The Brad Hole

Sunday morning, I let the dogs out (WOO! WOO! Woo-WOO!) in the backyard to play. After a while we heard Kermit yelping continuously. He and Barney came running into the house, although Kermit was still yelping the entire way. We were able to separate them and get him calmed down somewhat, and discovered that he was limping and trying not to put pressure on his left front paw. He was clearly in a great deal of pain, so we decided after a short bit that we needed to take him to a vet ASAP.

Let me just interject here and say that Sunday is a bad time for a dog to get sick or injured. Tell all your dogs to confine their illnesses to the weekdays. ;-)

We went to the nearest emergency animal hospital, which was at 99th Ave. and Peoria - a bit of a haul, but not across town, luckily. They did some triage and determined that Kermit's needs weren't urgent, and told us that we'd have about a 2 hour wait. They then presented us with a list of vets that were open "after hours" and suggested we try one of those for faster service. The list was a bit outdated (it listed our regular vet as being open on Sunday, and it's not), but we finally found one that didn't have a huge wait.

We took Kermit in and the vet there discovered that his paw was "crunching" and took some x-rays. There was no obvious sign of a break, so the thinking is that it's a sprained or torn ligament. She put a splint on his paw, and our Kermit had transformed into the Pegleg Puppy. It was pretty sad and shocking to see the first time. Kermit naturally looks a bit pitiful, and the split only makes it more pronounced. What's worse is that he's still in a bit of pain, as he has a tendency to yelp (or bark at full volume) when he tries to put pressure on that paw. Poor little bugger.

We're taking him to our regular vet tomorrow to have him checked out again. I'm somewhat concerned that the x-rays didn't show any damage, and we want to make sure that the injury isn't located somewhere higher up on his arm or shoulder. Plus our vet is super-nice and pretty thorough.

It's been a trying experience so far. We have to keep the puppies separated so that their exuberance doesn't exacerbate Kermit's injury further. That has resulted in some separation anxiety. Kermit has also had a case of the runs - what timing! This means that he needs to get up several times in the middle of the night, and the resulting walk to the yard and back invariably results in a full-volume yelp or 6 in the middle of the night. What's more, when he's "doing his business", he positions the pegleg right in between his two hind legs - great for balance, not so good for avoiding toxic sludge.

He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he's our Kermit. :-)

Posted by bradman at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The past 7 days have been quite a ride! We woke up to a flooded backyard (and empty pool) last Thursday. Turns out that our pump housing had completely cracked and while it was running overnight, pumped the water into our yard. The dogs seemed to enjoy it though, so that was a plus.

We've got a deadline coming up at work on Friday that is fairly important, but I had planned a while back to take this Thursday and Friday off for our annual "Guys Trip to Vegas". This has provided me with a little extra panic that I don't normally have. Working for Aspyr is, on the whole, pretty stress-free but this one was accidentally of my own making. Still, it looks like everything will fall into place nicely. Sleep is for the weak.

Adding to my scheduling woes, Beth's mom flew into town this evening, and will be leaving on Sunday. We had a very nice dinner with her, but I'm unfortunately going to miss visiting with her due to the aforementioned Vegas trip. On the plus side, Beth will have her to herself for 4 days. The puppies have accepted Beth's mom into the pack, offering to clean her nostrils and ears repeatedly. This is another plus, since her allergies have kicked in. You haven't lived until you've had 2 puppies overwhelm you and offer to de-booger you without warning.

In more house news, we turned on our AC today for the first time this season. I think I've written volumes about our craptastic AC unit, yet still the chapters keep coming. It's clearly malfunctioning badly - it turns on for maybe 5 seconds, then turns off and the cycle repeats. We renewed our home warranty last month knowing full well that we'd have more AC problems until we could afford to replace it, and it looks like that's going to pay off, although at an inconvenience to us yet again. But again there's a plus side: I'll be in Vegas while it's broken and 97 degrees here in Phoenix. I suspect Beth may not find that to be much of a plus.

My goal is to win a minimum of $20k in Vegas. After taxes, that should give us enough to replace the AC, pay off some credit cards, put a down payment on the elusive 4Runner, do some minor fixit tasks around the house and buy the puppies some more rawhide bones. I'm not greedy. :-)

Posted by bradman at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

The big news today is Apple's release of "Boot Camp." Apple has now provided a semi-official means to install Windows XP and dual-boot into it on the new Intel Macs. More importantly, they've made it relatively easy and have provided drivers such that most every important component works in XP, including native 3D graphics card support. So now I'm a conflicted man.

On the one hand, speaking strictly as a Mac user, this is nothing but good. It opens up a whole new world for Mac users, and makes switching to the Mac from the PC a relatively safe proposition. If I didn't work in the Mac gaming industry, I would be 100% behind this move as a Mac user.

On the other hand, it is likely going to impact me directly in a negative way, as it means that many Mac gamers will be able to easily boot into Windows to get their gaming fix. The Mac gaming market is not perfect. We typically ship our games 3-9 months after they appear on the PC. We can't license important middleware like Havok or GameSpy, either due to prohibitive cost or general Mac-hatery. We definitely don't have the time or manpower in our schedule to do add-ons like game editors. So often Mac game ports are not quite there, although certainly not for lack of effort on our part. If I were a Mac gamer, I'd be pretty glad to be able to run Windows games now in a dual-boot situation.

In all honesty, I don't know what the real-world impact will be. It's not going to make us release ports any faster (the implication in some parts is that, for whatever reason, we're not already doing this). We're also not likely to start doing smaller Mac-only games; Aspyr is geared up now for revenue on many platforms including the PC and consoles. Astute observers will note there are no Mac ports planned for our current PC and console titles aside from Stubbs. Perhaps it won't affect our sales at all, but that seems unlikely. Perhaps it'll mean a huge swarm of PC users converting to the Mac. That is more likely, but it could be a while before those numbers offset Mac gamers who are dual booting right now. I would not be surprised if current PC game developers and publishers start doing Mac ports in-house again as they did in the 90's, once the Mac marketshare increases.

What I do know for certain is that Mac users benefit no matter what, even if I and some other Mac game porters end up taking it in the shorts. ;-) My personal plan is to stick with what I'm doing now for as long as I can and see where that takes me.

Posted by bradman at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (30)

MacWorld is running a feature this week on the "'30 Most Significant Apple Products." I've been an Apple fan since the early 80s, so I figured I'd pipe in. :-) However, coming up with 30 "significant" products is challenging; very few Apple products truly deserve that tag, although the ones that do are monsters. So with that said, here's my list of 15.

15. QuickTime. Now a strong standard for video and audio media as well as the technology cornerstone of the iTunes Music Store, QuickTime started life in 1991 as an extension for System 6 on the MacOS.

14. AppleLink Personal Edition. No longer an Apple product, you may know it today by it's more familiar name, America Online (AOL). The first e-mail from space was sent from a Macintosh Portable on STS-43, albeit via a different version of AppleLink that predated AOL.

13. The Power Macintosh. A radical change in the Macintosh line, this represented what many folks refer to now as "The First Transition". With the Power Mac, Apple switched CPU architectures from the Motorola 68000 line to the PowerPC. Although it had a 68k emulator that ran old programs very quickly in software, developers also had to rewrite their apps to be PowerPC-native to take advantage of the true speed of this machine. This machine is notable mainly for the radicalness of the change and the ease with which Apple pulled it off.

12. The Apple ///. Significant isn't always good, and the Apple /// is the unfortunate example of that. Apple's first concentrated foray into the business market, the /// suffered from marketing and technical decisions that almost instantly relegated it to trivia status. Most famously, it suffered from overheating issues rumored to be caused by Jobs' mandate that it have no vents for aesthetic reasons. The solution to this problem - as suggested by Apple no less - was to lift the computer up 2-3 inches and drop it on your desk to reseat any chips that had become loose due to the heat. As a side note, I'd give my left nut to own an Apple ///+. :-)

11. The QuickTake. Apple introduced this digital camera in 1994, at the very genesis of the digital camera age. The first color digital camera for under $1000, it is one example of many where Apple pushed the envelope of technology years before it became popular. I don't believe there was a consumer mass-market camera that predated the QuickTake, although I could be wrong.

10. The Newton. The first consumer-level mass-market PDA (Apple even coined the PDA term), this predated the Palm Pilot by 3 years. "Eat up Martha!"

9. The Apple Computer-1, aka the Apple 1. Apple's first product, and the first personal computer to support a keyboard and monitor.

8. AIrport. Apple pushed wireless networking into the mainstream with the Airport. The first product of its kind, the Airport provided Mac users with wireless networking for a full year before similar products were made for Windows PCs.

7. Mac OS X. A radical reworking of the OS, it provided excellent backwards compatibility while being almost a total rewrite under the hood. The first release was a little rough, but there's no denying its speed and strength today.

6. The iMac. The iMac started the trend of dramatically simplifying Apple's product line, making a PC that focused on style and reinvigorating Apple's fortunes as a company. The iMac's stylistic impact was felt across the industry almost immediately, as other makers and peripherals rushed to come out in "colors" and stick an "i" on front of the name of their products. The iMac also single-handedly jumpstarted the USB spec as a major player by virtue of having no legacy peripheral support, thus requiring USB. Many USB peripherals shipped in "Bondi Blue" for the first few years after the iMac's inception, even for PCs.

5. The Disk II. The first mass-market floppy drive for a PC, this went hand-in-hand with the Apple II to deliver fast, reliable storage for home computers in a time of cassette tapes.

4. The iPod. One of Apple's most popular and most profitable products, it ignited the mp3 player industry and leads the field today, 5 years after its introduction.

3. The Laserwriter. This single-handedly started the desktop publishing industry.

2. The Macintosh. It's hard to overstate the importance of what the Macintosh brought to mass-market computing. It gave us a GUI for the masses, and did so with style and relative affordability. That the operating system and product line persist today is a testament to this.

1. The Apple II. This was the computer that ignited the home computer market in 1977 and showed that there was not only a demand for an easy-to-use, expandable and capable PC, but one that had staying power. The II's descendant, the Apple //e, was finally removed from Apple's price lists in 1993. That's a life span of 16 years for this family.

Posted by bradman at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)