I’m still waiting to get a decent, non-windy weekend to go up north before Fall.  It ain’t looking promising.

Since 9/11, I don’t travel nearly as much as I used to.  It’s not because I worry about terrorists or that the cost has changed. It’s because air travel has become such a hassle.

If you travel once or twice a year, the process for getting from the terminal to the airplane may not be that big of a deal.  But if you’re a frequent traveler, it’s a royal pain.

For me, the biggest problem is airport security. I absolutely hate having to take off my shoes and having to take my laptop out of my laptop bag.  While they have recently introduced special laptop bags for airports, they are so impractical as to be useless.

Would it really be that hard to come up with a way so that people don’t have to take off their shoes or put all their stuff into tons of little trays in order to get through security?  One has to wonder how many billions of dollars are lost each year because of the accumulated decrease in air travel by people like me.

Greetings!  I’m currently at PAX, getting ready to head back.  New builds have been coming in from GPG. 

Right now, they’re trying to get the replays nailed down.  I also asked about a number of player requests such as Torcher Bearer casting when running (the answer on that is that he’s not intended to be able to do that be design – some people will obviously disagree but there’s the answer).

Some exploits have been addressed that I won’t get into here.  I won’t give an ETA since the build is in internal beta and it’s hard to guestimate how long it will take to eliminate bugs and such in order to make is public.

The mod handling is also pretty advanced in this build but there are some security features that have to be in to help avoid some malicious mods that we’re looking to put in before that goes out.

The two new Demigods look pretty good. The visual quality is absurdly good.  The demon assassin is definitely something that I think will be very useful in a team based game.  I’ll try to get some screenshots up shortly.

It was great being at PAX and meeting many of you. It’s nice to hear a lot of positive feedback on the game since sometimes, reading the forums, you tend to get a…specific demographic of players that aren’t necessarily representative of the wider Demigod player base.

More to come shortly.

We’re on the last day of PAX.  If you want to get into the beta, you can still do so by pre-ordering it.  After the beta goes out, the beta will be closed to new users until next year.

Note: The beta will NOT be fun. These are real betas. The game mechanics are only partially implemented and subject to radical change based on player suggestions.

I can’t even begin to express how much fun I’ve had at PAX talking to other gamers. It’s been great meeting other gamers!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574387021307651050.html

Hilarious article in which a doctor turns the table on lawyers when it comes to “reform”.

If you have friends to play with on the Internet, then playing online is probably pretty fun. That’s how I play whenever I can.

But when you’re stuck playing with strangers, well, that’s when things go bad.  Ready to Play is being designed to solve some of this.  Mostly people will talk about its chat or matchmaking but what I think really makes it special is the recommended friends broadcasting.  That is, you say what kind of gamer you are and it will find other people like you.

My own preferences on gaming are different from say a 13 year old.  I was up at my cottage and some friends of the family were there with their 13 year old son who had apparently been banned from L4D.  The kid, in real life,is a nice kid.  But online, he’s a griefer of the worst kind.  I talked to him about his griefing and it became apparent that he just didn’t think about it. No empathy once he gets on that computer about the people behind the screens.

I remember when my 7 year old son and I were playing WoW together. His idea of playing the game was to go and fish and then go to the spawn areas and give people fish. His idea of what the game was about was pretty foreign to me but I thought cute.  Cute. But not compatible with what I’d want to have in my Raid party.

A 38 year old father of 3 with very limited amounts of time to play TF2 or Demigod (two of my favorites) and thus has a very different attitude towards what constitutes having a good time than someone who might have more time to play.  I could care less about the stats so I want to avoid playing with people who only care about getting that win stat.

So it’ll be interesting to see how this catches on.  So far, the biggest winner in internal testing of Ready to Play has been older games whose communities are largely gone with just a few hard core players left who don’t always welcome rusty old players back.

For years I thought I understood what causes heart attacks. The arteries narrow due to cholesterol build up and such until they get so blocked that eventually a blood clot gets stuck and voila.

While that does happen, apparently in most cases apparently it’s inflammation that does us in.  Specifically, cholesterol and such coat the arteries which then get covered by the body’s natural defense. Eventually, this will swell a bit and burst, releasing a substance that causes the blockage right then.

I don’t have the book in front of me as I write this on the plane but that’s the gist of what I got out of it.

So how do you avoid heart disease? The advice given is largely the same.  Keep your HDL high (over 60) and your LDL low (under 120) and your total cholesterol under 160. 

Or in other words, don’t do what Brad does: HDL is only 39, LDL is 179, and total cholesterol is 278.  So my blog may have its problems but the problem is going to go away…

Anyone who regularly reads my blogs knows that my views on the world are all over the place.  Not a week has gone by over the past decade or so that someone hasn’t contacted us saying they will never purchase something from my employer because I, being said employer’s CEO, offended them with something I said.

I have no doubt that over the years, my blogs, comments, writings, what have you have cost our company thousands of dollars because I take those people at their word.  So why not just create an alias?

I haven’t been able to come up with a rational or principled reason that is satisfying other than simply “because I don’t want to.”  I don’t have a problem with people who decide not to buy a product or service for any reason. I may think it’s stupid but it’s their money.

I suppose those same people should be thankful I don’t take the same attitude when hiring employees or contractors since most of them probably disagree with me on many issues.  Heck, whenever I go on a media tour, our PR rep and I debate politics on almost every issue while we drive to appointments. We do so because it’s enjoyable which is the same reason I like to post about this stuff as me and not as some alias.

In the end, many personality traits are double-edged.  My intensity about doing what I want to do is largely what built the company i the first place.  At the same time, it has the side effect that some people won’t like me doing what I want.

When JoeUser first started, we had the concept of audiences where we could have a friends list and decide who could see our posts.  This system became very database intensive once we decided, after the fact, to integrate blog posts and forum posts together to optimize the overall database performance.

The problem, however is that there are posts that one would make for family and friends and ones for the general public.  As I’ve learned the hard way since the change over, public scrutiny can be a pain.

For instance, everything from pictures of my house to my views on federal tax payer funded health insurance has started getting increasing scrutiny. 

To people on the outside, I seem to be becoming more of a public figure.  This has been hard to reconcile with the lifelong habit of seeing myself as someone who grew up pretty poor and being a fairly obscure software developer.  

So one of the features we’re bringing back is going to be the integration of posts being viewable by friends or public. You won’t be able to make the custom audiences per post anymore but at least you can decide whether that picture of your kid is something you want “the whole world” to see.

So if you’re noticing some of my posts being “gone” from this moment, it’s not that they’re gone, it’s that they’re only available to be read by friends and family.