Are We There Yet?

Dear Microsoft,

You don't know me and you never will, but as a born and raised American capitalist, I already expect that. I have no ill-will towards your company that would be considered unhealthy or irregular. Indeed, I have been guilty on occasion of participating in the fruitless effort that is an "Internet argument" when attempting to point out to otherwise intelligent and rational people how immature and stupid their posts sound when referring to your company as "M$". And while I have been known to curse your very existence when attempting to understand why MFC or Visual Studio do something so inexplicably stupid when all I want to do is get rid of a simple dialog, I understand that your company is the foundation upon which my very job, and subsequently my family, survives.

I say all this to point out that I am not an irrational individual owning a gun loaded with a bullet scribed with the name of Bill Gates or other such nonsense. My involvement with your company is one based purely upon need. That need has always been one confined to the realm of PC's until recently.

The first console I remember playing regularly was a family owned Nintendo Entertainment System, although I have vague memories of playing River Raid on an Atari. The Nintendo was so fantastic that when I was 13 and had a paper route, I saved up to purchase a Super Nintendo. My love affair with console systems declined after that as I became involved in the tumultuous soap opera known as the personal computer industry. Despite playing on the consoles of my friends through the days of the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation (college is a great place for doing this), I never broke down and bought another console, even after donating the SNES to my older brother some years ago.

That is, until the Xbox came along. I will admit that my infatuation with the Xbox was predictable at the very least considering my involvement in the computer industry. The Xbox spoke to that part of my mind which believed the only thing that could understand it was my computer. It became a 3-way telephone call of love at first byte. Some of the most beautiful graphics seen on a television mixed with a broad vision for online play created by an industry juggernaut with more ties than an S&M parlor all supported by the deep pockets of the richest man since the last ruler of the Roman Empire is the recipe for success. Graciously, my wife was even open to the possiblity of owning an Xbox once I convinced her that the DVD add-on gave us a viable alternative to plopping down the cash for a separate DVD player when we could get so much more for a little more money. Even though I knew the price of a console rapidly declines after its release, especially in a market of 3 heavy hitters, we procured an Xbox for our house not two weeks after its release to the general public.

That is why I have read recent reports on your plans for making Xbox2 with a sour taste in my mouth. I accept the decision to go with ATI over NVIDIA for the graphics of Xbox2. Even though I have a good friend who works for NVIDIA, I'm no slouch to the business world and can make my own conclusions about what led to this decision, despite the pomp and circumstance contained in press releases regarding "shared vision", "passion", and other such nonsense that conveniently ignores the power of the almighty dollar. At the very least, I can expect the superior graphics of the Xbox to be continued as ATI's resurgence in the graphics market gives me confidence they will do no wrong with such a juicy contract. I even have hope that on a fixed, closed platform that they won't screw up the drivers. Besides, your influx of cash in to the coffers of NVIDIA provided the computer industry with the venerable nForce platform for which we are all grateful (especially the boys at AMD).

The latest news is that you have chosen IBM as a partner in "a semiconductor technology agreement" that leads most to believe IBM will be providing the brains of the next Xbox. Choosing IBM over Intel has led many to believe that the x86 platform will see the boot as well.

Let's recap for a just a moment here: new graphics, new processor, new architecture. All of these do not bode well towards the prospect of backwards compatibility that Sony used as a spring board for the wildfire success of the PS2.

Let me be the first to say to you, Microsoft, that without backwards compatibility, I will not be purchasing an Xbox2. I spend my money very carefully when it comes to Xbox because I don't have the money to waste. That means that buying another console to replace my current one with no hope of compatibility is unacceptable until the day comes when I can afford a room dedicated towards my gaming addiction. The latest mathematical estimates tell me to work harder rather than buying more lottery tickets, so I don't see a gaming room in the forseeable future.

That places my future plans regarding consoles squarely in your lap. I know that I am not the only gamer with these same worries. The broken promises Nintendo made over the years regarding backwards compatibility as they leapfrogged from one cartridge technology to the next shattered the hearts of many a gamer. Wired reports that I should have no worries stating that "Microsoft will use the Virtual PC technology it acquired from Connectix last year to provide backward-compatibility with the current generation of Xbox games." As encouraging and logical as this sounds, until I see that statement in an official capacity or with some sort of reliable citation, I will continue to wonder and worry.

A while back, Fark posted a link to an MSN Dating article entitled Loving your geek, tolerating his hobbies. Fark readers are suckers for this kind of stuff, so it's only natural that such a link submission would get posted. I checked out the article with a bit of skepticism. Was the article written by someone with one foot in the geek kingdom or is it just another dating "how-to" that purports to have the inside scoop on the mindset of the elusive geek?

I found it to be a little bit of both. I agree with some of the points brought up in the article but I'm also a bit annoyed at other parts of it. One area of the article that I take issue with concerns social skills. The general consensus amongst the public is that geeks lack normal social skills until the tender age of 30. The article doesn't attempt to deny this, instead pointing out that we "grow out of it". My experiences have taught me that within the geek community, there are no more people lacking basic social skills than from any other sampling of society.

I think that what most people believe to be a lack of social skills is really the manifestation of something else that describes more geeks than the average person: introverts. Geeks tend to be more of a thinker than the average person. We are observers of all things that interest us and tend to remain that way until we feel we have something to contribute.

Another area of the article that I feel is a mistake concerns the writer's recommendation about what to do when confronted with some of our more esoteric hobbies. He feels we should be left to our devices so that we can indulge in our geekdom free from the possiblity of causing our loved one to see just how weird we can be. He adds, "(t)his conveniently frees you from having to be part of it." I think that's a terrible recommendation to anyone looking to have a healthy, lasting relationship. I don't mean to say that you should attempt to assimilate your significant other in to the Geek culture, but to say that leaving us on our own while maintaining that social divide is convenient is silly.

Having said that, there are points where the author hits the nail on the head. Namely, I'm talking about letting us have our own space where we can indulge in our hobbies and "geek out". My wife and I have previously lived in apartments where space was limited and I wasn't able to have "my" space. I didn't have a lot of spare time during which this really mattered, but now that we own a house, I have a corner of the basement where I can spread out hardware, build computers, listen to music, code, and game to my heart's content (although my time to do this is still severly limited). The funny thing about this is that geek's aren't the only ones who can benefit from such an arrangement. I think the reason geek's are more eager to have their space is that our hobbies tend to require intense concentration. You can't socialize while coding or painting the beard of a dwarf unless you want a dozen errors or brown fingers.

I think the thing that bothers me about the article is how he uses stereotypes to describe himself and other geeks early on while pointing out in the end that most geek stereotypes are no longer applicable as a generalization. Perhaps that was his intent from the start, but since he uses the stereotypes to justify several points of the article, I doubt it. I'd be curious to know the author's age as it seems he came from an earlier era of geeks where all he said was true. But today's world is full of geeks from all walks of life. We're as much an active part of society as the valley girl, socialite, and athlete. And I think we like it that way.

Wow....two weeks since my last post. What can I say other than I have been very busy. I'm winding down on one project that has consumed my life this month and hope to finish up another important project soon as well. I should have more time to post the thoughts and miscellaneous items that have been queuing up in my head since that last post.

Anyway, a few things remain at the fore front of my mind after the early morning I had and I thought posting them here might help me focus on my code a bit better.

I was awakened at 2:45am this morning to my cell phone vibrating. That can only mean one thing - our DSL at my office was taking some time off for a nap and I was going to have angry customers in the morning. I called SBC to find out what was going on to learn that there was planned maintenance on our network scheduled for 3:00-6:00am and they are, of course, very sorry for the inconvenience. The funny thing is that I found out earlier this morning that a co-worker knew about this scheduled maintenance in advance. How? His SBC dialer told him. Nice to know that residential customers are informed of SBC planned maintenance, but the business customers (who pay 5x more) don't get a single heads up notice. There isn't even a web site I'm aware of where I can find this information, unlike for my RoadRunner cable connection at home. The woman I spoke to on the phone actually said I had to "roll with it". Right. I'm sure my customers would love me to quote her on that one.

Everything was fine in the land of DSL by 3:30am and I played two quick rounds of "Dead Man Walking" in Max Payne 2 to bleed off some stress before attempting to sleep again. As my luck shortly informed me, it was not to be so. My 15-month old daughter decided now was a good time to wake up and demand attention. Letting her cry in her crib for a while did nothing to abate the pleas for help, so I obliged and brought her in to bed with me.

Of course, she wanted to cuddle with her Mommy, who is 8 months pregnant and can't sleep on her aching back WITHOUT a 20 lbs. wiggle worm burrowing in to her. She eventually warmed up to the idea of cuddling with me. As I'm laying there in bed with her, her foot kept rocking back and forth into my leg which did nothing to encourage a visit from Mr. Sandman. I was getting slightly annoyed and was about to shift her in to a position where she wouldn't be playing hacky sack with my knee when I realized something.

My foot was doing the exact same thing.

My wife will be the first person on the planet to tell you that I am a fidgeter. I'm NEVER holding completely still for long. My hands are tracing lines on the wall, poking at the bars of our headboard, or petting our cat while we're in bed. Before I doze off to sleep and when I wake up, I'm always ticking my foot back and forth at the ankle like some kind of human grandfather clock. And now my daughter's curled up in to bed with me doing the same thing.

I wrote a while ago about how the introduction of something new to my daughter was an incredible and amazing experience no matter how simple of an explanation it has in the adult world. It's funny because now I realize that it shouldn't have been so shocking to me as I was just as awestruck at 4am this morning as she was in the bath tub that night watching as I poured water out of a cup in front of her. I shouldn't be so surprised that my daughter has traits from me. Common sense says that it will be true and if I was that lacking in common sense, I'd have the little bit of genetics I learned in biology to provide some backup for the left hand side of my brain.

People are always saying that my daughter has my wife's eyes and cheeks. She's got my temper and my wife's stubborness (lucky her). I've heard them all a thousand times. But it runs deeper than the things that any patient observer could relate to me after spending an hour with my family. It's moments like these in the early hours of the morning that really make me appreciate what it's like to be a father. It's almost enough to make me forget that I spent the next two hours sleeping on the couch with my daughter so my wife could get some sleep.

Almost. ;-)