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.

I can’t believe I’ve had my ThinkPad T400 a year (or pretty much a year).

I love it.  Let me be clear about that: I’m IN love with it.  The romance continues. Best laptop ever.

Let me count the ways:

1. It’s light.  I don’t need a super fast laptop but it has to be decently beefy so that I can at least demo games and applications on it.  But I want it light. Less than 4 pounds ideally. The T400 is pretty light.

2. Trackpoint. Why do I buy ThinkPads? I need the trackpoint. Fine, others love the touchpad. I can use them but I prefer that the trackpoint.

3. 64-bit with 8GB of RAM.  Not really specific to the T400 but for those of you who have 32-bit Windows, move to 64-bit as soon as possible and get at least 6GB of memory. The difference in performance is massive due to disk caching.

4. SSD.  Again, not specific to the T400 here but this helps with performance significantly over the included drive. I got the Intel X25 which is very fast.  I would go with the RAM before the SSD but one thing about laptops that drives me crazy, especially with Vista, is that you boot up but you’re not really ready to work, the hard drive crunches forever – until you get that SSD and then that goes away.

It’s not cheap I will grant that. But given how much work I do on it, it’s well worth it for me.

Let’s say one day the public voted in politicians who vowed for the top 1% of income earners to have 100% of their income paid in as taxes. Would this be slavery?

Those people could move to another country. Those people aren’t in chains. So would this be oppressive?

I think we could agree it would be counterproductive to the economy but that’s not the question. Would it be slavery or oppressive? What do you think?

I’m on the plane on my way to Seattle so i don’t have the book in front of me but I’m reading an interesting book by the same author of the Singularity who outlines his belief that if we can live until around 2024 that we’ll enter an age where dying becomes very rare.

His position is that between now and 2024 we’ll reach a level of biotechnology where the big killers – cancer and heart disease will be well on their way out thanks to our exponentially increasing understanding of our living systems.

The reason he makes this case is that his believes, and makes a pretty good case for it, that in the last decade or so we have moved  from medical “discovery” to medical “design”.  That is, thanks to the vast information technologies we have today that are growing non-linearly that we are quickly coming to understand the specifics on what causes diseases and create molecules that deal with them.

I’m not sure about whether we’ll have that by 2024 since cultural and governmental roadblocks will likely slow down the process.

But everything he mentions seems pretty doable such as drugs that target cancer steam cells, being able to grow cloned tissues, drugs that are much more targeted towards specific diseases because we now have the ability to make these substances rather than discovering them out in nature and see what they do.

After 2024, things begin to migrate to nanobots being injected into us that take care of our bodies far better than anything else. Maybe the borg were on to something after all.

So the trick is living until 2024.  I’ll get to that next.

My wife and I have started taking our 3 year old to a new activity called “Tiny monkeys” that lets kids learn to tumble and jump and do all kinds of neat, fun things. 

I have to say, being a dad is definitely the funnest thing I’ve ever done.  Watching our tiny monkey running about the house (yesterday, she was saying she was a cat, the day before she said she was a sheep saying “Baaah” all the time). 

I’ll be giving some demos of Elemental this week at PAX.  Visit http://pax.stardock.com for an official schedule.

The 30 minute presentation will be broken into two parts.  The first part will talk about the game itself.  What our goals are. Inspirations for the game (Master of Magic, XCom, Civilization, etc.) and what makes Elemental new and different.

Here are some in-game screenshots.

As pretty as this is, the thing to remember here is that this can be run on a 2 year old laptop (non gamer laptop) and still look like this with 30fps.  How this this possible? Well, part 2 will talk more about the technology underneath Elemental that is new but in short: a 3D engine designed from scratch as a PC-only engine for land based strategy games (as opposed to FPS).

Full free camera to zoom in to see little people or zoom out and see the world in a single motion.  When I visited the game magazines, a comment that kept coming up is that I was able to demo this on my ThinkPad T400. No slouch but certainly not a gaming laptop.

When you zoom in, it almost looks like some sort of role playing game.  But as the demo will demonstrate, that’s intentional – your role is the sovereign of one of the kingdoms that you and your friends used to wreak havoc in when you played D&D or Fantasy Hero or what have you. 

Zooming out a little bit shows that cities aren’t icons on a map but grow based on your decisions.  The land is fully morphable via magical spells (Which I’ll be demoing).

More to come…

Yesterday Stardock and PC Gamer played a best of 3 series of Demigod where PC Gamer trounced us both games.  The video above was taken at the Stardock offices so you could see what was happening on our end.

So what happened?

The PC Gamer team, made up of editor Dan Stapleton, Evan Lahti, and Norman Chan (also at Maximum PC) displayed a level of expertise that I must confess blew us away. 

Their strategy was to control the map from the outset through flag locks.  This requires spending money on flag locks early but allows them to use teamwork (with teleportation scrolls) to pick the place and time of any serious confrontation. 

Our counter-strategy,which failed, was to try to control the life flag with 2 Demigods with our third protecting the tower on the other side while we slowly built up.  Our strategy was predicated on not getting killed and staying conservative for the early part.

But here’s where things fell apart for us: The PC Gamer team, with Dan as the Vampire Lord, Norman as Unclean Best and Evan as Oak worked as a single tactical unit which was far more flexible than our brute force strategy. Because they controlled the flags, any time we thought we had one of them on the run, the other two would quickly teleport in. One in front of us and one behind us. Then, Erebus, using his teleportation, would position himself to do a stun, Unclean beast could suck out the life, and then Oak would do the same.

A typical example would be where our 2-man team pushing on the life flag side would belief we had Unclean Beast cornered. He would begin to back off and our 20 man team would go to follow for the kill. Erebus and Oak would teleport in with Oak shielding Unclean beast, Erebus stunning us and Unclean best turning around and starting to do serious damage. then Oak and Erebus would cut off our escape. If we were lucky, we would escape the field to recharge ceding control of the map for crucial moments. All too often, however, one of us would die.

The number of times the PC Gamer team was able to coordinate a tactical push was impressive. By contrast, our team was focused on a global strategy.  My Erebus was focused not on stun but bite and minions and thus not much of an asset on team-based tactical exchanges.

The result were 2 losses to the PC Gamer team.  It was a total blast though and a lot of fun was had by all.