The Brad Hole

I'm continually surprised to find that people use Internet Explorer as their web browser. When Mozilla was nearing final for the Mac, I made the switch and haven't looked back.

My biggest beef with Mozilla on OSX has been it's rather plain appearance, but Mac users can download the excellent Pinstripe theme and put that behind them. Through thick and thin, I've stayed with Mozilla. I did switch to Safari for a time, but that came to a halt when I discovered that it totally anti-aliased printouts from the FedEx website, effectively botching the barcodes for their online shipping sheets.

Other people swear by Camino, and indeed its use of Aqua-native widgets in the web page content area, like in Safari, is great. However, I find it a bit unstable and a bit lacking in options compared to Mozilla, so I've never stayed with it for too long. I generally avoid nightlies, but I expect I'll give it another try when they get around to doing another official point release.

But anyway, if you're using a Mac or a PC, there's really no compelling reason to stay with IE and many compelling reasons to switch - pop-up blocking being number one, tabbed browsing being another. There's also the fact that just about every browser but IE gets regular updates that continue to put distance between them and IE. I'm sure someday Microsoft will update IE and catch up, but why wait?

Switch now. Do it do it do it do it do it!

Posted by bradman at 02:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We're a little behind the movie curve, and just got around to seeing Matrix Reloaded earlier tonight. I really liked the first move; the whole concept of humans-as-batteries really caught me by surprise. I remember going in and thinking it was going to be another dumb cyberpunk movie and coming out impressed that it was a unique blend of kung-fu, sci-fi and cyberpunk with a fairly original story to back it all up.

That feeling of discovery perhaps explains why this second movie didn't impress me to nearly the same degree. While the visuals were simply stunning, it felt like there wasn't anything new or compelling. The story didn't seem to offer up too much other than some goofy philosophy ("Sometimes things change, and sometimes they don't!") and a whole lot of seemingly gratuitous kung-fu. I walked away thinking that the best scenes were the ones with Agent Smith, and there weren't all that many with him present. Now I'm compelled to see the third movie, but it feels like I'm only going in to hear the complete story rather than an expectation of something that's going to rock my world. Still, I felt the move was certainly good, but nowhere near great. It seemed to me like there was a lot of lost opportunity here.

Beth and I also noticed that this movie was replete with Cadillacs, particularly in the chase scenes on the freeway. These could very well be the ugliest cars on the road at the moment.

Posted by bradman at 01:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've been busy as a bee killing bugs the past few days. EverQuest has seen the brunt of my attention, and Glenda and I have been hammering on it pretty hard. It's still got one or two whoppers, but on the whole it's really starting to shape up now. Just in time too - Glenda's last full programming day is Friday. If I knew I never had to worry about bugs in EQ ever again after 48 hours, I'd be falling-down-drunk with glee. Envy, thy name is Brad.

After 5 gold master candidates, it looks like Scholastic Math Missions 3-5 is really GM now. You'd think that might be some kind of record for a Westlake title, but you'd be wrong. Age of Empires 2 clocked in with 7 final candidate CDs. Krenek was the lead on that bad boy, so he had the joy of putting all those CDs together. Suckah! I guess I shouldn't get too cocky - Math Missions K-2 is expected to wrap up here shortly and then the GM parade begins anew with it. I'm cautiously optimistic.

I thought I had an Alice patch ready to go, but it turns out that it has all kinds of issues loading the Fortress of Doors level. I have no idea what broke, so back into the garage it goes. No telling when I'll get a chance to look at it again.

I'm pretty happy with the Civ3 1.29f patch, so I'm probably going to try and steal a few hours to fix the one last bug I know about and send it off to MacSoft. Unfortunately, I haven't had much time for the 1.29 editor, so if you apply the 1.29f game patch, the 1.21 editor will break. If the editor is more important to you than the 1.29 patch, then avoid the 1.29 update until a new version of the editor is released. That's likely to be quite a ways in the future, the way my current workload is looking.

Posted by bradman at 03:09 AM | Permalink

On Saturday, we invited over a bunch of people for Violently Competitive Croquet, eats and drinks. Jason and his very pregnant wife were there, as were Shawn, Dave Marli, Chris Budd, Paul and Maureen. We were a little concerned that it might be too warm, since the high was around 105F. Those worries were completely unfounded though, thanks to the "dry heat" for which Arizona is famous. We had some pretty good shade on the pitch and a cooler full of beverages. It worked splendidly. Most of us hadn't seen Shawn in a while, so that was nice. At one point, he threatened to pull out baby pictures, so the gloves were off and Violently Competitive Croquet was on.

We play a variation where you become "poison" after completing a circuit of the course and hitting the starting post. Jason mentioned some crazy Nebraska variant where you become poison after completing a circuit and going back through the center hoop. We may have to try that some day, but that day was not Saturday.

Anyway, the first game came down to Jason and Chris, who were poison, and Paul, who was not poison. There were two teenage girls sitting 20-30 yards from the end of the field, and at one point they appeared to be partaking of Forbidden Pleasures. Paul was being a wuss and spent most of his time whacking his ball away from Jason and Chris - and coincidentally towards these two nymphets, so naturally they decided to team up against him to put a quick end to that. Eventually Paul was knocked out and Chris went on to win. This was Chris's first time playing croquet, at least using our rules.

The next game saw the women partaking, with the exception of Daniella, as Shawn and Dave Marli had other places to be. I was poison first in this one, but Chris was right behind me and used the "regular balls can kill poison through a wicket" rule to take me out before I had much of a chance. The field got a little dark towards the end, and Chris eventually won this one as well.

It was later than we expected by now, so most people took off, but Paul and Maureen came back to the house, and we fixed dinner, had some drinks and partook of Cranium. Mo was exhausted and Paul was sloshed, so they spent the night rather than drive home. A good time was had by all.

Posted by bradman at 01:56 AM | Permalink

For everyone out there following our ex-landlady situation (which amounts to probably 1 person. Hi Beth!), we got a check from her on Saturday. Amazingly, we didn't realize we missed the mail on Saturday and found out today. She broke down the deductions for us - "broke" being the key word. Out of our $1200, she ended up taking out all but $105. Some of the charges would have been fair, and some were pretty bogus ($500 to re-landscape the yard!) She dated the invoice 4/17, the check 5/1 and the postmark on the envelope was stamped 5/21. Our next move is...to figure out our next move. Clearly, she broke some kind of law by not getting this to us 30 days after we moved out (which was the end of Feb.) but the burden of proving that the charges are bogus is on our shoulders, which could be very difficult since we were pretty trusting of the whole thing up until we moved out. Caveat renter.

Beth is gunning for blood big time at this point, so I'm going to call a lawyer in Austin tomorrow who specializes in landlord-tenant disputes and see if it's worth our time (and money) to pursue this. I think we have a solid case for "bad faith" since she didn't do all this within the 30-day window (which entitles us to 3x the full deposit, deductions be damned), but a judge may not feel so generous since her initial invoice was only 14 days late (even though the check and invoice got to us 1.75 months late).

Who knew I'd be spending all this space in my blog ranting about my ex-landlady?

Posted by bradman at 01:19 AM | Permalink

Like most people, I get a ton of spam. I have a filter through the almighty pobox.com which is indispensable. It flags e-mail with an altered subject line if it thinks it is spam, and I've got Microsoft Entourage set up to shunt all those e-mails into a junk folder. This catches literally 95% of my spam, and I periodically check out the junk to make sure no false positives sneak in.

I'm used to seeing spam for larger penises, naked women, college diplomas, X10 camera systems, EZ loans and mortgages and of course, my friend in Nigeria who wants to send me a billion dollars if I'll only give him access to my personal bank account.

Today I saw a unique variation on the "large penis" type of e-mail. Instead of offering the secret of being like John Holmes, it claimed something else entirely: "larger nuts."

Now I don't know about other guys, but this is clearly a case where size is not desirable, at least in my book. The last thing I need to do is increase in size the part of my body that is most sensitive to pain. Plus, I have to wonder if having all that extra dangling baggage would cause me to start walking like a bow-legged cowboy. That may be acceptable in Texas, but not here.

Posted by bradman at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We started the legal wheels in motion with our ex-landlady today. I left her a voicemail at her work number (pretty much the only known good contact info we have) that basically laid it all out: she's got 2 weeks to get in contact with us about our security deposit, or we'll file a civil claim against her.

It's kind of depressing in a way: in all other respects she was a nice landlady, and we know she's a divorced mom who is likely trying to make ends meet, but at the end of the day, she has a responsibility to us to make sure that she lives up to her end of our lease contract. Certainly a phone call explaining any trouble she's having would carry a lot more weight than avoiding us altogether. Hopefully, she'll see the light and realize that it'll be easier on everyone if we strike a deal rather than having Judge Larry Joe dispense TEXAS JUSTICE!

As it happens, I did some research on landlord-tenant contracts in Texas...

There's a specific clause in the Texas state code that deals with not getting your security deposit back: Title 7, Chapter 92, Subchapter C, section 92.109. In that section of the code, it states that if the landlord does not either a) give us the security deposit check or b) an accounting of deductions from the security deposit 30 days after the lease expires, the landlord is considered to be acting in bad faith. When that happens, they are a) liable for $100 PLUS 3x the security deposit PLUS any attorney fees and b) forfeit the right to withhold any of the security deposit for damages and other expenses. They also have the burden of proof of determining that withholding the security deposit is reasonable. Since we haven't heard jack about what, if any, our remaining security deposit would be, it seems pretty clear that we'd prevail in a civil court, but what is less clear (owing to the fact that I've thankfully never been involved with courts in any way) is when/if we'd get our money even if we prevailed.

Posted by bradman at 11:44 PM | Permalink

My workload is finally starting to return to normal it seems. The past two months, I've been working on 2 projects for Westlake: the EverQuest client (along with Glenda) and one of the many collaborations we've done with Hypnotix: this time a Mac version of Scholastic's Math Missions. I've done some titles for Hypnotix before, most notably Daria's Inferno. These are typically smaller projects that Westlake does on the side, so usually they're a fun diversion. I've actually enjoyed doing the Scholastic project as it's a nice change of pace from some of the hardcore games. It's somewhat refreshing to realize that there's probably no way I'll ever have to worry about reading flaming rants about how it crashes or is deficient in some other way in online forums. Indeed, the Hypnotix guys seem to have a sense of humor about their work. How could they not, having worked on Panty Raider and Deer Avenger?

Anyway, it looks like Math Missions is GM (or nearly so), so that means I can start focusing on the important things in life again.

In other news, I managed to get our ex-landlady's work number, but she must be on to us, as our phone messages there have so far gone unanswered. Beth and I will probably have to figure out our next step. $1200 is nothing to sneeze at, but it could end up costing us a chunk of change (and frustration) to get it.

Posted by bradman at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Around mid-February, the wyfe and I moved back to Phoenix from Austin, TX. We had been renting a house there, and our landlady was generally pretty nice to us. Anyhoo, as it happens we paid a security deposit up front, and we were naturally very curious when we moved out as to if/when we'd be getting some money back, since it amounted to almost a month's rent. So we waited about a month after our lease had ended and dropped our landlady a line. Dead silence commenced for around 6 weeks, and we decided to drop her a gentle but firm reminder. I also left a voice mail for her in case the e-mails fell into a black hole or spam filter, which would not be entirely out of the question.

That reminder did spur some action - she wrote us back to say that she had in fact mailed the check in mid-April and that if we didn't get it soon, to let her know and she'd cancel it and issue a new one. That was the beginning of May. We didn't receive said check, so we told her to stop payment on it and send out a new one. As of last week, no new check, so we fired off another e-mail, for which we haven't yet had a reply.

So we wake up this morning to find an e-mail from our landlady to what appears to be her entire address book, informing us that her e-mail and phone numbers are changing, and that she'll let us know what the new ones will be. This had the effect of setting off a big red siren. So I got on the horn, tried to call every contact number we had and a few acquaintances, and so far have come up pretty empty. I'm still hopeful that this is all a miscommunication, but the evidence is starting to mount that we'll never see our deposit refund. We could use that money pretty bad right now, so this sucks pretty hard.

Posted by bradman at 05:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today's been a pretty good day to be a Mac gamer. Aspyr announced Zoo Tycoon, and MacSoft announced Tropico: Mucho Macho edition. I'm totally stoked about both of these. (ObDisclosure: Mark Krenek of Westlake did the Zoo Tycoon port, so I'm not without bias there.)

This style of game is perhaps my favorite: strategy sim games that have a lot of meat to them, but aren't so complex that you get lost in the details. I've long wished for the Tropico expansion. I loved Railroad Tycoon 2, also by PopTop. I hope that with this version, PopTop has fixed a lot of the performance and stability problems that plagued the initial Tropico Mac release. In their defense, Tropico was one of the first OSX-native games, and we all know that 10.0 was not a very solid release, as it required a lot of hacks to get stuff, including games, working properly. At $20, it's a steal. (I sound like a pimping tool, but whatever.)

Now if only we had more World War II first-person shooters for the Mac...there's a genre that's been neglected!

Posted by bradman at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've been waffling for some time now about setting up a blog. I'm not sure I have anything of value to say, or the time and desire to say it, and the whole concept seems kind of self-indulgent to me. But I saw Corey Tamas' and Peter Cohen's blog, and I had an epiphany.

I think I can use this as a way to vent steam about things that I would be reluctant to do in a public forum, since that usually means that I'm venting directly at one person, which isn't too nice. Maybe having an extra outlet will help keep me from burninating some peasants. Because it's all about avoiding legal complications, ya know? We'll see how it goes.

Posted by bradman at 12:09 PM | Permalink