Well here it is, in the early morning hours of August 3. I’ve had DOOM 3 for about five hours now. I went to GameStop and took a number – only the first 20 preordered people got their game tonight. I stood around and watched everyone talk about the game, getting more nervous about my ability to play it or not. And someone in that room needed to shower very much badly.

I took it home and nerviously went through the three-disc installation. Then I fired it up. First thing I did was have it detect for me – 640×480, Low Quality, all effects on. Then I fired up the game. It plays a video, then a second video – but then pans out to show that the video is playing on a monitor, rendered in the engine. Kickass! the game runs, and it runs well!

Damndest thing though – it runs better in cutscenes than the game itself. Oh well – it still runs much better than I could have hoped for on a lowly GeForce 3 Ti/200. Actually, it runs much better than the GF3 deserves. And I’m amazed at how much detail I can still see. I figured I’d be happy if it ran as well as the Xbox footage I’ve been seeing – my experience blows the Xbox out of the water.

Multiplayer’s interesting. Right now, there’s no dedicated server out there and, as of this moment, not many people with the game, so there’s at best a smattering of servers. And I don’t know how this is going to factor in, but with ~4 people per game (I forget whether that’s a hard limit or just the default), it’s kinda tricky to find an open server. I can tell you this much – the server browser needs some serious work. It doesn’t sort or filter correctly and many times will tell you a server isn’t full when it is.

One amusing thing I’ve not experienced in a while – this is the first id game, I believe, to feature reloading. Consequently, it’s not uncommon for two players to run out of ammo and sit there reloading just trying to get more shots off. It’s like the comic relief scene in an action movie.

The other interesting thing which I’m sure will be gone tommorow is that since there’s no dedicated server and no one out there wanting to run a dedicated server with their copy, games just suddenly end since the person running the game decided to stop playing.

The amount of polish on the game is outstanding. The menu GUI is slick – I remember being unimpressed by the “oval” motif of Quake III: Arena but this one impressed me. The atmopshere is cool – I found myself stopping to watch the UAC videos on the monitors. And playing Super Turkey Puncher Pro.

I was impressed by the game, impressed by the graphics and engine, impressed by the multiplayer, and thinking the game is well worth the $55 I paid for it. For those of you looking to save, go to Circuit City where it can be had for $45 I’m told.

Anywho, I must stop playing since I must head to bed and get some sleep. The best thing about my system and DOOM 3 is that it can only get better from here, and now I’m really looking forward to QuakeCon.

Here we go again. It’s 2004, id Software is coming out with a new game, and I have no idea how well I can run it.

In this case it’s DOOM 3, and it’s actually going to hit stores on August 3rd or so. I’ve bought the last several id Software games on day one or as close as I can. I bought Quake II, Quake III: Arena and Quake III: Team Arena all on day one. I ordered Quake as soon as it hit shareware status. I think I even bought the floppy disk version of DOOM II the day it came out or that week. For DOOM II I was hindered by a 486SX 20 (yes, they did make them that slow) but on low detail it played acceptably. I had upgraded to a Pentium 133 when Quake came out, so it’s DOS-based software renderer ran fine, but I had issues with Quake II‘s Windows-based renderer. Fortunately I had upgraded to a Pentium 3 500MHz and Voodoo3 card just prior to Quake III: Arena.

DOOM 3‘s listed minimum system requirements are just below what I have (GeForce 3, Athlon XP 2000, 768MB RAM) which concerns me, but hardcore PC gaming site HardOCP has stated that more or less what I have actually does a decent job at playing the game, so I’m hopeful. I figure – worst case scenario I can run it about like an Xbox would until I can upgrade my video card. Which of course will be another thing I’ll need to buy at some point. Wish me luck on bouncing that off the Wife.

It’s been interesting to witness the recent DOOM 3 mania. I personally never minded the delays the game saw – I figured it would help me in the long run on upgrades. But here it is – oh well. I’m sure I can run it in some capacity. It’s kinda a bummer that I won’t be able to bells-and-whistles it from day one but hey – it’s guaranteed to look better and better. Hell, it’s desgined to look its best on 512MB video cards – of which there are none on the market yet. I need to upgrade my sound setup to do 5.1 so I can do the surround sound thing – but I don’t even have a TV/theater setup designed to do more than stereo and I don’t really know how surround speakers would work in the corner of the office I have.

All of this seems like a little far to go to play a game, but besides being an id Software game, we know DOOM 3 will be powering a lot of games in the near future.

More interesting is the reaction. id announced the game over four years ago, so we’ve had that long to know it was in the works. Contrast this to Valve and Half-Life 2, where the game was secretly in development for five years before being announced in May of 2003. Valve boldly announced the release date as September 30, 2003. id Software then had to concede that DOOM 3 was not coming out in 2003. I completely lost my bet that it would ship on December 10, 2003 – the 10th anniversary of DOOM shareware. But then Valve delayed Half-Life 2 for various reasons, not the least of which was the source code leak. It still hasn’t shipped and has no release date. Many people thought (some still think) that Half-Life 2 will be the better of the two games and that id had every intention of releasing DOOM 3 in 2003, but retreated from that for retooling due to Half-Life 2. No one knows if this is true or not, but it’s somewhat ironic that DOOM 3 is coming out first.

Sites like Blue’s News and Shacknews wouldn’t be here were it not for id Software. They were started by people who were fans of Quake, and most of them were fans of DOOM back in the day. While they have branched out to all things FPS and most things computer/video games in general, but their loyalty to all things id Software (and the people who are on them) shows. The “gone gold” thread on Shacknews has amassed over 7,000 Posts. Blue’s is running 2-3 DOOM 3 related stories a day.

It’s funny – one of the the things that’s always been id Software’s strength and weakness is that for the last twelve years or so they’ve been making essentially the same game. The game is “guy with gun runs around and shoots things”. Every so often the atmosphere changes (Nazis, Aliens, Demons), every so often the renderer changes, every so often the motive changes (key cards, multiplayer, etc.), but it’s always been “guy with gun runs around and shoots things”. For all DOOM 3‘s innovations, it’s also “guy with gun runs around and shoots things”.

What really kills me is how not cut and dry it all is. I’ve been seeing a lot of things on id Software recently – the G4 Icons special, the Masters of DOOM book I’ve taken to reading again, etc. After Wolfenstein 3-D they were considering doing a racing game. Quake was originally a 3rd person RPG. For all their verse/chorus/verse, id Software didn’t really mean for their games to be all versions of each other.

And yet there’s all these things id does to surprise us. Quake was the first game of theirs to require CD-ROM. Quake 2 was the first to feature prerendered cutscenes. Quake III: Arena was their first to require a 3-D accellerator and not feature a single-player mode. Now DOOM 3 is their first game to attempt the often unused PC Horror genre. It’s also the first since DOOM to be throttled down to a 4-player online mode. It’s also the first with a level editor in the box. Sure, it’s at its core another “guy with gun” game (and not, say, a flight simulator) but it’s still some different directions for them.

One thing they did that I think is kinda retarded (and I know I’m the only one that cares) is to change the number they’re numbering it with. There was DOOM, then DOOM II, with roman numerals. They went for a long time with a logo for DOOM III that also had roman numerals like DOOM II, then they went with DOOM 3, with the number three in that “cubed” fashion, like the posters and such for Alien 3. I don’t like this – I liked the big ass roman numerals. But hey, what do I know. Perhaps associating themselves with Alien 3 will work (though it really didn’t work for that movie).

Of course, perhaps this is to underscore the notion that DOOM 3 is not really a traditional sequel to DOOM and DOOM II so much as it is a “retelling” of the first game (at least). This is another big difference for id – a game that’s overtly a remake of an older game of theirs. Of course, Quake II wasn’t really a sequel to Quake at all, and of course the multiplayer universe of Quake III: Arena had nothing to do with the previous games either. Carmack let it slip in an interview that they kicked around the idea of a remake of Quake II with the DOOM 3 engine to show how it could be done quicker but they nixed that idea. That was probably either not a real idea or they didn’t want to storm on the thunder of Raven who is currently doing Quake IV with the DOOM 3 engine, but still it shows that id is still trying to be unpredictable after fourteen years (confusingly enough, Quake IV is a sequel to the storyline in Quake II but not a sequel to anything in Quake III: Arena).

On that aforementioned 486/20 is where my first experiences with DOOM went down. I had of course played Wolfenstein 3-D to death and loved it, but DOOM was one of the first games to introduce me to the concept of “you don’t have enough to play it”. Specifically, I had 2MB of RAM in my system and DOOM needed four. RAM was something my feeble mind didn’t know of until I went and bought Comanche, the helecopter sim, and the thing wouldn’t run since I didn’t have enough RAM (actually, I think I somehow knew I didn’t have enough but that I could sneak past it somehow). My friend at the time, Bill, did have 4MB of RAM in his 386, but for reasons I’m not sure I could troubleshoot even today, he couldn’t get it to run – except once or twice for some reason. He kept telling me about how amazing the game was (the head bobbing and the witnessing of the gloved hand pumping the shotgun in particular amazed him).

So I ordered 2 SIMM sticks, 1MB each. I opened up my machine, popped them into two of the four slots, fired up my PC – and nothing happened. Try as I might, I couldn’t get it to recognize the extra RAM. I was pretty pissed off if for no other reason than I had conviced my mom to buy these things for me and I couldn’t get the fuckers to work.

For reasons that have been lost over time, I came into possession of Bill’s computer. For reasons I don’t remember, I thought it would be perfectly OK to open his computer up. For reasons related to wild hunches, I took two SIMMs from his PC (I think he had tried the upgrade trick and also didn’t get it working) and popped them into mine. All four slots, a whopping 6MB of RAM – and it worked. And DOOM worked. And there was no going back. And for reasons that baffle me to this day, Bill didn’t murder my ass for opening up his PC. We both upgraded to more RAM and it continued to work.

We played the snot out of DOOM and downloaded tons of levels off of CompuServe. Getting DOOM to work over a modem was like pulling teeth – but man it was fun when we did get it working. I had the high school computer lab hooked up with DOOM – we played when our work was done. Not sure if I could get away with that today. I made levels (nothing releasable really) and generally loved it.

Quake wasn’t released until after my first year in college. To some degree, the fact that it was less mainstream popular than DOOM II and the offspring of that made it more likeable. I was ready, PC-wise, for Quake – I wasn’t ready for Quake II. Kinda sad really – I never got to upgrade in time to really enjoy that game. When Quake III: Arena came out, I had just upgraded my PC. But here I am, right before DOOM 3 and I have no idea if I can handle it. I think I can, but with a lot of bells and whistles turned off. Oh well, it’ll look better every single time I upgrade.

And the DOOM 3 hysteria is continuing. For starters, Chris Vrenna, the guy who did the theme song, is releasing a limited pressing of 500 7″ records with the theme on them. I bit – I don’t have a turntable but that’s too cool a collector’s item to pass up. I actually got a copy as soon as it went on sale – I thought somehow it would sell out quickly. Oh well, maybe I’ll get copy #1. Steven Kent, author of The First Quarter, is finishing up The Making of DOOM 3 – it should make a great companion piece to Masters of DOOM by David Kushner, a book I’m working on right now which is fascinating to say the least. I preorded the game at GameStop and it seems all the major chains got these boxes to give to people who preorder – with a pewter monster inside. The GameStop monster is the Baron of Hell from the original game. Pretty nifty for $5 – I wonder if there’s people who are preordering the game at different places to get the different monsters.

One thing about the game that does bug me though is this – the day it went gold, people were getting their copies of PC Gamer in the mail, with their exclusive first review of 94%. It’s still the only review of the game. But with the lead time of a print magazine it means either one of two things – either the game was done a lot longer than expected, or PC Gamer reviewed an incomplete game. Either way is intriguing, but the incomplete game angle is probably more likely. That’s not so bad, except that it makes you wonder what bugs they excused. Also, what are the odds they would fight hard to get the first review and then trash the game? Granted, 94% is hardly the best review they’ve ever given, but with their “Id’s Masterpiece raises the state of the art form” quote on the cover of the box – it’s obvious some people were scratching each other’s backs on this one.

But who cares – the Frisco GameStop told me on the phone today I can pick up my copy at 7PM tommorow. It’s on.

Congrats to Moe and Adam on their nuptials.

Congrats to Andra (Moe’s sister) on her forthcoming family addition. For the record, there’s not really a cute way to say that without being likely to offend someone.

If you’re someone out there doing something worth congratulating, get a blog already.

We were in a movie theater the other day and one of those “commercials before the trailers” came on – this one was a commercial for the aforementioned Coke C2 and the song playing in the commercial was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones. The connotation is simple – people who can’t “get what they want” (Coke) “get what they need” (C2). OK, kinda cute.

But then it hit me – the Rolling Stones are the freaking Rolls Royce of song licensing. There were gigantic headlines over how many millions of dollars Microsoft had to pay in order to use “Start Me Up” for their Windows 95 campaign. Disney tapped them for a “Rock and Rollercoaster” but had to settle on Aerosmith (truly the “poor man’s Stones”) for a tenth the price. The Stones have made $1.5 Billion since 1989 and it’s not due to screwing around.

So I guess this launch is pretty serious.

Ever have something you kinda keep up with for fun? It’s not really something you’re into nor does it affect you but it’s something you follow just for kicks? That’s sorta like my interest in the music group Van Halen. I’m hardly a huge fan, but the drama sure is interesting.

Van Halen was formed in the late 1970’s. The name came from the last name of the two brothers in the band, Eddie and Alex. Their lead singer was the eccentric David Lee Roth. They took the world by storm and became larger than life celebrities.

After their 1984 album, 1984, Roth left the group. Van Halen replaced him with solo artist Sammy Hagar and drove on. A number of people didn’t come along, and a number of others joined up for the first time. Hagar made the group sound different, and there’s pretty much an even split on whether or not it was for the best. Still, even though the band, to some degree, had to start over from scratch they topped their previous success by the mid ’90’s, the culmination of which was their 1991 album, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.

One of the band’s dynamics has always been to bicker and fight, and apparently they never stopped this. In 1996 the members of the band, sans Hagar, decided to come out with a greatest hits album with some new songs. Hagar disagreed, saying it was not good for the group at the time, and refused to play along. So the band members decided to call Roth back up. Roth came in and recorded two new songs. The band members decided that it was time to kick Hagar out of the group and did so via a phone call on Father’s Day. The album, The Best Of Van Halen Volume 1, sold truckloads, mostly on the premise that the old band was back.

Now, at this point I must interject – I’ve listened to all of the Van Halen albums and I must say: they’re much better with Hagar. Make no mistake, these are two separate groups, but the Hagar years are better. He’s got a better voice, the songs are better, etc. So why does everyone get excited when Roth rejoins the group. Well, besides the notion that most people just disagree with me, there’s also the fact that I think most people just really want their past back – their lives were probably much easier in the early 1980’s and they would love it if they could get even a little of that back.

So the culmination of all of this was the reunited Van Halen at the MTV Video Music Awards. Afterwards though the honeymoon was already over. The band started fighting again and it has been said that it all started coming back why they didn’t want Roth in the group to begin with (debate continues to this day as to whether or not Roth left to persue his bizarre solo career or whether he was kicked out). Roth was fired from the group. What tends to happen when a departed band member comes back they don’t get to rejoin the group, they’re intead “hired” as an employee to the band. KISS even goes so far as to “contract” its former members. The key difference is the much easier ability to fire them (or let their contracts expire) and of course they only recieve a fraction of the money they would get as a member. Roth was brought on as an employee of Van Halen and then fired.

So since they fired Roth and had fired Hagar they decided to go look for a third lead singer. They plucked Gary Cherone, fresh from the newly broken up band Extreme, and hired him. The resulting album, 1998’s Van Halen III, is widely regarded as the worst Van Halen album ever. Cherone is a poor power singer trying to sound too much like Hagar, and the songs themselves are just generally poor. After three years and tired of all the criticism he was recieving for “ruining” Van Halen (the second time VH’s been ruined, apparently) he left the group.

This is where the story gets odd and, to some degree, undocumented. Van Halen is in shambles. They have to either disband, hire a fourth lead singer, or hire one of their former lead singers back. Cherone is out, since he just left. Sammy Hagar has since gone on to a fantastic second solo career, while Roth’s has sputtered and died. The word is they went and hooked up with Roth to record new material – and then that went south again.

So for a long time nothing happened. Roth created a new group, The DLR Band, and dived further into eccentricity. Hagar remained friends with the Van Halen drummer Alex Van Halen, much to the chagrin of the other band members. Hagar and Roth then decided to tour together, titling the tour “Sans Halen”. They finished out the tour but Hagar vowed never to tour with Roth again, as he was difficult to get along with and apparently was oblivious as to his modern day relevance (or lack thereof). Even dedicated sites like the Van Halen News Desk decided to pack it in and call it a day.

For the longest time it looked like Van Halen was done for. But then earlier this year the rumors came down that they had decided to re-hook up with Hagar. The rumors were confirmed when a press release was issued – Van Halen was back together with Sammy Hagar and getting ready for a summer tour. A new 2-CD greatest hits compilation, The Best Of Both Worlds, is due to be released on July 19th. It will have three new songs, and none of the songs from the Charone era or the Roth reunion songs.

I’ve heard one of the three new songs, “It’s About Time”. It’s pretty good – classic, non-boat rocking Van Halen. The song title brings to light the “double meaning” of new songs. One of the two new Roth songs on Best Of Can Halen Volume 1 was “Can’t Get This Stuff No More”, alluding (I believe) to the older sound of Van Halen (a title which turned ironic when Roth was fired). The new song on the Billy Idol album was a cover of “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” – obviously a cry for a second chance. And you don’t have to even guess about the one new Michael Jackson song on Number Ones entitled “One More Chance” – another obvious cry for help even more ironic in the light of his recent round of litigation.

I’ve read they were experimenting with the Van Halen III album – the experiement failed. I’d usually say something about how bad it must be to be a group who can’t innovate – people (myself included) want them to sound the same way they always have (though in my case, I prefer their second incarnation), but hey – that’s life. There’s no law that says they have to continue at all, fired singers or no. They’ve tried the “we won’t do it” bit for six years now and apparently they’ve decided that their innovation or pride isn’t as important as continuing to do what they want to do.

Oh, and make piles upon piles of money off of now starved fans. Rock on.

It occurs to me that, if I have any dedicated readers other than my WIfe, I never updated with how my diet is going. Amazingly enough I’m still on it and have lost some 25 pounds. Had to buy new pants and everything. Still have some 20 or so to go but I’m still there.

More amazingly, I finally got used to Diet Coke. Diet Coke is something of an engineering marvel in that it has no carbs, calories or fat. It’s just that damned aspartamane you have to get used to. I couldn’t stand it for the longest time. I tried Diet Vanilla Coke and could tolerate it for a time but then I switched to Diet Dr. Pepper. I got sick of that but oddly enough by that time I could stand Diet Coke. Sometimes I even like it. The main reason I went through all of this at all (instead of, say, just drinking Crystal Light) is because these are the three non-water diet drinks my workplace supplies for free.

Now we have Coke C2. The unveiling of a new type of Coke usually has all the pomp and circumstance of a Rolling Stones release, but this rollout’s been sort of low key. Perhaps we’re just getting it here because we’re a big market. Anywho, the gimmick of Coke C2 is that it has half the sugar (corn syrup) of regular Coke, so it halves the carbs and calories. Neat – but at 19.5 carbs per can, it’s still too expensive for Atkins diets. I’ve tried it – it’s not bad. It’s kinda like hard liquor – you like it but you know if you’re smart you won’t drink too much.

I’ve noticed a lot of opposition to Atkins as a diet. I’m not strictly doing Atkins, I’m mostly just doing the low carb thing. The reasoning behind the backlash is simple enough (it flies in the face of conventional medical wisdom), but I think there’s something a bit deeper involved. Most people, like myself, wouldn’t diet previously because, besides not being obese (just overweight), diets are hard. But Atkins and low carb diets tell you lots of things you can eat.

You can eat A
But I don’t like A

You can eat B
I really don’t like B

Well you can eat C
Now that I can do! Hell, I’ll eat that morning noon and night!

C is of course something like a bacon cheeseburger with no bun, or a steak dinner without bread. As a result, if you like C and you don’t mind eating the same thing all the time, this sort of diet will work perfectly for you.

Of course to eat meat entirely is foolish, as is eating any one thing completely exclusively. I try to eat salads and chicken. I’ve yet to venture into too many vegetables.

But that’s not healthy eating
Well, was already eating really unhealthy – how can this be worse? Actually what I’ve found myself doing is consuming substitutes – and then much less of that. For example, the one “chip-like” thing that you can do without much carb consequence is pork rinds. So I ate the heck out of those things. Sure, it’s fried pork skins, but I figured if my weight loss stopped then so would I. Then I got to where I didn’t need to snack all the time. I never figured I was one of those “comfort eaters” since I never went home to eat while depressed – but turns out I was. I needed a Coke and some junk food to be happy. Now I can consume a little bit of food and a Diet Coke and be fine.

Plus being on a low carb diet is easier now than any time before. If anything out there is low carb, it’s very clearly marked. There’s low carb menus in most restaraunts and most things you like have a low carb equivalent. Quiznos does flatbread, Subway and Friday’s are actually on board with Atkins, and Frito Lay has a new soy-laced chip with fewer carbs. And some low carb items are pretty close to their equivalents – like the sugar-free Creme Savers and the low carb Russell Stover candies. Of course they feature the disclaimer:

Excess consumption may have a laxative effect

….

Well, there’s another way to lose weight I guess.

But as a result of all of this, low carb hysteria is at an all time high. So, people are resistant. I believe this is twofold. First, the natural reaction when overloaded with something is resistance. Do guys say they hate Jennifer Lopez and Brtiney Spears because they’re ugly? If anything their media overexposure should be a good thing. No, guys say they hate them because they’re so sick of them. But the other reason, I believe, is that as a result of all of the people on low carb diets, the number of people on diets has gone up exponentially. I’ve never been on a diet before (so lucky me that the first one worked), but now the odds of you knowing someone on a diet has gone up considerably. And if you’re someone who needs to be on a diet (as most people are – save for bodybuilders and the genetically lucky) then it’s easy to interpret the magnitude of people on these diets as a sign. And people really hate that.

But whatever. I’m one of like three people in my office on a diet, so I get cut out of certian things involving cake. And it’s somewhat asinine to have to limit yourself in a land of plenty. The one thing that concerns me about this diet is an “exit strategy” (obviously I can’t “go back”, so what then?) but in the meantime I’m going to go take a swig off of a Coke C2 and have thousand island on my salad.

Yeah, I’m naughty.

Okay, rant time. This one’s pretty minor in the scheme of things but I feel the need to vent.

One of my pet peeves is when people say something is “written in Visual Basic” or when something is referred to as being “all in Visual Basic” but then doesn’t go beyond that definition. Actually what really irks me is when people look at me like a space alien when I ask “Visual Basic what?”

So let’s clarify, shall we? Microsoft, as we’ve established, decided to kick start Windows development and go into Rapid Application Development with its Visual Basic programming tool/language. Visual Basic 1.0 was essentially a frontend for designing applications with a scripting language in the background. The language was based off of BASIC, but didn’t adhere to it strictly, mainly because BASIC had no standards bodies behind it (so you can’t say you’re ANSI compliant, like C++ compilers can).

Visual Basic was aimed at non-programmers and was fairly limited. Over the years it had six major version releases, with 1999’s Visual Basic 6.0 being the last. Each release added more power to the product, mostly through undocumented functionality (which had the interesting side effect of only the long-term programmers having access to them or the desire to use it). VB6 still retained the “only do what we thought of” mentality – it limited the users in ways that “to the metal” languages like C++ don’t. I’ve heard it referred to as the “glass cieling” of VB6 – at some point you’ll want it to do something that it simply cannot do. But in so far as being able to achieve a lot in a small amount of time, it couldn’t be beat.

But the language behind it was always kinda kludgey, and each release just grafted more onto it. What happened was – over time millions of people who weren’t considered programmers prior to VB’s release were now being considered programmers and these people demanded more from the product. Essentially Microsoft had created a beast – things they wanted to do with VB they couldn’t do without alienating their client base, and a number of things about VB never really worked, but the VB programmers worked around them anyway.

But then Microsoft hauled off and released Visual Basic .NET in 2002, as part of their .NET initiative. VB.NET changed a lot of things about the language, the environment, and the positioning of VB. Functions now had return types, VB could now power web pages, and everything written in VB to that point had to be redone. Additionally, while VB6 programmers were more or less standalone beasts, VB.NET programs ran in the .NET CLR meaning that the .NET Framework has to be loaded on the machine. Consequently, VB6 and VB.NET are considered two separate things, and a number of people have loudly decided that they will never move away from VB6 to VB.NET. Indeed, VB.NET is aimed at more advanced programmers and a number of VB6 programmers just don’t want to go there.

So that’s VB6 versus VB.NET. Then there’s VBScript. When Microsoft devised Active Server Pages, they conjured up a subset of VB functionality in scripting language (not compiled) format and called it VBScript.VBScript can run client side or servier side. Since ASP pages are server-based technology, the VBScript they use sprinkled within HTML is used to make the page more dynamic (for example, pulling things in from a database). ASP required an ASP-compatible platform, such as IIS running on Windows. Client-side, only Internet Explorer can do VBScript, which is why most web designers do VBScript on the server end and JavaScript on the client end. This practice of having pseudo-VB code running on web pages in the form of VBScript is the precursor to VB.NET’s running ASP.NET pages. VB.NET goes one step further, however, and can run the code in “code behind” – it’s in a separate file and is in fact compiled into a DLL tied to the individual ASPX page.

So that’s the three kinds of VB: VB6, VB.NET and VBScript. The part where it gets asinine is when the three get confused. Part of this is by design – Microsoft wanted the managerial staffs of the world to think VB.NET was a mere incremental upgrade on VB, which was only half right. If they knew the whole story they’d balk and not migrate, so the techies of the world played along since they wanted the upgrade. Same thing with ASP.NET and ADO.NET. But I’ve seen problems where people assume that VBScript is synonymous with all things VB and discount ASP.NET projects as “scripting”. This is nothing new – I hear of Java programmers being called to interviews where the person really needs a JavaScript programmer.

The rumor is that Microsoft secretly hates VB and would nothing more than to kill it off entirely – they’re rumored to be doing the majority of their future development in C#, including a complete rewrite of Office (though they have killed off previous efforts to do just that). Additionally, there’s word that with C# 2.0 (part of .NET 2.0), C# will get functionality that VB.NET will not – the two will fork off from each other. Why they would do that (since the MSIL would have to be updated and so therefore VB.NET could be upgraded as well) is puzzling (though for a C#-preferring language snob like myself it’s precious). The reason Microsoft came up with VB.NET to begin with is the fact that there’s some 3 million plus VB6 coders out there and they needed them to make their .NET push happen at all.

So that’s VB and the three faces of it. I don’t expect merely writing this to fix anything (since at least a few people who gave me the confused puppy look also happened to be seasoned programmers), but now at least anyone reading this knows another thing to be nitpicky over.

There’s this new concept in grocery stores. I think Albertson’s, oddly enough, innovated it. Just about every store around here now has “self checkout” lanes. The concept is simple – you scan in your own stuff, pay, then leave.

At first glance it’s a devilishly simple concept – just scan the things yourself and place it in the bags. Usually they’re arranged four in a “quad” formation, with one person at a desk to oversee them. I have mixed feelings on the one person thing – it could be that they’ve just eliminated the need for three workers, or it could be that that one worker is four times as effective.

Anywho, the first several times I saw these things I avoided them. Mostly it was because I was in a hurry and the last thing I needed to do was learn a new system. In fact, I saw these things deserted even though the lines for cashiers were quite long. Eventually though I decided to try one of these things out.

The first thing you have to do is scan whatever card you have to save money. This, ironically, is an advantage Wal-Mart has because they’re cheap to begin with. I don’t really mind the whole “savings card” idea at grocery stores (I have a keychain full of them), except for the fact that half the time these fuckers won’t scan. Anywho, you scan your card and then you scan your items. Once you scan your items, you place them in bags to the side. The bags and their dispensers are on a device which acts as a scale, which is how the machine figures out whether or not you have placed the item in the bag yet. Additionally, the system knows what the item would reasonably weigh, so it’s not enough to throw just any item in the bag. If you have produce, you place it on the scanner and either key in the code on the sticker or go through the interface to find the item in question. The scanner also acts as a scale and additionally has a camera so the overseer can make sure the item is what you say it is.

On the whole, this isn’t really a bad idea. It’s often times quicker than waiting in line, especially if you have just a few items. Sometimes though it just annoys the crap out of me. For starters, you have to do everything right. You have to scan each item individually and place them in the bag. If you get “off” from this rhythym then the system halts and the sixteen year old they hired yesterday gets to come over and place it in the bag for you. I think if you waited long enough (like ten seconds) then the problem would resolve itself, but in the meantime some kid gets to have a power trip. Occasionally the system gets confused on whether or not you placed the item in the bag already and then you have to “fake it out” – once I had to place an item in the bag along with a different item (so presumably the weight thing isn’t that precise).

And then there’s the payment method. Generally I use my check card by scanning it in the little scan thing. With a check card you can either do a debit transaction (which requires your PIN) or a credit card transaction (which requires your signature). Of all the places, Wal-Mart is the only one I’ve seen which lets you sign right on the scanning thing – even though some other stores use the exact same device to process your card. If you pick credit card at some other places then you have to go to the main cashier to sign and get your reciept. Not only does this negate the purpose (that you don’t want to interact with a cashier), but I always somehow seem to hit the one at Kroger while the main guy is taking a piss. Consequently, I go with the debit card option, even though my Wife doesn’t want me to – it’s just easier. Of course Wal-Mart’s little signing pad thingy has the resolution of an Atari 2600, so your signature never looks like your actual signature, so it’s kinda pointless to sign at all, especially since your handwriting is so botched by the unnatural angle you have to sign with in the fist place. And this is assuming the piece of shit holds still long enough to sign at all.

Now that people are starting to use these things it’s not uncommon to wait in line for them – and without fail I always get behind someone who doesn’t know how to use it. This isn’t awful – I didn’t know how to use them at one point either – but it never fails that the person has to pay in cash, feed bills into the machine (which, to its credit, has a much higher bill tolerance than a Coke machine), and then can never, ever figure out that the slot where the change bills come out is right below the scale. I guess it could be worse – it could give you your change in dollar coins like vending machines in post offices do.

The most amusing thing is the separate printer they have for coupons. You know, I’m never going to use these coupons (they’re never for anything you buy and hey, you don’t want to look cheap anyway) and I never wanted them when the human tellers would hand them to me and fill my wallet. At least now I can leave them there. Come to think of it, I would hate to see how these things redeem coupons, since it asks if you have any before you pay. This is of course right after they announce your total quite loudly – not sure if I want people in the back of Wal-Mart to know how much money I spentm but whatever.

Some stores at least have the plastic bags on a turnstyle, so you can get to more of them if you need – others just have two dispensers. Since at this point you’re too paranoid to move anything, lest the system dispatch someone to assist you and make you feel stupid, you tend to put everything into those two bags – consequently it’s only obvious when you’ve got too much when it’s too late. Fortunately there’s a “skip bagging” option for things like 12-packs of cans.

Ironically the other night I was willing to wait through a line of 2-3 people in each of the self-checkout lanes, just to glance over and see that the manned lane next to it had no one in it. I wonder if that means we secretly really don’t want to interact with the employees at a grocery store.

And all of this is really a new take that we are being trusted a lot more at the grocery store. I mean, unless they’re really being attentive and/or there’s something I’m missing, there’s nothing to keep you from just not scanning something in your cart. Now I see Albertson’s is introducing this new feature where you take a scanning gun with you and scan items as you go – then you put the scanning gun on a central station and pay there. This is crazy to me and would seem even more susecptible, except that you have to register to use this service so in theory they could hunt you down if needed.

But for all my complaints, if I have just a couple of things to check out with I’m still going to use this. But like those “voice recognition” services, I’m starting to get annoyed by the concept of “natural” human/machine interaction that requires you to act in a really unnatural way.

Seems that me and about a million other Bloggers got in on the GMail beta. It’s neat, but I need to try and actually use it some, so here goes:

schnapple@gmail.com

This is twofold – first to see if anyone wants to GMail me (great, another verb from Google) and to see if the Spam Filter is really all that great.

I’d normally have about five pages worth of blather here about GMail, but it’s been done elsewhere (try Slashdot) so I’ll be brief. The big advantage to GMail is that it offers you a gigabyte of space for free. Whereas Hotmail charges for more than like 2MB, GMail gives you ~500x more for free.

I never delete email (except for spam) ever. I have an outlook.pst file that has correspondence dating back to 1999 which has been travelling with me from reformat to reformat. It’s somewhere in the neighboorhood of 300-400MB. With hard drive space being so cheap and me being a packrat, I haven’t cared.

Hotmail has always served the purpose to me of being a “spam tarpit” – that is, when I sign up for something and I don’t want to give them my “real” email address, I give them my Hotmail address (though I’m not sure why – it’s not like I’m not already being spammed). I go and check it once a month at least (lest it gets shut down, which happens sometimes) and clean it out for shits. To Hotmail’s credit, the spam prevention’s gotten really good as of late – perhaps too good, but I don’t really “use” it, so I can’t vouch for it.

But it occurs to me – prior to Google coming out (and getting really good) the Internet was this sorta useful thing that could give you good information, provided you were determined enough to search for it. The “popular search engine” changed from time to time – Webcrawler, Yahoo, AltaVista, Hotbot, etc., but essentially you needed to search them all and wade through a lot of crap to find anything useful. The geeks on the whole didn’t mind – searching for hours to find the ultimate Quake site had a sense of accomplishment to it – but it wasn’t too practical.

Google changed all of that. I’m not going to say it’s perfect and infallible, but Google has turned the Internet into a useful tool. Google has become a verb (something Yahoo would kill for, something ICQ used to be). Google has made the printed Encyclopedia obsolete, made the Libraries of the world desolate, and made productivity go up. The Internet is now useful.

So we have web-based email, and have had for years now. It’s always been this kinda-neat thing and if you didn’t take your email too seriously it could be your main use of email. But for serious email, it’s never been that useful. But now since you could house some ten years worth of email on their servers, perhaps Google’s GMail will make Internet Email useful. It’s done this sort of thing before.

The beta is expected to go on for six months. This should prove interesting.

I bought a CD a few weeks ago, the first since Metallica’s St. Anger last summer. The CD was the new EP from They Might Be Giants. Weighing in at five songs, twelve-and-a-half minutes and $5.99, Indestructible Object is TMBG’s first effort since 2001’s Mink Car, which had the misfortune of being released on 9/11. This EP is a precursor to this summer’s LP release, The Spine. Three of the songs on the disc are new, one of which is a techno mix of the song used as the theme to the TLC show Trauma – Life in the ER. One of the songs is a redo of an old song of theirs (oddly enough, one from the first TMBG CD I ever bought), and the final track is a live cover of The Beach Boys’ “Caroline, No”.

Now what I find most interesting about this CD is this – it’s not available for download anywhere. I mean, it is – you can buy the tracks for 99¢ each on iTunes and save a buck or so, but none of the “usual haunts” have this CD for download anywhere. I thought at first it was because the CD was so short – but Everlast puts out a one-song promotional single to radio stations and that gets leaked for download. I then thought perhaps it was because the label the CD is on (Barsuk) is small and didn’t hand out promotional copies – but this EP has been out since early April and no one who’s bought it has leaked it. I thought maybe because it’s so cheap most people figured it wasn’t worth it – but at $7 retail price (I found it on “sale”) for 12 minutes of music, it’s not exactly cheap, value-wise, and it’s just the sort of thing that people like to rebel against.

Which leads me to probably one conclusion – the geeks of the world are conspiring to keep this CD off of the Internet. That’s intriguing.

They Might Be Giants formed in 1982 and was the subject in 2002 of a documentary, Gigantic: A Tale Of Two Johns. That title referred to the fact that the group is essentially two people, John Linnell and John Flansburgh. They have a backing band now, “The Band of Dans” because all three members are named Dan, but they started out as a duo. They had the fortune of hitting in the early experimental days of MTV when “post modern alternative” was just starting to crack through the hair band pop videos, and R.E.M. was still seen as innovative. Their quirky videos and odd songs were catchy to many, especially college radio. Among their innovations is the still-going Dial-A-Song where a phone call to 718-387-6962 gives you an answering machine message with a random song. You can hear new stuff, works in progress, early versions of songs for the next album, etc, as well as messages from the band.

In the late 80’s, they were signed to Elektra Records and released several albums under that label, untl they were pretty much lost in corporate reshuffling and left the label in disgust. In 1999 they made headlines by releasing the first-ever Internet-only album, Long Tall Weekend, only available on eMusic and quickly becoming the most downloaded artist on the Internet – legal or otherwise. The aforementioned Mink Car marked their return to original label Restless, though I’m not sure if Barsuk will now be their home for future releases or not.

On top of all of that, TMBG is the band you’ve never heard of but you’ve probably heard their work. They did the theme song for Malcom in the Middle, the theme song from The Daily Show, several songs for a series of ABC News Specials called Brave New World, the theme song for Austin Powers 2 and many others. Their song subjects run the gamut from robot parades, to racism and dead Belgian painters. Their most famous song is a cover of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” from the movie They Might Be Giants (the title refers to Don Quixote fighting windmills), but they’re about as famous for the Tiny Toons-animated video for “Particle Man”, the true meaning of which baffles people to this day. And their cover of “Yeh Yeh” has graced Cadillac commercials.

Back when I started actively listening to them again in High School, it bugged me that they were such a consistently good (yet quirky) group and yet had no mainstream popularity. I always likened them to Toad the Wet Sprocket, probably because they both started around the same time and had weird names (they were also close to each other in the record aisles). Of course TtWS went on to unbridled mainstream popularity before fizzling out and breaking up about six years ago (they also had more “normal” songs) so perhaps it’s better that despite winning Grammys, TMBG has never had a #1 hit.

Which brings me back to the MP3 issue. Moby released album after album without notice. When he started letting people use his songs in commercials, his 1999 album Play sold truckloads. His 2001 follow-up, 18, didn’t do nearly as well. Though most would agree that it was due to being just a poor album (save for the strong opening track “We Are All Made Of Stars”), Moby went on record as saying that it sucks when your core audience is techies, since they don’t buy your record – they just download it.

Now to some degree what Moby said is true – most techie types will download your album, and you’ll never have 100% of them go buy it. But while a certian percentage won’t buy it because they just don’t buy music, a lot of them will go buy it if it’s any good. In the weeks preceding the 2002 release of Eminem’s The Eminem Show, it shot up to the #1 request from the Gracenote CDDB Database, meaning that more people were playing it on CD than any other album – and it wasn’t in stores yet. Like what happened with his previous CD, Interscope bumped up the release of the album and executives got on television to point out how this is the epitome of how bad piracy can be. Then the album blew away all sales records in stores.

Most people say that as a result of MP3 they buy fewer albums now, but that the ones they do buy are smarter. They download ten albums, one of them is good enough to purchase. Thet feel that they’re rewarding the artists that did good. Those are nice anecdotes, and everyone has some. The problem is the record labels don’t care – they liked the “no trying first” model. They abandoned the concept of the single, on the whole, because charging full price for an album is much more lucrative. And there’s other factors – a lot of people don’t like a lot of today’s modern music. I know I don’t. And in today’s less-than-ideal economy, paying $15 for a CD when a DVD movie is $20 doesn’t add up (though to their credit, CD prices are going down from major vendors).

But then there’s TMBG. By releasing albums as MP3 and not treating fans as prospective criminals, they created a lot of goodwill and as a result their new CD is nowhere to be found on the Internet. Metallica still hurts to this day, thanks to their Napster lawsuits and the polarizing St. Anger CD. I always noticed that the artist which would complain about MP3 is rare, and I always figured it was because most artists don’t have good contracts, so they don’t lose much money anyway. Not sure how true that is or was, but it does now seem like the artists that stayed out are reaping the benefits.