I normally don’t write about myself but I thought I’d mention that I’m going to the Austin GDC in a week. If you’re reading this, happen to be going, and want to meet up, drop me a line.

When it’s really hot and everyone around us is using their air conditioning, weird things happen with the lights in our basement. It becomes more pronounced when we run the electric dryer. By weird, I mean this:

So what is that? Nothing else in the house seems affected, these are NOT on the same circuit as the dryer (and on super hot days, like today, we don’t even need to turn it on for this to happen). I have to admit, it freaks me out a bit. Our panel is only 100amp, so maybe this is why everyone upgrades to 200amp. But I mean, we were maybe drawing like 5A total when this was happening today.

I was asked by a client if I wanted to attend the DigitalLife conference. So, I went.

At the entrance, there was a booth called Tylenol Ouch, I’m not sure what they were selling there, but they were giving massages and they had these columns with Plexiglas around them filled with Tylenol. The booth was surrounded by a lot of young kids, and it was one of those science fiction becomes reality moments where the dystopic future society with drugs marketed as lifestyle choices and/or candy was suddenly front and center at a technology conference. Also, I guess it’s a-ok now to sell medication to kids using cute characters. Pardon the quality, but here are some pictures taken with my crappy mobile:

Maybe the message is, if you use all of this new technology, you’ll need painkillers. (Ha! I crack myself up!)

I took my 3 year old son to the event. Many of the exhibitors had Hummer H2s (Verizon, Hot97, some random game controller company, et. al.) and Cooper Minis painted up with logos and stuff on them, another booth had 7 or so scooters (of the motorized variety) in various colors, and my son kept telling me that “they have rides here” and tried
to climb inside random vehicles.

The biggest draw seemed to be the Logitech booth. They were giving away these clear round plastic discs with their logo, which had a flashing Logitech green LED in them. There was a line to get these things which was, I kid you not, about 20 minutes long.

Anyway, here’s what’s going to be new and exciting in your digital life:

• HD DVD. They demoed HD DVD on large flat screens. 1080p didn’t look that impressive versus 480p without a comparison, lord knows why they didn’t have a 480p system right next to it. My guess is it doesn’t look that
  much better to most people. Or maybe the problem was display they were hooked to, they were supposed to
  be the bomb or whatever, but they were pretty weak. I don’t know, to me this seems like a pretty incremental increase in quality that the masses will probably never get behind.
• Belkin had a display with the “Belkin Flip for Mac Mini” - it turns out that with this product you can have TWO COMPUTERS SHARING ONE MONITOR. HOLY CRAP! And not even at the same time, it’s just a KVM. But it was targeted at Mac Mini users and it looked like sort of a short Mac Mini so it’ll probably sell. For $80.
• Lots of people hawking iPod accessories. Apparently, your digital life will be filled with semi-disposable electronic fetish items with large add-on aftermarkets.
• GameTap had a DJ that was pretty decent, they were playing some cool music and they had displays hooked up where you could play their catalog of retro games. If you have Mame and MESS it’s sort of moot, but it’ll probably fly. This was probably the best exhibition in my opinion.
• Xavix had some cool stuff. They seem to specialize in what used to be called virtual reality, at least the controllers end of it. They had some golf demos and baseball demos and fishing demos (I cannot bring myself to link to a fishing game demo) with untethered controls–think Nintendo Revolution with custom controllers for
  each game. It was pretty cool.
• Intel had a controller that hooked up to a bicycle. It made it a stationary bike, and had a few pieces that hooked up to the rear wheel and fork, and the demo was riding your bike down a virtual road. Not in the Tour de France or anything, just a random road. I can’t categorize this as exciting, but I guess if you were to take “real life” and replace it with “digital life” this is what you’d be doing.
• The New York Post always seems to have a marginal-looking guy selling subscriptions at the weirdest places, and this was no exception. If you subscribed for a year they’d mail you a $40 gift card to Best Buy or something.
• The Cooper Mini I mentioned earlier was at an exhibitor that does in-auto video, and had a typical 7-inch widescreen display mounted in the center console, and then a 42-inch LCD display in the back, facing toward the back, like out the back window. Not sure that I get this, but okay.

Which brings me to Dance Dance Revolution.

Whenever I see clips of DDR compos, it’s almost always groups of semi-attractive Asian or European tweens/teens/young adults doing cool choreographed moves, or one player doing both sides with his hands and feet, or some other crazy-assed thing like Germans doing DDR on a moving subway. I know that when one sees something from another culture (like say British Comedy TV) one only sees the best of the best and can easily get a distorted view of what it’s actually like (British Comedy TV basically sucks overall, but you wouldn’t know it from Monty Python and The Office). I get that.

However, a typical snapshot-in-time moment was like this red-haired skinny freckled geek with long hair (did I mention it was red?) sporting the geek beard and “dancing” with absolutely no finesse and next to him on the next machine a decently overweight person (couldn’t really tell the gender). It always amazes me when someone seriously overweight can actually move like that.

No I’m not slagging overweight people, as I’d have to be slagging myself, but I can’t move like this person and I am maybe 4 inches taller and 75 pounds lighter than they were. It was impressive. But it wasn’t attractive squads of nubile
youth, either. Hopefully this improved as the day went on.

A huge line had formed at the entrance when they opened, and when I left a few hours later, the line was even more huge, winding up and down the inside of the Javits Center. I considered selling the 4 wristbands that I’d accumulated going in and out of the floor with my son to help pay for parking ($35), but you know, ethics.

So I sold two of them to people that already paid for tickets for $20, the marketing end of that transaction being “skip this huge line that you have to stand in even though you purchased your tickets online” which was snatched up right away.

Continuing in the vein of the Taco Bell post, here’s something else I wrote a long long time ago, on my birthday in 1994. It recounted a stabbing my friend Jim and I kind-of witnessed at the Denny’s in Newark. No, not Newark NJ as you might have assumed, but Newark DE. Here’s the post::

Newsgroups: alt.captain.sarcastic, alt.food.dennys, alt.stupidity, alt.angst, alt.basement.graveyard, alt.music.nin, alt.music.ween, alt.slack, alt.surrealism

From: kkoller@nyx10.cs.du.edu (captain sarcastic)

Date: 9 Aug 1994 04:07:27 -0400

Local: Tues, Aug 9 1994 4:07 am

Subject: Stabbing Westward at Denny’s

[This is a true story, and is Copyright 1994 Captain Sarcastic]

So, Big Jilm stops by my place and asks me to go with him to get some food
at Denny’s for my birthday (today, Aug. 9) and I say, “sure.” So, we hop
into his car and run over to Denny’s. We order, and eat, and everything
is going swimmingly.

Suddenly, before we get the check but after dessert, we hear a loud crash
of breaking glass, and a waitress saying, “call 911.” Oh, joy. So I
start to look over at the area of the restaurant that the crash came from,
which is in sort of a corner behind a partition. Two people run out from
behind the partition, and leave the restaurant.

Suddenly, I see a hand rise up behind the partition holding a glass full
of water and ice. Then the hand rapidly disappears behind the partition
again, and a large crashing noise follows. Another person then runs out
from behind the partition.

Our waitress is now on the phone calling 911, and the service is even
worse than the normal Denny’s service. Two more people come out from
behind the partition. Actually, one person sort of *threw* the other out
from behind the partition and then jumped on him on another table, making
yet another smashing noise. Oh yeah, the one guy’s eye was bleeding
profusely, and the other guy was sort of half-covered with blood.

“Oh, a fight,” I casually say to Jim.
“Yeah,” he says back.

As they sort of get closer to where we are sitting, we stand up and sort
of move back, figuring it would be a bad idea to get in the way of flying
bodies. Then one guy pulls out a Denny’s butterknife, and begins rapidly
stabbing the other guy up against the front counter area. I mean, we were
close enough where you could hear the knife entering flesh.

“Hey Jim, he’s stabbing that guy,” I casually say to Jim.
“Yeah,” he says back.
“Maybe we should leave now,” I casually say to Jim.
“Yeah,” he says back.

We go outside, and bolt to the car at sort of a brisk pace. There’s a
little white car parked at the end of the parking lot, and the two guys
come out of Denny’s sort of slowly, and limp their way to the car.
They’re both bleeding pretty well, and they get into the same car. Who am
I to understand these things?

“Hey Jim, let’s get the plate number from that car in case someone’s dead
or something,” I casually say to Jim.
“Yeah,” he says back.

Jim then takes off after the car, which had a pretty good head start. We
get close enough after about 2 miles (staying far enough back to avoid
things like gunfire) to read the plate. Delaware has simple six digit
plate numbers, no letters, so it’s easy.

We head back to Denny’s, and there’s a cop there in the lot.

“Hey Jim, let’s pull up next to that cop and tell him the plate number,”
I casually say to Jim.
“Yeah,” he says back.

We pull up next to the cop, and he rolls his window down.

“Hey, are you here for that ruckus that just happened in Denny’s?” I
casually ask the cop.
“Yeah,” he says back.
“Hey, we got the plate number from the car, do you want it?” I casually
ask the cop.
“We can’t really do anything, since we don’t have a victim,” he says back.

I think to myself that yeah, the victim’s in the CAR, dumbass, and we have
the PLATE NUMBER, assmunch, maybe you can go find em or something? I sort
of keep that to myself, though, remembering back to other encounters with
the police where I had that sort of attitude. I love it when you present
a critical piece of evidence to a cop, and he doesn’t even say, “Thanks.”

“Yeah, I thought I saw you guys pass me at the intersection,” says the
cop, casually.
“Yeah,” I say back.
“What was that number? he asks, casually.

I give him the plate number.

“That was a green Chevy Nova, right?” asks the cop, casually.
“No, it was a small white hatchback of some sort,” I say back.
“Oh,” says the cop, casually, and rolls up his window and talks on the
radio for a while.

We go back inside to pay the bill, and there’s spattered blood all over
the front area of the restaurant, and the area where they were sitting
looked like a small bomb had hit it. The guy that was getting stabbed
repeatedly was moving really slowly to the car, and with the amount of
blood that he lost, I would say that he probably ended up dead, especially
since the car was headed not to a hospital, but into an industrial park.
My adrenaline was hardly raised, and neither was Jim’s.

We had a little talk about that, and neither of us could figure out why we
weren’t really even shocked at seeing this stabbing taking place right in
front of us. Weird. Anyway, I gotta go now, cos Jim and I are sitting
around drinking iced tea and playing Doom.

–
Captain Sarcastic <kkoller@nyx10.cs.du.edu> alt.captain.sarcastic is BAD.

So I wrote this little ditty back in 1993 about a customer service experience I had. I posted it to usenet from my nyx account in Denver, and it went crazy. Boing Boing published it (thanks Mark!), lots of other people claimed they wrote it, and it made me mildly famous. Since I haven’t done anything else to make me mildy more famous since then, I’m pathetically keeping this around forever, I guess.

Taco Bell $2 Bill Story

On my way home from the second job I’ve taken for the extra holiday ca$h I need, I stop at Taco Bell for a quick bite to eat. In my billfold is a $50 bill and a $2 bill. I figure that with a $2 bill, I can get something to eat and not have to worry about people getting pissed at me for trying to break a large bill.

ME: “Hi, I’d like one seven layer burrito please, to go.”

IT: “Is that it?”

ME: “Yep.”

IT: “That’ll be $1.04, eat here?”

ME: “No, it’s to go.” [I hate effort duplication.]

At this point I open my billfold and hand him the $2 bill. He looks at it kind
of funny and

IT: “Uh, hang on a sec, I’ll be right back.”

He goes to talk to his manager, who is still within earshot. The following
conversation occurs between the two of them.

IT: “Hey, you ever see a $2 bill?”

MG: “No. A what?”

IT: “A $2 bill. This guy just gave it to me.”

MG: “Ask for something else, there’s no such thing as a $2 bill.” [my
emp]

IT: “Yeah, thought so.”

He comes back to me and says

IT: “We don’t take these. Do you have anything else?”

ME: “Just this fifty. You don’t take $2 bills? Why?”

IT: “I don’t know.”

ME: “See here where it says legal tender?”

IT: “Yeah.”

ME: “So, shouldn’t you take it?”

IT: “Well, hang on a sec.”

He goes back to his manager who is watching me like I’m going to shoplift, and

IT: “He says I have to take it.”MG: “Doesn’t he have anything else?”

IT: “Yeah, a fifty. I’ll get it and you can open the safe and get change.”

MG: “I’m not opening the safe with him in here.” [my emp]

IT: “What should I do?”

MG: “Tell him to come back later when he has real money.”

IT: “I can’t tell him that, you tell him.”

MG: “Just tell him.”

IT: “No way, this is weird, I’m going in back.”

The manager approaches me and says

MG: “Sorry, we don’t take big bills this time of night.” [it was 8pm and this particular Taco Bell is in a well lighted indoor mall with 100 other stores.]

ME: “Well, here’s a two.”

MG: “We don’t take those either.”

ME: “Why the hell not?”

MG: “I think you know why.”

ME: “No really, tell me, why?”

MG: “Please leave before I call mall security.”

ME: “Excuse me?“

MG: “Please leave before I call mall security.”

ME: “What the hell for?”

MG: “Please, sir.”

ME: “Uh, go ahead, call them.”

MG: “Would you please just leave?”

ME: “No.”

MG: “Fine, have it your way then.”

ME: “No, that’s Burger King, isn’t it?”

At this point he backs away from me and calls mall security on the phone around the corner. I have two people staring at me from the dining area, and I begin laughing out loud, just for effect. A few minutes later this 45 year oldish guy comes in and says [at the other end of counter, in a whisper]

SG: “Yeah, Mike, what’s up?”

MG: “This guy is trying to give me some [pause] funny money.”

SG: “Really? What?”

MG: “Get this, a two dollar bill.”

SG: “Why would a guy fake a $2 bill?” [incredulous]

MG: “I don’t know? He’s kinda weird. Says the only other thing he has is a
fifty.”

SG: “So, the fifty’s fake?”

MG: “No, the $2 is.”

SG: “Why would he fake a $2 bill?”

MG: “I don’t know. Can you talk to him, and get him out of here?”

SG: “Yeah…”

Security Guard walks over to me and says

SG: “Mike here tells me you have some fake bills you’re trying to use.”

ME: “Uh, no.”

SG: “Lemme see ‘em.”

ME: “Why?”

SG: “Do you want me to get the cops in here?”

At this point I am ready to say, “SURE, PLEASE,” but I want to eat, so
I say

ME: “I’m just trying to buy a burrito and pay for it with this $2 bill.”

I put the bill up near his face, and he flinches like I’m taking a swing at him.
He takes the bill, turns it over a few times in his hands, and says

SG: “Mike, what’s wrong with this bill?”

MG: “It’s fake.”

SG: “It doesn’t look fake to me.”

MG: “But it’s a $2 bill.”

SG: “Yeah?”

MG: “Well, there’s no such thing, is there?”

The security guard and I both look at him like he’s an idiot, and it dawns on
the guy that he has no clue.

My burrito was free and he threw in a small drink and those cinnamon things, too. Makes me want to get a whole stack of $2 bills just to see what happens when I try to buy stuff. If I got the right group of people, I could probably end up in jail. At least you get free food.

END_OF_STORY