For those of you in the beta, you're going to be pleasantly surprised (we hope) with beta 2 which is due out right after we get back from E3. It has an entirely new user interface with a lot more usability integrated in. We also are starting to flesh out the AI so that it'll be a more playable game.
Most of the main features of the game won't show up until the end of summer (star bases, debris, fleet battles, enhanced graphics, etc.) but beta 2 should hopefully show the direction we're heading.
Our goal is to make a strategy game that doesn't just look good but is as playable as possible. We want the game to always be center stage and your interaction with it to be seamless.
If you've never been to IMDB, check it out. It's a fantastic way to find out if a movie is any good. I generally avoid any movie that gets less than a 7.
Here are my ratings on various movies from over the years:
I've been playing with a new program called Face Filter Studio. It lets you get rid of blemishes and red-eye from your photos. But it also has various effects to allow you to do..things to your pictures. So for fun, I decided to see what I could do to some pictures of my family. If I don't write again for awhile, it's because my wife has killed me. Don't believe any stories you may hear, she killed me! 
Alien Alex
Alien Ryan
Piggy Ryan and Fat Ryan
Oh this year's Christmas letter is going to be really fun..heh heh.
I've been to Disney World 3 times. The first time I stayed at the Contemporary Resort. The second time we stayed at Fort Wilderness Lodge. This time we opted to go with the Polynesian Resort.
The resort is not a single hotel but a series of small buildings that surround a larger building that houses restraunts, shops, etc. It is well maintained and sits on the lagoon that is directly across from the Magic Kingdom.
Guests can reach the Magic Kingdom by boat or the Monorail. Similarly, they can reach the Epcot center through the monorail as well. Other Disney parks can be reached by buses which come frequently.
The staff and service quality at the hotel was top notch. Everyone we interacted with was friendly and courteous and helpful. The restraunts there (with one exception which I'll get to) server outstanding quality food with good service and the prices not out of line with other similar restraunts on the Disney properties (which means they're overpriced but not ridiculous).
We opted for the "concierage" section of the resort which provided us with a room facing the lagoon and therefore facing the nightly fireworks and electric boat parade. We also had a faux-beech that came up to our room as well. The concierge building has a large room that has "free" snacks, mini-meals, and drinks from 8am to 10pm daily. The food and drink are pretty good stuff too. This is particularly true in the evening where various wines, liquors, cognac, and more are set next to very high quality deserts of various kinds. Since you can take food with you and much of it is portable, guests are encouraged to "stock up" before their trips to the parks with goodies which can save quite a bit given the gouge-level prices found at food stations at the parks.
Of course, all this comes with a price, namely $700 per night. Not cheap by any means. What you are paying for is the convenience of always having quick-good quality food at the hotel, great scenerey, and easy convenient access to all the parks. I suspect the final element is the biggest part of all since no other resort has as quick access to all the parks at the Polynesian.
That said, I don't think Disney gives guests enough bang for the buck. $700 per night is an incredible sum. And on top of that, it, like Disney's parks themselves, seem to be incredibly blatant about gouging its customers. "Captain Cook's" restaurant is a good example. A hamburger (not even McDonald's level) at Captain Cook's is $6. Come on. My wife and two young sons spent over $30 on a very low-grade, "dinner" our first night that consisted of a warmed up pizza, a hamburger, a chicken sandwich (a piece of chicken and a bun), and some chicken fingers. This is a meal that would normally cost about half as much anywhere else. They're already charging a premium for the hotel, how they justify such blatant gouging is beyond me and left a pretty negative impression with us.
Secondly, the rooms themselves are incredibly small. Smaller than a typical Day's Inn room. Two queen beds with a 13 inch TV and a small table and tiny bathroom is all our $700 per day got us in terms of a room.
Thirdly, there's no high-speed Internet access. That part really surprised me. Even fairly low-end hotels offer Internet access. What is the Polynesian's excuse? And not to be too conspicuous here but anyone who can afford $700 per night probably is someone who needs to be able to keep some eye on what's happening at work.
Fourthly, Disney is a paper mouse. That is, throughout the parks and resorts Disney's "cast members" state various rules such as no flash photography, no eating and drinking, etc. But inevitably, some people do just that and the rules are never enforced. So those who choose to ignore the rules prosper.
But what really got us at the Polynesian was that we were on a no smoking floor and the people next to us were smoking like crazy in their rooms. Given the size of these rooms, our room by the end of the evening was so smokey that you could see the smoke hovering around the room. Now I wasn't 100% positive it was the people next door (i.e. not enough to pound on ther doors) but sure enough to ask the Concierge to see if they could check on it and if they were certain, to "remind" them that they're on a no-smoking floor. But they did nothing. They said "There's not much we can do, if they're breaking the rules that's very rude of them but there's not much we can do.." Oh? What about enforcing the damn rules! We were pretty flabberghasted by the whole thing. It definitely tainted our experience.
Fifthly, the pool was fairly mediocre overall relative to other resorts I've been to. And there's no hot-tub whatsoever. Moreover, in keeping with the Disney tradition, the pool-side bar provided drinks at vastly inflated prices that were quite sub-par in quality.
Now, if I sound like I'm down on the Polynesian, I'm not saying it's a bad place. But at the $700 per night level, it's competing against some pretty incredible places. For 7 nights, that's about $5,000. So the bar is raised pretty high. So overall, while it's a decent hotel, it's really not anywhere near as good as it should be to justify the premium price point. That said, the "Garden Room" view rooms are only $300 per night and at that level, given its proximity to the parks, it's more competitive. But anything beyond that is not worth it in my opinion.
Overall: 3 out of 5.
Going to Disney World may be hazardous to ones health. When our family went to the magic kingdom, I weight 161 pounds. This morning, I weighed 168 pounds. I admit, we..I..ate a lot. I had hoped all the walking would work it off and it is possible that building some muscle in my legs from walking contributed some to that weight.
Oh well, either way, time for better diet and excercise..
I finally bit the bullet and had custom LASIK done to both my eyes. The procedure was performed by Dr. D.C. Fiander of the Farmington Laser Eye Center.
It was not an easy decision to have this procedure done. I had spent a great deal of time researching the pros and cons on LASIK, PRK, Custom LASIK along with other methods to improve vision.
Since I work in front of the computer all day, my eyes are very important to me so weighing the potential side effects from such a procedure was key in my decision. For the past near 20 years, I've been wearing contacts. And glasses for years before that. My vision was bad. Very bad. 6.5 in my right eye and 5.25 in my left. I also have some astigmatism. For those of you who aren't familiar with these numbers it means that without glasses and contacts that am disabled. I couldn't function without glasses or contacts because my vision was so bad that I could only make out shapes.
For years I've hesitated in having this sort of thing done on my eyes. I didn't like glasses and contacts but I just don't like the idea of people messing with my eyes. And let's face it, as annoying as those things are, they are preferable to taking a chance on permanently damaging ones vision.
So I did a lot of research. The Usenet news groups weren't helpful because the main group seems to be populated by a handful of kooks telling horror stories that just didn't match up with anything I'd read elsewhere (and it was only a couple of people who seemed to have some agenda). There were numerous websites that gave clinical information on it and told me of the benefits and potential pitfalls of the procedure.
But I learned the most from talking to other people who had had the procedure and all were very happy with it. But still, I was just not willing to go in and have someone do things to my eyes. I was just too squeamish.
But then this summer I was at a wedding reception on the other side of the state when I got something in my eye while there. I was wearing contacts so this was a big deal. Taking them out meant being basically blind. That was my turning point. I travel a great deal and I'd reached a point where I simply didn't want to mess around with contacts and glasses knowing that if something unforseen happened that I could be left totally helpless. Whether it be a business trip or vacation or whatever, the idea that I could be left essentially disabled due to a lost contact or broken glasses became unacceptable. The logistics train of having to bring extra everything "just in case" exceeded my tolerance threshold.
So I made an appointment at Dr. Fiander's. He was someone that some friends had recommended and went for an evaluation. There are two types of LASIK available these days. The regular LASIK and Custom LASIK which uses Wavefront technology to have the changes be more customized to your eyes.
The Custom LASIK costs more and is somewhat more invasive, has a slightly longer recovery time. But it has a higher statistical likelihood of giving good results.
My vision with glasses and contacts wasn't particularly good. In my case, I saw 20/40 with glasses and 20/60 with contacts. So anything that equaled that or bettered it was an improvement.
The first step was the consultation. I did that about a month ago. In that, they do a great deal of measurements on ones eye. It was like an optometrist appointment but much more intense. In hindsight, I wish I had asked more questions and received more information from this. For instance, most LASIK centers offer free enhancements for up to a year. I don't know if this is covered or not (and hopefully it won't be relevant to me either way). The price range was on the high side compared to other places I went to but results were my overriding concern. Still, I would expect to be "taken care of" in the event that I do need further enhancements later on.
I also would have liked to find out things like my Corneal thickness, corneal steepness, pupil's in dim light,, tear break up, and other pupil measurements. Essentially, for helping my research for myself after the consultation it would have been nice to be given a copy of the results so that I could assure myself that I was a good candidate for this procedure. I am confident of Dr. Flander's view on this but it would have been handy to have this information for my own peace of mind. I'll probably mention this to him on my next appointment as a suggestion.
Another suggestion I would have would have been to receive a print out on all the equipment. There are several different types of lasers and several different wavefront systems available. I recall hearing that they use the Excimer laser with LadarWave which would make it Alcon's "LADARVision CustomCornea". My right eye is at around 6.5 to 7 so it was at the very edge of what this system can correct (according to the FDA). But I could be wrong on this (hence why it would have been handy to receive a bit more data on this). Because it could also be the Technolas 217 Excimer laser with add-ons that supposedly give better results. I will ask more on this in follow-up exams.
So about a month after the consultation (October 22) I went in the Custom LASIK.
It took about 2 hours from the time I went in. Most of that time is in preparation. They take close up topical pictures of your eye. This was not pleasant because with custom LASIK they have to take a picture of the entire eye ball which involves having a nurse holding your eye lids open just right (which took awhile to get right).
Then they dilate your eyes. Once your eyes are dilated, they come in and put some numbing drops and use a special pen to draw dots on your eyes (very weird stuff). A few minutes after that they took me in and had me lay down on this table where you rest your head under this machine. It seems to be totally computerized -- complete with computerized voice telling you what % of the procedure is complete.
They started with my right eye and I won't lie, I experienced quite a bit of discomfort. About the same level as getting a shot for getting a cavity filled (not excruciating but not comfortable). You hear the computer say "acquired" and then apparently a little blade comes and slices a very thin flap of your eye surface that is pealed back for the laser machine to do its thing. For the next minute and a half, the laser does its thing while you stare at a red blinking light. I didn't really feel pain but the longer it did its thing the more heat I could feel in my right eye. I did feel a distinct burning sensation when the right eye was being worked on.
A minute later they did the same to my left eye which was easier for some reason. When they were done they put some anti-biotic drops in my eyes, some steroid compound drops and gave me some drugs to make me go to sleep and sent me home (my wife drove me home).
When I went home, I went to bad and slept for about 10 hours. I got up the next day and I can instantly see the massive improvement. It's not yet nearly as good as glasses or contacts but that is to be expected they say as my eye has to heal. Mostly it has to do with fluid in my eye and such that should go away over the coming weeks.
So am I glad I did this? The jury is out. It depends on how recovery goes. I expect in the next couple of days I'll have a pretty good idea. There's no doubt in my mind that my vision is far better than it was. But as the literature said, for the first 72 hours after the procedure I can expect halos and other light refraction issues which I am experiencing. It is also hard to read close up things right now which I am told is normal and will work itself out in the next 72 hours.
Day 2: The glare has gotten considerably better. So I can read pretty well at this point. My first concern that's come up though is that my right eye's vision is significantly less defined than my left. I don't know if this is something I can expect to change or not.
Basically my right eye's vision is slightly garbled. Imagine the letter S where a second letter S is superimposed on top of the first S but just a few milimeters above the lower S so that you have an almost double letter S going. The left eye is completely sharp.
I've not found very good resources on the net yet to find out whether this is normal or not. After all, it's only been 48 hours. I won't worry too much for another week or so. But right now, while my left eye is basically perfect, my right isn't so great. Reading text and such, distance or near, is very indistinct.
Day 3: Halos and glare decrease. My eyes are fairly comfortable at this point. I'm quite pleased with my left eye but my right eye isn't quite as good. It seems to have a moderate case of monocular diplopia. I am hopeful that over the coming weeks as it heals that this will clear up. I'm currently seeing about 20/30 in my left eye and 20/50 in my right eye. This is still better than contacts and once the "glow" effects from light and such dissipate over the coming weeks I expect to be quite happy. Though I am hopeful that my right eye will improve as it heals (I am left eye dominate fortunately).
Week 1: Still have some halos. The world is still vaguely like looking at the Sky Captain and the World of tomorrow. Left eye feels good. Right eye still feels a little tender. Vision in left eye is about 20/25. Vision in right eye has improved to probably 20/45 at this point. It's still noticeably less clear than my left eye. I'm not sure if that's due to it being less fully healed or what. Eyes do get fatigued quite easily. But overall, I'm still pretty happy about things. Not having to wear contacts or glasses is very nice. I expect the halos and overall glowy effect of everything to subside (basically with every light source big or small giving a glow effect it does make the world look a bit odd).
I'm having to put various drops into my eyes. Anti-biotics and steroid drops 4 times per day and about the same # of times for "refresher" (wettening) drops. The left eye needs it a lot less than my right eye. I don't get star bursts which was one side effect I read others having on the net. So I'm happy about that.
Will keep reporting.
Week 3: Night vision is still problematic because light sources give of a large halo (glow around the light source). My vision is about 20/30 overall at this point. But it's 20/50 in my right eye. Overall, i don't see as well as I did with my glasses but I see better than I did with my contacts.
Eyes do get dry quite a bit but it's getting better. There is still a significant haze in my vision largely due to the reflection of light off of surfaces. I have not found that to have improved yet.
Overall, I'm pleased with the results but I am thinking I may need them to tweak it.
2 Months:
I've become more pleased with the results over time. I see about 20/20 out of my left and 20/25 out of my right. Overall I see 20/20 at this point.
One of the things that I've been told is that CUSTOM LASIK, as opposed to regular LASIK does have a longer recovery time. I wish this had been stressed to me at the time as I wouldn't have been as concerned with the results early on. Most of the articles I've read on-line deal with plain old LASIK.
I still experience dry eyes, something I didn't before. But it seems to get better by the day. I am still getting a significant halo affect but that too is improving over time. I think I'll have a better idea in another month or so. Overall, I'm quite pleased with the results at this point.
6 Months later:
Very pleased with the results. The halos are gone or at least so much subdued that I can't notice it. My eyes do get dry sometimes so I carry some re-wetting drops with me. But it's pretty minor.
We recently went on a trip to Disney and it was wonderful because I didn't have to lug around contact stuff or glasses (or both). And I can definitely see better than I did with glasses/contacts so I could definitely appreciate the difference.
WinCustomize provides the means for users to create their own personal blog sites where they can write about anything they want, show off their skins and themes, share their favorite stuff, and for subscribers, be able to put up a personal photo album.
For the month of April, these are the most popular personal pages on WinCustomize along with how many visitors they received:
| 1. | adam.wincustomize.com (237,460) |
| 2. | Pixtudio.wincustomize.com (205,342) |
| 3. | stevegrenier.wincustomize.com (76,677) |
| 4. | mormegil.wincustomize.com (54,273) |
| 5. | jairob.wincustomize.com (45,105) |
| 6. | frogboy.wincustomize.com (32,323) |
| 7. | filkose.wincustomize.com (26,600) |
| 8. | adni18.wincustomize.com (25,864) |
| 9. | tiggz.wincustomize.com (25,431) |
| 10. | yangge.wincustomize.com (21,299) |
Incidentally, you can see my photo album by going here:
http://frogboy.wincustomize.com/photos.aspx?SID=5&UID=1
p.s. You may have noticed that the personal pages are now very fast. We've just finished implementing a new caching technology that enables the personal pages to be as fast as static pages but have dynamic content.
If you decide you want to finish your basement there are lots of options to consider. Do you do it yourself? Do you contract it out? Maybe do a little in between? For me and my wife, we just aren't handy enough to try to finish a basement on our own. So we decided we'd contract the whole thing out.
Once you decide you're going to contract it out, then it's a matter of deciding what direction to take with it. Do you go with drywall? The problem with drywall is that it takes months to put in (how long do you want contractors going in and out of your house?). It makes a lot of mess (expects months if not years of drywall dust to be floating around your house), it's susceptible to damage from a wide range of sources (water, normal wear and tear due to it being in a basement). So we wanted our basement finished but drywall had a lot of negatives to it.
That's when we heard about the Owens Corning Basement System. After intense negotiations, we had it done. And below you can read about our experiences during the sales process, installation, and after effects. I hope you find it useful.
The Owens Corning Basement System has been in place now for our basement for about a month now so I've had time to get used to it.
The project went pretty smoothly except for a few hiccups that I'll talk about here. So what's the verdict? Here are the things I really liked about it:
The big thing for us though was the speed of it. My first basement was done with dry wall and I have no regrets about that. It was nicely done. But it took months to do and over a year for the house to stop having more dust in it than before. The dry wall dust simply gets everywhere.
If you're as unhandy as me, then you likely want contractors to do pretty much all the building. It can be uncomfortable having strangers in your house for months. In contrast, the Owens Corning Basement System was installed in our roughly 1100 to 1200 square foot area in about 2 weeks (closer to 10 days).
In short, I was willing to pay a premium to not have to deal with a summer of construction. The fact that it looks nice and can't be damaged easily was a real bonus. My 3 year old already put that to the test by taking a permanent marker to one of the walls. In a few minutes we were able to wipe it off with some bleach and you can't even tell where it was. Contrast that to having to repaint that area with a dry wall basement. Not to mention all the nicks and gouges that would be there due to moving stuff down there.
That said, here are things that I ran into that I didn't like that you should be aware of:
I really didn't like the sales strategy of their sales people. High pressure combined with little specifics created a lot of headaches during the project.
First off, people who can afford to pay a premium for their basement being done aren't fools. Even so, they used the same tactic on us as they would on some gullible yokel. No offense, but the reason we can afford this stuff is because we have some financial savvy. So don't march into our houses with magazines showing that the "Average" basement costs over $50 per square foot to finish. Because that's nonsense and does more to harm your sale than anything else. Sure, if you're going to have bathrooms and kitchens and tiled areas and wet bars and such it will cost more, but the Owens Corning System doesn't take care of any of that. They just do the "walls", drop down ceiling, electrical, and a few other things. They're not going to build you a bar or tile your floor for you (unless you make a special deal with them). Just for reference, a typical basement done with dry wall with nothing too fancy done shouldn't cost much more than $20 per square foot. Our last dry wall basement cost around $17 per square foot.
The price you should try to get with the Owens Corning Basement System is somewhere between $25 and $35 per square foot. They may balk at $25 but $35 they should certainly take. I paid about $28 per square foot. $30 per square foot would be good. Anything much higher and you're paying too much. Which is why they do the high pressure tactic to get you to sign right there. To the sales guy's horror, I made him sit there while I had my laptop doing net searches on how much other people have paid. By the way, be aware that most states do have a law that allow you to back out of contracts within 72 hours. So if they did manage to get you to commit for $55 per square foot or something you aren't up the creek.
The second thing I didn't care for was the amount of vagueness to the agreement. Because of the high pressure sales tactics, the sales guy didn't write down a lot of our specific needs on his "agreement" (which was literally just a 1 page form he hand wrote notes on which I was pretty unhappy about). For instance, we said we wanted padded carpet so he suggested Home Depot. Which we did. But they didn't cut the doors so that they would fit on padded carpet so when we put in the carpeting, we had to take off the doors. It took us 3 weeks to get them to make good on this. They argued it wasn't their responsibility to fix the doors. Nonsense. We told them up front that we were going to get padded carpet. For us to fix would have meant bringing in another contractor. They agreed to fix it only after I made it clear that I would ensure that my experiences with the Owens Corning Basement System would show up high on google. It took the guy 30 minutes to fix it once he dropped by. So they made good but it did mar an otherwise fairly seamless experience.
So make sure that you are clear (and document) exactly what they do and what they expect you to do. The Owens Corning contractors don't tend to do as much as regular full service basement contractors. They weren't planning on putting in our phone and cable lines for example but luckily that was written into that agreement.
Thirdly, the only negative I've run into since putting it in is that it is, contrary to what they said, not that easy to hang things up on the walls. Since they're not drywall, you can't just put in a nail and put stuff up. You have to use special clipper thingies. These work nice on light things. But they didn't give us any samples or directions or order forms to get things for putting up heavier items (like a big white board for example). This has been a source of some ire since it's turning out not easy to find these "mending plates" in low quantities. Office Max and Staples don't seem to have them. None of the hardware stores we've looked at have them. I've looked on the net and I can buy them in quantity (like 1000 at a time) but I only need like 5. My suggestion is to insist that they provide you with 100 of the t-pins (small stuff) and 100 mending plates (big stuff) as part of the agreement.
Fourthly, this gets back to the "customers are suckers" sales pitch. The sales guy and his materials really went hard on the mold scare tactic. Mold is definitely something not to blow off. But it should not be your motivating factor to spend a third again as much on a basement. Would you pay $15000 more on your house for a "lightning strike resistant" design? The kinds of houses most people who would put this stuff in are usually newer and on the premium side. The basements, in short, don't get wet very easily. That isn't to say they shouldn't mention mold, but it should be more of a "bonus" feature rather than as the principle selling point.
Now that it's all done, I'm pretty happy with it. I like knowing that I won't have to mess around with painting or touching up the basement in a few years. I do wish it was easier to modify with other things. For instance, I can't just build out a bar from it. But that is no biggie really. The basement does what it was supposed to do. And even better, since I want to have a theatre down there eventually, it's got incredible acoustics. If you have the money and are more interested in having your basement be finished quickly and cleanly rather than having some incredible basement palace created, this is something you should seriously consider.
Completion date: September 2003.
Update: September 2005: I have created a second article for people who want to share their experiences (good and bad) with the Owens Corning Basement System. GO HERE to discuss.
update: 10/2003 - still pretty happy with the basement. thanks for all your emails. if you have any questions, ask them in the comments area or you can email me at [email protected].
update: 5/1/2005 - still happy with how it's turned out. I get a lot of email on this stuff from people, I don't usually get to answer it. But I will say that we are happy with it still. It absorbs sound. But I maintain that the main reason to get it is that you want to save time. If you don't mind having people working on your basement for 6 to 10 weeks and the drywall dust and other dirt that is inevitable with dry-wall then get the dry-wall. But for me, having it all over in a week or so was the key and no mess afterwards.