Blinkymach12

Features versus Benefits

2009-11-08T16:02:00.001-08:00

I’ve heard of featuritus, but never benefititus.

Again and again, I’ve heard the mentality of “we need more features, because features are what sell.” This is easy to think of, think about, and dwell on. It’s qualitative. It’s also easy to get wrong.

There exists a market for lattes. Starbucks is currently making money by selling lattes, and so does Latte Man’s Latte Experience down the street. Starbucks sells a lot more lattes than the Latte Man ever will, but Latte Man is growing.

There also exists a market for pumpkin spice lattes. They’re creamy, caffeinated, and taste like the best part of Thanksgiving. The Latte Man doesn’t sell pumpkin spice lattes, but Starbucks does, and Starbucks is making money from pumpkin spice lattes.

Herein lies the dilemma. Latte Man, who also happens to be a software engineer and thus thinks like I do, just so happens to follow Joel On Software, and just so happens to have attended Stack Overflow DevDays, and Latte Man agrees with Joel’s mantra of ‘Do one thing, and do it really well.’ So, Latte Man’s latte’s are made exclusively using the AeroPress, and the Latte Experience is divine. Someone seeking the best possible latte, given an informed choice, will choose the Latte Man every single time. But what of the pumpkin-spice latte seeker?

Latte Man Sucks, Starbucks is way better because they have pumpkin spice lattes.

What’s a latte man to do? Well, he could start making pumpkin spice lattes. In fact, let’s go so far as to say that he could dominate the market of pumpkin spice lattes. For the vast majority of the Latte Man’s customers, however, having pumpkin spice lattes is a Feature: It’s a proposed solution to an unrecognized need. For the people who will only ever buy lattes of the pumpkin-spice variety, it’s a benefit (because pumpkin spice lattes are like crack).

For Starbucks customers, pumpkin spice lattes are not a feature, they’re a benefit. Starbucks doesn’t sell lattes, they sell a culture, and part of that culture identifies with the desire to feel special about an overpriced cup of coffee with too much milk, and part of Starbuck’s reinforcement of that culture is to provide a seasonal menu. Their seasonal menu provides them with benefit- the items on it hardly matter.

In a month or so, Starbucks will stop selling Pumpkin Spice Lattes, and start selling Eggnog Lattes.

Should the Latte Man sell eggnog lattes? Gingerbread lattes? Peppermint lattes? No, because these are features. Give me less choices, latte man, just make me an awesome latte. Give me a benefit like latte expertise: Invent a ‘Latte of the Day’, write it up on a your chalkboard, and make me smile.

Latte of the Day: White Irishman
”Latte Man, pray tell, what is a White Irishman?”
”Oh-Ho-Ho, it’s a tautology”, he says, “but let me give you a sample!”
”Wow, Latte Man, That IS Good, what’s in this?”
”Irish cream and white chocolate.”
”Superb! Also, marry me!”

Features are things whose need you don’t understand. Excel supports Formula Auditing. I don’t even remotely know what that is, and the fact that I see that feature is actually negative to me. I would prefer Excel if it did not support Formula Auditing. For a Formula Auditor, this is probably a benefit.

Benefits are things whose need you understand. Excel lets me perform page layout prior to printing! I’ve sure never done that before, but I can see why laying out my page could be useful!

Let’s talk about features some more.

A feature is a hack.

Let me tell you about NoteSlab.

NoteSlab is a rich-text editor with a fast and easy startup, tabs, and autosave.

These are benefits, and they’re easy to sell:

- As easy to start typing in as Notepad
- Never bother saving stuff, just type.
- Tabbed browsing for notes keeps them organized. Manage your tabs just like a web browser: Create and destroy tabs with a keystroke, but don’t worry- your destroyed tabs are just hidden, you can bring them back if you ever need to.
~~- Helps you copy your DNA.~~

And then someone wanted to be able to print something, so I added printing. And full-text search. And network synchronization. And more and more Features, and these did nothing to help sell NoteSlab.

Having NoteSlab support printing is a hack.

It’s a customer-service hack: You’ll hate me if I can’t print as well as Microsoft Word? Crap. Well, ok, here, you can print now! They’re happier, but still think you suck relative to Microsoft Word.
It’s a programming hack: Nothing about NoteSlab was designed for printing, and patching it in as an afterthought meant that it wasn’t well done.
It’s a hack because it doesn’t make NoteSlab a better product, it just makes it a little bit better (in a disappointing sort of way) for people who want to print. For everyone else, it’s a feature.

How could this have been a benefit?
Printing in NoteSlab could be special, because NoteSlab contains Notes. In fact, it’s rather like a tabbed notebook, and when people are printing things from a tabbed notebook, they’re probably doing so for the sake of having it in a tabbed notebook. Here’s a benefit that I don’t mind adding to the list:
Easily convert from NoteSlab to real notebook hardcopy

Get rid of the general purpose printing, and get special:
’Print Notebook’
- Print each tab as a separate page (or series of pages), and print the tab name and a tab graphic on the [top/side] of each page, each tab offset from the last.
- When printing, provide wide margins and double spacing for additional note-writing abilities.

This lets you tell NoteSlab to print, and then you can just pick up your notes from the printer, 3-hole-punch them, stick them in a binder, and you have a tabbed binder filled with your notes. Benefit. People would buy NoteSlab because of that.

Wait A Freaking Minute…

I can certainly see why I would want to print some notes, and if I print something cool enough, I copy DNA. Ergo, Printing is a Benefit.

Indeed. So something else is going on here.

I think it’s this:
A poorly executed benefit becomes a feature.

And this is scary, because benefits can be poorly executed at every location that your product / brand / company / dna interacts with a user. Benefits must be conveyed and reinforced, and if they’re betrayed, then they become features.

New York City

2009-09-20T18:13:00.001-07:00

I’m a resident of New York City now- Brooklyn, actually. Next time you see me, I’ll sound really tough, bench 450 lbs, and be able to tell you all about how the best pizza comes from Brooklyn.

Just Kidding.

New York is interesting, though, and the things I’ve come to enjoy about it have been quite different than the things I expected.

Dealing with people everywhere, all the time, isn’t such a big deal. It takes a little while, but I got used to it. The fact that subway platforms can be crowded at 2 AM is really quite comforting. Outside of my apartment, I’m never alone. That’s an odd thing.

The subway is a blessing. Yes, I just said that. I have a 30-minute commute to my office from my house, and 25 minutes of that is spent in the subway system. It’s fantastic. At first, it really wasn’t fantastic, but now it is. It’s fantastic because I have 2 25-minute chunks of my day where I am forced to stand and wait. This gives me reading time. I could easily piss this time away- daydream, listen to music, whatever… but I’ve been able to use this sunk time to reintroduce books into my life. Every weekday, I read for 50 minutes. This means that I generally finish a book a week. I haven’t been at that pace since before high-school. Seth Godin’s books have been getting my attention most recently, but next up is likely to be Kite Runner.

Theatre, art, and music overflow out onto the streets. It’s easy to walk by it, to save a dollar (…or 30) and go about my own ways, but it’s so much more interesting to dive into the random-indie-film-festival that we happen to walk by. For a person desiring adventure, this is a good place to be.

Unlinked Referents

2009-04-14T10:35:00.001-07:00

The tires need to be replaced.
They're no longer acceptable for the purpose of the duck.
He can't fathom why they can't buy the coffee with them.
They won't enjoy it unless it has lots of whipped cream.
It's funny that the coffee have such a strong preference, and he finds that unfortunate.
He prefers them when they float.

The Business Plam

2009-03-31T12:54:00.001-07:00

You’re approaching the podium, and your palms are a little sweaty. The lights are bright. It’s funny how you’re not confident anymore. You decided against queue cards because it’s so much cooler to have memorized your presentation. There’s some manner of slide deck being displayed behind you. You start talking. Things are going according to plan. You’re in control. Awesome. Slide 2. You elegantly convey all you desire. Slide 3-5. People are interested. The time comes to sell your product, your business plan. A couple people giggle- that subtle joke must have worked! You catch a glance at your slide, its concise and critical title: Business Plam.

Feeling a little silly, your train of thought is jarred. What was that point you were going to make? Crap, this isn’t going according to plan… you’re not in control any more. And now you’re uncomfortable. And your voice just cracked. And you stuttered. Crap.

There are two perspectives during a crappy presentation, the audience and the presenter. In a good presentation, there should only be one. Let’s talk about control.

Of my hundreds of occasions speaking to a crowd, I have had perhaps 4 instances of everything going according to plan. More frequently, things went according to plam. For me, planning to be in control is a fallacy. There are people who excel at controlling a crowd, people who move with measured step and speak with graceful tongue, and these people I highly respect. These people, to me, are actors. They are thespians. Despite my occasional aspirations, I am not a thespian, and neither are the vast majority of presenters who I have witnessed. Thespians can stay in control. I, and most likely, you, cannot.

During a good presentation, there is one perspective.

In the theatre, the perspective is that of the presenter. You’re drawn into their world, their mind, and you and them become one. Your thoughts are slave to the speaker, and you are in their control. This works beautifully, but is hard to pull off. Theatricality is a wonderful aspect of any presentation, but so is not sucking.

Another perspective can be that of the audience. That person behind the podium? They’re just a marionette, and you’ve got a front-row seat with popcorn, a noisy neighbor, a fat guy pressed against you, and a set of strings. Be your own audience, and make yourself laugh. Make yourself smile. You don’t need to sell other people your ideas, you just need to sell them to yourself. Hey look, the marionette misspelled ‘plan’'- what dance can we make it do to most please the audience? Pull the strings and reenact Barack- he could make it work, so your puppet can too. This is easier.

I had a high school friend named Asael, or ‘Ace’. He was in most of my presentation-heavy classes, and our approaches contrasted heavily.

I always had a plan. I had many plans. I knew how I wanted my presentations to work, and I knew that they could work beautifully. And every time I was in less than complete control, they didn’t. I wanted to be a thespian, but I wasn’t good enough.

Ace was less formal. His speeches were given with great comedic enthusiasm, and he was quick to laugh at whatever blunders might occur. All things came in stride, and all things remained fluid.

My best presentations were better than his, but not by much. My presentation quality, however, varied wildly, and my worst presentations were useless. His presentations didn’t vary much- If my presentations varied from 0’s to 10’s, he was pretty consistently hitting 8’s.

He taught me that, while control can be powerful, it’s most important to merely be able to laugh at yourself. If you can do that, then your plams will come to fruition.

I’m a Deserter of the Holy Wars

2009-03-30T15:02:00.001-07:00

No, not the Crusades.

Part 1: Suspicion and Allegiances

"You know computers, right?"

"Yeah?"

"Tell me something: What's wrong with Windows Vista?"

“uh… Well, when it was released it didn't have sufficient driver support, and this caused many unhappy compatibility issues. But really, that was to be expected- the same thing happened with XP when it was first released. Otherwise, I'd argue that Vista is better than XP in just about every way."

"I have Vista on my computer, and I hate it. I took a class about computers and the guy kept talking about all this advanced stuff and I couldn't understand him. He kept talking about folders! What's a Folder?!"

At this point I came to realize that her complaints really had nothing to do with Vista, it was just the name that she came to associate with everything that embodied her computer. Google is Vista, for her. She couldn't care less what a driver is, and in fact she'd probably be much happier not knowing.

Microsoft has fought a long and bloody battle to get people to associate computers with Windows, and Windows unlocking all of the great things that a computer can do. Apple is fighting a similar battle. I suspect that many of the people most affected by these campaigns are the people least capable of understanding the consequences of their brand choices.

I hypothesize that branding is a particularly convincing draft officer in the recruiting office for the operating system holy wars.

Consider the newb, eager and experimental. They are easily frustrated when software products fail to meet their mental models, and are frequently frustrated because their mental models of computer software are largely incorrect. They generate statements such as "I love/hate _____ because it sucks/rocks." Seeking affirmation, they google these phrases and find a community of users who have similar sentiments. They also find in this community the tech-savvy members who state more reasons why their opinion is correct. They find their appropriate cult, and their biases are formed. They even preach the gospel which they don't quite understand, "I hate Windows because it doesn't support virtual desktops!", and gradually gain the approval of their cult's luminaries.

A power user is merely a newb matured. Some are agnostic, some are atheist, but many are devout. They have reasons for their choices, but many fall victim to their religious doctrines.

Branding is powerful, any marketing person will agree. I have many brand preferences, and I have many brand insistences. It's easy to keep me completely satisfied with Dial Soap, but software products… not so much.

Part 2: Fear and Loathing

Visual Studio and Eclipse are both awesome, as are Vim and Emacs.

Every programming language sucks, including yours, but the essence is becoming ever more approachable.

Every operating system sucks, but they're getting damn cool.

I would be afraid to work directly for Microsoft, and more afraid to work directly for Google.

Microsoft is interesting to me because of how big, old, and stereotyped it has become. I view Microsoft kind of like I view the United States of America:

Overall, it has drastically improved my life, and there are many aspects of it which are absolutely fantastic. Many excellent people are associated with it, and it does many remarkable things which I would love to be involved in. It's also very, very big. It's so big, in fact, that bad people have snuck in. It's so big that it occasionally has to make decisions to which there is no answer which won't heartily displease many masses of people. It has its own culture, its own history, and its own unique way of existing in the world.

I would be afraid to work for Microsoft because I would be unable to defend it. I could not proudly state that I work for them without fear of rebuke, even though I would personally be delighted by the fact. I'm an engineer, and dreadfully afraid of attack dogs.

I would be afraid to work for Google because of its culture. Google: You are brilliant, and I like you, but I don't want to hang out with you because you pick on the big smelly kid, Mic. I agree that Mic is smelly, but I don't think it's very nice of you to pick on him. I've attended at least a half-dozen of your technical talks / recruiting sessions, and you always bring up the fact that he is smelly. There is a yak growing in your eye.

iGoogle: What The Hell?

2009-03-10T00:03:00.001-07:00

Today, I find this in my iGoogle page:

A brand new chat interface which proudly announces to me that it doesn’t work. The minimize button by it? No, that doesn’t minimize the text. Maybe I can turn it off in settings…

There. There is the toggle. Holy Crap Google, that is the most disgusting toggle UI that I have ever seen. Please tell me, is it standard convention for the bottom item to correspond with the left button, or the right button?

Google… WHAT?!

Windows 7 Beta

2009-01-24T13:40:00.001-08:00

I’ve been using W7 as my core OS for about a week now.

Some highlights:

1. Redesigned Core Applications:

Wordpad, Calculator, Paint, Minesweeper, etc., have all been updated. I find this delightful, especially the Programmer’s Calculator:

2. New core applications:

(some of these require downloads, others are already available in vista.)

These include sticky notes, DVD Creator (which is quite wonderful), and (my favorite) the math input panel.

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

3. Gui and navigation enhancements:

Keyboard shortcuts are a big deal, as are the lack of security notifications. There’s too much for me to tackle writing about, but there’s still no virtual desktops. The new taskbar interface keeps things clean, and the library system makes indexing work better. Full screen previews of minimized items- very good. Here’s a substantial statement:

It’s snappy, clean, and FAST.

4. Compatibility wizard

Remember the compatibility settings which could be set for programs that didn’t quite work right? It’s a wizard now, and it has a decent success rate. This means a lot to me, as I frequently install antiquated games.

5. Bootup time:

Fastest yet, relative to hardware trends.

6. Performance:

Completely owns Vista.

Beta Issues:

Sleep, though overhauled and seeming to work better, doesn’t always properly awaken my SATA hard drive. A cold boot is necessary to recover from this. Also, MSN/Live Messenger spams me when I remove cd’s from my cd drive, but messenger has always had some amount of stupidity attached to it, so this isn’t really new. Aside from those issues, the beta is wonderfully stable. All my drivers and software work just fine.

The only bluescreens I've encountered have resulted from trying experimental WDM drivers.

I encourage all Vista users to upgrade to W7Beta before they stop offering new keys.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx

P.S. Do read the release notes. There’s a trivially correctable bug related to playing music with WMP which can damage your files. Fix that.

FogBugz + iGoogle = Win

2008-10-22T23:51:00.001-07:00

I use the free student edition of FogBugz to manage my relatively busy schedule. It's pretty damn useful.

If you want one, just go to FogBugz.com and create a trial account. Once you're in the trial, go here:

I also use the iGoogle homepage to keep track of the assorted events that are of interest to me.

Until today, my 'homepage' has been set to a two-tab collection: iGoogle, and FogBugz.

But wait! iGoogle has tabs, and can embed RSS feeds! Saved filters in FogBugz can be viewed as RSS Feeds!

This enables the following:

1. My most important filters can live on my homepage!

2. I can have a FogBugz tab which can show me samples of the 9 top items from every filter that I care about(and also provide me with a quick link to FogBugz):

3. I can enter a detailed view of a given filter, thus gaining a complete view:
(…And I can click on the listed items in order to directly open them in FogBugz!)

Sweet.

Wasting Humanity’s Time

2008-08-13T17:45:00.001-07:00

I commute to and from the Fog Creek office via the New York City Subway. It has all of the perks and quirks that you might expect of a massive underground train system.

On my way home today, a women outside of the train blocked the almost-closed doors with her foot and pried her way into the car. This is not normally a remarkable thing- It's abnormal for such happenings to not occur during a subway excursion. What is remarkable, at least from my perspective, is that I had a stopwatch in my hand as this happened, and I now know that she is personally responsible for stalling the train by 22 seconds. Of course, it's possible that there were other people simultaneously blocking other doors, so it's feasible that not all of the time was lost due to her, but for sake of calculation let's make that assumption anyway.

I did a headcount of the people in my car. About 90. There were 7 cars, and it's fair to assume that the population was evenly distributed. About 630 people.

630 people * 22 seconds = 13860 peopleseconds = 231 peopleminutes = 3.85 peoplehours.

If she were to miss the train, presuming the door was not otherwise blocked, the next train would have arrived in < 10 minutes, and she could have entered the train at no additional peopletime cost except for her own. Missing the train would have been over 23 times more efficient for humanity.

As it turns out, every second of subway stall (at 630 people / train), costs humanity 10.5 peopleminutes.

Call it 10. Rush hour is worse by a factor of 4 or so, late night is better. Etc.

In terms of humanity's efficiency, stalling a subway train for 1 second is worse than letting it proceed.

I share the guilt of stalling trains. I've had a door try to close on me before. I've stood in the doorway while a crowd has passed through.
I resolve to do those things no more.

[Television campaign against stalling:]

When you stall public transportation, you stall America.
You know who else stalls America? Terrorists.
Why do you hate freedom?

C# String versus StringBuilder

2008-07-15T09:06:00.000-07:00

When constructing strings in C#, I'd been in the habit of just appending data willy-nilly. I've known this was a bad habit, but I didn't think it mattered much.

For instance, I might write code like:

string s = "";
for (var ix = 0; ix < 100000; ix++)
{
s += ix.ToString();
}
out(s);

This is rather stupid code, but for the sake of argument, that is the way I would normally go about that. The problem with this? C# strings are immutable: every time this happens, a new string object is created based on the combination of 's' and 'ix'.

C# also has a StringBuilder class. I don't know exactly how it works, but I imagine it's some sort of linked list. It is better. I've known that it is better. It involves more typing, so I have not been using it. That same code with a StringBuilder might look like this:

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
for (var ix = 0; ix < 100000; ix++)
{
sb.Append(ix.ToString());
}
out(sb.ToString());

More typing, Right? Thus, I don't want to use that.

Well.. let's actually run this code, with with a cap varying from 100 to 10,000,000
(at 100,000,000, I run out of ram.)

First the StringBuilder.
cap: 100
done sb: 0s
cap: 1,000
done sb: 0s
cap: 10,000
done sb: 0s
cap: 100,000
done sb: 0.0159243s
cap: 1,000,000
done sb: 0.1910916s
cap: 10,000,000
done sb: 2.0064618s

cool.
now the string:

cap: 100
done s: 0s
cap: 1,000
done s: 0.0159243s
cap: 10,000
done s: 0.1114701s
cap: 100,000
- 2+ minutes, unfinished. terminating.-

Hey look, the StringBuilder is drastically faster for large operations. Who would have thought? (that was sarcasm)

So:
In all honesty, for operations under 100 appends, I'm likely to continue just using strings. It is less code, and won't matter. Period.
Better practice: Always use the StringBuilder.
Why I don't? Because "sb += s" is not valid.
Solution? If using .Net 3.5, just append the += method to the StringBuilder class, and have it call Append(value). (It turns out this solution isn't possible: C# extension methods do not permit operator overloading.)

Game Development and Polish

2008-06-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

First, read: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000356.html

Reflecting on this, I'm fairly certain that these dynamics account for the entirety of game development culture up until the moment that the game is being played. If you're watching someone playing the game, I suspect that these elements are still what dominate- you have to play yourself before you can get past them.

I've been considering the assorted games that have been produced by the CU Game Developer's Club, and I realize that the games which have most followed these rules have also received the most praise from our club.

I've considered the ImagineCup entries, both in game development and software design, for 2008, and the winning entries are those which obeyed this.

CU Senior Projects obey this.

Grants submitted to the Engineering Excellence Fund obey this.

Presentation is everything, and I generally hate it. It means that if i were a graphic designer, I could make people like my software more than I can as a computer scientist. So what if it doesn't work- it'll be pretty. So what if mine works- it's not pretty. Hmm.

An excellent partial solution to this is outlined in this short ebook:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html
(yes, also Joel on Software...)

Read this, and ponder. I believe that the production value of any independent programmer would more than double if they can adhere to these principles.

- Jude

Sugar

2008-03-13T17:39:00.001-07:00

For the last week or so, I've been passively pondering sugar content. Actually, it started when Stirling ate a heaping tablespoon of brown sugar. My initial reaction was to think that she was insane, but after a few seconds of reflection, I realized that I had no idea how much sugar that was. I still didn't want any, but it hit me that, in commercial goods, I know about sugar quantities in terms of grams. In cooking, I know about sugar quantities in terms of volume. And so, I've sought to resolve this mental disparity...

As it turns out, based on internet research,
a cup of sugar weighs about 200 grams. (generalizing here... we're probably talking about sucrose. Think refined white sugar. Cane sugar, unrefined sugar, etc., would naturally weigh a little bit more.)
I visualize volume easiest in tablespoons, and there are 16 tablespoons in a cup, so that means that a tablespoon of sugar weighs approximately 12.5 grams.

Wait a minute... 12.5 grams?
There must be something wrong here- I mean, sugar is so sweet, there can't be more than like a half-tablespoon of sugar in a soda.
Checking math...
Checking sources...

Indeed, it seems that a tablespoon of sugar weighs only 12.5 grams.

...

Holy shit.

I had thought Stirling unwise to eat a tablespoon of sugar, but that was only ~12.5 grams of sugar.
The average canned soft drink contains between 30 and 50 grams of sugar...
Her spoonful of sugar is only as sugary as about 1/3 of a can of Coca Cola.
Her sugary snack now seems remarkably acceptable, as much so as, conversely, soft drinks have become remarkably un-.

For the past few years, I've sought to limit my (non-fructose) sugar intake, as it generally serves no beneficial purpose and is largely unnecessary except for as a "treat." It hits me hard, now, that I'm quite a hypocrite-- I'd assumed there'd be no more than perhaps a half-tablespoon of sugar in a common soft drink, and further that that was a lot of sugar. In actuality, nearly a fourth of the volume in most commercial beverages is sugar (often in the form of HFCS).

Stirling, it would appear that you are wiser than I had imagined.

Mentality shift:
- 1. Soda, soft drinks, etc., suck far more than I had previously imagined.
- 2. I can use more sugar in cooking. If I were to increase my cooking-sugar usage by 10-fold, and stop consuming soft-drinks and sugary juices, my sugar intake would still drop by more than half.

Iced herbal teas, FTW.

p.s.,
A handy web-based visualization is located here:
http://education.wichita.edu/caduceus/examples/soda/soda_index.html

Vegan Thoughts

2008-01-27T12:46:00.001-08:00

Via http://www.xanga.com/the_failing_light/638547200/vegan-for-a-week.html, I spent a week attempting a vegan diet + seafood. The purpose of the experiment was to see if I could live as a vegan without significantly altering my lifestyle. My reflections follow.

As for staying true to veganism, I was unsuccessful: I ate a little cheddar cheese on 1/25, and the milk tea I drank on 1/23 might have had milk in it.

Anecdotally speaking, I feel great. Excess energy, waking up earlier, strong… None of this is reliable, as it's feasible to be a placebo effect. Regardless, avoiding meat and dairy seems to be, imho, quite beneficial.

I found that I could indeed become vegan without much of a lifestyle change. The core to it was simply being mindful of what I eat, which is something I should be doing anyway. By choosing vegan alternatives, I found that my lifestyle was largely unchanged. Simple vegan cooking is extremely easy: use soy milk as a milk substitute where necessary, and otherwise don't cook with animal products.

College restaurants are actually pretty easy to find vegan food at. This is because most of their foods are extremely simple. Pick and choose the ones without animal products, and you're in the clear. It's very easy to be vegetarian at these restaurants, and jumping to veganism just requires a mild awareness of dairy. I was able to have this awareness relatively easily, as I habitually analyze foods for their ingredients so that I can later cook them myself if I so desire. Non-cooks might find this a tad bit more challenging. Beware breads- many contain dairy.

Traditional restaurants are a bit harder. As most menu items are significantly more complex, and many recipes vary due to the chef's preference, it can be quite hard to pick out the vegan dishes. In many cases, I'm unsure that such dishes exist. During my week, I scoped out many restaurants, and I decided against most of them because I would've had to ask questions and probably make special requests in order to receive a vegan dish. This is problematic, as restaurant dining is a very social activity, and I don't wish to be barred from that.

Another problem is that, should I eat at someone else's house, they would have to make special preparations for me. I find that unacceptable, and it lead to 1/25 cheese.

I've decided that I'm no longer going to adhere to veganism. My desire for clear boundaries won't work in this case, as I'll have to either behave in a way I deem inappropriate or void said boundaries on various occasions. This experiment has strengthened my food-conscious brain, and I realize that I would be extremely happy to prepare only vegan dishes via my own cooking. I intend to loosely adhere to that, purely for the reason that I find it immensely enjoyable. Further, though I will not be a strict vegan, I will consciously minimize non-vegan dietary intakes. I seem to have lost most of my appetite for beef, pork, and milk.

This was a fun experiment. I encourage you to try it if you are at all interested in feeling awesome.

Epiphany

2008-01-23T17:23:00.001-08:00

Use Machine Learning algorithms to create Boom Boom Rocket style (aka guitar hero/ddr, but better) music and rhythm games from arbitrary songs!

How:

Create a program which plays songs.
Create a program which timestamps keypresses on 360 controller as the song is played
Modify 2 to be additive, such that we can create complex songs.
Enjoy said song, and then feed the keypress style along with the wave form to a ML Algorithm. Repeat.
1. Alternatively, gain access to Guitar Hero database and use their songs for algorithm training.
Reinforce the algorithm by giving it positive/negative feedback when it produces output
1. Quantize the feedback to sections of the song – (this was great, but that sucked.)

Result:

The Best Music and Rhythm Game, of that style, EVER.

*excited*

Leadership Speculations for CU Game Developer’s Club

2007-12-21T00:51:00.001-08:00

I've been the president of CU GameDev for about a year, and administratively involved in the club for much longer. Running GameDev well is a tricky thing- it seems that we've always had some sort of negative factor to overcome. What follows are my reflections on club leadership and direction.

Past Leaders, strengths, and difficulties:

Under Eric Faller, the club was very production-driven. Meeting content consisted of demos and tutorials, with assorted incentives offered to attempt to drive participation. I've heard little positive things about this style of meeting, but I think that there was some merit to them. Specifically, anyone who was already sufficiently interested in the game development process was heavily supported. From what I've heard, there were perhaps four people in that category.

Under Cami, the club embraced socialization, game design, discussions, and content. I felt that the club was quite strong under her leadership… for about 6 months. All of her ideas required one key thing: content. Someone had to be working behind the scenes to be creating specific content for the club. Even if the content falls to sources such as guest speakers, team activities, etc., it still falls to someone to function administratively. One person can do that with relative effectiveness for short periods of time, but they burn out quickly. Cami noticed that, and recruited officers. The officers functioned as content providers, but at a slower pace than Cami previously was, since the workload could be distributed. But then the officers started getting burned out. And then the club passed to me…

Final officer burnout occurred under my leadership. I'm certain that I hastened the process, for I don't have as eloquent of a leadership touch as Cami. As matters stand, the officers are no longer active participants in the workings of the club. This was not an intention of mine, but I'm certain that it is a result of my guidance: As their enthusiasm faded, I found that I could depend on them less. Realizing that, I found that meetings were becoming less and less useful, and so I stopped holding them regularly. Planned content, then, is now squarely on my shoulders, with occasional (and invaluable) help from my vice president Namaste. There is other content—members still step forward desiring to present things. Luke is an occasional source of excellent content, as is Ben. One change under my leadership, - a positive thing! – is that the club now has ample funding. Any funded event we'd like to do… we can do.

Where this leaves us:

I see lots of positive things that can be done. Officers can be re-involved. Solicitations can be made. More speakers can be brought in. However, there's a fundamental problem with all of the solutions and improvements that we've tried and considered: Someone has to put in time to make them happen. It's reasonable to demand time of the President and VP, but only to an extent – demand too much, and the quality plummets, and then nobody is happy. Is it reasonable to demand time of the officers? Given their present formulation, I don't believe so, but I'd like for it to be the case.

One thought I'd pondered for a while was that "we're a game developer's club- we don't need to cater to the non-game developers among us." This is in stark contrast to Cami's method of running the club. This was originally a thought of Namaste's, and it had grown on me because it implicitly solves a lot of GameDev's problems: "We're game developers, so lets cater to us. They're not, screw them." This philosophy is bad, and is wrong. This philosophy, without tons of content to support it, would destroy GameDev, and has already caused great damage.

To illustrate why, consider this: What is the greatest potential strength of CU GameDev?

I would argue that its greatest potential lies in having
1. A large member base
2. Support for aspiring game-makers
3. Feedback and user-base for student game developers

All three are heavily interconnected, and I deem them high-priority because:

A large member base / meeting attendance is necessary to provide our game creators with an audience. Bigger audience means more people to evaluate the games that we make, more suggestions, and more resources. Further, the more people that think your game kicks ass, the better you're going to feel about it.
Supporting aspiring game developers will cause there to be more game developers in our club. We have the support part down, but not the aspiring game maker part. I'm fairly certain that all of our current members who are interested in developing games are already familiar with the necessary tools. The people who aren't able to develop games probably don't want to in the first place- otherwise they'd have taken advantage of our tutorial sessions. For us to spawn new game developers, we need to reach them. Therefore, we need to grow our member base.
For the game developers among us, the thing that most of us want is an audience. We want play testers. We want help improving our games, and we want warm fuzzy feelings when we show off our games.

I don't believe that any of this(2 or 3, I mean) will happen if our member base is small. We, as game developers, are not and cannot function well as lone gunmen. Those of us who feel otherwise probably wouldn't be attending GameDev anyway, no matter how game-developer-centered GameDev became.

And so, how do we increase attendance without heavy time commitment and while maintaining strength in game development?

Well… Have more social events. We grow a community; we'll grow a member base. But we already know that a socially-centered club is not what we want. Therefore, I propose incorporating social events into general meetings. Meetings begin with serious game-dev stuff. Demos, presentations when available, discussions, etc. Keep this as brief as possible. No superfluous content- and never content for the sake of content.

Additionally, have more events to appeal to the college. Host poker tournaments and advertise to engineering. Host massive werewolf games. When we do tutorials, advertise them heavily- fliers, etc. visibility is key. We can't expect membership to improve if we only advertise to our current members.

In conclusion,

The things I feel to be key to GameDev's success are:

Low maintenance meetings
Large member-base
Steady influx of new members
Heavy support for and encouragement of game developers and game development
Not alienating anyone

And methods of attaining this are:

Strong socialization-base in meetings, with structure (as opposed to "ok, go play games now.")
Improved visibility
More dedicated social events

Some things I'd like to try are:

Engineering Werewolf Night, more Assassin games, etc.
Meeting structure: Introduce a game and spend the night playing it, instructing people to reflect on it as they play. Next meeting content, discuss the game.
Bring back consoles. Offer incentives to console-bringers?

Please let me know if you have any ideas on further improvements we could make, or fun things we could host.

- Jude

Introduction

2007-12-05T04:04:00.001-08:00

What is this blog?

My original intention in creating this blog was to have it be my technical blog.

Simply put, I occasionally have technical thoughts and post them to my social blog, but anyone who might be interested in them would also be severely disinterested in the bulk of content that they would reside with. I don't like that.

I realize, though, that I want this blog to be more than a "Technical Blog" by definition. More to the point, I want this to be an "Intellectual Blog." Everything I post here will be related to a learning, an analysis, a divination, revelation, cranial combustication, etc. They will be things that interest me in an intellectual sort of way. My hope is that by limiting myself to those topics, this blog will maintain a sparse but well suited collection of posts that are interesting to people whose intellectual pursuits, fascinations, and quandaries are similar to my own.

That being said, my other resources are:

Webpage: http://blinkymach12.com/

This is where I store files, my resume, and other blog-free content.

Social blog: http://www.xanga.com/the_failing_light/

This is a weblog that I've maintained since high school. It has lived through 3+ girlfriends, a half dozen living situations, and many assorted absurdities of the most absolutely atrocious and occasionally well-articulated audacities. It's also where I post all of my creative writing and photography, but without any organizational structure what-so-ever.

- Jude