good enough, so maybe 3 GTX video cards would be sufficient. Each of the GTX video cards is about $700 today, so 3 of them would be $2100. If we assume that the consumer part for these devices have to get down below $200 in order for them to be commercially viable, that would be four Moore's cycles to get to $132 for the compute equivalent of 3 GTX video cards.

The traditional Moore's cycle is 18 months, but in recent years, it's been more like 2-3 years, or 8-12 years. However, there are several factors. First of all, it might not be necessary to deliver games at the full 4K resolution. The 7th generation of game consoles only delivered 720p resolution to HDTVs, and it's entirely feasible that the 9th generation of consoles would deliver say, 2560x1440 resolution rather than "true" 4K. This would be particularly attractive for whoever lost the 8th generation console wars, since that vendor (currently Microsoft) would be more motivated to start the 9th generation wars earlier rather than allowing the 8th generation to be dominated by a major competitor. It's entirely feasible that Nintendo could do this as little as 4 years out, but given their recent statements, I do not expect them to try to compete on the basis of CPU or GPU horsepower with Sony or Microsoft. Secondly, it's quite possible that dedicated gaming hardware that has software written close to the metal will outperform Anandtech's benchmarks. Put all this together and I expect the next generation of consoles to be deliver within 5 years, rather than the 8 years between the PS3 and PS4. This is made much more likely now that both consoles are on the x86 architecture rather than custom hardware, enabling more frequent updates.

I have to say that I'm fairly excited about 4K, though I disagree that 4K streaming is necessarily a good thing. HD streaming already looks much worse than Blu Ray to my eyes, so my guess is that it would take a higher bandwidth delivery format than Blu Ray for 4K to truly take off.

Are you surprised by the success of the game consoles?

If you read reviews in general interest newspapers or magazines like the New York Times, you should be surprised to learn that the PS4 has been out of stock nearly everywhere. This is surprising since not only do the consoles face competition from tablets and PCs, but also a range of devices ranging from Roku to Chromecast. One would think that those cheaper devices would out-rank expensive and "difficult to use" game consoles for Netflix streaming, but NPD reports that 39% of Netflix users who watch movies on a TV watch it on a game console! This figure is even more amazing when you consider that only 56% of US households have a game console, meaning that those game console owners are much more loyal to their devices than Roku or Chromecast owners. By the way, this unexpected use of the game console as a media device explains why the Wii U had such low adoption rates: the Wii U cannot double as a blue ray player, nor can it play movies from an external device.

The mystery becomes much less of one when you consider recent computer ownership trends. Most laptops simply do not have the GPU capable of running modern games. For instance, the highest end Apple Macbooks and iMacs have an Nvidia GT 750M inside them. This is a 722 GFlop GPU with 384 stream units. That sounds very impressive, until you consider the PS3 and PS4 each have more than 2 TFlops of performance, with the PS4 running 1152 shader units. But that's not all, the high end Apple machines are driving 2880x1800 displays or 2650x1440 displays, while the PS3 is only driving 720p output and the PS4 is only going to drive 1080p output. In other words, the game consoles have more than 3X the GPU power but are driving 1/4 the pixels of the laptops.

Tablets are even worse, as they frequently have the same resolution as the above, but have to be optimized for battery life of 10 hours or more. The iPad Air has 76 GFlops (1/10th the power of the high end Mac), while driving the same number of pixels. For reference, the PS Vita has 38.4 GFlops, but is driving a display that's 1/6th the resolution of the iPad Air, so it's got 3X the equivalent power of the iPad in terms of pushing pixels around. Note that the Vita has a battery life of 3-5 hours, as opposed to the 10 hours that you would expect from an iPad.

Gaming PCs are a different story, since they don't have to run at low power, but if you look at a typical PS4-alike PC, not only do you not manage to hit the $400 price point and end up with a much larger case and lower memory bandwidth than the PS4, you also run out of budget to buy a blu-ray drive or controller. You could buy an Alienware PC, but now you're looking at a budget well over $400, and you're locked out of Sony's exclusive games for the PS4, which judging from the track record on the PS3, would be a fairly substantial loss. This explains why my PC gamer friends were disappointed with the PS4 and XBox One announcements, while the market has proven that those consoles are selling very well. The typical PC gamer will have a $1,000+ PC that will outperform any of the consoles, but will also be an increasingly small percentage of the population compared to the number of folks toting Macbook Airs.

The problem with PC gaming recently has been the focus on lower power rather than higher performance. Intel has simply chosen to use its real estate on the chips to increase performance/watt by delivering more cores rather than deliver more GPU. While most consumers couldn't care less about reduced power consumption on their machines (most PC users still turn on and off their machines, and don't run their machines at full capacity often enough for the power bills to matter),
Intel's primary customers for high end processors are the companies running high end data centers like Google and Facebook, rather than the individual consumer looking for maximum single-threaded performance. In addition, it's hard enough for you to get others in your household to use the controller for movie streaming, let alone a mouse and keyboard that's required to manipulate a PC UI.

The net result of this set of trends is that unlike many other pundits, not only do I not think that console gaming is dead, I expect to see a console-like device in about 50% of homes for the foreseeable future. There will be a 9th generation of console, and beyond. The typical household doesn't consider PCs/Laptops anything other than work devices, and will continue to buy separate game consoles both for streaming video and for playing high-end games.