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.

Pain. So much pain.  PC Gamer schools Stardock at Demigod.  There is something…wrong with that.

From left to right.  Leo (Father Oak), Brad (Frogboy), Akil (Akil).  Getting ready to play some Demigod online today.

I’m thinking we should get rid of the “skirmish” mode.  Very few people use it and it only serves to divide the community.

Instead, Pantheon would become the focus of ranked games and help build a larger base of players for it.  But in order to do that, we have to deal with the problem of hyper-competitive people who quit games on start if they don’t get the person they want to play with.

So I was thinking that on pantheon games, once someone disconnected more than 3 times and it’s greater than 10% of the games in the first 5 minutes that those games would count as a loss for that player.  Same for custom games too.

What do you think?

Going through the camera today and found this great shot of the kids.  My daughter is the little blond on the set and my son is the little boy. Around them are their cousins up at the cottage.  Ah, this is what summer was made for!