Virgin Islands 2014: Norman Island to Peter Island

As was my wont on these sailing trips, Arturo and I got up at 6:00am, made coffee, checked the engines, and moved the boat to the Indians. The seas were still rocky, but that didn't deter us from doing a dive and snorkeling in the area.

From Virgin Islands 2014

The waters were churned up, and so lacking in the clarity that I'd seen on previous trips, but it was still very good.

From Virgin Islands 2014

After lunch, we intended to motor over to Cooper Island to spend the evening, but just off Peter Island we heard an alarm from the engine, and quickly ascertained that the Starboard engine was overheating. We quickly turned off the engine and I took the boat into Peter Island's Great Harbor to a mooring Buoy to assess the damage. Upon examining the engine, we found some coolant on the floor but didn't see any other obvious damage. Calling Conch Charters, they asked us to run an experiment again in an hour and report back. We tried it and the engine quickly overheated once again, so they asked us to bring the boat over to them again tomorrow for a thorough check.

I didn't feel like moving the boat after that, so we grabbed the tender and went ashore, where we hiked over to Sprat Bay and walked up the hill towards the hotels until we saw Deadman's Bay and Honeymoon Beach, where we anchored during the previous trip. The winds were so high that there were no boats anchored on Deadman's Bay. Arturo successfully negotiated a low price for a diving boat at the island's dive shop, and we headed back for dinner and a beautiful sunset.

From Virgin Islands 2014

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Previous

Virgin Islands 2014 Trip

Bowen, my parents, Arturo Crespo, Amy and I chartered a sailboat and visited the British Virgin Islands and St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands from November 23rd to December 2nd. It was my longest sailing charter yet, and in November we got great weather, plenty of rainbows, but murky waters (comparatively) for diving.

This is the hub for all the blog posts from the trip report, as well as photos, etc.

• November 23rd, Tortola to Norman Island
• November 24th, Norman Island to Peter Island
• November 25th, Peter Island to Cooper Island
• November 26th, Cooper Island to Marina Cay
• November 27th, Marina Cay to Leverick Bay
• November 28th, Leverick Bay to Marina Cay
• November 29th, Marina Cay to Sandy Spit
• November 30th, Sandy Spit to Leinster Bay
• December 1st, Leinster Bay to Sanders Bay
• December 2nd, Sanders Bay to Tortola
• Learnings and Conclusion

Virgin Islands 2014: Tortola to Norman Island

We got off the plane, spent a night in St. Thomas, and then took the ferry to Tortola to spend our first night on the Conch Charters catamaran, Sail Pending.

From Virgin Islands 2014

The Sail Pending was a 10 year old Leopard 43 that looked like it had been well used. Some of the hatches wouldn't seal properly, while everything felt just a bit loose. I'd always said that I'd take an old, well-maintained boat over a newer boat that'd been abused any day, but this was pushing it quite a bit.
Nevertheless, Sail Pending was half the price of all the other charters available at this time, so it was either this boat or we wouldn't have done the trip, given my difficulty in recruiting crew on short notice. Joining me this time around was Arturo and Amy, who were also present for the previous BVI trip.

From Virgin Islands 2014

As sail briefings go, Conch was very personal, but also very casual. In addition to going over ship systems, we were also given a chart briefing that was mostly unnecessary, but still a good refresher. Our dive equipment arrived just as the briefing was over and we were ready to sail. The engine tachometer on the starboard engine didn't work, despite the staff's attempts to fix the problem, but we promised not to over-drive the engine anyway, since we were in a sailboat!

The seas were high today, as were the winds. Rather than go out with reef'd sails, we were told that just opening up a reef'd jib and sailing downwind would get us to Norman Island on a broad reach rather quickly, and indeed we got there in a record 45 minutes! What was even better, my favorite anchorage, Kelly's Cove, had a mooring ball open and we quickly took it.

From Virgin Islands 2014

Then, it was the requisite visit to the caves, followed by a visit to shore where we did some light hiking. Sunset from Kelly's Cove was gorgeous as usual, and we got a dinner of Pasta as everyone was too tired to cook that evening. It was a rollicky night, but with the exhaustion from travel, we all got plenty of sleep.

From Virgin Islands 2014

Next

DisneyWorld Magic Kingdom

From December 4, 2014

Our goal was to visit the BVIs for another sailing trip, but since it was such a long flight, I decided to break it up and visit DisneyWorld with Bowen.

DisneyWorld tickets are expensive, about $90 per day per person. You can opt for more expensive "park hopper" passes, but in practice, the overhead of switching parks is so high that you'd never do it with a toddler, so I opted to visit only one park a day. Given the realities of a 3-year-old, we could only visit the Magic Kingdom as he was unlikely to get much out of the other parks.

We landed in Orlando and got a hotel at the Ramada Inn Suites near the airport, rather than try for one of the park hotels. The park hotels are closer, and you don't have to rent a car, since they'll pick you up from the airport, but on the other hand they're very expensive, and you pretty much have to eat on site if you don't want to drive.

One fairly well known trick is to sign up for the FastPass+ in advance, so you can skip lines. There are books and apps that tell you which rides need Fast Passes and which rides don't, but I figured I'd just wing it. It turned out that we visited on low-crowd days (crowd level 4 on the first day and crowd level 3 on the second), so while the FastPass was good, it wasn't critical.

From December 4, 2014

It turns out that the FastPasses are most useful for kiddie rides like Dumbo the Flying Elephant, Goofy's Barnstormers, Buzz Lightyear, Winnie the Pooh, and the Haunted House. The rest of the rides like Pirates of the Carribean or Under The Sea were relatively unimpacted and we didn't need fast passes to see them. One ride that most needed FastPasses was the Astro Orbiter, but didn't offer them

From December 4, 2014

The fun ones for Bowen were the Tomorrow Speedway, where he got to drive his own car, Buzz Lightyear, because he got to rotate the car, and the Barnstormer, the only roller-coaster style ride in the park he was tall enough to do. But true to form, he tried every ride once and didn't actually want to repeat rides. He wasn't scared by Haunted Castle, but didn't find Winnie the Pooh as much fun.

One thing we did was to rent a stroller. That was OK, but it wasn't strictly necessary. I thought it might give him an opportunity to nap, but it turned out he was too wound up to nap anyway.

For me, about 2 days is right for a 3 year old in the Magic Kingdom Park. It's enough that you can do every ride (provided you arrive on a low crowd day), and watch a substantial number of shows, but not so much that you would have to repeat rides. The Orlando Park is a lot bigger than the California Park, so it's nice to see things like the steamer or the Tom Sawyer's island take on a scale that California just can't do.

As a break just before this year's Virgin Islands trip, it was just the thing, but I wouldn't want to do this more than once every few years.

Review: Asus RT-N66U Router

My 5 year old used Cisco E3000 was on its last legs, and the cheap $20 replacement TPLink wasn't any better. Worse, in an attempt to upgrade the firmware on the TPLink, I bricked it, and was suddenly indeed of a decent router.

The problem with routers is that most of them use the 2.4GHz band, which is very prone to interference as everything in your house probably uses it as well. Furthermore, your neighbors also probably use the 2.4GHz channel for their wifi, and soon you're in connectivity hell.

The answer, then, is to get a dual-band router, one that will handle both 5GHz and 2.4GHz channels. You can't just get a 5GHz router, since legacy devices only support 2.4GHz, and chances are you have at least one of those in active use.

My lesson with bricking my TPlink also taught me that I should just rely on the firmware that comes on the router and not mess around with installing open source stuff. The net net is that I ended up with the Asus RT-N66R.

The weird thing about Asus is that rather than have only one product in each category, they have lots of products with the exact same name differing by only one character, but for all purposes there's no difference between the R and the U units, they just get revised at random and it's just pure insanity.

Installing the router was easy, as was configuring it. What you want to do is to separate the 2 SSIDs into 5GHz and 2.4GHz one so that there's clear separation. I then did an internet speed test and wow, ok, now I'm getting all the speed I was promised by comcast, rather than a pathetic performance. The real test came over the next few days as we saw zero dropped internet connections. The router was rock solid, as were connections with the devices.

You can spend lots of time dicking around with equipment or you can just throw money at it. This is one of those cases where throwing money at the problem solved all sorts of problems, and hence the product is highly recommended.

2015 Video Game Reviews

This is the index for video game played and reviewed in 2015. I picked Games of the Year for 2015 in November.

• Injustice: Gods Among Us (PS Vita)
• Final Horizon (PS Vita)
• Infamous: First Light (PS4)
• The Walking Dead: Season 2 (PS4)
• Little Big Planet (PS Vita)
• Defense Grid 2 (PS4)
• CounterSpy (PS Vita) 
• Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition (PS4) 
• Heavy Rain (PS3) 
• Murasaki Baby (PS Vita) 
• Monument Valley (Android) 
• Smart As (PS Vita) 
• Velocity 2X (PS4, PS Vita) 
• Sleeping Dogs (PS4) 
• The Order 1886 (PS4) 
• Deadlight (PC) 
• Entwined (PS Vita)
• Max Payne 3 (PC)
• The Last of Us: Left Behind (PS4)
• Never Alone (PS4)
• Call of Duty : Advanced Warfare (PS4)
• Arkham Knight (PS4)

Review: Injustice: Gods Among Us

I picked up Injustice: Gods Among Us for the Vita during a Sony sale for $4.20. As luck would have it, in January, that's going to be a free game on Playstation Plus.  But that doesn't matter, since recently I was on a flight that gave me enough time to play through the story mode on the game.

Injustice is a fighting game. For me, that usually is a very frustrating genre, since my fingers and reflexes are not what they once were, and even at my best I wasn't very good at them. This was confirmed for me when I had several tries to do some combos during the tutorial and couldn't make many of them consistently. I don't know to what extent that's because the Vita's buttons are tiny, and that I just suck.

Nevertheless, I went into the story mode and to my surprise the game's set not to be frustratingly difficult! In fact, I think I got through about 30% of the game before I felt the need to turn down the difficulty from "medium" to "easy", which is an unusual experience for me.

The story is pretty good for an excuse for superheroes to beat up on each other. It involves parallel dimensions and an out of control Superman who decides to take over the world. To the game's credit, the story mode doesn't provide ridiculous situations such as Batman beating up Superman in hand to hand combat. (You can do that in the classic battle mode) Each character has signature moves and interesting things to do with the environment, and the story is compelling enough to keep me playing and drain most of the Vita's battery on a 6 hour flight, and the next day my thumbs were still sore.

After you're done with the story, there are still additional content that don't have full cut scenes, but still provide a challenge for the player who wants more. After about 3-4 of those missions it got really hard so I stopped. There's also an on-line versus mode. I have not tried the online mode since I was on the plane when playing this game.

The graphics are pretty, and the Vita definitely gets hot while you're playing indicating that the CPU is pushing very hard. While not a purchase for the full price, I'd recommend it at any price below $10 or you could just wait for PS Plus on your Playstation 4 in January.

Review: Hide Me Among The Graves

Hide Me Among The Graves is Tim Powers' sequel to the superb The Stress of Her Regard. While the latter featured Byron, Keats, and Shelley, this novel features the much lesser known Rossettis (Christina, William, Dante, and Maria), Algernon Swinburne, and Edward John Trelawny. The novel shares but two characters with its prequel, John Crawford, who plays only a minor part in that novel, and John Polidori, who acts as a major villain in this one.

The structure of the novel is broken into 3 parts. In the first part, we are introduced to the Rossettis, Crawford, and Susan McKee. Crawford and McKee flee from the Nephilim early on in the novel and have a daughter together, who becomes the subject of John Polidori's attention. The first portion ends with Crawford and the Rossettis figuring out what they're up against, while seemingly failing to rescue Crawford's daughter.

The second part focuses on the characters' attempt to flee the attention on the Nephilim and seemingly succeeding, while the last focuses on their final fight.

While the premise and the delightful interposition of poetry in the text is lovely, this novel doesn't introduce anything new over the prior. Worse, while the characters in The Stress of Her Regard are active and the climax of that novel revolves around a plot to escape the clutches of the Nephilim, too much of Hide Me Among The Graves feels a lot like deus ex machina, with the characters escaping death for instance only by accident.

As such, Hide Me Among The Graves is a lot weaker as a novel and a lot less compelling a read than The Stress of Her Regard. Not a complete waste of time, but definitely disappointing.

Re-read: The Stress of Her Regard

I've long considered The Stress of Her Regard to be Tim Powers' best novel. However, I read it about 20 years ago, and for the longest time the book was out of print, which I thought was criminal.

Well, the rise of the Kindle meant that such books are no longer out of print and also relatively cheap, and unbeknownst to me, there was a "sequel" (set in the same universe but not with the same characters) out last year, so I bought The Stress of Her Regard to re-read.

And wow, the book's as good as it is now as it was 20 years ago when I first read it. It's a vampire novel, but if you're used to cringing at that term because of what recent teenage fashion for angst is, don't. This isn't "vampire for teeny-boppers". Powers merges the greek myths of the Nephilim, vampires, and then brings in the romantic poets John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley (yes, he whose wife wrote Frankenstein) into a grand narrative worthy of your time and requiring way too much effort and attention span for the usual vampire crowd.

The story revolves around Michael Crawford, a obgyn who on the eve of his wedding makes the mistake of putting his wedding ring on what he thinks of as a statue. Of course, this turns out to be an invitation to the Nephilim to enter his life, and he ends up fleeing, meeting up with the above mentioned poets who are also haunted by the same type of creatures.

The story then heads into the Alps (and yes, the story is now better for me because I've spent so much time in the Alps and visited Wengen, Kleine Scheidegg, etc) and then Venice. What's beautiful about the story is that like all Powers novels, it ties in with the historical events as well as personas, so you're brought into the life of the romantic poets as well as the events of the Austrian empire in Italy during that time. Powers' take on the tragic lives and deaths of Keats and Shelley has to be read to be appreciated.

What's even better is that Michael and Josephine (the protagonist and female lead) are both "damaged goods", with plenty of baggage and histories of mental disorders. Josephine's a schizophrenic, for instance, and Michael frequently resorts to drinking in order to cope with the horrors the Nephilim have brought into his life.

What's more, the novel's climax is a C-section performed on a guy. Take that, Stephanie Meyer!

Needless to say, this book comes highly recommended. Buy it and read it!

2015 Book Reviews

Note: Books of the Year for 2015 have been selected.

Fiction

• On Stranger Tides
• The Stress of Her Regard
• Hide Me Among The Graves
• The Year's Best Fantasy and Science Fiction
• Sand Omnibus
• Joyland
• The Golem and the Jinni
• Indexing
• The Pillars of the Earth
• Uncommon Stock, Version 1.0 
• Chaos Quarter 
• The Altar Girl 
• The Fall of Giants 
• The Winter of The World 
• Edge of Eternity 
• Mistborn 
• The Well of Ascension 
• Up The Down Staircase 
• The Hero of Ages 
• Deep Navigation 
• Terminal World 
• Slow Bullets 
• Blue Remembered Earth 
• On the Steel Breeze 
• The Annihilation Score
• Armada
• Foundation and Chaos
• Foundation's Triumph
• The Martian
• The Rhesus Chart
• Finders Keepers
• Carbide Tipped Pens
• Year's Best SF 10
• The Second Ship

Non-Fiction

• What If?
• Oh Myyy!
• Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview
• Zero to One
• The Marshmallow Test
• The Fifth Discipline
• Console Wars
• On Immunity 
• Being Mortal 
• Superman
• Mindhunter 
• Joss Whedon: A Biography
• The Fox Effect
• Tippi: My Book of Africa
• Isaac Newton
• The Opposite of Spoiled
• French Kids Eat Everything
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
• Why Nations Fail
• The Curve of Time
• A Spy Among Friends
• Last Child in the Woods
• Double Cross
• Regional Advantage

Comics

• Fables #19 and #20
• The Walking Dead Compendium #1
• The Walking Dead Compendium #2
• Fables #21 
• Exploring Calvin & Hobbes
• Fables Farewell

Review: On Stranger Tides

On Stranger Tides is Tim Powers' pirate novel. While it was optioned as a novel for Disney's Pirates of the Carribean movie with the same name, it's plot, characters, atmosphere, and feel are altogether different. For one thing, Powers can actually craft a coherent plot, unlike the screen writers of the above-stated movie.

The novel revolves around Jack Shandy, a passenger on a ship over-run by pirates who becomes pressed into a life of piracy due to circumstances, but stays one by his own volition. The main love interest in the novel is Beth Hurwood, who's accompanying her father a trip. The similarities between the book and the movie include Blackbeard (Edward Thatch) and the Fountain of Youth, but that's about it.

The novel is fairly short and a quick read, though the opening is slow. Nevertheless, by the middle of the novel it'd become compelling. Powers is a master of doing a lot in very few words, and yet getting everything historically correct. His description of naval warfare between sailing ships, managing a storm in a sailboat, and the atmosphere of the Carribean all ring true.

The weakness in the novel is in Beth Hurwood: she functions mostly as a MacGuffin to be rescued, and does not play much of an active role in the novel until the very end. To be honest though, Powers' novels rarely have strong female characters, so you should just know this going in.

I'm glad I finally got around to reading this novel: it's a lot of fun, and very well paced. Recommended.

Video Games of the Year

For those who are unfamiliar with this blog, I have an annual tradition of picking out the best books I've read over the previous year.

This is the first year I've played enough video games to be able to deliver a similar judgement, but interestingly enough, I've been catching up on about 10 years of not playing video games, so nearly every entry that I go around to finishing has been great, or I wouldn't have bothered playing through to the end. If you ever want to feel like a genre is fantastic, you just have to leave it for 10 years and then come back to only the good ones, with time doing the work of eliminating the dreck that results from Sturgeon's law.

I'll separate the selections by platform, since the pickings have been so rich.

I'll start with the PS3, because it's the oldest platform and has the most games out. It's a great time to buy a PS3, and the wealth of software and media available for it is nothing short of astounding. In many ways, the PS4 is still an inferior machine for the casual user, since it still can't talk to DLNA servers or even play MP4 movies!

By far the most outstanding game on the PS3 is Uncharted Among Thieves. It's a relatively old game, but you can't tell. Newer games look better, but load slower or have long startup times. Compared to its predecessors, however, it's clear that Uncharted Among Thieves has done everything right with respect to pacing, game play, and movie-like action. It's an amazing game and has aged well. If you own a PS3 you need to play this game.

Journey runs a clear second place on the PS3. It's non-violent, not challenging, but immerses the player in the environment far better than any of the other experiences I've tried. It's also not available on any of the other platforms, so it's a clear exclusive for the PS3, and well worth the experience. If you like that type of game, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons also stands out, and is a short game that's well worth your time.

On the PS Vita, it's a tough decision for my game of the year. I enjoyed Tearaway, and as a game that fully exploits the physical capabilities of the vita, it is nothing short of amazing. However, Golden Abyss also does a lot of very similar things, and is still a better game for me as I dislike platformers. By far the most addictive genre for me, however, is the desktop tower defense game, and for that, Pixeljunk Monsters Ultimate is just too good not to recommend.

Finally, the PS4. Well, I've sampled a bunch of games on it so far. The best one is still Resogun. Over and over again, it is the one game I fire up the PS4 for. Once you have a PS4, however, you might as well get Flower. On the PS3, Flower is overshadowed by Journey, but on the PS4, that doesn't happen and you might as well get to play it at high resolution. It is truly an experience to be savored.

Strangely enough, looking at my list, there's only one PC game on the list, and it's the very old Arkham City. The reality seems to be that the desktop PC isn't in a very inconvenient place in the home for me, and takes a long time to startup and play. It's also not very comfortable compared to playing on the couch, and I'm always tempted to do some work on the PC instead of playing a game. In the future, I'll probably abandon my PC as a gaming platform and stick to the PS4, despite the higher expenses playing on the PS4 entail.

Books of the Year 2014

I read 31 books this year (not counting comic books, magazines, etc), which was unusually low. Part of this was that a portion of my time went to video games, and another part of the reason was that for a large part of the year I lost my Kindle, which had a direct and immediate impact on the number of books I was able to read.

Fortunately, the quality of non-fiction books were very high, and I consider Capital in the 21st Century now just the book of the year, but quite possibly the book of the decade. The book has been widely read, reviewed, and mostly misunderstood, even by luminaries such as Bill Gates. As such, there's no substitute to reading this book for yourself. I cannot sufficiently urge an intelligent reader who cares about the structure of society with even a modicum of curiosity to read this book right away.

All Joy And No Fun is also the best alternative to the standard parenting book you can find today. I highly recommend it to all parents, and especially to the moms out there. If you read only one parenting book, read Brain Rules for Baby, but All Joy And No Fun should be the very next one.

On the fiction side, however, this has been a bleak year. Looking at my list of books I read this year, the best fiction book (and even Tim O'Reilly would admit that the book was mostly "faction") is The Things They Carried. I read that book in 1987, and it's still holds up on re-reading. If it's not in your library it should be.

But the best new (to me) fiction book was Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of the Dark. The problem with this as a selection is that it wasn't even close. None of the other (new-to-me) books I read this year were even remotely a contender, and if I left this book off the list, I would declare a no-winner situation rather than be forced to pick amongst the remaining novels. That's pretty bad.

If there was a particularly great book you read this year but that I haven't, please recommend it. It's sad to think that my usual sources of book recommendations are failing me this year. Piketty's book makes up for the disappointing novels, but I would hate to see this trend continue.

Review: Life with a fire-breathing girlfriend

Sometimes, I buy a book after reading just one review and a sample because the premise had so much promise. I almost always regret this, but with Amazon's publishing platforms, the books are so cheap that it's not much of a regret. Life with a fire-breathing girlfriend is one such example.

The book is almost a homage to every Mary Sue novel that's ever been written. The protagonist is a geeky IT person who one day has a beautiful woman drop into his life, kiss him, and ask to be with him for 3 years. In case the title of the book isn't hint enough, she turns out to be a dragon.

The promise of the book is that you get a mixture of Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie, but with a dragon. And the early part of the book leads you to believe that's what the book would be, which is a lot of fun, since the dragon doesn't know much about human life and doesn't think much of human conventions.

Unfortunately, past the first third of the book, the author drops this premise and the novel quickly devolves into a Mary Sue novel. You never feel like the characters are in danger, even as the challenges spike, as the characters never actually have to sacrifice, and nearly everything they need for their quest falls into their lap. The only saving grace is that the characters are very self-aware and make lots of geek-pop culture references.

The book's priced at $1.19, so it's not much of a regret. As an airplane novel it's reasonable, but there's a lot of other books better worth your time.

Review: The Magician's Land

The Magician's Land is Lev Grossman's third novel in the series starring Quentin Coldwater, a wizard who went to school in the magical equivalent of Harvard in The Magicians, gets thrown out of Narnia Fillory in The Magician King, and now faces exile from that fabled land.

The novel is a book about discovery, such as when Quentin discovers he enjoys teaching and research back at Blakebills. But the plot is extremely contorted, and more than a little silly, with little twists that turn out to be "uh, why did you bother" when the big reveal shows up.

Quentin as a character finally comes into his own in this novel. Fantasy novels do end up with power creep in a big way, as characters get more and more powerful in order to scale up to more and more challenging threats. The Magician's Land does the same, with Quentin becoming more and more powerful until the climax of the novel, where he literally becomes a god. The neat thing about it is that you do see him actively work on it, so it's not as bad as I've seen in other novels where the characters get vested with power.

The first third of the novel is a magical heist caper. It's fun to read, but doesn't quite fit in. Furthermore, one of the characters who's a big player in that section sticks around for the rest of the adventure but never amounts to much other than window dressing. The rest of the novel revolves around the end of Fillory, which resembles Narnia's ending far too much though thankfully does away with Christian allegories.

What bugs me about the novel is that it had a natural ending, with Quentin sealing his ties to his beloved Fillory forever, but instead veers off in order to leave things open for a sequel. The resulting end of the novel doesn't feel as solid as I thought it could have been, and smacks too much of commercialism.

It's a reasonable read on an airplane, but I wouldn't go out of my way to find this novel to read or pay full price.

First Impressions: Sony Playstation 4

My brothers got me a PS4 for my birthday, so here are my first impressions. The first thing I did after unboxing the unit was to install an old Momentus XT hybrid SSD in place of the 5400rpm drive. It's not worth installing a brand new SSD onto the PS4 because that would cost as much as the console itself, but since I had a couple of the old drives around before SSDs became reliable enough to use on the laptops/desktops, I repurposed them as drives for the PS3 and PS4. This particular drive has a 7200rpm spinning platter, unlike the newer drives that utilize a 5400rpm platter. The net result is that even if the SSD cache on the drive doesn't get hit that frequently, the increased RPM should grant better performance compared with the OEM drive.

The experience of doing so was a snap. Unlike other vendors, Sony actually designed the system to make replacing drives easy. You slide back the left side of the device, exposing the drive bay, undo one screw, and slide out the caddy holding a 2.5inch drive. The OEM drive is 7.5mm thick, but Sony thoughtfully made the caddy such that it supports a 9mm drive, so the momentus fit with no problems. The OS install was painless and easy, though finding the power on button was surprisingly challenging, since there was no obvious button, just a touch sensitive pad.

Installing the device into my existing entertainment system was straightforward. One potential complication if you have an ancient analog receiver like I do, is that the PS4 doesn't support analog output, only HDMI. I redirected the audio to the analog receiver through the TV, but that adds lag, if that sort of thing bothers you.

Once the system boots up, it's clear that this is a different animal than the PS3. It boots up quickly, and you can quickly download multiple applications and games easily and quickly. Even logging onto Amazon Prime was easy as the controller felt less laggy than the PS3's. What's interesting to me is that the PS4 controller feels much more comfortable than the PS3's, so the ergonomic improvements are definitely very welcome. The controller also uses standard micro USB ports, and thankfully can be charged with any charger, unlike the PS3's which required special chargers. What is much appreciated is the headphone port on the controller: I could mute the TV and then playing using headphones attached to the controller. It'll even support a microphone headset, and the PS4 comes with one so you can chat. I eschewed the crappy PS4 default one for my Koss Portra Pros, and the sound was acceptable, though not as nice as when I plugged it into my Vita.

I stuck the Life of Pi into the PS4 and watched it with my wife. That's a gorgeous movie and the PS4 was more than capable of doing rendering the movie in gorgeous 1080p. I was very pleased, though you wouldn't buy a PS4 just to act as a Blu Ray player, knowing that it can serve the function is the major reason to go with one of the major video game consoles, as opposed to a Nintento Wii or Wii U, which can't serve as a general media player.

Vudu and Amazon Instant Video both installed nicely onto the PS4, as did YouTube (as of the 2.0 update). You're not missing anything over any of the other streaming sticks or streaming video boxes. What's missing from the PS3 is that it won't serve as a DLNA client, or even play music from disk.

I've already completed one game, Resogun on the device, and it's definitely very impressive. One problem with the PS4 right now is that there aren't that many high quality titles out yet. I expect that to change over the next year, and look forward to being able to play console titles that my 5 year old desktop probably won't be able to keep up with. That's an unfair comparison, since the 5 year old desktop is driving a 1440p display, but that's how it goes.

One of the big benefits of having a PS4 and a Vita is that you can use the Vita as a remote play terminal for the PS4. The two sync up very nicely, and you can use the OLED screen to play games on the PS4 via remote play from any room in the house with decent wifi. This runs surprisingly smoothly with next to no lag, and lets you do things like play games while someone else uses the TV to watch streaming video, though you can't do that if your primary input into the TV is the PS4, so you need at least a secondary streaming device like the FireTV stick or Chromecast. Now, the problem with remote play is that in order to take advantage of it, you need to keep your PS4 in standby mode. Standby mode, however, consumes nearly half the power projected to be used by your PS4 over its lifetime, so it's not costless.

I'll maintain that right now is a bad time to buy a PS4, while it's the best time ever to buy a PS3. But if you already have a PS3 and are setting up a second room with a TV, then you might as well get a PS4. It's a sleek device, and does its job for anything faster than the alternatives.

Review: Resogun

My brothers gave me a PS4 on my birthday, so the first thing I did was to download and fire up Resogun. I wasn't able to get into Housemarquee's previous big outing on the PS3, Super Stardust HD, because it was simply too hard. The original asteroids game just wasn't this hard.

Resogun's the spiritual successor to Defender, If you grew up in the 80s as a kid, you'll remember that Defender was amazingly, incredibly hard. The arcade box had 5 buttons and one joystick, and being an arcade game, had only one difficulty level: hard. Like Super Stardust HD, I expected to get my ass handed to me for about an hour and then I'd give up in frustration to try more modern games.

To my surprise, Resogun's easy difficulty level with unlimited continues allowed me to not only complete all 5 stages of the game, but also taught me how to get good enough to finish the game without continues a second time with a second ship. That's a first for me as far as an arcade style game is concerned, and that I continued to play despite finish the game once is a testament to how much fun the game is. Defender was never this much fun! I'm even tempted to bump u the difficulty level another time.

Like the original game, Resogun has you piloting a space ship through a horizontally wrapped world. Unlike the original, you can pilot the ship in one direction while firing in the opposite, though you cannot fire in any axis other than the horizontal. Enemies spawn and come at you almost constantly, though you can clear the board and gain a breather. As opposed to the hyperspace button, you have a "boost" button, which lets you zip around the board at speed. There's also an over-drive button, which puts the game into slow motion and turns your weapon into a solid beam that scorches enemies. Both buttons need to be recharged over time.

Finally, of course, there's the smart bomb, which clears the screen of enemies. There are enough differences from the original to knock you for a loop the first time you hit them. For instance, you can only pick up one human at a time, unlike the original. And rather than just picking it up, you can also deliver the human to an exit point to "save the human". Another interesting point of difference is that the humans rather than being free standing at start, begin by being locked into prisons, and when keepers show up, you have to destroy them to free a human for you to save.

The game is a scintillating cluster of colors, pixels, boxes, and moving pieces that are both retro and modern at the same time. The scrolling display is rendered in a 3D cylindrical view, and the music is as kinetic as you would expect. It takes you a split second at each introduction of a new enemy to figure out what it's doing and how best to attack it, and the same applies to the boss fights. After a single play through, certain events finally get a chance to filter into your consciousness and you start paying attention to them. "Keeper Detected", for instance, is an audio cue to let you know that those new enemies that are showing up have to be destroyed for you to free up a human. Once you've destroyed those, a shooting star animation takes place on the far side of the planet and you have to race there to rescue your newly freed charge. Fortunately, Housemarquee chose not to allow you to accidentally shoot your humans.

One of the best things about video games is that the good ones let you feel like a kid again. And Resogun definitely is one of the good ones. While I wouldn't get a PS4 just for Resogun, it's definitely worth picking up once you have one.

Review: Binary Domain

I started playing Binary Domain by accident. I was playing Killzone 2 and getting frustrated at one stage. That's the fault of the first person shooter experience: while you have no problem figuring out where you are, it's sometimes difficult to map where your enemies are relative to you because they're moving while you're moving, and if you're playing hide-and-seek like in that particular stage of Killzone 2, you can end up dying repeatedly because your mental map can't compensate for the AI's movements without a frustrating (to me) amount of repetition.

I ended up finishing Binary Domain first, because the third person shooter perspective is just more intuitive, and to me, more fun. The implementation in Binary Domain is also very well done. One of my favorite things about the Uncharted franchise is that you almost always have a buddy with you to help out during combat. Well, in Binary Domain, you can have up to 4-5 buddies, and sometimes the story divides you up into teams and you get to decide who to have on your team, which lends you the ability to customize your play experience. Your conversations and banter on the team will be very different depending on who you chose to take on any given mission.

What's more, there's a trust mechanic, where how you perform with each team member (buying them upgrades) as well as combat performance increases trust, and accidentally shooting them in combat lowers trust. This affects the ultimate outcome of the game and ending in various ways, which I think is pretty cool. Furthermore, at easy difficulty, the game is not frustrating, and the fact that you're shooting robots means that this is one of those games that's easy for a parent to let a child play.

What's more, the game's story is very good for a video game. It's set in a science fiction universe with global warming, robots, and even features ethical dilemmas which I thought were appropriate when we start mixing in AI along with advanced robotics. The problem here is that the game is very linear, so you're dragged along by the story and ultimately have no control over the ethics (or even your choice of love interest), but for what it's worth, this is not the usual poor story line game.

The big weakness of the game is the AI companions. They're just not very effective, even on easy mode. Now, part of it is by design: in the big boss fights, it'd be kinda lame for the player protagonist to not make the killing blow. However, it's also kinda silly to have a very long dragged out fight while your companions who seem to be competent the rest of the time suddenly be unable to hit the broad side of a barn. The other problem is that sometimes they blithely walk into your zone of fire, thereby causing you to hit them through no fault of your own. That's frustrating if you're trying to build a high trust level with the rest of the team.

But none of this was enough to keep me from playing the game all the way to the finish. It's a lot of fun, and while it doesn't beat Among Thieves, I think that it's a game that's under-rated by the standard gaming press reviews. Third person shooters are still rare as a genre, and this one is very well done. Recommended.

P.S. There's one final scene after the credits roll, so keep the game running through the end credits.

Review: The Flash Boys

Books about Wall Street have a way of being incredibly depressing. For instance, Elizabeth Warren's story about fighting Wall Street has a main theme, which is, "Bank meets consumer, Bank screws consumer, ad nauseum." I'm happy to report that The Flash Boys is an exception to this rule.

The book is about high frequency trading: the practice of front-running investor's trades electronically in order to capture the bid-ask spread. It's an obnoxious practice, but generates so much profit that the firms doing so are willing to spend hundreds of millions relocating servers to be closer to the exchanges. Obviously those folks are the villains of the book.

But the book does have a hero, IEX, co-founded by Brad Katsuyama. Lewis follows the discovery (by Katsuyama, amongst others) of the existence of HFT, the desire to build an exchange immune to predation through HFT, and the creation of IEX and its team. The story is told well, as compelling as any thriller you might have read, and I found myself turning its pages furiously. It's also a short read.

I tried to think of ways IEX was built that might make them prone to the kinds of conflicts of interests that have plagued other exchanges, but came up short, so I think Lewis has done the story justice, rather than just acted as PR agent for IEX.

Recommended.

Hat tip to Larry Hosken for pointing me at this book.

Review: The Inquisitor's Apprentice

I loved Chris Moriarty's Spin State, Spin Control, and Ghost Spin, so when I saw that she'd written a series of young adult books starting with The Inquisitor's Apprentice, I didn't hesitate to check them out from the library.

The Inquisitor's Apprentice is set in an alternative history turn of the century New York City. Those were heady times, and historical figures such as J.P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, Harry Houdini, and Teddy Roosevelt perform more than just cameo appearances in the novel, lending the novel a lovely "I've been there" feel.

The story's told from the view of Sacha, a 1st generation Jewish immigrant living in the tenements with his parents, who've escaped from Russia and lived through a harrowing past. Sacha discovers that he can see magic performed, and is then conscripted into being an Inquisitor's apprentice.

In this version of New York, magic is real (and everyone knows it), but is illegal, and an Inquisitor is a special department of the police force charged with policing the use of magic and the investigation thereof. Sacha's apprenticed to Inquisitor Wolf, one of the most prominent investigators of the era, and is swept up in a plot apparently intended to end the life of Thomas Edison.

This was an incredibly promising premise to the novel, and had me very excited to read it. The description of turn of century New York is awesome, and Moriarty's description of Jewish culture (especially that of Russian immigrants in New York) is authentic and feels real. The introduction of Jewish mythic elements in the form of the dybbuk, and integration into various pieces of city paraphernalia such as the rag and bone man and china town is well done and taps into your imagination.

Yet the novel falls flat. The protagonist, Sacha, is weak-willed and lily-livered. Rather than taking action, he's dragged into one event after another by his mentor, his friends, and his colleagues. He lacks common-sense, and has no self-control over his emotions. He's a thoroughly unlikeable protagonist, and unfortunately, I don't think it was intentional on Moriarty's part. I think she bent over backwards to make a heroine out of Sacha's cohort intern, Lily Astral, not realizing that she'd weakened her protagonist to the point of unlikeability.

The resolution of the novel is also incomplete, obviously setting up for the next novel in the series. I cannot recommend this novel over any of Moriarty's other novels, so I'm not sure I'd get around to reading The Watcher in The Shadows.