In my last Twenty Bucks post, I pulled $10 from June to get Europe at War.  I played through one solo game against the AI, and now I’m playing by email with a friend from GWJ.  That gives me $10 left from June, $20 from July, and $20 for August.

Last night I put $30 towards a pre-order for Heroes of Newerth.  Because I’m in the beta and under NDA, I can’t tell you about the game; but the fact that I essentially bought a beta should communicate to you everything that matters. :)

HoN has a native Linux client, and no DRM, and so scores a two on my 3-point scale – though it is only playable through their site and requires a login similar to many other online games (no big deal).  Many thanks to S2 Games for their Linux support and sensible distribution strategy!

It’s that time of year again.  If you don’t have a group that you support directly, here are some of my suggestions:

• The Durham Rescue Mission.  This group does a lot of really great work around Durham, helping people who have no one else to turn to.  They need support now more than ever.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation.  They are the reason why you have strong SSL encryption to protect your web transactions, and they are doing enormous good in the online world.
• The Free Software Foundation.  The software I’m using right now to write this blog entry is due in part to their efforts, and they continue to fight the good fight against copyright and patent abuse.

If you want to support me more directly, I am running for Durham City Council Ward 2 and will not turn away birthday donations. :)  You can also support the efforts of the Libertarian Party of North Carolina to get North Carolina’s ballot access restrictions struck down as unconstitutional.  The case is currently awaiting a verdict from the Court of Appeals.

Thanks!

Amazon has decided to recall two electronic books.  The irony, as noted in the article, is the choice of the particular books that were recalled; one simply cannot imagine a more perfect storm of derision and mockery than what Amazon has just done to the Kindle.

Look guys, here’s a tip – you want to know why, even now, ebooks aren’t really taking off?  Yeah, there are technology issues.  But it’s really stuff like this that kills it.  You have some pretty good technology.  Explain it to your publishers.  There’s money to be had here.  A lot of money.  The first one to the table with good technology and a NOT COMPLETELY BONEHEADED relationship with their customers is going to win.  Every time you do this you are hitting your business model and your customers with a tire iron.  Stop.  Just stop.  And better yet, apologize.  Profusely.

Lets do math!  I’ve owned my Yamaha C3 for just over a year now.  I’ve put 4800 miles on it in that time.  Assumptions:

1. My car gets 30 mpg – I’ve been verifying this over the last few weeks.
2. The scooter gets 110 mpg – my mileage is slightly worse now that I have a shorter commute.
3. We’ll put the price of gas at $2.50 a gallon.  It was higher, it was lower, $2.50 is what it is now, seems like a good median.

The cost of gas for the scooter was 43.6 gallons * $2.50/gallon = $109.  The cost of driving the car would have been 160 gallons * $2.50 = $400, for a total savings of $291.  Not bad.  How about carbon dioxide?  If you accept the government’s numbers, then each gallon of gas burned releases 20 pounds of CO2 into the air, along with lots of other nasty stuff, so I’ve avoided releasing 2,328 pounds of CO2 – just over a ton.  Seems good, especially including the other pollutants that come from burning gas.

Interestingly, if you put in $4.00 as the cost of gas, the savings rises to $465 – almost one sixth of my total scooter cost.  If I had kept up my mileage rates up with the commute to Apex, lets say doing 10,000 miles instead of 4800 at $4/gallon, the savings would have been $970 – almost half the cost of the scooter itself, and 1/3rd my total costs (which were, as you may remember, about $2800).  It’s clear that the price of gas and how much you drive has a huge impact on the cost of operating both a scooter and a car, and it’s easy to see why scooters are much more popular in Europe, where gas is $5-6 a gallon.

But … I’m not saving that money – gas is no longer that expensive, and my commute is shorter with fewer highway miles.  Still, one of the best things about the scooter is that I know it will be easier to fuel and run it even if I lose my job and I’m just scraping by.  There’s no payments to make, the repair bills are low, and the bike has proven itself to be highly reliable and dependable.

I’ve been starting to teach my son to drive, even though he doesn’t have the grades to get a license just yet.  He’s at my in-laws this summer, working and adventuring … and driving, if only the utility vehicle around my in-laws property.  I’m proud of him.

driving "Ketchup" the Kubota

What I’m really interested in is the thought process that lead to this decision.  Is this what success and growth have done to you, Blizzard?  Are you EA now, out to screw your customers because you want to attack people who don’t buy your games?  Are you really that blind, that foolish, that arrogant?

I’ve lost track of how many copies of Starcraft and Brood Wars I’ve bought, specifically so I could play on a LAN with my friends.  I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on WoW, and I have been anticipating Starcraft 2 since before it was announced.  I have provided you with years of revenue, and a lot of that was because you have almost always put your customers first.  What you just did was lose a sale.  I’m thinking right now that you don’t care.  If that’s true, then you’ve lost more than a sale, you’ve lost a customer.  See ya.

This is my hat.

Hat

I’ve had it for several years.  I believe I bought it at the San Diego Zoo, but my memory is somewhat hazy.  It is one of the few impulse buys that I’ve made in my life that I am completely happy with.  I sunburn easily, and this hat has protected my head faithfully through many travels.  As you can see, it’s a bit … well used.  The word “crumpled” would not be misused in this context.

Things are about to get a lot worse for my hat, but I think it is up to it.  I’ve decided to run for the non-partisan Ward 2 City Council seat in Durham, North Carolina in the municipal election this year.

I’ve been watching Wrong Tomorrow for a while now.  They are slow (investigating the claims by hand?), and the number of predictions is small.  This doesn’t matter.  They, as far as I know, are one of the first attempts to really add a searchable, reliable time dimension to public discourse.  Web sites are, of course, ephemeral – but once information is out there, it’s hard to take back.

For thousands of years we’ve had a record of one form or another.  It was always incomplete, and rarely objective.  We’ve relied on hearsay, rumors, journalists, authors, television shows, databases, court records, and a thousand other methods to keep track of what people did and said in the past.  What we’re keeping track of now is also incomplete, but since we have a lot of storage, we’re tracking a much larger scope of … reality.

This brings up an interesting question.  In the past, there have been people who claimed to be able to see the future.  Their predictions were often vague, and easily interpreted to mean one thing or another.  Those who really could predict the future through analysis or guessing were often ignored until it was too late.  Now, we have a nascent but growing ability for people to establish their historical record of soothsaying.

Think a bit about what that means.  If we choose, we can track literally anyone’s skill at predicting the future.  Those who are consistently correct can prove it, or at least give better evidence than hearsay or testimonials.  Those who are consistently wrong … well, why are we listening to them?  We should expect our public officials and pundits to be correct in their predictions.  Every book, every speech, every statistic, research claim needs to be recorded, tracked and scored.

When that happens, these sites are going to come under a lot of fire.  I hope they are ready for it. :)

If you want a perfect example of how to conduct a protest, watch and learn.  Personally, I think those police are crazy to ride motorcycles into a crowd like that.  The crowd is angry, and surges forward, knocking the police off their motorcycles and start to beat them.  Then, members of the crowd quickly pull the riot police out of the fight and into a building where they are protected.

Protests are not places to take out your vengeance on authority.  This is the right way to do it.  I’ve seen several videos like this, and despite the fires and fighting, the protestors are doing an admirable job of keeping the lid on while still getting their point across.  Every day the authorities shoot people and beat people, their cause and moral standing go down, and more people join the protests.  Every day the protestors behave like this, protecting even the cops that are trying to beat them with sticks, their cause is strengthened and they rise in standing with the rest of the population.  If this goes on long enough and the protestors can keep it together and keep gaining ground, they might have a chance.

In any case, to those who pulled that cop out of the crowd: keep it up, you’re doing it right.  I’m not going to tell you to be careful, because this isn’t the time for that.  Be strong, be tough, be persistent, and keep the big picture in mind.  The world is watching.

EDIT:  Glenn Greenwald has an insightful column reminding us of what could have happened: how many of these protestors would be dead or in hiding if we had bombed Iran like many people in our government wanted?

Based on a two-year-old stellar review from Bill Trotter over at The Wargamer, I’ve decided to blow my remaining $30 and $10 from June on a copy of Commander: Europe at War.  It’s closed source, has no DRM (just a serial number) and runs perfectly in Wine, so I guess it scores a 1 (1.2?).  Sold!  Purchasing was smooth and the download quick. Thank you Slitherine!

Edit: the game is written in Java – so there’s at least a chance it’ll run native on Linux, and at one point it was able to do so.  Plus, the game is littered with free software/open source help – it uses PNG images and ogg vorbis audio files.  Woot!